Jeremy's Account

My name is Jeremy Barnes and I am 10 years old. Soon I will be 11 years old. I am supposed to tell you about ole man grodey. He is a homeless man. That means he doesn’t have a bathtub, or a bedroom or even a dining room. We have a dining room and a china cabinet. Except I’m not allowed to touch the china cabinet. I don’t ever go in the dining room, anyway, except like on Christmas, so I guess it is okay that he doesn’t have one. But maybe he should have a bathtub because he looks really dirty, like he could use a bath.

Anyway, I have a bouncy ball collection. I started it when I was 9 years old and have had it ever since. I like bouncy balls because, if you throw them against like a wall, they can bounce back to you and then it doesn’t matter like if Mellie, or even Hugo, is busy because I can have fun, anyway. The wall of that store on main street is really good because when the ball bounces it makes this funny sound like a space ship and the ball goes straight back to you. Really cool. So I play there a lot and sometimes Mellie and Hugo come and then we all play things. Well, now we don’t do that so much because we are in grade 4. And when you are in grade 4 you get more homework and that means we don’t get to play so much like when we were on break.

So one time, when I was playing with the bouncy ball and Mellie was talking to Hugo about something, that time, I saw ole man grodey. Only he wasn’t ole man grodey, yet. I said something like, “That man’s legs are funny”. And Hugo had his notebook with him, like he always does and he made a scrunchy face and scribbled something. And then, like a few days after that, Mellie told us to go follow that guy, only she called him ole man grodey. So we did.

I like Mellie a whole lot because she always has these really good ideas. Only she goes missing for days sometimes, and I know it’s because she gets in trouble but she always says it’s because she goes to visit some aunt. I don’t think Mellie has any aunts because I don’t think she has much family, at all. And I don’t think she even has a china cabinet or a dining room. But I like her a whole lot and I knew her since I was 5, which means we are best friends. But I don’t know Hugo that much, but I guess he is okay. Mellie says she saw him looking really hard at something, when she first saw him. And she thought he was maybe doing homework, only it was summer. And now we are all friends.

When we first followed ole man grodey, we thought it was going to be a real sort of adventure. Only it wasn’t really an adventure at all. In adventures, people find treasures or someone dies, but never the hero. But none of that happened. We just watched him buy bread and then he took it to some kids at the duck pond. And Mellie asked me if I knew those kids, but I never did see them around and I have lived in Plankton since the day I was born. But Mellie seemed to think there was something special about ole man grodey, and his bread, and those kids at the duck pond, so we kept following that man all summer long.