Claudia and the New Girl by Ann M. Martin

rooms, but now our sculptures stood proudly on brown pedestals. I could see about twenty in the room we had entered. The
    rest must be in other rooms. Ms. Baehr had said about sixty pieces were on display.
    Still gripping hands, Stacey and I began walking from sculpture to sculpture. Some of them were hard to see because of the crowd, but we waited patiently or stood on tiptoe until we could get a glimpse of each one. I was determined not to miss a thing.
    "Look! There's something by Mary Drabek!" exclaimed Dawn. "She's in my math class."
    "Hey, she got a third-prize ribbon!" said Kristy, wiggling her way closer to the sculpture.
    "This is very impressive, honey," my mother said to me. "I think the new gallery is wonderful. You should be proud to be in its first exhibit."
    I nodded my head. I was afraid to speak. Where was my sculpture of Jackie? I didn't hear any laughing. . . .
    Stacey and I had finally dropped hands. Soon I got separated from my family and the club members, so I wandered around by myself. I made a complete tour of the first room and didn't find Jackie.
    I entered the next room.
    The first piece I saw was a boxing cow by John Steiner. It hadn't won an award.
    The next piece was Fiona MacRae's. It was the stag she'd been working on. The second-prize ribbon was attached to it.
    I passed a rabbit, two little girls holding hands, a man reading a newspaper, and a baseball player.
    And then I reached a small crowd of people. They weren't laughing so they couldn't have been looking at Jackie. I edged closer, squeezing between a man who smelled of tobacco and a woman with a baby in a Snuggli. There on a brown pedestal was Ashley's fireplug. The blue first-prize ribbon hung jauntily in front of it.
    I was amazed. Somehow, Ashley really had managed to make that hydrant come to life. And the judges must have appreciated what she'd done.
    "It's an animated inanimate object," I heard a voice explain.
    Ashley.
    There she was.
    Our eyes met.
    I smiled. "Congratulations," I mouthed to her.
    Ashley nodded at me and then smiled back.
    I left the room. Suddenly, I wasn't very interested in finding my sculpture. I didn't care where it was or whether anyone was
    laughing at it. Maybe I should have listened to Ashley more. Maybe I really could have learned from her.
    But just at that moment, I heard an excited squeal behind me.
    "Claudia!" Kristy cried. She had grabbed my arm and was jumping up and down. "Come see what I found!"
    Kristy led me into a third room. Then she picked up her pace and pulled me straight through it, nearly knocking a bunch of people over.
    "What is it?" I exclaimed, half-annoyed, half-amused.
    "It's . . . this sculpture!"
    In front of me was Jackie. Kristy had been the first of us to find it. Right away, I noticed two things: no one was laughing at it, and a green ribbon had been fixed to the pedestal.
    "You got an honorable mention!" said Kristy.
    "For a work-in-progress," I marveled.
    "You would have won first prize if you'd finished," someone spoke up behind me.
    It was Ms. Baehr.
    "I would have?"
    She nodded. "The judges were very impressed."
    "You'll have to tell Jackie," said Kristy.
    "I'll say."
    The next half hour was one of the most exciting I've ever known. My parents and sister and Mimi and Mary Anne and her dad and Dawn and Stacey all crowded around to look at and exclaim over the half-finished sculpture of Jackie. Then a Stoneybrook News photographer took a picture of all the winners, even the three of us who just got honorable mentions. She said that the photo and an article about us and the gallery would appear in the paper a few days later.
    All that night people kept congratulating me. Even my sister, who wants to be a physicist and whose head is usually in the clouds, said, "This must be most rewarding for you. You're among very talented company." And Mimi hugged me to her and said, "I love you, my Claudia."
    The next day I was sitting with my friends in the cafeteria. We were back to