On the morning of the first Mini-Society selling session, Amy and Violet went into the classroom before the bell rang and left a Divine Decorations ad on every desk. The first Mini-Society selling session was for their class only. Then they’d have an “international” selling session for all the fifth graders, and parents, too.
The ads had turned out even better than Amy had hoped. She had printed them in colored ink, and drawn a little pinecone on each one, and dusted it with glitter. Julia and Kelsey were going to wish they had thought of making ads for Frizzy Fred. Instead of glitter, they could have stuck on each one a wisp of Fred’s pink hair.
But as soon as the others came streaming in from the playground, Amy could tell that the ads had not been a good idea, to put it mildly.
Some of the ads simply fell on the floor as kids took their chairs down from the tops of their desks. Nobody bothered to pick them up. Amy hated to think of all that painstakingly applied glitter being trampled by careless feet.
“Divine Decorations?” Amy heard someone ask. “That sounds dumb. Whose product is this?”
Well, she had thought it was dumb herself a week ago.
“‘The perfect pinecone is waiting for you,’” another boy read aloud. “I don’t want any perfect pinecones waiting for me. Help! I’m being stalked by a perfect pinecone!” He raced across the room, clutching his throat and rolling his eyes in mock horror.
Several of the boys began folding their ads into paper airplanes and flying them toward the trash can. Most of the planes crashed before they reached their destination. One boy launched his toward the Mini-Society cardboard buildings. It hit the hospital.
Across the room, Todd folded his ad neatly and put it inside his desk. One thing about Todd: he never laughed at Amy when things went wrong. Amy knew he must feel almost as terrible about the ads as she did—unless he was too busy feeling terrible about his own product. The last Amy had heard—ten minutes ago—he had nothing. And of course they were both feeling terrible every minute of the day about Wiggy, who was still in the hospital. Dr. Atriya had called last night and said that Wiggy’s condition continued to be “worrisome.” As if Todd and Amy needed to be told to keep worrying.
Amy saw Julia study her ad intently and whisper something to Kelsey. Kelsey whispered something to Julia, and both girls burst into wild giggles.
Violet saw them laughing, too. Her eyes filled with her usual tears. One slid down the side of her nose.
Ms. Ives came into the room at the height of the commotion. A low-flying ad airplane narrowly missed her as she strode to her desk. “Boys and girls! What is going on here?”
“Someone put ads for their product on all the desks,” Damon reported. His tone sounded carefully noncommittal. Amy knew Damon wanted to sound somewhat scornful, in case Ms. Ives said that leaving ads on desks was against school rules—but not too scornful, in case Ms. Ives said that leaving ads on desks was a brilliant strategy.
Ms. Ives picked up one of the ads that had fallen on the floor and read it silently. Amy waited for her response.
“What a wonderful idea!” This time Ms. Ives didn’t make her comment into a question. Her face lit up with genuine enthusiasm. “Amy, Violet, you two are really getting into the spirit of our Mini-Society. Advertising is a big part of how products are sold in the real world.”
Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be a big part of how products were sold in Mini-Society.
Or not sold. As the case might be.
At lunch Amy sat with Violet. It had been a long two weeks since she had sat with Julia and Kelsey. She hadn’t even spoken to them since the day Julia had said that she didn’t want to come to Amy’s house if Amy’s dad was there.
“The thing about ads?” Amy said to Violet, in a low voice. “When they don’t work, they make your fears and insecurities even worse.”
“Okay, the ads didn’t work,” Violet said. “But once people see the pinecones, they’ll want them, don’t you think?”
Amy took a deep breath. “Actually—no.”
For once, Violet didn’t cry. Maybe it was better to have a
bad truth said out loud than to keep on pretending that it wasn’t true.
“What did your brother make?” Violet asked Amy.
There was no point in lying. “He didn’t make anything.”
Violet looked flabbergasted. It had probably never occurred to her that someone could simply refuse to do an assignment.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” Amy said, though suddenly she did, sort of. It was as if Todd couldn’t succeed while their dad was failing. Or something like that. But the Divine Decorations weren’t exactly going to be a huge success, either. Right now it looked as if they might be the biggest failure in the history of any Mini-Society selling session, in any school, anywhere.
After lunch, something about the classroom looked different. Amy looked again. A lot of the desks had signs taped to the front of them. The signs said NO SOLICITATIONS.
“What does NO SOLICITATIONS mean?” Violet asked in a voice that sounded as if she already knew.
“I think it means no ads,” Amy said.
She was furious. She knew, she just knew, that the signs had been Julia’s or Kelsey’s idea: they were still giggling out by the water fountain. Amy snatched the sign from Julia’s desk, and then from Kelsey’s, crumpled each one into a hard little ball, and stuffed them into her own messy desk. Wordlessly, Violet started removing the signs from the other desks. Todd’s desk didn’t have one, of course, and neither
did Isaiah’s. The other kids, coming in from lunch recess, stared. Amy didn’t care.
Ms. Ives, busy writing on the chalkboard, didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong. After calling the class to order, she explained the procedure for the first selling session. Students could buy goods with the minis they had earned from doing their classroom jobs over the past few weeks. They could also buy goods with the profits from their own sales. At the same time, they needed to save minis to invest in manufacturing more of their product for the international selling session.
“And remember, you may want to make a different product if you find that this product isn’t selling as well as you had hoped,” Ms. Ives said. At least she didn’t look directly at Amy and Violet as she said it. She seemed to be trying very hard to look anywhere except at Amy and Violet.
There was more commotion as the students set up shop. Violet had brought in a pretty basket, lined with red felt, and it did look appealing with the Divine Decorations spilling out of it. Isaiah had cleverly arranged his Crayon Critters in a little stockyard made of Lincoln Logs. Julia and Kelsey had put on their own bright pink Frizzy Fred wigs. Damon had propped his calendars on the chalkboard ledge where the flag designs had been, twelve calendars, each opened to the picture for a different month. But all the pictures looked pretty much the same. It was bright and sunny almost every day in Colorado.
Todd’s desk was bare.
Amy swallowed back a choking lump in her throat. Why couldn’t he have made something? Anything. Even her pinecones were better than nothing. But last night when she had tried to talk to him about it, he had just turned away.
The selling began.
Todd bought the first pinecone. The only pinecone?
But Isaiah came by next. “I’ll take two dozen,” he announced.
“You’re kidding,” Amy said.
“No, he’s not,” Violet said quickly. “That will be four hundred eighty minis, please.”
“Hey, I’m rich!” Isaiah said. “I have to spend my ten thousand minis on something.”
Amy and Violet took turns selling while the other shopped. That was one advantage of working with a partner. Amy bought a crayon pig from Isaiah, and a paper flower from someone else, and some surprisingly tasty homemade fudge. She refused even to look at the Frizzy Freds. But she saw a lot of kids carrying them around. The matching wigs, she had to admit, had been a stroke of genius.
At the end of the session, Amy and Violet had sold twenty-six pinecones total. One to Todd, twenty-four to Isaiah, and one to Ms. Ives, who despite all her talk about not buying anything out of pity, had bought one item from everyone.
“I can’t believe it!” Amy heard Kelsey squealing. “I mean, I knew everyone would love Fred, but I never dreamed we’d sell this many!”
Hot tears stung Amy’s eyes. She tried to turn away before anyone could see.
But Violet had seen.
“Don’t cry,” she whispered to Amy.
Violet was telling Amy not to cry?
“It doesn’t help,” Violet said. “Take it from me.”