Smiling Renaldo

22 Smiling Renaldo Renaldo wasn't very cool. He was the new kid. He came from another country, and he didn't speak English very well. In fact, he barely spoke at all. When he did, you could barely hear him. No one had ever seen him smile-not once. Weeks of the new school year passed, and he barely said a word. Even our teacher, Ms. Sole, couldn't make him smile. Finally, we decided that we would have a contest. The goal was to see who could make Renaldo smile. The next day at school, we tried everything. We tried jokes. We tried falling down in front of him. We tried making funny faces. Nothing worked. We gave up and went to class. In English class that day, we had a new teacher. He was handsome and young, and all of us liked him. The first thing he did was to ask everyone to introduce themselves.

Up and down the rows he went. Everyone said their names. When it was Renaldo's turn, he said his name very softly, so the teacher asked him to repeat it. He could see that Renaldo was shy. He knelt down to be closer to him. Renaldo was at the back of the class, so everyone had turned around to see him. " Please repeat your name, " the teacher said, smiling at Renaldo. Then, Renaldo did the most amazing thing. He noticed something about the teacher. And he gave a huge smile and said, “ My name is Renaldo! " The whole class cheered. I bet you're wondering why he smiled. All this time, Renaldo had been embarrassed to smile until he realized he had something in common with the handsome new teacherbraces! You know? Those weird wire things dentists put on kids' teeth to make them straight. From that day on, Renaldo smiled all the time. You could tell he felt it was really cool to have braces.