Boys Rock! Read Free

like to enjoy a rain or an anthill or a spiderweb without interruption. He would like to count drops or drips or ants or all the separatesections of a spiderweb without one of his three brothers barging in to ask, “What are you
doing
, Wally?”
    Wally was on the porch floor, actually, lying on his back, trying to see exactly where in the gutter the drops were leaking out.
    “Counting,” said Wally, and got up, crawling over to the steps again. No one ever understood when he tried to explain things to them, so he wasn’t going to try.
    “Well, we’ve got problems,” said Jake. “Eddie’s going to be editor in chief, so she gets to run the whole show.”
    Wally looked up, surprised. “How did
that
happen?”
    “She’s tricky, that’s what! But here’s our ace in the hole, here’s what hotshot Eddie never thought about: if she asks any one of us to do something we don’t like— something really awful—it’s all for one and one for all. We’re in this together, and we strike. If the workers on a newspaper go on strike, it means no newspaper, unless the editor in chief does it all herself.”
    “What if she doesn’t care?” said Wally. “What if she figures she won’t even
be
here when September comes and you have to turn in your summer reading reports?”
    “She’ll care,” Josh put in, “because I’m going to make posters and put them all over town announcing the newspaper.
The Hatford Herald
, the signs will read.
Coming July Sixteenth! Eddie Malloy, Editor in Chief
.”
    “The
Hatford Herald
?” asked Wally in amazement. “Did Eddie agree to that?”
    “Nope,” said Jake. “She doesn’t even know. But by the time the posters are up all over Buckman, with heron the masthead, she’ll have to go along with it. If she tells people she never agreed to the name, it will look as though she’s not in charge. And Eddie could never stand for that.”
    “Anyway,” said Josh, “as the new distributor, would you go down to the bookstore and ask Mr. Oldaker if we can leave a pile of newspapers in his store each week for people to pick up? You know … explain the whole thing to him. Turn on the
charm
, Wally.”
    One … two …. three…. four…… five……. six……. seven………The water drops were really slowing down now. Wally wanted to see how long it would take after the rain had quit for the water in the gutter to stop dripping altogether. This always happened. If there was something fun to do, he didn’t get to do it. But if there was work or a walk or a mess or a fuss to deal with, guess who got stuck?
    He didn’t have any charm, and the bookstore probably didn’t have any room for stacks of homemade newspapers that kids brought in. What if twenty other kids who were entering seventh grade decided to make one? That was why someone had to go talk to Mike Oldaker in person. That was why someone had to turn on the charm. That was why Wally had to give up an interesting evening on the porch to try out some charm he didn’t have on a bookstore owner who didn’t have any space.
    He thought of telling the twins that he’d changed his mind. He didn’t want to be part of this newspaper after all. But if his brothers were busy for the rest of themonth looking up words in the dictionary and writing stories, guess who Dad would choose to clean out the shed? If Jake and Josh were going back and forth to the library to find historical stuff, guess who Mom would pick to mow the grass? Why wasn’t counting drips from a rain gutter as important as drawing a comic strip? Wally wanted to know.
    “All right,” he said, his voice flat. “I’ll go.”
    While Jake and Josh and Peter went upstairs to play computer games, Wally went down the steps and started toward the business district. The Buckman River, to his left, seemed to have no more energy than Wally did. Despite the earlier rain, it flowed so slowly that it appeared hardly to be moving at all. Everything seemed to have come to a