How Oliver Olson Changed the World

by Claudia Mills

  “I’m going to add Pluto to mine,” Crystal whispered to Oliver. She drew a small circle at the far left side of the page, pressing down hard with her pencil. “Plus, I’m going to put Pluto in my diorama.”

  Oliver had a thought. “You could put it outside the shoe box and make a little sign for it that says ‘Let me in!’”

  Crystal stared at Oliver. “That’s wonderful! That’s perfect! And we could have a petition for Pluto signed by the other planets. And we could have the scientists—we can cut out pictures of scientists from a magazine—we can have them with balloons coming out of their mouths, saying ‘No!’ We’ll have the best diorama in the class.”

  It would be a great diorama, Oliver had to agree. But there was something about the way that Crystal kept saying “we” that was making him nervous.

  “You’ll do it with me, right?” Crystal asked.

  What was he supposed to say? That his parents had already spent half of Saturday working on his diorama? That if he was going to work with somebody from school, he wanted to work with J.P.?

  “Um … I’ve already gotten a lot done on mine.” He had carried the computer box in from the garage. And he’d carried the library books downstairs from his bedroom.

  “That’s even better. That gives us a head start. Because it’ll take time to find the scientist pictures and cut them out and glue them onto cardboard. Or we can make them like puppets, with Popsicle sticks on the back. Then we could act it out, for extra credit, maybe. We could do it as a skit at the space sleepover.”

  Before Oliver could say anything more, such as, What makes you think my parents are going to let me go to the space sleepover?, Crystal had her hand in the air. “Mrs. O’Neill, Oliver and I want to do our diorama together.”

  Mrs. O’Neill stopped by their desks. “That’s fine. Have you finished your work sheets yet?” She looked down at Crystal’s paper. All Crystal had done so far was add her drawing of Pluto. “Finish up, Crystal. And I’m looking forward to seeing what the two of you come up with.”

  Great. Oliver was not looking forward to telling his parents that his diorama was now going to be the first protest diorama in the history of the third grade.

  “All right, third graders,” Mrs. O’Neill told the class once all the planet work sheets had been turned in. “Who remembers what we learned the other day about big ideas?”

  Crystal raised her hand.

  “I see that Crystal remembers. Anyone else?”

  Oliver remembered, but he didn’t feel like raising his hand. To his surprise, Mrs. O’Neill called on him. “Oliver? I bet you remember.”

  “One person with a big idea can change the world,” Oliver recited dutifully.

  So far in his life he had had exactly one small idea, twenty minutes ago, and it wasn’t going to change anything. It would only upset his parents, if he ever found the nerve to tell them. Maybe he would make two dioramas, one with them and one with Crystal. If Sylvie was the bunny kid, and J.P. was the rock kid, Oliver could be the diorama kid.

  “Yes!” Mrs. O’Neill said. “Well, later this month our school is going to have a very special visitor, Colorado state senator Claire Levitt. State senators work to pass laws to make our lives better, laws about education, highways, health care, and the environment. Senator Levitt will be speaking to the whole school at an assembly on the last Friday in April; your parents are invited to attend, too. That’s the same day as our space sleepover, so it’s going to be an exciting one for all of us.”

  Well, for some of us, Oliver thought.

  Mrs. O’Neill paused in her favorite attention-getting way. “Boys and girls, I want each of you to come up with an idea that you think can change the world, and write that idea in a letter to Senator Levitt. I’ll need it by Thursday of the week before she visits our school. Then I’ll mail all of the ideas to her. Who knows? Maybe your idea will become a law.”

  “Does it have to be an idea about Colorado?” Crystal asked.

  Oliver knew she was thinking about Pluto.

  “No. Of course, an idea about Colorado is more likely to become a law in Colorado. But your idea can be about anything you want. Anything in the world—or even out of it.” She smiled at Crystal.

  “All right, class, start thinking!”

  4

  The computer carton was still sitting on Oliver’s dining room table. Next to it lay an enormous bag filled with Styrofoam balls of all sizes, which Oliver’s mother had bought at the crafts store. The bag contained enough Styrofoam balls to make every planet and every moon for every kid in Oliver’s class.

  Oliver reached inside the bag and pulled out one of the smallest balls. “Hey, Pluto,” he said to it softly.

  Oliver’s mother was in the kitchen fixing him a healthy snack. He could hear her running water to wash away any trace of germs from his apple. He rolled his eyes, wondering if she had ever considered putting his apples through the dishwasher.

  Oliver set Pluto on top of the carton. He imagined Pluto holding a tiny sign. He imagined what his parents would say when they saw the sign.

  “Pluto,” Oliver said, “we have a problem. I have to tell my mom I’m working with Crystal on the diorama.”

  Maybe if he practiced his speech to his mom right now, it would help.

  “Okay, Pluto, pretend you’re my mother.”

  It wasn’t going to work. Pluto looked too small, too helpless, already defeated. Oliver fished around in the bag of Styrofoam balls and dug out the two biggest. They’d be good as the sun and Jupiter. For now the sun could be his father, and Jupiter could be his mother.

  “Mom, Dad,” Oliver said, addressing the two Styrofoam balls as they towered over Pluto on top of the carton, “there’s something I need to tell you.”

  Jupiter and the sun waited for him to go on.

  “Mrs. O’Neill said we have to work with partners on our diorama.”

  No. That was a lie, and his parents would find out it was a lie, and besides, he didn’t want to lie.

  “Mrs. O’Neill said we can work with partners on our diorama, and there’s this girl, Crystal, and she asked me if I’d work with her.”

  That was all true.

  “I hope you told her no,” Oliver made Jupiter say.

  “Well, actually, it’s very hard to tell Crystal no.” He’d like to see them try. “So I sort of told her yes.”

  Had he? As far as Oliver remembered, he hadn’t told Crystal anything. But she certainly assumed they were working together, and she had informed Mrs. O’Neill that they were.

  “Anyway, I want to work with Crystal.”

  Did he? He was surprised at the answer: Yes, he did.

  Oliver’s mother came into the room bearing a plate with wedges of well-scrubbed organic apples, slices of low-fat cheese, and a brown rice cake.

  “Who were you talking to, Oliver?” she asked.

  “No one.”

  She looked worried.

  “Just to myself.”

  She looked even more worried.

  “I mean, I was thinking out loud about my diorama.”

  The worry lines in her forehead relaxed. “Here, have your snack. You washed your hands when you came home, right? I don’t want you getting sick this spring the way you did last year when you had to miss all that school.”

  Oliver nodded. He took a bite of the rice cake. Maybe they could cut a hole in the middle of a rice cake and make it into a ring of Saturn.

  “Mom,” Oliver said. It might be easier to talk to her first, rather than to both of his parents together. On the other hand, he’d have to go through the speech twice, and it was going to be hard enough to go through it once.

  “What is it, Oliver?”

  He might as well just say it. “There’s this girl in my class, and we want to do our diorama together.”

  The worry lines in his mother’s forehead reappeared. “Oh, but, Oliver, remember when you did your science project with J.P. in second grade, and you had twenty points taken
off for J.P.’s messy printing? What if your partner doesn’t take it seriously?”

  Crystal took the diorama seriously, all right. But Crystal’s idea of serious and his parents’ idea of serious were completely different.

  “What if she promises to do her part and she doesn’t do it, and it’s your grade that suffers?”

  “She’ll do her part.”

  “Which girl is it? What kind of student is she?”

  “It’s Crystal.”

  “Oh, Oliver. Isn’t she the one who always gets into trouble for talking?”

  “She has a lot to say.”

  “But—Oliver—your father—he’s already put so much effort into this—selecting the box, worrying about the scale—”

  “We’ll use the computer box.” Crystal would probably prefer a gigantic diorama. “And the Styrofoam balls, too.” Oliver already thought of the Styrofoam balls as his friends.

  To his amazement, Oliver sensed that his mother was weakening. If she had to convince Oliver that working with Crystal was a bad idea, then she thought it was a real option.

  “Well, we’ll have to talk to your father when he gets home,” she said. She sounded hurt and disappointed, but at least she hadn’t come right out and told him no.

  One down, one to go!

  Inspired by this first success, or at least not complete failure, Oliver plunged ahead. “And, Mom? I want to go to the space sleepover.”

  Instantly she stiffened. “What space sleepover?”

  “The one at school. When we finish our study of outer space? Mrs. O’Neill sent home a sheet about it. We’re going to sleep in sleeping bags and play games and look at the planets through a real telescope.” He couldn’t bear the idea that he would never see Jupiter’s moons or Saturn’s rings through an actual telescope. He just had to.

  “Oliver, you and J.P. have asked us about sleepovers before, and you know the answer is no, and it’s going to stay no.”

  “But everyone else is going.”

  “If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you jump off, too?”

  Oliver had heard that line before. “Going to a sleepover isn’t like jumping off a cliff,” he replied.

  “Do you really think kids will sleep at this so-called sleepover? Do you think they will brush their teeth for two minutes before getting into their sleeping bags? Do you think they’ll cover their mouths if they cough? Most of the other kids haven’t had the health problems you’ve had. You know you always catch any sickness that’s going around.”

  “Never mind,” Oliver said. “I’d better go do my math homework.”

  He snatched Pluto from the top of the computer box, grabbed the phone, and stalked off to his room.

  He shut the door and called J.P.

  “My parents won’t let me go to the space sleepover,” he told J.P.

  “I sort of didn’t think they would,” J.P. said. “I mean, your mom …”

  “Are your parents letting you go?”

  “Well, yeah, sure.”

  “Do you think there’s anyone else in our class who won’t be there?”

  J.P. hesitated before he answered. “Um—no, not really.”

  Oliver said goodbye and hung up with a sigh.

  Pluto would be the only planet not inside the space diorama. Oliver would be the only kid not going to the space sleepover.

  He would never have guessed that he and Pluto had so much in common.

  5

  On Saturday morning, Oliver lugged his computer carton over to Crystal’s house to begin working on their diorama together. In all his nine years of life, this was the most astonishing thing that had ever happened to him.

  Oliver’s father hadn’t objected. Apparently he hated making dioramas more than Oliver or his mother had realized. That morning his dad looked like the sun himself, beaming as he got ready to go outside and tinker with the lawn mower instead of hanging Styrofoam balls inside a computer carton.

  Oliver’s mother had talked on the phone to Crystal’s mother for ten minutes, asking the same questions she always asked before any playdate: Would an adult be in the house at all times? Were there any guns in the house? Would the kids be watching any violent programs on TV? Would they be using the Internet without supervision? She still asked J.P.’s mother these questions, even though Oliver went to J.P.’s house all the time. Fortunately, whatever answers Crystal’s mother gave must have been the right ones.

  So now Oliver and his carton and his sack of Styrofoam balls were all spending the morning with Crystal.

  One of Crystal’s dogs, the biggest one, jumped up onto Oliver and tried to lick his face. Oliver’s mother had forgotten to ask about badly trained dogs. J.P. didn’t have any pets, only nice, quiet, well-behaved rocks.

  “Down, Bart!” Crystal shouted.

  Another, medium-sized dog, sniffed at Oliver’s pants in an embarrassing place.

  “Sit, Lisa!”

  A tiny dog raced around Oliver, giving a series of high-pitched, excited barks.

  “Quiet, Maggie!”

  Oliver tried to hide his panic. There were so many dogs, and only one of him. They might bite, or slobber germs, or go to the bathroom on his leg. He stood as still as he could, barely breathing.

  Finally Crystal succeeded in dragging or carrying all three dogs out of the room.

  “How many dogs do you have?” Oliver asked, hoping his voice sounded normal.

  “Just these three.” Just! “Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, like the Simpsons.”

  Oliver must have looked blank.

  “You know, the Simpsons? The cartoon on TV?”

  “I’m not allowed to watch cartoons,” Oliver confessed.

  Crystal’s jaw dropped. “You don’t have any dogs, either, do you? I can tell.”

  “I don’t have any pets.”

  “Why not?”

  “They have germs, and they shed, and they damage the furniture.” Oliver recited his mother’s reasons.

  “So? They also love you and act thrilled whenever they see you and sleep in your bed.”

  Oliver shuddered. He would not want dogs like Crystal’s sleeping next to him in his neatly made bed. If any dog tried to sleep in any bed in his house, his mother would die. She would literally keel over with horror, and that would be the end of her.

  “I think we’d better get started on the diorama,” Oliver said in a strangled voice.

  “Okay. Why don’t you pick out the planets and figure out how to hang them in the box. I’ll go through these magazines and look for pictures of scientists.”

  It wasn’t hard selecting the planets, especially since Oliver had already picked out the sun, Jupiter, and Pluto. “How should we hang them in the box?” he asked.

  Crystal shrugged. “The garage is full of stuff we can use.” She pointed toward a door that led off the kitchen.

  “Are there … The dogs won’t be in the garage, will they?”

  “No.” Crystal laughed. “But you’ll find everything else you can imagine.”

  There were no cars in the garage, either, it turned out. The garage was completely filled with bicycles, boards, bricks, broken pieces of furniture, and piles of odd rubbish. Oliver didn’t know what he should be looking for. Wire? String? And where should he be looking? He was relieved when, on a shelf against one wall, he found a ball of twine and a long piece of thin wire.

  Returning to the kitchen, Oliver saw that Crystal had given up on her stack of magazines and was drawing scientists on pieces of cardboard.

  “Which do you think is better, wire or string?” Oliver asked.

  “Wire,” Crystal said without looking up from her drawing.

  “Um … what do I cut it with?”

  “There are some pliers in the toolbox on the table in the garage.”

  Back in the garage again, Oliver found the toolbox, filled with a jumble of tools. He recognized hammers, but all the rest looked equally mysterious. If only one had been labeled “pliers—good for cutting wire.” He
dragged the heavy box from the garage to the kitchen.

  “Um … what do pliers look like?”

  Crystal reached into the toolbox and plucked them out and handed them to Oliver.

  He hated to bother her again, but he had no choice. “Um … how do you use them?”

  He expected Crystal to give a snort of disgust, but she just picked up the pliers and showed him how to snip off a piece of wire.

  Now he wanted to ask her how long the pieces of wire should be, but instead he studied the size of the carton. Carefully he snipped off nine pieces of wire, one for each of the planets, not counting Pluto, and one for the sun. Ta-da!

  “We need to paint the planets first,” he told Crystal. “Do you have any paint?”

  Forty-five minutes later, Oliver had painted all the planets. At first he felt nervous painting without a smock to cover his clothes, but he hadn’t seen any smocks in the garage. No dogs, no cars, no smocks.

  When he had finished, Oliver lined up the planets in a row on the kitchen table to dry. He stood back to gaze in admiration at his work. He was especially impressed with the orange and white bands he had painted on Jupiter and the dark sunspots he had painted on the sun. Of course, he’d be able to paint them even better if he could see them through a real telescope.

  “How do you think the planets look?” he asked Crystal, fishing for a compliment.

  Crystal studied them. “Beautiful!”

  Just then Crystal’s older brother came into the kitchen. Unfortunately, three high-spirited dogs came bounding in with him.

  Before Oliver knew what was happening, Bart was jumping up onto him, washing Oliver’s face with his tongue. Maggie was barking and sniffing at Oliver’s ankles. Worst of all, Lisa pounced on the row of expertly painted, proudly drying planets. Before Oliver’s very eyes, the smallest planet was carried away in her mouth.

  Pluto!

  All that Oliver could do was to paint a second Pluto. At his neat, orderly house, Pluto would have had a safer life—but at his house, his parents would have made the diorama for him, and Pluto wouldn’t have gotten to be in it at all.