Read Online Screaming at the Ump by Audrey Vernick - Free Book Online Page A

right?”
    â€œEveryone can write for the paper,” he said, “once they’re in seventh grade.” Everyone laughed.
    â€œWait, what? So in sixth grade, nothing? There’s no section or kind of article or anything?” I had been waiting for this forever, and now I couldn’t do it? “Do you have, like, a sports section? Maybe we could try to put together a sports . . .”
    People were starting to give me looks. Like everyone should know that sixth-graders were supposed to be, what, silent or something?
    â€œCan I speak?” Chris Sykes asked. Mr. Donovan smiled at him and gestured with his hand like,
It’s all yours
.
    â€œSixth-graders get involved by helping us sell advertising space. A lot of local stores have already said they’ll buy ads in the
Messenger
, but we’re always looking for new ones. We have an advertising kit you can use—”
    â€œWhat does that have to do with journalism?”
    â€œWhat?” Chris said, annoyed.
    â€œI mean, I came here because I like to write. I don’t like selling stuff. I’d have started a lemonade stand or something if I wanted to sell stuff.” I was surprising myself, but there was Chris Sykes, of all people, telling me I couldn’t do what I’d been waiting to do since forever!
    A few kids laughed. Chris looked pissed. “Why don’t you, then? Go open your lemonade stand.” I was waiting for him to suggest we hire vampires to squeeze the lemons.
    Mr. Donovan put up his hand. Then he said, “This newspaper’s a business. Businesses need money, funding.”
    â€œIt’s the way it’s always been,” Chris said. “When I was a sixth-grader, it’s what I did. It’s how I earned my spot.”
    Was I missing something? “Wouldn’t it make more sense to let people who are the best reporters do the reporting and the people who are the best salesmen, or those who like being salesmen, sell ads and stuff?”
    I felt a shift in the room. Some kids nudged each other, a few pointed with their chins or the tops of their heads in my direction, in a not-so-positive “Get a load of that kid” kind of way. Or maybe a “When is he going to shut up?” way.
    It wasn’t exactly the start I had imagined for my journalism career.
    â€œI guess it would be fair to say that no sixth-grader has ever had a story in our paper. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Just very unlikely. It takes time to learn how to write a good article. And you’re in the right place to learn. Shifting gears now,” Mr. Donovan said. “We’re going to have to get a really early start with our first edition, because Chris and Tomas and I have decided that we are going to enter this year’s Honorbound Newspaper Competition.”
    Someone yelled out, “What’s that?” but my mind was already wondering why I was even here. I could be back at BTP, in the rhythm of a world I knew and loved, instead of sitting here with people who wondered why I didn’t want to walk from store to store asking, “Would you like to buy an ad in our school paper?” I would have joined the Girl Scouts if I wanted to do fundraising. At least then there’d have been good cookies.
    Mmm. Thin Mints. Samoas.
    Mr. Donovan kept going on about our school’s outdated equipment and how, if we won this competition, we’d get a whole new state-of-the-art computer setup. He said the schools that had won in the past had entered really big stories, investigative reporting kinds of things, and we might want to think big, beyond the school’s walls. The next meeting would be Monday.
    My first thought was to skip that meeting—and all the other ones. But really, even though the whole thing kind of sucked so far, I didn’t plan to take no for an answer. No other sixth-grader could have ever wanted it as much as I did. I would be the