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cry. Instead she said to the manny, “Are you mad at me?”
    The manny said, “No. Of course not, but why would you shove anything up your nose?”
    I started to say, “Lulu shoves her finger up hers,” but I didn’t.
    “Because I’m crazy,” said Belly. “Aren’t I crazy?”
    Belly gets away with everything just because she’s the youngest. When she painted the tail ofour neighbor’s cat green, Mom just shook her head and said, “You’re so crazy.” When Belly put on Mom’s lipstick and practiced kissing the bathroom mirror, Dad just laughed and said, “You are one crazy baby.”
Crazy
is Belly’s favorite word. Now Belly always says this when she’s done something wrong and she doesn’t want to get into trouble. She is the youngest criminal ever to plead insane.
    The manny said that next year he was going to go to school to be a nurse, and he grabbed a toothpick and tried to get the pea out. Belly wouldn’t stop wiggling, so the manny said we’d have to go to the hospital. We left our uneaten portions of dinner on the table and loaded into the Volkswagen Eurovan to go to the emergency room. The manny asked Lulu and India to roll down their windows, stick out their heads, and make “woo-ooo” siren sounds. They did. I held my arms out of the sunroof and turned a flashlight on and off. The manny pretended to be talking on a CB radio. “We’re headed in with a pea that’s been attacked by a nostril. I’ve seen this before, but never quite this bad. It looks like the pea might need surgery, if it can be saved at all. It looks pretty smashed. The tragic part is that the rest of this poor pea’s family died earlier tonight.” Belly laughed.even though she probably didn’t understand it.
    When we arrived at the hospital, Lulu and India raced into the lobby and began flipping through
Highlights
magazines. They said things like, “Oh, I love this one,” and, “I hope we get to stay longer than we did last time.” It was like a homecoming. Lulu got bored with trying to find the hidden pictures and began writing in “The Manny Files.”
    I went into the examining room with the manny and Belly. The doctor came in and removed the pea from Belly’s nose with long metal tweezers. When he pulled it out and held it on the end of his finger to show Belly, she grabbed it and stuffed it into her mouth. The manny said she was sweet to put it out of its misery like that.
    On the car ride home Lulu scolded, “I can’t believe you let her eat that pea. Why did you do that, Mirabelle?” She calls her Mirabelle when she pretends to be Mom.
    “Because I’m crazy.”
    The manny started singing, “All we are saying … is give peas a chance.”

6
Mary Poppins
     
    After several days of finding unusual useless objects in our lunches and returning from school to find a spectacle awaiting us at the curb, Mom and Dad came back from Mexico. Lulu’s “The Manny Files” was nearly ready for a second notebook. I caught her smiling once while she was writing in it. I told her that I could tell by her smile that she liked the nutty things the manny did. She said that she was smiling because she was fantasizing about Mom and Dad’s horrified faces when they learned that the manny had worn a tutu over his jeans one day when he met the bus. Or that he’d juggled eggs in the kitchen and dropped one on the floor. Or that he called our bus driver “sweet potato” to her face. I grabbed the notebook and tried to take it from her, but she pulled it back out of my hands. It left a paper cut on my thumb. She ran to her room and hid “The Manny Files.”
    We spent the entire Saturday morning preparing for Mom and Dad’s evening arrival at the airport. The manny woke us up early, except for Belly. He said that we could watch an hour of cartoons, but then we would have to start our chores. We were going to make the house spotless before Mom and Dad got home. That’s why we let Belly sleep. The last time she tried to help