Miss Understood Read Online Free PDF Page A

through it.
    ‘I don’t know much about plants and trees and stuff, but I think it already looks great,’ I said.
    Miss Huntley smiled. ‘This garden is like my face, Lizzie – it takes a lot of hard work to get it to look this good.’
    Mum heard me come back inside while she was in my little brother’s room. She called out, ‘Okay, recess is over, Lizzie. Can you please keep going with what we were doing before – I’m just changing Richie’s nappy, then I’m going to put him down for a sleep.’
    As I walked into the dining room I saw this written on the chalkboard: HSIE . And under that, she’d written: Practical Project.
    I frowned at the words. A project for HSIE? A project, on my first day at my new school? It usually took teachers at least a week to get around to giving out that kind of big, serious homework. And here was my newest teacher giving me a project on Day One!
    ‘Did you know about this?’ I asked Muppet, who was lying on the floor near my chair. If he did know he wasn’t telling. He just looked up at me, yawned and went back to sleep.
    I was ready for Mum. ‘What’s that mean?’ I demanded the moment she walked in, before she’d even had a chance to sit down.
    Her eyes followed my finger. ‘It means exactly what it says – it’s a project.’
    ‘What kind of project? And I thought we were going to do reading after recess.’
    ‘Don’t be rude. We were going to talk about the project after lunch, but if you like, we can do that now.’
    ‘Yes, please,’ I said. I wanted to get this bit over with. I’m not a big fan of projects, especially since my pirate one had, thanks to the burning of the cardboard principal, ended up getting me expelled from my school.
    ‘All right.’ Mum laid her big, fat copy of Henry Lawson’s Collected Works on the table. ‘HSIE – it stands for Human Society and its Environment.’
    ‘I know that much – we do it at my other school. At my old school. We did it at my old school.’
    ‘So we’re going to do a practical project,’ she went on. ‘And of course, when I say “we”, I actually mean “you”.’
    ‘Why?’
    She blinked, as if it should have been the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Because it’ll be more interesting than sitting around here doing exercises out of workbooks,’ she said.
    ‘So what will I have to do?’
    ‘I want you to talk to someone interesting, then write a story about them.’
    ‘A story? Don’t you just make stories up?’
    ‘Not always,’ said Mum. ‘In this case, when I say story, I suppose I mean article. This will be a bit like being a journalist.’
    ‘But I don’t want to be a journalist,’ I said, because I don’t.
    ‘Doesn’t matter – this is what we’re doing,’ she said.
    ‘Don’t you mean what I’m doing?’
    ‘Right. So who do you think you could talk to?’
    ‘Can’t I just write a story about the time I went to the beach or something like that?’
    ‘You’re not in second grade, Lizzie,’ she replied. ‘And stop sulking. Besides, this project needs to be about a real person.’
    ‘I’m a real person,’ I said.
    Mum sighed. ‘Lizzie, you know what I mean. Anyway, you don’t have to decide now, but have a bit of a think and let me know when you’ve come up with an idea. Then we’ll talk about how we can arrange an interview.’
    ‘I really wish Grandpa wasn’t dead,’ I said. ‘He had heaps of good stories.’
    Mum nodded. ‘I know, he would have been perfect to talk to. Anyway, back to what I was planning to do now; have you ever read The Loaded Dog ?’
    I groaned, and it’s possible that I might have rolled my eyes. ‘Only about three million times,’ I said.

CHAPTER 6
    D ad likes to sing. He’s not very good, but he doesn’t care. Once, at Uncle Tony’s fiftieth birthday, he broke a karaoke machine. He reckoned it wasn’t his fault, but these are the facts: it was about his sixth song, he was singing loudly (and badly) when the speakers