Free All About Sam by Lois Lowry Page B

course, Husband," Mrs. Krupnik said, and she took his bowl to the stove where the pot of chowder was. "Would you like some more, Son? How about you, Daughter?"
    Sam and Anastasia both said "No, thank you" and giggled.
    It was all very confusing, Sam thought, as he finished his dinner.
    Anyway, what he
really
wished—he hadn't told them this—was that they would call him He-Man.

    Sam had daydreams about being bigger. Not only bigger, but also stronger and more powerful. He wanted to be someone who could catch criminals, beat up bad guys, fly airplanes, shoot rockets, and end up being He-Man of the Whole World.
    All the guys at Sam's nursery school wanted the same thing. Their favorite games had to do with blasting off and zooming and bashing. They were so noisy that Mrs. Bennett was always saying, "Time Out, guys," and then they would listen to her read a story about Babar or Madeline or Curious George.
    Sam loved listening to stories. And sometimes he liked to play the quiet games. He liked playing house with Leah and Rosie and Skipper when they would cook pretend dinners on the little stove and serve the dinners to the stuffed animals that they propped up in chairs.
    But sometimes, while playing house, Sam would have an urge to race around with the pretend dinner in its plastic dish, and bomb the animals instead of feeding them nicely.
    Then Rosie would always start to cry, and Mrs. Bennett would have to say, "Time Out, Sam."
    Time Out meant that he had to sit quietly in the big green chair.
    Sometimes Sam had Time Out several times every morning. He didn't mind that. Football players had Time Out, too; he saw it on TV when his daddy watched the Patriots.
    "Why do they have Time Out?" Sam asked his daddy. "Were they bad?"
    "No, they just need to take a rest and to
think
a little bit," his daddy explained.
    So that's what Sam did, too, at school, when Mrs. Bennett said "Time Out," and Sam had to sit in the green chair. He rested and thought.
    Mostly, he thought about being a He-Man.

    "Do I have big muscles?" Sam asked Anastasia. He had pushed up the sleeve of his shirt, and he showed her the top of his arm.
    Anastasia was busy with a school project. She was at her desk, with her feet wrapped around the rungs of the chair, and a pencil tip in her mouth. She glanced over at Sam.
    "No, I wouldn't say so," she said. "Your arms are kind of skinny."
    Sam stuck out his lower lip. "Well," he asked her, "how can I
get
big muscles?"
    Anastasia glanced over again, impatiently. "You have to pump iron," she said. "There's this guy at the junior high, Ben Fraser, who has
humungous
muscles. And he got them by pumping iron."
    "How can I—" Sam began.
    But Anastasia interrupted him. "Sam," she said, "I'm busy.
Please
quit bothering me, okay?"
    Sam sighed and wandered away from Anastasia's bedroom. He went downstairs. He thought about pumping iron.
    He knew what an iron was. His mother had one. She kept it in the pantry on a shelf, with its cord all twisted around it. His mom was allergic to the iron, she said.
    Sam went to the pantry and lifted the iron down very carefully from its place. He took it up to his room.
    Then he went to his mother's closet. He kicked aside her sandals and her torn sneakers on the closet floor. He crawled inside the closet and looked around. He saw a couple of old pink slippers. Those weren't what he wanted.
    Finally he found what he was looking for, inside a shoebox stacked with others in a corner of the closet. They were high-heeled and black. There were two of them. Pumps.
    He took one of the black pumps to his room and laid it carefully on his bed beside the iron.
    Then he tried to figure out how to do it. How to pump iron.
    But it was a mystery. He could do it
backward.
He could iron the pump. He did that for a while, but it was boring, and it didn't make big muscles at all.
    But he simply couldn't figure out how to pump the iron.

    Maybe there was another way. Sam went to his mother and asked