Nobody's Perfect by Marlee Matlin

rooms?” suggested Alexis.
    Hamster-size rooms, thought Megan. She had to admit that it wasn’t a bad idea.
    â€œBut how do you get the hamster from one room to the other?” asked Mr. Ryan. “Are you just going to drop Zippity into a room and see how he reacts? Or are you going to give him a choice?”
    â€œA maze !” cried Megan. “Let’s build him a maze !”
    â€œA maze that leads to two or three different rooms,” added Alexis, already into the idea.
    â€œAnd we can watch Zippity in the maze and keep track of how many times he goes to one room over another!” said Megan.
    â€œWe’ll keep a chart!” said Alexis.
    The girls looked to Mr. Ryan for approval.
    Mr. Ryan was already smiling. “Sounds like a science fair project to me,” he said.
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    Megan and Alexis met at a patio table outside the school library to hash out their ideas for the science fair project. Mr. Ryan had already agreed to let them take Zippity home in his cage for the weekend so that they could run him through the maze after it was built. “But you better not lose him,” Mr. Ryan said, after he poked the sleeping hamster with a finger as a way of saying good-bye. “Principal Smelter will have my hide if he finds out I lost Zippity.” The girls solemnly promised to take good care of the hamster over the weekend. The only problem was that they still didn’t have a maze.
    â€œI’ve never built a maze before,” said Megan. “Have you?”
    â€œI’ve never built one,” said Alexis, “but I was inside a maze once. It was a garden maze, so it was made out of hedges.”
    Because Alexis didn’t know sign language, Megan had to rely on her lip-reading skills. But she understood Alexis well enough. “Cool,” Megan replied. “I saw a maze like that once in a movie. You get lost in a maze like that.”
    â€œI liked it at first,” said Alexis, “but then it got scary and all I wanted was to get out.”
    â€œI was in a maze at the school carnival,” said Megan, “but it was made out of bed sheets and clothesline. It was like getting lost in the laundry.”
    Alexis laughed.
    â€œBut we can’t use a garden maze or a carnival maze with a hamster,” said Megan. “Zippity would bust right through the bushes and sheets.”
    â€œA maze that big is too big for a hamster.”
    â€œExactly,” said Megan. “And too big for the science fair.”
    â€œIt’s probably going to end up being about this big,” said Alexis. She stretched her arms to roughly the size of a card table.
    â€œAnd made of cardboard or something,” said Megan. “Like a big box. Big and flat.”
    â€œWhere are we going to find a big, flat box?” asked Alexis.
    â€œBeats me,” said Megan. “The only thing I ever made out of a box was a diorama.”
    â€œMe too!” chimed Alexis. “I made it out of a shoe box.”
    â€œMe too,” Megan chimed back. “I love dioramas.”
    â€œMe too,” said Alexis.
    The process of brainstorming their hamster-size maze got stalled once the girls discovered a shared passion for dioramas. “Mine was the Salem witch trials,” said Megan. “I still have it.”
    â€œCool,” said Alexis. “Mine was the swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano.”
    â€œCool,” said Megan. She was trying to picture Alexis’s diorama and her own. “Isn’t it amazing what you can do with a shoe box?”
    â€œAbsolutely,” Alexis agree.
    Megan and Alexis were both quiet for a moment. It would be hard to say which one came up with the idea first. Maybe the idea occurred to each girl at the exact same time. Regardless, it was a mere instant before the girls looked at each other and cried, “Shoe boxes!”
    â€œWe could build the whole maze out of shoe