leaving me alone with a hundred butterfly corpses, a wagon, a Hello Kitty cash register with fifty cents in it, and wounded pride. “Yeah? Well Arthur‟s already over. So ha!” I was characteristically determined to have the last word. Plus, he wasn‟t the only one disappointed about missing our favorite TV show. “Nuh uh, my mom got it on tape!” And with that final, devastating blow, he slammed the door. I walked home that afternoon in solitude, hauling the wagon behind me at such a furious pace that I stubbed my big toe on the sidewalk and scraped half the pink nail polish off of it. But by the next day all was forgiven, and I knocked on Zane‟s door that morning with a box of Goldfish as a peace offering. “Circle, circle, dot, dot, now you got the cootie shot,” I said, poking his arm. This was our daily greeting, and he cheerfully returned it to me. It was our big day, possibly the biggest day of our careers. It was the day we began selling butterflies. It was early on a Saturday morning. Plenty of people were out: old guys with headbands were running very slowly, though they looked as if they thought they were running very quickly; boys on bicycles throwing newspapers at people‟s houses (I always wondered if the grownups knew about that); blonde ladies with poodles walking swiftly down the street. So I really could not understand why we hadn‟t sold a single butterfly. We had the sign we made, which was still very pretty even though it had lost some of its smelly-goodness. Zane was holding it high above his head and waving it in the air where I knew people could see it. “Butterflies are way cooler than lemonade,” Zane grumbled in the general direction of the kids
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