So did you say it?” Todd asked Amy when she walked into the family room right before dinner. Dinner was going to be pizza delivery, even though their father had said the other day that pizza was too expensive. Their mother wasn’t cooking, their father wasn’t cooking, and Todd and Amy and Wiggy weren’t cooking. Pizza it had to be.
One look at Amy’s face told Todd that she hadn’t. How hard could it be to say seven little words to someone? Seven little words that would save you weeks of misery. Every year when they had some project at school, Isaiah wanted to work with Todd, and every year Todd told him, “I’ve decided I want to work alone.” Friendship was one thing, self-destruction another. Todd always came up with a terrific project, and Isaiah always came up with a terrible project, and through it all they stayed best friends. If Todd could say no to Isaiah, why couldn’t Amy say no to Violet?
“It was impossible.” Amy buried her face in Wiggy’s fur. Wiggy thumped her tail. Wiggy was an extremely nonjudgmental dog.
“Amy—”
“You couldn’t have done it, either,” Amy snapped at him.
“They had napkins shaped like tents! Silverware made out of real silver! Strawberries dipped in chocolate!”
“So?”
“You can’t wipe your mouth on someone’s linen napkin and then refuse to be their Mini-Society partner,” Amy explained wearily.
Todd didn’t understand, but he could tell there was no point in making Amy feel worse than she did already.
From the kitchen he could hear his mother’s raised voice: “And who’s going to pay for this pizza, may I ask? I know all this is hard for you, too, but a crafts store salary isn’t exactly enough for a family of four to live on.”
“I can pay for it,” Todd heard his father say.
“On your unemployment insurance?”
His father didn’t answer.
“And another thing,” his mother went on. “Why did I find popcorn kernels on the family room carpet this morning? I thought we had a rule about no food in the family room.”
Todd tried to close his ears, to avoid hearing whatever sad excuse his father would offer.
“What’s your product?” he asked Amy.
“It’s bad.”
“How bad?”
“Well, I suggested writing stories about people in the class and illustrating them, but Violet said she can’t write stories and she hates to draw.”
“So what are you doing?”
“We’re going to use pinecones—Violet’s yard has a million pinecones. We’re going to dip them in glue and then
sprinkle glitter on them. And then when we’re done, we’ll have sticky, glittery pinecones.” Amy glared at Todd. “I already said it was bad, so don’t you dare laugh.”
Todd tried to think of something positive to say. His parents’ voices had gotten louder, but at least they had closed the kitchen door, muffling his mother’s sarcasm. “They might be good for Christmas ornaments,” he said.
“In September?”
“People’s parents might like them.”
“Ms. Ives said she’s going to tell the parents not to buy things just out of pity for us. We’re supposed to learn about supply and demand. If you supply a cool product, there will be a lot of demand for it. If you supply a stupid product, there will be no demand for it. Can you think of anything more stupid than sticky, glittery pinecones?”
“They won’t be sticky once the glue dries.” But Todd knew that when Amy was in a bad mood, she was bound and determined to make everything sound as hopeless as possible.
“Oh, that’s a big comfort. That is just a huge comfort, Todd! Julia and Kelsey are going to sell ten thousand Frizzy Freds, and Violet and I won’t sell even one sticky, glittery pinecone.”
“I’ll buy one.”
“All right, we’ll sell one.”
“Isaiah will buy one.”
“Two pinecones!” Amy shrieked. She looked as if she was about to say something more; then she turned and ran out of the room.
Todd stared at Wiggy. “What did I say wrong?” he asked the dog. “I mean, really. I was just trying to help.”
Someone in their family had to help with something. Wiggy thumped her tail sympathetically.
“Seven words,” Todd told Wiggy. “That’s all she had to say to save herself from sticky, glittery pinecones. Just seven little words.”
“Our Mini-Society needs a flag!” Ms. Ives said the next day.
Todd groaned. Now she was going to tell them each to come up with a design for a flag, and the class would vote on the designs, and either Amy’s friend Julia, who was great at art, or perfect-at-everything Damon would win.
Sure enough, Ms. Ives was starting to pass out sheets of white construction paper.
“Each of you will come up with a design for a flag. Be as creative as you can! And then our class will vote on its favorite design.”
And Julia or Damon will win, Todd added to himself.
“But there’s a twist,” Ms. Ives said then.
Someone other than Julia or Damon would win?
“You also have to decide how much you’re going to charge the rest of us for your flag design, if it’s chosen. In Mini-Society we get paid for what we do.”
“Will we know the price of each design before we vote?” Julia asked.
She was probably counting her profits, Todd thought,
though he saw that she was looking at Damon as she spoke. Julia knew who her competition was.
Ms. Ives hesitated. Todd could tell that she couldn’t remember the exact instructions in the Mini-Society teacher’s manual on this point. “We’ll vote on that, too? Yes, in Mini-Society, we make all our collective decisions the democratic way, by voting.”
“I think we should know the price of each design before we vote,” Julia said.
“Me too,” Kelsey chimed in.
They both looked at Amy.
“Me too,” Amy said.
Well, that clearly made sense. It would be stupid to pick one design over another without knowing the price. Not that they were using real money, just fake money they had already voted to call “minis.” But still. Knowing the price of something before you bought it made sense.
Damon put up his hand. “I think,” he said in the superior way he had, as if everyone were especially interested in his thoughts, “we should vote for whichever design we think is best. This is our flag we’re talking about. When our country was founded, George Washington didn’t pick the cheapest flag. He picked the best one.”
As if Damon had spent years studying the process by which the Stars and Stripes had been selected.
They voted. Damon’s side won, proving, in Todd’s opinion, that democracy could come up with some pretty unreasonable results.
“Now, just for inspiration,” Ms. Ives said, “I have a handout with some flags from around the world. I want you to see how many kinds there are. And soon there will be twenty-five new and different flag designs for us to consider!”
Todd studied the handout. Most of the flags were rectangular in shape, but there were a couple of wild-shaped ones. Most had plain bars of color, either vertical or horizontal: red, white, and blue; red, white, and green. But some had emblems stuck in the middle of them.
He decided on a plain solid rectangle, with one big spot in the middle, like the flag of Japan. If it was good enough for Japan, it was good enough for Mini-Society.
Each color was supposed to stand for something. On the handout flags, white stood for purity, red for courage, green for hope. If there was one thing Todd didn’t feel these days, it was hopeful. One country had black for the hardships its people had suffered. Okay. Todd’s flag would be black, with a big yellow dot in the middle. Yellow could stand for money, since Mini-Society was mainly about making money. Money solved hardships for a lot of people. If his father still earned any, maybe his parents could order a pizza without fighting about it for half an hour.
“Put the price of your design on the back,” Ms. Ives reminded the class.
Todd wrote 50 on his. Fifty minis wasn’t very much, but a big yellow spot on a black rectangle wasn’t worth very much.
Half an hour later, the flag designs were displayed on the ledges of the chalkboards. Amy had come up with a wreath of flowers against a pale blue background: poetic and pretty,
just what he would have expected from Amy. Unfortunately, Julia, Kelsey, and Violet had all come up with flower designs, too. Julia’s looked the best, because she was so good at drawing. Probably none of the flower designs would win.
Todd had to admit that Damon’s design looked as if a grownup had made it, with an elaborate coat of arms in the middle of three vertical color bars. Damon had written a whole page explaining the significance of each one.
Isaiah’s flag was orange—for happiness, he said—and it had a funny-looking cartoonish chicken in the middle. Todd had forgotten that Isaiah was pretty good at drawing, too.
“What is the significance of the chicken?” Ms. Ives asked Isaiah.
“It’s … Well, it can lay eggs, so we’ll never be hungry. Or we can eat it if we are hungry. And … I just like drawing chickens.”
Everyone laughed.
“All right, turn in your ballots,” Ms. Ives told the class.
When she counted the ballots, she looked surprised. “It was close,” she said. “Damon, your drawing came in second. But our winner, by one vote, is Isaiah’s flag. The—um—one with the chicken.”
Todd led the class in a cheer. Isaiah looked stunned. Damon glared at him. It must have been too much for Damon to have his perfectly drawn coat of arms beaten out by a cartoon chicken.
“Oh, the price,” Ms. Ives said. “We have to see what we’re paying from our classroom treasury for our new flag. Damon, what would you have charged us if your design had won?”
Sullenly, Damon turned his flag over. “A thousand minis.”
The class gasped. A thousand minis was a lot of money, even fake money. Good thing Damon’s design hadn’t won.
“Isaiah, what is the price of yours?”
Grinning, Isaiah turned his over. “Ten thousand minis.”
Todd saw a big, messy 10,000 scrawled in crayon. The class was in an uproar now.
“But, Isaiah—” Ms. Ives sputtered. “That’s an awful lot for one flag?”
“That’s ridiculous!” Damon burst out. “We have to pay nine thousand more minis for a flag that got one more vote. I think we should vote again, now that we know the prices.”
Todd was too mad to raise his hand. “No! It was your idea to vote for the flags without knowing the prices. It was a bad idea, but that’s what we voted to do. Isaiah’s design wins.”
Ms. Ives looked from Todd to Damon and back to Todd again. Then she smiled. “I think we’re learning some very interesting things from Mini-Society,” she said. “Our new flag will be Isaiah’s chicken. We’ll fly it over our Mini-Society buildings. Isaiah, come to our bank, and Spencer”—the boy who had been voted banker—“will pay you ten thousand minis.”
Without knocking over his chair, Isaiah presented himself at the bank.
Todd grinned. They hadn’t even had their first selling session yet, and Isaiah—Isaiah!—was already the richest man in town.