Iva Honeysuckle Discovers the World by Candice Ransom

I va Honeycutt was scolding her Cadet Blue crayon when Heaven’s shadow fell across the porch.
    â€œDid I tell you to stand next to Sea Green?” Iva said, not looking up. “You’re supposed to be with the blues.”
    Heaven loomed over her. Her cousin was hard to ignore. She was a head taller and weighed fifteen pounds more than Iva. And she was a mouth breather. Heaven huffed wetly next to Iva’s ear.
    Iva shifted so she was sitting on the one thing she didn’t want Heaven to see. The Shame of Her Third Grade Year.
    Of course, Heaven saw. Her eyes were as sharp as a lizard’s.
    â€œI see a little corner. Is that your map?” she said. “You said you lost it.”
    Iva stuck the wayward Cadet Blue in the time-out row at the back of her sixty-four-crayon box, where crayons with peeled wrappers and broken tips were sent to think about why they were there.
    â€œDid you fib to me? I’m going to tell Aunt Sissy.” Heaven cut her eyes toward the door. She was the only cousin who didn’t have the Honeycutt light brown eyes. Heaven’s eyes were a shifty gray, like oysters in a mason jar.
    Iva thought about sad little Cadet Blue. Maybe she’d been too hasty. She plucked the crayon from the time-out row and said, “Stand beside Cerulean and learn a few things.”
    Iva had spent all afternoon straightening out her crayons. On the first day of third grade, she’d marched into Miss Callahan’s class with her brand-new box of sixty-four.
    But Miss Callahan had a rule. No one could have more than twenty-four crayons, just like in second grade. Iva didn’t think her teacher was very forward-thinking, as her great-grandfather Ludwell Honeycutt used to say.
    She went home that day, picked her favorite colors from the box of sixty-four, and packed them into her old twenty-four-crayon box. All year the other kids asked Iva how she could have a Dandelion colored sun or a Robin’s Egg Blue James River, when their suns were plain old Yellow and their James Rivers were dull old Blue.
    Now school was over for the summer, and order was at last restored in Iva’s crayon box.
    â€œI’m talking to you.” Heaven punched Iva in the arm.
    â€œI hear you.” Iva wiggled away, accidentally uncovering her map.
    â€œYou got an Incomplete!” Heaven shrieked, spit flying. She always spit when she got excited.
    â€œI did not!” Iva flipped the construction paper over.
    â€œI saw it, Iva. In-com-plete . I got a B plus on mine.”
    Iva knew this. She knew every little thing about her almost-the-exact-same-age double-first cousin. Heaven lived right next door. Iva’s bedroom window looked into Heaven’s bedroom window. When Heaven sneezed, Iva reached for a Kleenex.
    This year Iva had been able to escape from her cousin in school. Heaven had been assigned to Miss Park’s third grade. Everyone in both third grades had had to make up continents, and their maps were displayed in the hall outside the two classrooms.
    All but one.
    â€œI’m telling Aunt Sissy,” Heaven said again.
    Iva stuck her little finger in the plastic sharpener in the side of her crayon box. She liked testing the limits of her power. The sharpener didn’t even hurt.
    â€œMama knows I got an Incomplete.” Iva hated that word. It made her feel half finished.
    Her map had serious problems. Number one, she had not invented a continent, like they were supposed to. Why make up countries and rivers and mountains when there were so many real ones to discover?
    Heaven had named her continent Cloudland, which Iva thought was stupid. Who could live on a cloud without falling through it?
    Instead of making up a continent, Iva had drawn a map of the world. But she had made the United States too big. Russia, Japan, and China were scrunched along the far edge like squashed cockroaches. She had put Australia next to Hawaii, in the wrong ocean.
    Iva didn’t