WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?

I couldn’t sleep that night. I was tired, but I just kept lying there, staring at the ceiling.

What Leo told me made sense, but there was something off that I couldn’t figure out. What was it? I hadn’t gotten into trouble for a while, Mom was pretty happy, and Mrs. Stricker might even have forgotten she hated me by now.

Okay, maybe not that last part.

Around midnight, Mom told me to turn off my light once and for all, so I did. But then I just kept right on not sleeping.

The next time I looked at my clock, it was ten after one. Then one thirty. Then one thirty-eight.

And then I was up again.

“Junior?” I whispered. He’s always ready for anything, so I put on his leash and we went outside for a walk.

And by outside, I mean our backyard. Mom would cancel my subscription to life if I went walking around the neighborhood at one thirty-eight in the morning. So we just went around and around and around the yard instead—like for forty-eight laps. (It’s not a very big yard.)

So there I was, going in circles with Junior in the middle of the night, trying to get sleepy… and that’s when it hit me.

I wasn’t happy.

I know that doesn’t seem like a huge revelation. It probably seems like I wasn’t grateful for the cool stuff I had, like a dog and a best friend. I was, but Mom says outside things don’t really make you happy inside (she usually trots that line out whenever I ask her for expensive sneakers or video games).

So why wasn’t I happy? Things were good, as Leo said, and I could even learn to live with football and Learning Skills. And since I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, it took a few more laps with Junior to figure out what was wrong: football. And Learning Skills.

Yeah.

I could learn to live with them, but I wouldn’t be doing them if it were up to me. I didn’t make the choice to join them and I didn’t have the choice to quit them. And that was the real problem. Hardly anything about my life, except for my art, was up to me. And that’s what made me not-happy… and a little bit mad.

I stomped around the yard a few more times, getting more angry the more I thought about it.

Then something strange started to happen. In a good way. Mom says she gets some of her best painting ideas when she’s mad. Maybe that’s what happened to me.

At first, it was just this teeny-tiny little baby idea in my head. Not even that. Mostly, I was thinking about all those genius works of art in Ms. Donatello’s classroom, and how she was expecting “big things” from me, and how she was barking up the wrong kid on that one.

Also, if you know me, then you know I once had a really gigantic idea at Hills Village Middle School, and it was something I thought of all by myself. Okay, Leo had a big hand in it, but he’s technically a part of me. It was even called Operation: R.A.F.E., which stood for “Rules Aren’t For Everyone.” And even though I got in a lot of trouble for it, it was my idea. My choice.

Now I was thinking maybe I could do something big like that again. How crazy would that be? And unlike football or Learning Kills, the idea would be 100 percent mine.

The more laps I did around that yard, the more excited I got. I was going to take a little bit of what Ms. Donatello said, a little bit of R. K. Whatchamacallit, and even a little bit of Operation: R.A.F.E. Then I was going to throw it all in the blender and turn it into a whole new thing, like a giant smoothie made out of ideas.

Kind of.

Best of all, I already had a really good name for it. This one was going to be called Operation: S.A.M. And in case you’re wondering (I know you are!), S.A.M. stood for:

It was time to get started.