Howl by Karen Hood-Caddy

Zo-Zo asked, flipping the pages.
    “I don’t think we should tell anyone . If my dad finds out, I’ll be grounded for life.”
    Zo-Zo sat back and crossed her arms. “Oh, come on — Brodie wouldn’t tell. Not if we made him promise. He’s cool.”
    “Me, cool? Glad you noticed,” Brodie said, breezing into the library. He plunked his books down on the table. “I figured it out.”
    Zo-Zo looked up at him. “Figured what out?”
    “How to make our contest less depressing. All we have to do is get people to do exactly what I did. Fill out the questionnaire twice.”
    Zo-Zo and Robin both stared at him.
    “Remember how pathetic my score was the first time I did it? I felt really down about it, so, when I went home, I changed some things, then I did it again and my score was way better. That made me feel really good.”
    Robin wanted to stay mad at him but found it too hard to. “What kind of things did you do?”
    “Nothing huge. I, like, changed our light bulbs to those weird-looking environmental ones, then I put up a clothes line, and got my dad to install one of those water-saving shower heads. Oh, yeah, and I got my mom to make veggie burgers. When I did the questionnaire again, my score went way up.” He grinned at them. “That’s the way we should do it with everybody.”
    “Oh, I get it,” Zo-Zo said, tapping her pen excitedly. “The first time is kind of like an assessment or something. It just shows people where they’re at in terms of being green. But then we give people a chance to do better. That’s cool. Really cool.”
    “And the person who makes the most changes wins!” Brodie said.
    “Yeah!” Zo-Zo’s pen tapping quickened. “After people do the questionnaire once, we could give them a list of things they could do if they wanted a higher score.” She grinned. “Then we’d really ace the project.”
    “Yeah!” Brodie said. He turned and looked at Robin. “This probably all sounds pathetic to you, but the way I figure it, if we can get a whole lot of people doing a whole lot of small things, the total could be huge.”
    Robin couldn’t really argue. She found his excitement infectious. “Maybe we should take the questionnaire to other classes and get more kids involved.”
    Brodie’s smile became huge. “Great idea. We could make this really big.”
    Zo-Zo ping-ponged from Robin to Brodie. “If we go big like this, my dad will want to do an article on us for the newspaper!”
    Brodie preened his hair. “I’ve always wanted to have my picture in the paper.” He grinned at Robin. “Told you guys it would all work out.”
    Zo-Zo leaned over and pulled a package of papers from her backpack. “Now that we’re back on track, take a look at this. It’s a mock-up of our questionnaire.”
    Robin looked at the freshly printed contest sheet. It was printed in a rich green and blue, and the questions had been done in white with little boxes to fill out beside each one. She had to admit it looked great.
    Brodie held one up and whistled. “Sweet!”
    “Okay, it’s a go,” Zo-Zo said. “I’ll call my dad at lunch. If they print it today, we could have the printed contest sheets by morning. That way we can hand them out tomorrow.”
    Motivated now, they spent the next fifteen minutes brainstorming ideas for the fact sheet. Within twenty minutes, they’d come up with over twenty things people could do to be greener. Zo-Zo wrote them down and promised to work them up into a fact sheet.
    “Okay,” Brodie said. “If we hand out the first round of the eco questionnaires tomorrow, we’ll have them back by the weekend. Then all we’ll have to do is score them.”
    “Let’s do the scoring together,” Zo-Zo said. She turned to Robin. “If we meet at your place, Brodie can see the bear and the sk —” Zo-Zo’s threw her cupped hand over her mouth.
    Robin stared at Zo-Zo in disbelief.
    Brodie blinked. “You have a bear?”
    Robin glared at Zo-Zo, then turned to Brodie.