R U READY FOR THIS NONSENSE?
(Me neither.)

Here is chapter 1, unedited except for footnote comments.

< Preamble

Chapter 1: The Beginning of Chaos

“So if you give me your aluminum cans, I will professionally flatten the aluminum for the canoe and then proceed to weld the parts together to form a double-plated body, a task essential but sadly overlooked by most canoe builders.”

I tried to look interested. Really. The only problem was that I had no idea what Carmel was talking about. I smiled, but inside I was saying, “what?”

Carmel must have noticed, because she looked my direction and said, “To put it plainly, Carla, it means I’ll stick the cans together to make a canoe.”

Oh.

Some kids collect baseball cards. Others collect stuffed animals. My sister, Carmel Fitzgerald, collects Coke cans. She’s a little on the crazy side. Today at lunch, she was trying to get the kids in the lunch room to hand over their cans from the school’s lunch.

“Remember,” she said to us, “the canoe race is three Saturdays from now, so make your contributions today!” She held out a plastic garbage bag.

Carmel is extremely smart, considering she’s only nine years old. She’s already taking high school classes when she should just be beginning third grade. But she’s not just smart—she’s a publicity hog. She’s kind of a mini-celebrity at our school and she enjoys it to the fullest. She likes the things she does to be uniquely her.

“Carmel, why do you want to make a canoe out of Coke cans, anyway?” I asked. “So you can win the award for the most creative canoe?”

“Precisely,” she answered. She then began a big speech about convincing the judges to listen to her. By now, I was beginning to feel just a little bit jealous. And why shouldn’t I? I was the only kid in school who wasn’t smarter than their younger sibling. Well, I was also the only kid in school with thirteen siblings.¹

The youngest is Dulcie, a fiery six-year-old who always got her way. Jacob is seven and is obsessed with one of his toys. If anyone messes with it, he goes nuts. Morgan is probably the bossiest person in our family. He’s eight and he even bosses around our parents. He says he wants to be an astronomer, but he’d probably end up just bossing the universe around (“hey, you stars! You’re shining too brightly! Earth! You’re spinning too slowly! Go faster!” Things like that).

My brother Travis is nine, like Carmel. He and she despise one another, but Travis is usually pretty calm for the most part, except when he is forced out of doing something because of one of our other siblings. Carmel, like I said, is nine, and has the longest hair of anyone I know. It’s at least two and a half feet long, and Carmel is only three feet 11 inches tall, so you can imagine how it looks on her. I guess it has something to do with her being a genius. I’m ten and in fourth grade. I think I’m the peacekeeper in the family, since the only person I ever really fight with is Carmel. I like to sit back and watch the volcanoes erupt, if you know what I mean.

Now I come to the archenemies of the family: Helen and Mabel. They’re both eleven, both have short blond hair, are both stubborn, both loathe Carmel, and both want a lot of attention in the house. My mom insists that we try to solve our own problems, but still Mabel and Helen fight.

The identical twins, Craig and Ed, are twelve. They actually get along pretty well for brothers. Both are calm, but love to play pranks on people. Craig is much more creative than Ed, but Ed has all the facts, so they could probably write a book on pranking people if they wanted to.

Henry was born exactly one year before Craig and Ed, which makes him thirteen. He always wanted to be part of Craig and Ed’s duo, and they, surprisingly, seemed to have let him. The oldest, Adelle and Zach, are fifteen. Out of all of us, they seem to be the two who get along the best.

Well, that’s my family. Now back to school. Having ended her speech, Carmel was now holding her garbage bag open to anyone who would donate. Every time someone tossed a can in the bag, she’d say, “Thank you for your contribution. The canoe race is three Saturdays from now. Be sure to arrive at 8 AM sharp and look for the aluminum canoe!”

I sighed. It was going to be a long three weeks. Then the lunch bell rang and we had to struggle through English, math, and science before we got to go out to afternoon recess. Of course, there was Carmel again, campaigning for her cans. Most of my classmates were gathered around her.

The last hour of school passed in a blur and I walked home with Carmel.

“You know,” she said, chewing a gummy bear, “I bet with the right stamina and training, we really could win that award.” She threw another gummy bear up in the air and caught it in her mouth. “We might even win the ‘Most Creative Canoe’ award!”

We rounded the corner, and already I could hear the screams from a house that could be none other than ours. Walking up the front steps, Carmel stayed behind (probably to count the cans). The first thing that happened when I opened the door was that I was hit in the shoulder by a beanbag.

“Hey!” I shouted. I didn’t know who had thrown it, so I picked it up and chucked it at Travis. It hit him on the back and he started screaming. I stepped into the house and my foot came down into an orange origami box.

“Watch it!” said Helen.

“Sorry!” I made my way through Dulcie’s crayons, stepping on a few, passed Mabel’s model robot, accidentally knocking off its head, but finally made my way into my room and sat down on my bed. After a few minutes, I could hear noises from Carmel’s room through the wall, and it took me a second to realize that she was smashing cans for the canoe. I could also hear screaming still coming from Travis. Geez, I thought. I couldn’t have thrown the beanbag that hard. I got up from my bed, threw open my door, and marched into the hallway.

“Travis, I—” But it was not the beanbag he was screaming about. It was much, much worse. Dulcie, Jacob, Travis, Helen, Ed, and Craig were having a screaming contest. Henry was yelling at them to stop, Adelle was practicing for her choir recital, Mabel was practicing her drums, and Zach was rehearsing his death scene for the school play.

“Somebody help!” I yelled into the chaos. That’s when Carmel walked into the room. She had a pencil and a notepad in her hand and, despite her size, somehow managed to yell louder than all the other noise in the room.

“Alright, everybody!” she screamed. “Settle down! It’s time for me to give the assignments!”

Immediately, everyone stopped screaming, yelling, and practicing and gathered around Carmel. The reason everyone quieted down so quickly was because they all knew what the assignments were: they were for the canoe race.

I walked over to Dulcie and sat down beside her. She immediately started to bawl.

“Whaaaaa! Cawla bwoke my cwayons!”

But Jacob, who was in front of us, whirled around quickly and shushed her. “Shh!” he hissed. “I wanna hear my assignment!” Everyone else murmured in agreement, and Dulcie was quick to quiet her wails.

“Okay,” said Carmel, flipping the notepad to the first page. “Who wants to load the canoe into the truck and then position it in the water once we get to the river?” She didn’t even wait for an answer. “Adelle? Zack? Henry? I think you three should do it. You’re the oldest and strongest.”

They agreed. Carmel may be one of the youngest siblings in the family, but even the oldest kids would listen to her when she spoke.

“Alright,” she said, writing down the information. “Now I also need a look-out.” She looked up from the notepad to see if there were any volunteers. “You know,” she said, clarifying. “For the actual race? Someone to look out for upcoming obstacles as we weave down the river, to make sure we don’t crash.”

“Ooh!” said Helen, as if she’d just figured out what a look-out was. “Can I do it?”

“Sure,” replied Carmel. As she was writing this down, our dad came in through the front door and almost stumbled over the lot of us sitting on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” he said, surprised. “I didn’t realize I was walking in on a conference!”

“No, daddy,” Dulcie said, crawling over to him and hugging his leg. “We were talking about beanut putter.” I have no idea what made her mention peanut butter, but she never could get those words right.

“Beanut putter?” asked Jacob.

“Yeah,” said Travis. “Like shace spips!”

“And bight lulbs,” said Helen.

“And sop picles!” shouted Mabel.

“Polored censils!” I contributed.

“Kurger Bing!”

“Plothes cin!”

“Flow snake!”²

We kept yelling louder and louder until Carmel got so frustrated with us that she stood on the couch and bellowed, “ranoe cace!!” This once again got our attention and made us calm down. “You guys,” she said, sounding disgusted. “If we keep goofing off like this, we’ll never get this race figured out.” She sighed. “By the way, Dulcie, where did you come up with peanut butter?”

Dulcie looked up at Carmel, then shrugged and muttered, “merlins.” That’s Dulcie-ese for “Martians,” which unfortunately got everyone going again.

“Martians!” yelled Travis, swinging back on his knees and hitting Mabel.

“Hey!” she said, shoving him. “Watch it, you gorilla!”

“Wait,” said Craig, running to the window. “Look! Martians! They’re outside! All different kinds and colors.”

“Are they green?” asked Jacob.

“Yeah!” replied Craig. “And red!”

“And blue?” asked Zach.

“Purple?”

“White!”

“Brown!”

“Turquoise!”

By this point, Carmel was so frustrated that she threw her arms up in the air, exclaimed, “I give up!” and ran to her room. Nobody seemed to notice she was gone. They just kept talking about colorful Martains and making up more words.

I went into the kitchen, grabbed a bag of gummy bears from the snack drawer, and sat at the table to eat them and think about Carmel’s plan. I thought that making an aluminum canoe was really not such a bad idea.

Around 5:00, our mom came home. Right as she walked through the door, she was hit with the usual flood of questions.

“Henry ate all the cookies,” said Zack. “Can you go get some more?”

“I have Girl Scouts tonight, but I can’t find my vest,” said Mabel. “Where is it?”

“Who took my Dynamo Dino?” yelled Jacob from the other room (his Dynamo Dino is a toy he got from our grandma last Christmas. It’s a little plastic stegosaurus with sunglasses, and orange shirt, and a Mohawk. When you press on its foot, it shoots water out of its mouth. He adores it).

“Guys,” my mom said with her infinite patience. “One at a time, one at a time. I’ll help everyone out. Just give me a minute to put my things down. Oh, and wash up for dinner.”

As she was speaking, Adelle, wrapped in a bath towel, came shuffling down the hall. It was clear that she had just gotten out of the shower.

“Alright,” she said angrily. “Where are my clothes?”

The twins and Henry burst out laughing, which only made Adelle angrier.

“Craig,” she cried. “Ed, Henry! I thought you guys were nice.” They kept laughing. “Okay,” said Adelle, clearly even more annoyed than she’d been a moment earlier. “Where did you hide them?”

They stopped laughing. Ed looked over at Henry, who looked over at Craig. Craig ran his fingers through his hair in an attempt to look cool.

“Adelle,” he said in his smoothest “cool guy” voice. “We…um…sort of…I don’t know, uh…forgot where we hid them.”

“What!?” yelled Adelle. “I don’t believe it. You hid them yourself, didn’t you? How could you forget where they are?”

“Uh, actually, we got Travis to hide them,” said Craig. I looked over at Travis. So did Adelle.

“Um, I’ll go get ‘em,” Travis said. He ran outside.

“Oh well,” said Adelle, sighing. “I guess I’ll just find some different clothes.”

“Guys!” Mom’s voice came from the kitchen. “Dinner!”

Since our family was so big, our table was the size of a small swimming pool. The two people at the ends practically had to scream across the table if they wanted to hear one another. Once we were all seated, our mom came in carrying a plate with a slimy blob of browninsh-green stuff on it.

“I didn’t feel like cooking tonight,” she said as she set it on the table, “so I made some special casserole from a box.”³

“Yuck,” muttered Morgan.

“I’ll try it!” said Henry. He got himself a big spoonful of the gross-looking casserole and took a bite. He chewed thoughtfully. “Good!” was his conclusion. I figured his judgment was sound, so I scooped myself a bit of the casserole and tasted it. Yuck! It tasted like some sort of dead skunk!

Mabel must have shared my opinion, as she spit her bite out into a napkin and proclaimed, “it tastes like some sort of dead skunk!”

“I like it,” said Henry as he got another spoonful.

“Gross,” Travis proclaimed. He pushed his plate over to Carmel, who had finally emerged from her room for dinner.

“Ew!” she squealed. “Don’t put this revolting concoction in front of me!” she shoved the plate away. It hit Morgan’s glass of milk and a piece of casserole flew through the air and hit him right in the eye.

“Hey!” he yelled. When he thought no one was looking, he picked up his roll and hurled it towards Carmel. She ducked and the roll hit Travis in the ear.

“Ow! Hey!” And that’s how the food fight got into full swing. Helen picked up her roll and threw it at Zack. He dumped the contents of his water glass over Adelle, who picked up her entire piece of casserole and threw it at Henry. By then we were throwing food at anyone who was a good target. Even dad was in on the fight until mom re-entered the room from the kitchen and let out a scream that made us all freeze.

“Who started this?” she cried. Adelle looked at Zack. Zack looked at Henry, then glanced at Ed. Ed looked at Craig. Craig looked at Mabel. Mabel looked at Helen, who looked at me. I looked at Carmel.

“Morgan,” we all said in unison. Mom looked over at Morgan, who sank down in his chair.

“Well,” my mom said to him, sounding both annoyed and angry. “Do you know who’s going to clean all this up?”

He sank lower down into his chair. “You?” he asked timidly.

“No,” said mom.

“Dad?”

“No.”

“Adelle?”

“No!” yelled mom. “You!”

“What?!” said Morgan like he couldn’t believe it. “No way! I didn’t even start it! Carmel did!”

Carmel looked up. “What?” she said. “Are you suggesting that I would stoop to such extremes as to start a food fight?”

“Yes,” said Helen and Mabel in unison.

“Well,” Carmel huffed. “If everyone thinks so lowly of me, then I’m just going to go up to my room.” She got up, took her glass of water, and dumped it over Morgan’s head.

At 8:00, I went over to Carmel’s room and knocked on the door.

“Go away, Morgan,” she said. “If you’re here to terrorize me, I should let you know that I’ve armed my door. If you turn the doorknob even the slightest bit, you’ll meet your worst nightmare.”

I didn’t want to find out what that was, so I stood outside and said, “Carmel, it’s me, Carla.”

There was a pause. “Hold on.”

There was a click, a buzz, a thud, a crash, and then the door opened. “Hi,” she said.

I looked past her. There was a pile of gummy bears on her bed;⁴ she obviously was sorting them by color. She sat down next to them, took a yellow gummy bear, and bit off its foot.

“You know,” I said. “I didn’t think you started the food fight.”

“Yeah right.” She seemed to be in a trance with the wall.

“Morgan did,” I continued. “And the way he accused you was evil.”

A smile crossed Carmel’s face. “Morgan,” she said, sounding satisfied. She put the rest of the yellow gummy bear in her mouth, picked another one from the pile, threw it into the air, and caught it. She then looked at me, picked up yet another gummy from the pile, and threw it over to me.

“You can have as many of these as you want,” she said as I caught it.

I raised my eyebrows. If there was anything Carmel was exceptionally possessive about, it was her gummy bears. “Why?” I asked.

“Because you just defended me,” she said. “And because of that, you’ll be rewarded with much more than gummy bears later.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but I was sure I’d soon find out.

____________________

1. I was heavily inspired by the size of Mallory Pike’s family in The Baby-Sitters Club books. And I think Carmel being a genius comes from Claudia Kishi’s sister, Janine, being a genius. Can you tell what my favorite book series was back then?

2. I remember thinking these were hilarious. I was clearly wrong.

3. That so totally still counts as cooking.

4. Was I pretentious enough to be using semicolons when I was in 4th grade? Apparently.

Y’ALL READY TO SEE WHAT KIND OF GARBAGE YOU GET WHEN CLAUDIA CAN’T THINK OF A BLOG POST?????

Hi.

A while back, I promised that I would type up and post a story that I wrote back in 4th grade because nothing’s more embarrassing than having to read old crap that you wrote back when you thought you had talent, right?

And this blog is all about my embarrassing moments, right?

So.

Consider this the “preamble” post I guess.

Background: I don’t know where I got the inspiration for this stupid story, but I remember writing it in a purple journal back in 4th grade. It remains the longest thing I’ve ever written by hand (that is, not typed), which is kind of sad, but also kind of expected, as I learned to type in 7th grade and never looked back when it came to how I wrote up my stories.

I also never came up with a title for it, so I’m calling it “The Fourth Grade Story.” Which I guess is a little bit appropriate because the narrator is a fourth-grader.

Anyway, I’m going to post it chapter by chapter with no edits. Any misspellings, wrong words, terrible dialogue, awful plot…it’s all going to be in there. Just please remember this is something I wrote in FOURTH GRADE, so the quality is going to be absolutely horrible. I’d like to think I’m a better writer now than I was back then, but who knows, haha.

Stay tuned for the first chapter tomorrow!

OH, I’ll also put a list of links to each chapter here in case any of you are masochists and actually want to read this garbage.

Chapter 1

BYE!