CHAPTER 12

I know it’s good to be . Mom and Dad are always talking about it. But Maryam and her friends took the ambitious thing and went with it.

On Saturday morning, when I was lost in my Xbox games, waiting for my friends to come over, Maryam had invited her group, too. I only found out when Daniel and Charlie rang the doorbell. Maryam’s friends were taking up the entire kitchen table with their paint mess. (Mom only lets us paint in the kitchen, where there’s no carpet.) You won’t believe this, but they were trying to paint pictures that they could sell for $500 each. They were doing it even though (or maybe because) Mrs. Rogers’s son, John, is an artist and he says it’s hard to sell art, but when you do, you can make a lot of money.

In fact, Mrs. Rogers was sitting with them, telling them to make another splatter here and darken the tones there.

She looked up at me with a sly grin that I didn’t even know grandmas could have. That face told me she knew Maryam couldn’t sell any of those paintings for that much money, and it was hilarious.

I complained. “Where are my friends and I going to make our stuff? We need the kitchen table, too!”

“You can do yours tomorrow, brat face,” said Maryam.

Her friends giggled.

My friends grimaced.

Esa picked up a paintbrush and started painting his own face, while Dad tried to figure out what to do.

Then Mrs. Rogers said, “You can use my kitchen.”

“Really?” said Dad. “That won’t be a problem? We don’t want to be a bother.”

 . . . My dad was too polite sometimes.

“We’ll take it!” I said quickly, before Mrs. Rogers changed her mind.

So Mrs. Rogers and her kitchen were all ours for the day, which was super excellent because when we baked the cookies, she let us use her

“Mrs. Rogers is old, so if this recipe is her mom’s, that means it’s from the olden days,” Daniel whispered as we sampled the first batch.

We stopped and stared at each other. They were out of this world. We were going to make some big bucks!

After we baked tons of cookies, we all helped Daniel make more origami birds, and then back at our own houses we chose some toys and books we had grown out of to sell. I didn’t have many, because I’d given stuff away before we moved, so I took a deep breath and picked a couple of toys that I still played with. It was hard work being sometimes.

I wished I had more things to sell. I couldn’t stop thinking about what might happen if the mosque did shut down. Mom and Dad might not find their secret smiles in any other mosque, and we’d all have to travel much farther. Other people from the community wouldn’t have a nearby place to pray and meet their friends, either. And Mrs. Rogers wouldn’t be able to come to the next Eid celebration at the mosque like she wants to.

It made me feel all worried again, thinking about that, so I sent Allah a quick little prayer.