LEO TURNS UP THE HEAT

I’m not saying that five Cs and a B-minus make me some kind of genius, but those were the best grades I’d ever gotten. With Mom home all the time, she was around to help me with my homework and to make sure I did all my assignments, whether I wanted to or not.

And Operation: Get a Life was going even better. By the time report cards came out, I had 58 things on my list, with 137 to go. I figured I must be doing something right.

But Leo figured otherwise.

“You’ve got to step this mission up,” he told me. “It’s time to start thinking bigger.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “I’ve got this whole huge list already.”

“It’s called Operation: Get a Life, not Operation: Get a List. Most of that stuff is just about classes you have to go to anyway, and walking around the city on a leash with Mom. You’re not even trying to make this interesting.”

“Oh, man. Here we go,” I said.

This is what Leo does. He calls it making things interesting, but I call it a pain the butt.

“New rule,” he said. “From now on, you have to do at least one really big thing for every ten little things. And no more credit for the little stuff until you do.”

“Hang on—what counts as a big thing?” I said.

Of course he had an answer. He always does. “For starters, it has to be something you’ll remember doing for the rest of your life,” he said.

“Oh, that’s all?”

“No, actually. It also can’t be anything you do at school, and there can’t be some adult looking over your shoulder while you’re doing it.”

On top of all that, I still had the No-Hurt Rule to worry about, and none of this stuff could cost money either, because I didn’t have any.

Still, Leo had a point. If this mission was going to be worth doing, I needed to do it right. It was time to step up my game. I just didn’t have any clue what that was going to look like yet.

And then a few days later, Mrs. Ling gave us the junk-sculpture assignment.