Strider by Beverly Cleary Page A

like to go to his big old house, built on a slope so that it has a view of the bay when the fog lifts. Everything in the house is shabby and comfortable. There is a smell of good things cooking. Barry’s stepmother, Mrs. Brinkerhoff, is plump, but she doesn’t worry about it the way Mom’s friends worry about gaining one teeny ounce.
    Barry’s house is full of cats, hamsters in cages, and little sisters. I once saw a tortoise under the couch, but I have never seen it again. Sometimes a grandmother is there. She knits sweaters out of beautiful soft yarns in wild designs she makesup as she goes along. Barry says she sells them to an expensive boutique for a lot of money. Watching her needles move so quickly in and out of beautiful yarns fascinates me.
    The basic Brinkerhoffs are the parents, Barry, and five little sisters. Two girls belong to Barry’s father, two to his stepmother, and the little one, who crawls and likes to play peekaboo around corners, belongs to both parents. Sometimes the girls seem like more than five because their friends come over, and they all dress up in old clothes Mrs. Brinkerhoff keeps in a big box.
    This morning a bunch of girls were kneeling on chairs around the kitchen table, popping corn in the electric corn popper. When they dumped it out in a bowl, Barry and I reached for some.
    The girls tried to slap our hands away. “This isn’t for eating,” one of them said. “This is for shrinking.”
    That stopped us. Whoever heard of shrinking popcorn?
    The girls were busy dropping perfectly good popcorn into a bowl of water, one piece at a time, to watch it shrink until nobody would eat it except maybe a hamster.
    â€œThat’s a stupid thing to do,” Barry told the girls.
    â€œIt is not,” said the oldest sister. Betsy I think is her name. “We are performing a scientific experiment to prove that popcorn has memory.Drop it in water, and it remembers it is supposed to be little and hard instead of big and fluffy.”
    Barry and I helped ourselves to more popcorn. “You’re being mean to popcorn,” said one of the girls, which made me wonder what popcorn remembered when I chewed it.
    Barry and I went to his room to work on a model of an antique car with many little parts. If we put glue on one piece and couldn’t find where it belonged right away, the plastic melted, and the piece wouldn’t fit. That happened a couple of times. Then I got glue on the hood. When I tried to wipe it off, the shine wiped off, too. The funny part was, I didn’t much care.
    I looked at Barry, and he looked at me. I could see we both had the same thought at the same time: we had outgrown models . Without saying anything, we threw the car pieces into the wastebasket, and as we went through the kitchen, we snatched some more popcorn.
    Here comes Mom’s car, it’s almost midnight, I’m supposed to be asleep, and I haven’t even come to the good part. I’ll write more about today tomorrow.

June 8
    Back to yesterday. There are so many places our moms won’t let us hang around, like the Frostee Freeze and the video arcade, that we headed for the beach, not for any special reason. The beach was just a place to go. The damp air gave us goose bumps below our cutoffs. Fog dripping off the eucalyptus trees made them smell like old tomcats.
    The beach was so gray and chilly the only person around was a rugged old man we call Mr. President because he is always saying if he were president he would make a few changes in this country. He patrols beaches and parks, dragging two gunnysacks, one for broken glass and beer bottles, the other for aluminum cans, so kids won’t cut their feet. Some people think he’s nutty because he lives in anold bread truck, but we don’t. Sometimes we help him.
    At the foot of the steps to the beach, beside the seawall, a dog was sitting in the soft sand. He was tan with a few white spots and a