Leaf Explorations: The Sequel to Leaf Days

That time when, before going to bed, Leaf had sneaked into her room and whispered,"Tomorrow we will be adventurers," before shutting the door, was one of the most puzzling times of Maya's life.
It was a Friday night, and Maya was exhausted from school. She fell asleep right away, not giving much thought to what Leaf had said.
The next morning they packed. Along with clothes and a few packets of food, they brought along a tent. "We might need to camp out," Leaf told Maya as she stuffed the now compacted tent into her own, bigger bag.
They seemed to fly out the window, it was all in a blur from excitement. She ran, following Leaf as well as she could. Soon they came to a large patch of grass surrounded by woods. There they explored and played until noon, when they ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, along with a banana each.
Then, suddenly, hurriedly, Leaf jumped to her feet. "I have to go, sorry," she shouted from a few yards away. She was running, her medium-long hair trailing behind her.
Maya worried. What if Leaf never came back? No, that's silly, she told herself. But she still worried.
Maya started to cry. Her tears streamed down her cheeks and into the wind. At this time of day, the woods got windy. Maya shivered. "I wish I had a jacket," she said aloud.
I could live here, Maya realized. I could set up the tent as a house, and catch fish from the stream for meals... She pulled the tent out of Leaf's bag, starting to carry out the first part of her plan, when Leaf came rushing along, crunching fallen leaves all the way. "What, you think you're going to stay that way?" She stuffed the tent into the bag, picked up Maya, and began to walk.
Getting home was all blurry now, whenever Maya thought about it. Leaf had carried her all through the field, and when they finally got home, it was night time. Maya fell asleep the instant she touched the bed, like on Friday night.
Asleep or not, this story remained in Maya's head the rest of her life.

It was recess time, and the yard was noisy from all the yelling. To Ella, it seemed like everyone was yelling, the girls especially: their chants of "Go, Ella, go," drowned out the rest.
She was standing in front of a ledge made of play structure. A wide gap separated this ledge from another one, maybe one or two yards away. A rope was tied from a bar on this ledge to a bar on the ledge Ella was standing on. She was supposed to walk on it like a tightrope; she knew it.
Ella's big brother came over to her. "You can do it, El," he told her. "Remember gymnastics lessons?"
Ella ignored him. Shaking from fear, she carefully moved one foot forward, closer to the rope.To small a distance,she decided, then moved it a little further. This time, it landed on the rope. Carefully, step by step, Ella made her way a small distance across the rope. The girls' cheers were louder now.
All the cheering must have motivated a teacher to come out, because there one was suddenly one there: the science teacher for the fourth and fifth grades. "What's going on here?" she asked, and then, seeing Ella, exclaimed, "Oh, you poor girl! Forced to walk a tightrope!" And, right then and there, she scooped Ella up and put her down on the woodpiece-covered ground. Luckily for the boys, she had not seemed to notice that the "tightrope" was actually stolen rope from the P.E. cabinet.
And the surprising thing was, though Ella had expected the boys to remember the contest and schedule it for another time, the contest was never finished. All the rest of her first-grade life, and all the other grades too, and the after-grades, too, she remembered the contest.
And that is the end.

Black Ice

"And be careful not to skate on the black ice," warned Mother as she gave the twins their skating bags. "You'll fall through."
"We won't, Mama, I promise," said Jennifer.
"Me too," said Lucy.
So the twins walked and walked and walked in the cold winter weather until they came to a frozen pond."Let's begin," said Jennifer.
"Me too," said Lucy.
It was quite a large pond, so Jennifer went skating around it to make sure was safe.
"Fine, except for some black ice," she reported when she came back.
"Well, we can just skate around it," said Lucy.
They skated for a few minutes until Lucy said,"Jennifer, go skate on that black ice."
"No," said Jennifer, "you do it."
"Me too," said Lucy.
So Lucy went over the black ice and easily skated over it. "Now it's your turn," she told Jennifer when she came back.
Jennifer went to the black ice. When she was halfway through skating over it, there was a sudden crack.
"Uh-oh," said Lucy.
She quickly skated over to the black ice just in time to grab Jennifer by the arms and pull her out. Then they warmed each other up until the only evidence of them having an encounter with black ice was their hands: they had turned black.
When they got home, Mother asked them, "What have you two been up to?"
"Nothing," they both innocently said, hiding their bare hands behind their backs.

The Stairs to Antville

Antville was a high town for ants. It was so high there were stairs to climb to get to it.
One day, two ant friends were climbing those stairs. It was taking them a long time.
"It's been a long time since we started," said one ant.
"Maybe we should turn back," suggusted the other.
"Of course not!" screamed the first ant, so loudly that they both started laughing.
"I feel the stairs wobbling," noticed the first ant.
"Let's run!" screamed the second ant, and they did.
But they were too late. All the stairs toppled down onto the ants.
"I never noticed the stairs to Antville were made of blocks," said the first ant.
"Me neither," agreed the second one.
And there they fell asleep in a pile of blocks.

The Plan

Every ant had to climb a big, tall tree. When Lulu was 15, her turn came.
Lulu tried her best to get ready for the big event. It was on her 15th birthday, and on the night before, she lay in bed thinking. Soon she had a plan.
In the morning, Lulu met with three friends. She told them the plan. After a lot of laughing, they all went their separate ways. Lulu went up to her room, and her three friends went to their houses.
Lulu started to get ready, but then she got a bit afraid. After a few minutes of relaxing, she was okay again.
When Lulu's mom called upstairs that Lulu had to get ready to go, Lulu answered, "Okay!" She put some stuff in a pack and ran downstairs. She kept running to the tree she was going to climb, and there were her friends, waiting for her.
"Hi," Lulu said. They played together until it was time. Then, everyone got in their positions.
Lulu began to climb- or, at least, that was what it looked like. The secret was this:
Lulu was attached to a rope. Her three friends, at the top of the tree, pulled her in such a way that it looked like Lulu was climbing.
When Lulu got to the top, she jumped down. And that is the end.

Nonsense

Nonsense words were floating in the air, waiting for someone to say them. When someone said them, they disappeared the instant the word came out of the person's mouth. "Good bye!" They would usually include those two words in the mix of word that came out of their mouth when they realized they were going and never coming back.
"I didn't come here because I wanted to," declared oEJWNe. "We all had to come here. We didn't want to be at the direct risk of..." None of the nonsense words dared to say that word. "But the queen made us come here to be lookouts. And we're best friends, aren't we?"
All the other nonsense words nodded in agreement. It was quite a coincidence that a group of best friends all got picked for the lookout job.
But then they heard a sound that all of them, especially oEJWNe , feared. Someone seemed to have a name that was, or at least was like oEJWNe. So someone had called,"oEJWNe!"
First, oEJWNe started to dissolve. Then, he did a sweeping kind of motion, and shouted,"GoodbyehelloseeyoutomorrowhopeI'llseeyouagain!"
When he had completely dissolved into the air, a gloominess spread over the group. One nonsense word, xLPHONE(EE)s, started to cry.
"Don't worry," XENALINEEEEE said comfortingly. "We're best friends, and we can fix this."
After a while, all of the friends felt comforted, too. Especially since oEJWNe had came back, more ghostly than before, but still oEJWNe.
"Come on," announced LeakOUiKkn. "I think our lookout period is almost over. So let's iieeijdiffoos;OOOS
kdskjdksjddddsodirfiidifiddiiiiiifdhfihaiidhhusiiadhhussd
hnusksidosihysudhsdhn!*"

*NonsenseWord for "get going!"

Kenna Cat Bup (Episode 1)

"O0OO0O0O0": that is what Kewin (Also known as Kenna Cat Bup or Kennte: pronounced KENT) says the first thing every morning. She believes it is good luck. But one morning she forgot to say it. This is the story of what happened then:
"Kennte, your science project is due today," Kennte's mother was calling from the kitchen. This made Kennte unhappy, because her science project (seeing how fast mini plants could grow as opposed to larger ones) wasn't even finished.
"Mom, I need a full ten days!" Kennte called back sleepily, only to hear her mother saying,"Well, anyway, you need to get dressed and come downstairs." And it was getting hard to resist: the smell of French toast drifting up from the kitchen was so good it was getting hard to disobey.
Kennte pulled on her second-favorite leggings with a cute cat dress. Maybe it'll make me feel better, she thought as she wobble-walked downstairs for breakfast.
When she got downstairs, Kennte immediately wished she hadn't. Her big sister, Leanne, was at the table too.
"Hurry up, you two," Kennte's mom (call her Vanessa) called from the stove. She was mixing something that Kennte couldn't see in a pot and was turning a knob on the stove at the same time. But if Kennte knew what was in the pot or not, it didn't matter in a minute because Vanessa told them the answer to that question.
Now we will skip ahead a while, and come to the part of Kennte's terrible but highly interesting day where there was a spelling test. That was the only part of the day where Kennte felt completely normal. She felt she had done very badly, but that was the same feeling she had had after all the spelling tests she had ever taken.
"Oh, if my day had gone better, I would feel so much happier," Kennte moaned to her friend at recess. But her friend just patted her back comfortingly and said, "Never mind how you feel. Let's go play a game of hopscotch."
Amazingly, though, hopscotch made Kennte feel aa little better, like her day was not going as badly as it was. And by the time she got home, Kennte felt great!
"I guess it was what I said that did the trick," Kennte told her friend later. And amazingly enough, she was right.