I'd been watching this fly for ages. First it had landed on the back of Austin Bentley's head and crawled around on his hair for a full minute. Then it had flown to Dorianne Wallingford's right sneaker, but had had to move when Dorianne used her sneaker to scratch the back of her left leg. It tried Pete Black's pencil, but Pete flicked the pencil immediately and sent the fly on its way again.

I wondered whether the fly was a boy or a girl. I wondered whether flies have families. I wondered whether flies have family reunions and decided they didn't, because family reunions are almost always picnics, and at a flies' picnic, how could you tell the guest flies from the regular, uninvited flies who just want to land on the food for awhile? Then I wondered what it would be like to look out through those gigantic fly eyes, and whether flies would say "eyesight" or "flysight."

I wondered whether the fly found English class as thoroughly boring as I did. I'll say this about Mrs. Hall, our teacher. She at least tries to make the class interesting. For instance, most of the other English classes in our grade have to read The Yearling and A Tree Grows inBrooklyn . Mrs. Hall is doing something different with us — this big project on books that have won the Newbery Award. This gives us a pretty wide selection of books (and some of them are an awful lot shorter than The Yearling), but the thing is I just don't like to read. Except for Nancy Drew mysteries. They're fun. And I'm a pretty good sleuth.

Mrs. Hall was talking about From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Westing Game. Okay, I'll admit it. I hadn't gotten around to reading either one, even though there is a character in Mixed-up Files with my name — Claudia. In fact, the only Newbery Award-winner I had read so far was this one called Sarah, Plain and Tall. That was because it was just fifty-eight pages long.