Rocky Read Online Free PDF Page A

was the first to shoot up. “I did!” she said.
    “Wonderful,” said her teacher. “Our project is really coming along. On Monday, I want everyone to bring in their letters so we can start making our bulletin board display. Won’t it be fun to share our pen-pal experiences?”

Lizzie’s stomach lurched. What? Bring in their letters? Nobody had told her she was going to have to display the letter she had gotten from Allyson. How could she do that? If people read Allyson’s letter, they’d find out that Lizzie had made up all sorts of things about herself. She clutched the sides of her desk and groaned.
    “Are you okay?” Maria gave her a worried look.
    Lizzie managed to nod. “Sure,” she whispered. But she wasn’t. For the rest of the school day, Lizzie worried. What was she going to do? She was trapped. She had already raised her hand when Mrs. Abeson had asked who’d gotten letters, so she couldn’t say that a letter had not come.
    Maybe she could pretend to be sick on Monday, so she could stay at home. She had never done that before, but how hard could it be? She could just tell Mom that her stomach hurt. But that would only put things off for a day or two. Whenever she did come back to school, Mrs. Abeson would ask about the letter.
    Could she say that her dog had eaten it? No, that was the oldest excuse in the book. Besides, she couldn’t blame Buddy for doing something he would never do. And Rocky was not the chewing type, either.
    Lizzie was in trouble, and she knew it was her own fault. Why hadn’t she just told Allyson the truth about who she was? She needed help, and she knew it.
    After school, she and Maria were in Maria’s neighborhood, walking two dogs each. Lizzie held the tiny red leash of Pickle the Pomeranian in one hand and a hefty leather lead attached to a Lab mix named Tracker in the other. Maria was being towed along by twin poodles, Pogo and Pixie, who had enough energy for four dogs.
    “What’s the matter, anyway?” Maria asked. “You look like you’re getting sick or something. Plus, you’ve been really quiet all day. That’s not like you.”
    Lizzie hung her head. “I did something dumb,” she admitted. “It was just for fun, but now … ugh. Now I don’t know what to do.”
    Maria just looked at her. “Go on,” she said.
    Lizzie knew what her friend was probably thinking. This was not the first time Lizzie had gotten herself into a jam. “You know that letter I got from Allyson?” she asked. “Well, there’s no way I can bring it in and pin it up on the bulletin board in class.”
    “Why not?” asked Maria.
    Lizzie sighed. “Well, I sort of made some things up when I wrote to Allyson. Stuff about my life. I was just trying to make myself sound more interesting, so she’d like me.”
    Maria looked shocked. “You mean, you lied?”
    Lizzie squirmed. “I didn’t lie exactly.” But even as she said it, she knew that she had lied. She had not told the truth, and even though she hadn’t done it to hurt anybody, it was still a lie. “Okay, so maybe I did,” she said. “But let’s forget about that for a minute. The problem is, when she wrote me back she said things in her letter that make it obvious that I … lied. I can’t put her letter up on the bulletin board. The question is, what do I do about it?”
    Maria opened her mouth and shut it again without saying anything. Then Pogo and Pixie dragged her off to one side so they could smell an especially interesting mailbox.
    Lizzie smiled sadly down at Pickle. “Think she’ll help me?” she whispered to the tiny dog. Pickle sat up on her hind legs and put one tiny paw on Lizzie’s leg. That meant she wanted to be carried for a while. Pickle was a little spoiled.
    Maria did not say much until they had finished walking all the dogs, even Ginger and Rocky. When they were done, they went to Lizzie’s house, grabbed an apple each from the bowl on the kitchen counter, and went up to her room. Lizzie sat on