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uncle is an artist and he sews used tea bags together to make beautiful artwork. He’s made thousands doing stuff like that.”
    “Wow. Really?’
    “Just from used tea bags?”
    “So Bethany was right …”
    “Imagine getting rich from used tea bags!”
    I noticed Bethany beaming as some of the kids crowded around her, asking for other ideas that would make them rich.
    “But it’s about saving the planet,” Bethany argued.
    Emily spoke up. “Well, if you can save the planet
and
make money, that would be awesome!”
    Bethany smiled. “Yeah, that’s true. And you could always donate your profits to a rainforest campaign.”
    I walked out of class quickly. Tanya followed me. Bethany was attracting a lot of good attention. How had she gone from being a weirdo to suddenly having a group of kids wanting to talk to her?
    Emily Wong.
    I’d underestimated her. She was better than I thought.

    Okay. I exaggerated Tanya’s ability to play basketball. She got the ball through the hoop
once
. And when she dribbled, the ball seemed to want to be anywhere but under her control.
    Within ten minutes Julie was fed up.
    “I thought you said Tanya was awesome?!” she yelled at me.
    Tanya stood still but didn’t say a word in her own defense.
    “She is,” I snapped back. “It just takes the right kind of teamwork. Come on, Tanya, let’s go.”
    Lucinda, who’d also been playing, watched with sympathy. It was obvious she didn’t want to keep playing, but Julie passed the ball to her and cried out with manic enthusiasm, “Come on! Let’s play some
real
ball!”
    Tanya followed me away from the courts.
    “What happened? Didn’t you say you were a good shooter?”
    “Well, yeah, that’s what Dad tells me all the time.”
    I groaned. It was my fault, not hers. I’d always made it a rule to never listen to compliments paid by parents. They were
supposed
to make their kids feel good about themselves. I’d had to sort out hundreds of problems caused by parents overpraising their children.
    “Well, never mind,” I said, giving her a reassuring pat on the arm. “There is plenty of other best-friend material out there. We’ll keep on trying.”
    “Do we have to try now? Could we maybe just hang out for the rest of recess?”
    I looked over at her. “Okay. We’ll try again tomorrow. I need to prep you at lunch today. Our next target is Carla.”
    Tanya grinned. “Cool! So … I noticed you like writing.”
    “Yeah, I do. How’d you guess?”
    “I see you writing in a book all the time. And then you put it away like it’s something special. You always have a dreamy look on your face when you’re writing.”
    I smiled. “I love it.”
    “Is it a diary?”
    “Nah. I don’t keep one.”
    “Me either. So what do you write?”
    “It’s private … sorry.” Huh! Wouldn’t she and the rest of the school like to know?
    “That’s okay. I write too, you know.”
    “
Really?
What do you write?”
    “It’s also a secret.”
    I laughed. “Two secret writers. Well, let’s give each other a clue.”
    “Okay! My book is kind of like a how-to book. Like a long piece of advice.”
    “No way! So is mine. Well, it’s more like a manual.”
    We laughed.
    “So when do you write?” I asked.
    “Mainly at night, before I go to bed.”
    “Same!”
    We spent the rest of recess talking about our writing habits and who our favorite writers are and what we do when we get stuck for words. I confessed that I actually hate books about talking fairies and vampires but that atschool they are really the only books that are cool to be seen reading. I explained that this was based on a year of research, and Tanya said she understood because I was the expert. Anyway, she also hates those kinds of books. Like me, she reads fantasy, horror, and action books. We swapped our lists of book titles, promising to read each other’s favorites and report what we thought.
    By the time the bell rang, I’d almost forgotten that I was supposed