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my mouth about us needing a new president. See, she's smart and I'm not. She knows when to keep her mouth shut and I don't. (WHY CAN'T I EVER LEARN THAT?)
    I should have just left things the way they were. See, that was always my mistake. I was always trying to fix things—like trying to make my foster non-parents be nicer people or trying to act better so they would like me more. One time, I had a foster non-parent who used to lock up every room in her house at night because she was afraid of foster kids stealing from her, so I told her it would save her a lot of trouble if she waited to see if I was honest first instead of wasting her time locking everything up. Just suggesting that idea got me into trouble with her.
    And if I had left things the way they were years and years ago, maybe I wouldn't even be living with foster non-parents in the first place, because maybe my Gram would still be alive. In fact, you could probably say that if I hadn't been born when I was, things could have been different. Maybe my mom wouldn't have gotten into that car to get away from her screaming, throwing-up baby (me).…
    As Rhondell pushes open the front door of the school and we step outside, the first snow of the year is falling. Actually, it isn't really snow, but more like round spitballs zinging out of a freezing gray sky.
    “Look at that, Sharice,” Rhondell says, squinting up at the sky. But I'm so mad at myself, I just duck out into the snow without saying good-bye to Rhondell or even stopping to pull on the sweatshirt I've got in my backpack. I head down the street toward the library, letting the spitball snow sting my arms.

JAMES HARRIS III
    “This pyramid's gonna have STYLE now that I'm working on it.” That's what I tell the group on the first day I'm Prez. “And everybody better do exactly what I say now that I'm Prez, too. Or else you gonna get a beating from me.”
    “James—” Collins raises his eyebrows and gives me the teacher look, but I just pretend to ignore it. I stroll on over to the big pyramid that Marcel and Collins have been starting to glue together, and I show them how they don't have a clue about what they're building.
    “Why you gluing the colors like that?” I point to a section where little purple and green and yellow tetrahedrons have been all mixed together. “You should be gluing the same colors next to each other—you know, make one big section of purple, then blue, then green”—I show them with my hands—“so the whole pyramid looks like a rainbow when it's done. That would make more sense than this mess—” I wave my arm at the pyramid.
    See, I've been sitting back there in my corner drawing my comics and watching them try to build this pyramid for about a month now—and it's been cracking me up because Collins can't build and Marcel doesn't know what he's doing when it comes to art. Just look at his daddy's barbecue signs. I could have given them about fifty ideas for how to make the pyramid look better, but they didn't ask me for help, did they?

    I got the idea for making the rainbow a while ago. I was sitting there in the back of class doing nothing one day and I remembered something I did in art class when I was in third or fourth grade. The art teacher, who was this cool guy who sometimes played music in class, had us soak this heavy piece of white paper with water and then paint big stripes of different colors. The water on the paper made the colors blend together like a rainbow, and once the paper dried, we did pen and ink drawings on top of it. Mine was a bald eagle with its wings out. It was one of the best things I had ever done, and I wished I still had it, but I didn't. Who knows where all that stuff went?

    But I figured if the tetrahedrons were glued together by color, they would blend into a rainbow just like that painting did. Even though nobody else looks like they agree, Collins says he likes my idea, and since the pieces are only attached at the points, it