1.  She told on me about the celebrity drawings.

She says she didn’t mean to. She says she found them in my room, and they were so good she couldn’t help showing them to Mom.

Of course, it never occurred to Lucy that she shouldn’t have been in my room in the first place. When I accused her of completely violating my constitutionally protected right to personal privacy, she just looked at me like, Huh? even though she is fully taking U.S. Government this semester.

Her excuse is that she was looking for her eyelash curler.

Hello. Like I would borrow anything of hers. Especially something that had been near her big, bulbous eyeballs.

Instead of her eyelash curler, which of course I didn’t have, Lucy found this week’s stash of drawings, and she presented them to Mom at dinner that night.

“Well,” Mom said in this very dry voice. “Now we know how you got that C-minus in German, don’t we, Sam?”

This was on account of the fact that the drawings were in my German notebook.

“Is this supposed to be that guy from The Patriot?” my dad wanted to know. “Who is that you’ve drawn with him? Is that . . . is that Catherine?”

“German,” I said, feeling that they were missing the point, “is a stupid language.”

“German isn’t stupid,” my little sister Rebecca informed me. “The Germans can trace their heritage back to ethnic groups that existed during the days of the Roman Empire. Their language is an ancient and beautiful one that was created thousands of years ago.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Did you know that they capitalize all of their nouns? What is up with that?”

“Hmmm,” my mother said, flipping to the front of my German notebook. “What have we here?”

My dad went, “Sam, what are you doing drawing pictures of Catherine on the back of a horse with that guy from The Patriot?”