My Extraordinary Ordinary Life by Sissy Spacek, Maryanne Vollers

patrolled the night streets in a very large pickup. We knew he would turn us in to our parents if he found us wandering around in pajamas. So we kept our eyes and ears open for that white truck; it added to the danger of our walks. One night he nearly caught us. We were rounding the corner of a three-sided parking shed, just past the graveyard, when suddenly there was Shorty, coming the other way. We ran around the other side, but he’d already spotted Queenie standing next to the building so he decided to stop and investigate. He was a nice man and he leaned down to pet Queenie.
    “What are you doing out this time of night, girl?” he asked the dog. “Shouldn’t you be at home asleep on the rug?”
    He pointed his flashlight beam in our direction just as we made the corner. With our little hearts pounding—and trying not to giggle—we stayed just ahead of him as he circled the building. He finally gave up and drove off into the night. We ran the whole way home with Queenie as our sentinel.
    I was always a good student, but I wasn’t the smartest in my class. That was Hill Goldsmith, my sometime boyfriend. We sat next to each other in first grade while we were taking achievement tests. It was multiple choice so we had to color in a little circle with our pencils next to the right answer. I happened to glance at Hill’s paper and saw that one of his answers was different than mine. So of course I changed my answer. But when I got my paper back, the answer I’d copied from Hill’s paper was wrong. You would think that experience would have taught me a lesson, but I had one more ill-fated brush with cheating.
    Vickie Johns was my childhood partner in crime. We were both in Mrs. Frost’s fourth grade class when we came up with another brilliant idea: I liked to do math, which was simple for me, but hated writing out all the spelling sentences. Vickie loved to write but hated math. So we decided to join forces and do each other’s homework. We figured it was stupid to have to suffer through work we didn’t like, when the solution was so obvious. For about a month we had a real production line going. The last thing I’d always say when I handed Vickie my assignment was “Remember! Write like me!” Apparently, she was a pretty good counterfeiter. But we made the fatal mistake of bragging about our system to some friends.
    One day Vickie and I convinced our mothers that we were both sick and that we should be allowed to stay home from school and convalesce together at my house. We had a big time lounging in our pajamas. When we got tired of reading comic books, we decided to do an art project in the bathtub. First we melted down dozens of wax candies that we had been hoarding—those miniature soda bottles filled with horrible, sweet, colored liquid. Then we sculpted a magnificent horse out of the wax. Vickie and I were congratulating ourselves on our creation when the phone rang. It was a friend warning us that we were in deep trouble. Another one of our classmates, emboldened by our absence from school, told Mrs. Frost what we had been up to. First we panicked. Then we came up with a plan: We’d apologize and give Mrs. Frost the wax horse as a peace offering, hoping we could bribe her into forgetting about the whole thing.
    The next morning Vickie and I slunk into Mrs. Frost’s class a few minutes early and presented her with our great gift. She put it on her shelf without saying a word and then told us she’d like to talk to us at recess. We sat through the class wringing our hands, worried sick. Not only was Bonnie Frost our teacher, but she and her husband—yes, Jack Frost!—belonged to the same church and knew our parents. Disaster loomed. But much to our relief, Mrs. Frost didn’t turn us in to the elementary school principal, Mr. Goolsby. She talked to us about the importance of doing our own homework, that it was about learning, not just grades. We promised her we would never do it again, and didn’t.