All About Sam: Chapters 7–13

"Stay right here," she said. "Don't run off."
"I won't," Sam told her. He had no intention of running off.

Quickly Sam scurried back to the No Candy line and stood beside his mother.

The carpool driver, Skipper's mom, got very flustered and kept telling the kids to zipper their lips, but none of them did.

Sam poked at his peas. "Anastasia got to have gerbils," he grumbled.
The whole family groaned. Sam giggled. The gerbils had been terrible. They had had babies, and then they had all gotten out of the cage, and there had been gerbils all over the house for a while.
The Krupniks had all been very glad when they finally gave the gerbils away.

They checked to make certain that Sam's worm box was safely situated on its table, and then wandered over to look at the goldfish in a bowl nearby.
"Not as good as Frank the Second," Anastasia whispered to Sam, and Sam nodded in agreement. "Not as bright-colored, not as big. And Frank's face is more intelligent."

Fake burping wasn't easy. Skipper finally managed a pretty good one, but most of the children simply giggled and sputtered, and Nicky got the hiccups.

"Well," his sister confided, "when I was younger, I used to be jealous of you. Sometimes when people would come to visit Mom and Dad, they would all start talking about what pretty curls the baby had."

"When people started talking about how cute you were and what pretty curls you had, I would get so jealous and mad that I would leave the room. I would go sulk."

Very carefully he reached up with the scissors and snipped at a curl. It fell into the sink on top of the foam. Where the curl had been, there was now just a small tuft of hair. It was sticking up. Straight up.

Sam leaned over the sink and looked once more into the mirror. Foam had dried on his chin and cheeks, and snippets of hair had dried in it, so he had a fuzzy beard.

For a very, very long moment his mother still said nothing. They stared at each other in absolute silence.

Sam's lower lip was still quavering.

"Sometimes I put an invisible hair across the cover, and if the hair is dislodged I know a spy has been into my notebook."

"I've written words after each boy's name, but the words don't really mean what they say. So if I wrote love, that really means 'hate,' see? And despise means 'love'. And my friend Meredith has the code, too, so she can understand. And if I call Meredith up and say, 'I despise Steve Harvey'—well, Meredith could look at her code notebook and see that would really mean that I love Steve Harvey. But no one else would know, because they wouldn't know the code."

Content, he crept back through the dark room and climbed into his bed again.