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woke up late. I dressed quickly and was trotting along the sandy side of the road when Miss
Noelle zipped by. She saw me and slammed on her brakes. “Hey, buddy,” she called out, “need a ride?”
    â€œSure,” I said. I opened the car door, cleared about a million things off her front seat, and hopped in.
    â€œHow’s the crush doing?” she asked.
    I looked over at her. Her long blond hair was wet and the wind was blowing it around. She was smiling and her eyes seemed full of the clever ideas she had been up thinking about all night. “I think the friendship part is beginning to take hold,” I said.
    â€œGreat,” she replied. “I told you it would. Now, are you ready to read your life story as you wish it to be?”
    â€œDefinitely,” I said.
    She parked the car and hustled off to the teacher’s workroom to copy some project material. “Meet you in class,” she hollered, like an old friend.
    But before I got to class Mrs. Nivlash pulled me aside with one of her strong hands and led me into her office. “What have you found out?” she asked. “I’m desperate to get all the dirt on everyone.”
    I may have told Miss Noelle the truth, but I was definitely going to keep telling Mrs. Nivlash what I thought she really needed to hear.
    â€œThis is a great school,” I said. “I’ve always heard that behind every well-run school is a fantastic principal.”
    â€œOh, for goodness’ sake,” she groaned, and slapped her desk. A few papers fluttered off the edge. “Tell me
what you know before you smell up the room with another load of bull.”
    She sounded exactly like my dad, and like him, I knew there was one thing that would wear her down. Niceness. After all, he had married my mom and she was the nicest person I knew.
    I gave her my list of all the kids who I had seen do something nice—kids who had stopped playground fights, who had helped teachers carry books, kids who had been kind to the senior-citizen volunteers, who had shared at lunch, who had helped younger kids with reading, who had picked up trash, who had taken turns—it was a long list.
    â€œThis isn’t what I’m looking for,” she said, frowning. “I want the dirt. Not the nice stuff.”
    â€œBut don’t you think that by pointing out the good things nice kids do, you’ll send a message through the whole school that nice kids are who you respect? And that bad kids are not what you are looking for all the time? Maybe bad kids will get the message and be like the good kids.”
    â€œThat’s one way of looking at it,” she said. “But I find it more satisfying to catch the corrupt.”
    â€œAnd one final thing,” I said, “about the gum.” I pulled a piece of folded paper out of my pocket and passed it to her. I had written the gym teacher’s name on it. She opened it and read it, and looked at me with
one eyebrow raised in suspicion, or maybe she had suspected him all along. “You didn’t hear it from me,” I whispered. I put the Respect Detective ID card on her desk, turned, and smiled as I headed for the door. As I walked down the hall I crammed two pieces of Dubble Bubble into my mouth, and by the time I stuck it to the gym teacher’s door I had chewed all the sugar out of it.
    That afternoon we were reading limericks when Mrs. Nivlash’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “I want to say how proud of everyone I am for behaving so respectfully this week …” Then she went on to praise the behavior of the kids who were nice, who were thoughtful, helpful, well mannered, polite, brave, honest, caring, and kind to others. And as she called out the names of the good kids, I looked around the classroom. I could tell that everyone was wishing their names would be called.

Lucky Buddha

    O ne day after a few weeks of building new officers’ quarters for