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seat.”
    â€œThanks, Sandy. I know where to find you.”
    Sandy grins. He’s not fully toothless, but he’s missing two teeth in his smile.
    Dad and Sandy were good friends. They talked a lot about birds, and Dad always brought Sandy leftovers from dinner. But Sandy didn’t show up at Dad’s funeral. Mom said it was wrong of Sandy to stand Dad up like that, so she hasn’t talked to him since then.
    I jump down the bus steps and walk toward school.
    There’s no chance of finding Gabriela in the first day chaos, so instead I search for my locker in the seventh-grade hallway. I rummage in my bag for a slip of paper with my locker combo scribbled on it. I give the lock a couple of turns and pull up on the handle.
    Right away something smells funny.
    Not funny, but sweet.
    It’s actually a nice smell, like Mom came by and de-germed my locker. It wouldn’t surprise me if she had. Mom does a lot of awesome things like that. Last year, on the first day of sixth grade, I opened my locker and founda note with a folded-up twenty-dollar bill in it. Mom said that it was my reward for making it to middle school.
    Thinking nothing else of the smell, I take my books, pencil, and bird journal out of my backpack and throw my backpack into the locker. My bag lands in a lump of translucent brown goo.
    I walk closer to the locker, stick my head inside, and smell.
    It’s honey.
    I pull my backpack from the locker, but it’s too late. The bottom of it is caked in stickiness.
    â€œProblem, honey?”
    It’s him again.
    Mouton.
    MOO-TAWN.
    He’s leaning against his locker on the other side of the hallway.
    â€œâ€Šâ€˜Look out, look out. I need to talk to the principal about my schedule.’ You really bought that bag of smoke, didn’t you, Bird Boy?”
    I wipe my hands across my shorts, but that only spreads the honey and makes everything twice as sticky.
    I throw my backpack down and take off toward the bathroom.
    Grabbing the bathroom door handle, I slam face-first into a sheet of red, otherwise known as Gabriela’s dress.
    â€œEddie?” she says. “This is the girls’ bathroom.”
    â€œOh, sorry,” I say.
    I turn around and hurry away, my face and neck and every other part of me becoming hot and tingly.
    â€œEddie,” Gabriela calls after me. “What is wrong?”
    â€œMouton!” I say, without turning around.
    Great. The first day of seventh grade is going just how I imagined it.
    Not.

Blue-Ribbon Redemption
    I ’ve been in science class for twenty minutes, and my dad was right, Mr. Dover is full of hot air. First off, he wears a navy-blue bow tie. Everyone knows that only people who think they’re really smart wear bow ties. The only good part about his bow tie is that it’s covered with little white ducks.
    Mr. Dover began class by talking about rocks and minerals, and then he started talking about a rock he found at his house, and the next thing you know he’s telling a story about an owl plucking a rodent from his property. I don’t mind stories about birds. I mean, owls are silent assassins and ninja-like hunters, so I cansee why Mr. Dover talks about them. But every other sentence out of Mr. Dover’s mouth has to be about his property.
    Mr. Dover rolls up his sleeves and takes a green marker from the white-board tray. He writes “SCIENCE SYMPOSIUM” in capital letters on the white board.
    â€œWest Plains has a reputation for producing world-class scientists,” he says. “Seventh graders, just like you, who have gone on to become leading experts in their fields. You have a chance to become one of them when you display your project at our annual event, the Seventh-Grade Science Symposium.”
    Last year, when I was in sixth grade, the whole grade was invited to tour the symposium during the last fifteen minutes, once the parents and judges had seen all the projects.
    If you ask me,