THE FIRST PART

DEAR JUDGE HENRY,

I will tell you three things right now.

Number one: I’m almost twelve years old. I do not want to go to prison, even if it’s a prison for kids.

Number two: Nobody calls me Aurora Dawn Bauer, not even my grandma, and she’s the most legal person I know. Everyone calls me Daisy.

Number three: Your face looks like squirrels flopped their tails where your eyebrows should be. I can’t tell if your eyes ever laugh, but you were all business when you told me to write this, and—

UGH. Mom just peeked over my shoulder and said, “Erase that stuff about his weird eyebrows or we’ll have more trouble. I mean it!” I went to my room and slammed the door. She’s a snoop.

You told me to write everything I think and feel. Everything. And I will.

Mom’s afraid. If I screw this up, she says, the County will never get off her back.

I won’t screw it up. I’m going to do what you said and use the brain God gave me to explain myself instead of causing more trouble.

Mom thinks I could finish this paper in a couple of nights if I work hard. She has no idea how much I have to say. Sometimes you hold stuff tight inside until a judge makes you let it out, and the stuff starts a spark and the spark starts a fire and the fire burns big and terrible. The Chemist says you can’t stop a big and terrible fire with a regular garden hose.

So who caused this mess? Not the Chemist. I swear on everything I’ll ever have—every single Christmas present and birthday present from every single Christmas and birthday. The Chemist didn’t know we were going to break him out of prison. It’s not his fault.

You should blame my mom and her boyfriend, Alex, for running off to Mexico. Or Kari, the worst babysitter in the world. Or Grandma’s crying. Or Ashley and that dog whose name may or may not be Fred. And most of all, you should blame my never-friend Graham Hassler, aka Graham Cracker, and his stupid Idea Coin. If you broke up this story into one million pieces of blame, only two of the pieces would be mine and 999,998 would belong to Graham.

Why do you think we called it the Graham Cracker Plot?

DEAR JUDGE HENRY,

The Chemist is my dad, but he’s not the kind of dad who lives in your house. He doesn’t drive me to school or fold socks or put away dishes. My parents were never married, so he didn’t learn that stuff.

The Chemist’s the kind of dad who buys presents and lets you watch zombie movies and gives you ice cream even though you already had cookies. Mom was like that, too, back when she’d put booze in a travel mug and pretend it was coffee. But now, she’s all, “Eat your peas and do your homework and that’s enough T V for one day.”

So my dad and I were eating mozzarella sticks at the Rattlesnake Bar and Grill when we gave each other new names.

“Guess what I did at school today?” I said.

“Played with Graham?”

Nobody seemed to get the Graham thing. I said, “He’s an after-school friend.”

“What’s that? A part-time friend? Like a part-time job?”

“We don’t hang out at school.” Something about Dad’s face said, “Buckle up for a guilt trip. Poor Graham doesn’t have a dad and goes to special reading classes and probably won’t ever get braces for his crooked teeth.” I wanted that look wiped off his face quick. I said, “Graham pulls my ponytail and makes fart noises with his armpit.”

“Oh, come on. Armpit farts are hilarious.” He laughed and laughed. Then he wiped his eyes on his napkin and said, “The ponytail thing means he likes you.”

“Hello! I said I have a story to tell! Guess what I did at school today?”

“You took over the cafeteria from the crabby old ladies? And you threw away the veggies and made marshmallow sandwiches!”

“That’d be awesome. But, no. We were in the media center and we looked up our names to learn their meaning and where they came from. What were you thinking when you named me Aurora Dawn?”

He asked the waitress for two more beers—a real one for him and a root one for me. “Your mom picked Aurora, and her favorite aunt was named Dawn. It’s a great name. It’s unusual. Now my name? It sucks. Do you know how many Jacobs are in this world? Probably millions.”

“Guess what? Aurora means the dawn! My name is Dawn Dawn! Do you know how dumb that sounds?”

He thought about it. “Really? Are you sure?”

“Yes! I found it on the Internet. I couldn’t write that on my paper. Dawn Dawn. Dawn Dawn!”

“So what’d you say?”

“I wrote that it means Daisy.”

“I gotta tell you sweetie, Daisy Dawn Bauer sounds pretty silly, too.”

I shrugged. “Time was up, and I was thinking about the wallpaper in Grandma’s bathroom with the little daisies. It’s better than Dawn Dawn.”

“Better than Jacob, too,” he said. We tended to agree on most everything.

He pulled the last mozzarella stick in two pieces and gave me the bigger half. That’s when I got the idea. “How about I go by Daisy, and you go by something that’s like you. How about Video Game Man?”

“I do like video games. But it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it, Daisy?”

“Carpet Cleaning Man!”

“I quit that job.”

“Mom said the job quit you.”

“She gets things mixed up, doesn’t she?” He took a gulp of beer and said, “Well, I was good at chemistry in school. I took two chemistry classes before I left college, and I’m kinda into that.”

“Chemistry Man?”

“The Chemist.” He smiled. “Yeah. The Chemist.”

*   *   *

A few months later, the Chemist went to prison. You weren’t the judge who did that to us. I already asked Grandma, and she’d know because she paid the lawyer bills. If you were that judge, who punished my daddy for an accident, I’d use all the bad words I promised the Chemist I wouldn’t say until high school.

Text copyright © 2014 by Shelley Tougas