7 Simon Picks a Name

CHAPTER SEVEN SIMON PICKS A NAME WE WALKED TO my house from school and Rosie explained her plan to us. Simon and I thought it might actually work. "How do we start?" I asked as we got to the back patio. "We need to get our supplies," Rosie said as she unzipped her backpack and pulled out ten magnifying glasses. "Mr. Willow let me borrow these from the science closet. I told him they were for the science fair." "Did he ask you what our project is?"

"Yes," Rosie answered and nodded. "But guess who came back into the room to get something from her desk right then?" "Copycat Katie?" I asked. Rosie squeezed her lips together, squinted her eyes, and nodded again. Rosie almost never looked mad—but she looked kind of mad right then.

"No way!" Simon exclaimed. "She wants to take your idea? Again?!" "I didn't want to take the chance, so I told Mr. Willow I wanted it to be a surprise," Rosie said and shook the mad look off her face. She knew we had to get moving. "Let's get what we need." "We need some big plastic bottles," Rosie said after we'd collected everything else. "Regular water bottles won't work. We need big two-liter soda bottles." We didn't have any at my house. But some of my neighbors did. Simon, Rosie, and I found ten of them in the big

blue recycling bins at the end of their driveways. It was kind of weird looking through my neighbors' garbage. But it wasn't gross things—like old food and wet stuff. It was just recycling things—newspapers, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and cardboard. We took those ten bottles back to my patio and put them with the other supplies. "We need an awesome name for our project," Simon said. Rosie and I thought that was a good idea. "We're inventing something to attract fireflies,"

Rosie said. "What's a good name for that?" "The Great Firefly Catcher?" I suggested. "It's good, but we're not really catching them," Rosie said. "It's more like we're getting them to meet up in one place." "I've got it!" Simon exclaimed. "The Fantastic Firefly Fetcher!" It was perfect. Rosie and I both loved it. "Okay, we have a name," Rosie said. "Now we have to turn these soda bottles into clear plastic tubes. Oh, and there's something else." Simon asked, "What's that?" "We have to figure out one more thing," Rosie

said. "And it's going to be tricky."