Super Duper Pee Wee! Read Free

are you? Do you have a dog? I do. Mrs. Peters is our leader. We go on trips and do good deeds and get badges. I have a mother and father and no brothers or sisters. I have lots of friends in Pee Wee Scouts. My best friend is Mary Beth. Her pen pal is a girl. Mine isn’t. My other friends are Jody and Kevin. They are boys, but they are nice anyway.”
    Molly read this much over and erased the last line. It might make Lyle feel bad. Then she wrote, “Some of the boys in our troop are mean. Especially one named Roger. I hope you aren’t like him.”
    She read it over and erased it. It was even worse than the other sentence!
    In its place she wrote, “Love, Molly Duff.”
    But did she love Lyle? She didn’t even know him! She crossed out love and wrote,“Yours truly.” Then she folded it in half and put it in an envelope. The envelope had an
M
with flowers just like the stationery.
    Molly was worn out. Letter writing took a lot of thinking and it made her fingers stiff.
    She went downstairs and asked her mother for a stamp. She’d mail it tomorrow. Then all she had to do was sit and wait for a letter back. It didn’t really matter if Lyle was nice or not. Even if he wrote only one letter, she’d get her badge.

CHAPTER 4
From Whole Room
to Half a Room
    T he next morning Molly mailed the letter to Lyle. Mary Beth mailed her pen pal letter too.
    “I don’t know what to say in a letter,” whined Sonny when the girls met him in the park riding his bike. “And I can’t spell all those words.”
    “Use a dictionary,” said Mary Beth.
    Sonny sighed, as if a dictionary was definitely too hard.
    “I can’t read dictionaries,” he said. “I can’t read those hard words.”
    Sonny was lazy, thought Molly. He only wanted to do things that were really easy. It was his mother’s fault. She treated him like a baby instead of a seven-year-old.
    Sonny rode off and the girls sat on a bench in the warm sun watching the robins dig for worms.
    “This is an easy badge to earn,” said Mary Beth. “Writing a letter is simple. I’m going to write a bunch of letters to people I know.”
    “What if our pen pals don’t write back?” said Molly.
    “They will,” said Mary Beth. “They have to. Or they won’t get their badge.” She stood up and stretched. “I have to go home and baby-sit my little brother now,” she added.
    Molly wished she had brothers and sistersEveryone else did, it seemed, but her. Her family was too small.

    But when she got home, her mother had some news that looked as if it might change all that.
    “Auntie Ree is coming to live with us for a while,” she said, hanging up the phone.
    Auntie Ree was her mother’s sister. Her name was Marie, but when Molly was little she couldn’t say “Marie” so she called her “Auntie Ree.” Auntie Ree was married and lived in a fine house of her own. Molly could understand her coming to visit. But her mother did not say visit. She said “live.”
    “Is Uncle Chuck coming too?” asked Molly, thinking how quickly her wish for a bigger family had been granted.
    “They are getting a divorce,” she said. She looked sad. “They have been separated, but I hoped they would get back together. Instead, they are divorcing.”
    This was not happy news. This was not news that Molly would be getting a new sister or brother. A divorced aunt was not the way to add to a too-small family.
    “You may have to share your room for a while,” said her mother. “Till we see howlong she will be here. The den is all torn up, and the couch is gone to be re-covered.”
    She put her arms around Molly and said, “Do you mind very much? I know it won’t be easy.” Molly did mind. But she did not want to make her mother even sadder.
    “No,” she said. “I don’t mind.”
    But she did!
    Her own darling little room! The place where she went to be alone when she was sad or happy or just to read a good book!
    Her other twin bed was where her stuffed animals sat. It was where