Extra Credit

by Andrew Clements

  The letter wasn’t too long, written on the front and back of one piece of paper. But compared to the first one, it felt like it had been created by a whole different person.

  First of all, thank you for your interesting letter. You should be very proud to know a whole other language so well.

  I also loved the pictures you sent—such good drawings. I can’t wait to show them to my class at school.

  Nice poem, too. I don’t write poems myself, but I know one that was in a picture book my mom used to read to me at bedtime when I was little.

  The rain is falling all around,

  it falls on field and tree.

  It rains on the umbrellas here,

  And on the ships at sea.

  It’s good, don’t you think? It’s by a man named Robert louis Stevenson. He also wrote adventure books, but I haven’t read any of them yet. I’m okay at reading, but I don’t like sitting around. Mostly I love being outside. I have a new fort I’m building in a fallen tree in the woods behind my house. I’ll take a picture of it with my phone and send it to you with my next letter.

  It’s pretty hard to imagine what it’s like to live where you are, but the pictures helped. I’ve also looked on the Internet at a lot of photos of your country. And now I pay attention to all the news stories on TV about Afghanistan. There’s still shooting and bombs and stuff. But I’m glad it’s been safe in your village for a long time now. I hope it stays that way. And not just where you are, but everywhere. Here’s another one of your words I’m trying to learn how to write:

  I really love the shape of this word in Dari. It looks more interesting than it does in English: peace.

  You asked about the picture of me climbing. That thing I’m on is called a climbing wall, and it’s for learning how to rock climb. It’s inside my school, part of my gym class I have every morning. My gym teacher says I’m a good climber because I’m strong and I don’t weigh too much. And I love climbing because it’s so hard to do it perfectly. Except I wish I had mountains like yours around here so I could climb on real rocks. Have you ever tried mountain climbing? Or any of your friends? like I said, here in Illinois, the land is very flat and boring.

  I’ve got to do my other homework now. If I mess up at all for the whole rest of this year, then I won’t be allowed to move ahead to seventh grade. I know—very bad of me. But I’m doing better. And I think it’s great that you like schoolwork and that you’re a good student. Keep it up!

  Oh, I meant to ask, do you have any pets? I would love to have a cat of my own, but my dad doesn’t like animals in the house. But we have about six cats that live in the barn. So that’s okay. Also, what’s your favorite color? Mine is green.

  And what color is your hair? My hair was really long until I was nine, and sometimes I wore it in braids that my mom wrapped around my head, sort of like a crown. Is yours long or short?

  Do you ever wear it in braids?

  Do you wear your scarf all the time, even when you’re at home?

  I’ll be waiting for your next letter.

  Your friend,

  Abby

  Sadeed sat there looking at the picture of the girl and her family, feeling how strange it was to have this contact with someone so far away. It was like these people lived on the moon, or in a whole other universe.

  He stared at Abby’s face, trying to connect the words he had just read with this girl he saw looking straight at him. And at that very moment, gazing at her picture, Abby Carson became a real person to him—someone who was intelligent, someone who loved being outdoors, someone who noticed the beauty of nature and the shapes of words. And her favorite color was green.

  And it struck Sadeed that right now he probably knew more about this Abby Carson in America than he had ever known about any other girl in his whole life, including his own sister.

  He looked up from the photograph, startled. Amira was staring at him. She had crept back into the house and stood there, a few feet in front of him.

  She gave him an impish smile, with one eyebrow raised.

  “What are you looking at?” he snapped.

  “You,” she said. “You like her, don’t you?”

  “Don’t be a donkey. I don’t even know her.” Sadeed reached for his notebook and waved Amira toward the place beside him on the charpoy. “And don’t just stand there—sit down and tell me what you want to say. And be quick about it.”

  This time it didn’t take Amira very long to dictate her reply. And she didn’t try to get funny and say something to Abby about Sadeed. She was too good at judging her brother’s moods to put herself in that kind of danger. She talked, he scribbled, and it was all over in less than fifteen minutes.

  Then Amira left to go back and help her mother, and Sadeed put his notebook away and hurried off to his father’s shop.

  When he got to school the next morning, Sadeed went over to speak with his teacher. The man was standing outside by the doorway as he always did before class, watching to be sure that the play didn’t get too rough, and that the older children didn’t bully the young ones.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  Mahmood smiled and said, “Hello. Have you and your sister got the next letter ready?”

  “Actually, no,” Sadeed said. “It’s not quite done yet. But I can finish it when we go home at noon. And if you like, I can take the letter with me when I go to my father’s shop at the bazaar and give it to the bus driver. That will save you a walk to the marketplace. If that would be a help. Or I can bring the letter back here to the school, and you can take it to the bazaar.”

  Sadeed felt like he was talking too fast, pushing out too many words at once. And when Mahmood narrowed his eyes and frowned slightly, Sadeed almost stopped breathing. Because he wanted his offer to sound completely normal and natural. And he felt better when the teacher’s smile returned.

  Mahmood said, “No, you go ahead and deliver the letter. That will be just fine,” and he dug into a pocket on his vest and pulled out a crumpled Afghani bill. “Here, give this to the driver, for his trouble.”

  Sadeed took the money and nodded, then hurried off to join his friends, who were kicking a soccer ball around the piles of snow that still dotted the school yard.

  At about three thirty that afternoon, a bright blue bus rumbled and clanked and sputtered its way into the marketplace. True to his word, Sadeed was there at the bus stop, waiting for it. Every square centimeter of the bus had been decorated with hundreds of bright aluminum pie tins, so the bus looked more silver than blue. At least fifteen men, four goats, a crate of chickens, three spare tires, and countless bundles of belongings and luggage were piled on top, all crammed within a rectangle of low iron fencing that rimmed the roofline.

  And when all the arriving passengers had filed out the front and back doors or climbed down from the roof, and when all the departing riders had paid their fares and crammed inside or been pulled up top by helping hands, Sadeed went up the steps into the bus, bowed respectfully to the driver, and handed him the letter and the Afghani bill. “This is from Mahmood, my teacher,” he said.

  The man smiled and nodded. “Ah, yes—Mahmood. Very good. I’ll mail this tonight in the capital.”

  Then Sadeed pulled something from his vest and said, “And this is from me.” He handed the man another Afghani bill and another letter. “Also to be mailed in Kabul. All right?”

  The driver shrugged. “No problem.”

  Sadeed bowed again, said, “Thank you,” and dashed out of the bus back into the marketplace.

  There was a steady stream of customers at his father’s shop, and all afternoon Sadeed measured grain and weighed flour.

  But in his mind he kept hearing what the bus driver said as he had accepted that second letter: “No problem.”

  Sadeed wanted to believe those words were true.

  And for the time being, they were. “No problem.” Completely true.

  But how about in a week? Or two weeks?

  Then it
could be a different story.

  CHAPTER 12

  POSTINGS

  There were four items on the to-do list for the pen pal project, and number three was very specific:

  3. Using copies of the letters you send, plus the letters you receive, you will make a bulletin board display in the classroom. You will update your display as often as there are new letters.

  Mrs. Beckland had cleared some space on the corkboard at the back of her room after she had given Abby the address of the school in Afghanistan.

  So the next day, Abby used a classroom computer to make a banner with letters two inches tall and stapled it to the bulletin board.

  My Pen Pal in Afghanistan

  Then she had downloaded a map of central Asia from the Internet, printed it out, stapled it below the banner, drawn a heavy black line around Afghanistan, and just north of Kabul she jabbed in a red pushpin.

  She also found an image of the Afghan flag online, and she printed it out extra large, using the big printer in the art room. She wanted the flag to fill up a lot of the empty space.

  And before she put her very first letter into the envelope, she had gone to the school library and made a copy of it. And she stapled the letter up on the wall.

  For the first week the whole setup looked pretty dismal—a big banner with one little handwritten note hanging there below a crummy map and a huge black and red and green flag. And hardly anyone noticed the project, and nobody cared. At all.

  Then, during homeroom on the morning after she got her first reply, Abby made a copy of Amira’s letter and hung it on the bulletin board.

  When the letter from Afghanistan was in place, she also began hanging up copies of the pictures that the girl’s brother had made.

  And that’s when three or four kids came to see what she was doing, all of them girls.

  Abby’s friend Mariah said, “Your pen pal made these pictures? Herself ?”

  “No,” said Abby as she stapled the third one in place. “Her brother’s the artist.”

  Mariah leaned in closer, looking at the family portrait. “And that’s the brother, the guy on the end?”

  Abby nodded. “Right. Sadeed.”

  Mariah said, “Don’t you think he’s cute?”

  Abby shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  McKenna gasped. “ Eew—did you read this part in her letter where she tells about the rocket that blew up and killed people? Right across the street from her house?”

  That information got a handful of boys up out of their chairs. And suddenly more than a dozen kids were checking out Abby’s pen pal bulletin board.

  “So, did you write her back yet?” Mariah asked.

  “Because you’re gonna put that up here too, right?”

  “I wrote to her,” Abby said. “But . . . I have to get it all ready. Before I put it up on the board . . . my second letter.”

  Which wasn’t really true.

  The night before, Abby had made copies of her second letter and the three pictures at home, and she had them in her book bag, plus a color copy of the envelope that showed what kinds of stamps she had picked out.

  But with so many kids suddenly tuned in, she felt embarrassed. Because when she had been writing the letter to Amira, she’d gotten all caught up in it, and she had written things she probably wouldn’t have—not if she’d remembered she was going to have to put it up on the wall at school for everyone to read.

  She pulled Mariah over to her desk. “Here,” she said. “Read this.” And she handed Mariah her letter.

  When she was finished reading it, Abby said, “I don’t want to put that up back there. For everyone to read.”

  Mariah made a face. “Why not? It’s fine.”

  “Don’t you think it’s too . . . personal? I mean, that part about how I might get left back and everything?”

  “Almost everybody knows that anyway,” Mariah said.

  Abby’s jaw dropped. “They do?”

  “Sure. It’s not like you can keep your test grades a secret or something. And then you suddenly start doing every single bit of your homework, and then start in on some big extra-credit project? Dead giveaway. Besides, lots of kids blog and chat all the time, so your little bulletin board here is nothing. They blab about everything.”

  “Not me,” Abby said again.

  “Whatever,” Mariah said. “Anyway, I don’t think you should worry about putting your stuff up there. And you have to do it anyway. For your grade, right?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “So just do it,” Mariah said. “Get it over with.”

  And that’s what Abby did. She walked right back there and posted copies of her envelope, and the letter, and the three pictures that went with it.

  And Mariah was right.

  Nobody made fun of her, nobody said much of anything about it. And a few minutes later, Jill Ackerman even walked by her desk and said, “Great letter, Abby.”

  So Abby felt like the bulletin board part of the pen pal assignment was under control. She could deal with it. Whatever came in the mail, it would go up on the board. And she was going to write back to Amira and say whatever she wanted to, and just stick the letters up there for the whole world to see.

  After all, she had nothing to hide. Nothing at all.

  But just one week later, Abby was forced to rethink her whole privacy policy.

  It wasn’t because of the new letter she got from Amira. Because Amira’s next letter was very ordinary, full of news about her school, and how she had shared Abby’s last letter with all her friends, how she didn’t have any pets, and how she couldn’t wait for spring and summer to arrive. And about how she had never once wanted to climb a mountain in her whole life. No, Amira had not shared one thing that could be called sensitive or private.

  But the same day that letter arrived, another letter came, also from Afghanistan. And the second letter changed everything.

  CHAPTER 13

  SMALL MOUNTAIN

  It was a Thursday afternoon, and Abby had just come home from school. And there on the kitchen counter were two letters from Afghanistan, both addressed to her. She recognized the handwriting on each envelope, and she was puzzled about getting two letters from Amira on the same day.

  So she picked up one envelope, opened it, and read a simple, newsy letter from Amira. No photos, no poems, no drawings. The whole letter seemed sort of flat and lifeless—like soda without fizz.

  As she picked up the second envelope, she yawned. It had been a long day at school, and as usual, she had a ton of homework. And now she also had two letters that needed to be answered. Then she thought, Yeah, but at least this’ll be a whole other letter I can put on my bulletin board. Which gets me that much closer to being done with this thing.

  So she tore open the second envelope, pulled out the paper, and began to read.

  Dear Abby, Amira’s friend in America,

  I am Sadeed, Amira’s brother. And I write to you because I must tell you the truth. The truth that Amira is not really writing letters to you, not on her own. I am helping her. She speaks her letter out loud to me, and I copy down her words in Dari. Then I am the one who writes the letter. In English. And she signs her name on the paper when I am finished. And I have to tell you also that I have added words of my own to what Amira has spoken. So it is like we are both writing to you.

  And the letters are even more from me than from my sister. Except for the letter you just got from her. That one is almost exactly as she said it out loud to me. Because I knew this one time I would be writing you this letter in my own words, signed with my own name. So I did not need to add anything to Amira’s letter this time.

  Here in our village, it is conservative. That is a word I know. It means that everyone is staying close to the traditions, to the old ways, and especially the rules of our religion. And here it is believed by most of the men who run the village that a boy of my age should not be writing letters to a girl of your age. So when your first letter came to o
ur school, my teacher gave Amira the job of writing back to you, because that is the proper way.

  But I was also given a job. I was told to be sure my sister’s letters make sense. Because if she had been writing to you all by herself, the letters would be bad. Or harder to read. And you might think the children here are bad writers. Which is not true. Amira is really quite bright. But English is hard for her, and for me also. But I have worked at it longer and much more than she has. I am the best student in our school at speaking and writing English. And I do not mean to boast, saying this. It is just to explain. And I think I have gotten better at English mostly by reading books.

  Did you ever read a book called Frog and Toad Are Friends? It is a small book, one of the first American books my teacher ever let me read. It is simple. But very true in the way of friends putting up with each other. I have a friend, Najeeb, who needs a lot of putting up with. He is Toad, and I am more like Frog. I would read a million books in English. But my teacher has only a small boxful, and I have already read most of them.

  I wanted you also to know I am enjoying your thoughts in your last letter. And I think it is a fine thing that you are learning to write words in Dari—Amira loves that too, but she forgot to tell you so in her new letter. And it is interesting that you like to be out of doors. I enjoy that also, unless it is too cold. Or too hot.

  But I do not share your love of climbing on rocks. My uncle once worked for some Englishmen who went to climb a tall mountain in Pakistan. One of the men died in a storm. Another had both his feet cut off after they froze hard as iron.

  My uncle says those climbing men are crazy.

  I do not think that. But they must be different from the men I know in my village. Because a man who needs to make a living and care for his family cannot think about climbing a mountain. In my village, it is enough to not be killed by the ice and snow and wind of these mountains, and to grow food and animals in the shadow of them. The mountains look beautiful, but we have to fight with them, just to live here.