Free Super Duper Pee Wee! by Judy Delton

CHAPTER 1
New Badge News
    “T he new badge we are going to earn,” said Mrs. Peters, “is one of my favorites! It is the letter-writing badge!”
    Mrs. Peters was the Pee Wee Scout leader of Troop 23. The troop met every Tuesday in her basement.
    She waited to hear her Pee Wees cheer. She waited until they looked happy about their new badge. But they didn’t. They began to groan.
    “It sounds like school to me,” said MollyDuff to her best friend, Mary Beth Kelly. This was the first time Mrs. Peters had let Molly down. All the time she’d been a Pee Wee the badges had been exciting. Like the badge for skiing. Or fishing. Even baseball. Molly had nothing against letter writing—she liked to write to her grandma and her friends who moved away. But badges were for something special.
    “It sounds like work, not like fun. Pee Wees are supposed to be fun,” said Tim Noon.
    “Just wait till I tell you about it!” said Mrs. Peters. “We are going to have a pen pal club! We will write to a group of children miles away. They live in a town out west called Golden Grove and are Pee Wees too, with a different leader. They are super duper troopers, and they can’t wait to earn this badge along with us and become our new friends. Letter writing is a wonderfulway to get to know new people and learn new things.”
    The word
learn
was not a word the Pee Wees wanted to hear. It was too much like studying in school.
    “We’ve got friends,” muttered Sonny Stone. Sonny was a mama’s boy. His mom had married the fire chief a while back, and Molly thought he would grow up if he had a dad. But so far he hadn’t.
    “Everyone can use more friends,” said Mrs. Peters, frowning. She didn’t look happy about the poor response to her favorite badge.
    Rachel Meyers was waving her hand. “I already have a pen pal, Mrs. Peters. She lives in Germany. She sent me her picture.”
    You might know Rachel would already have a pen pal, thought Molly. She always knew everything before the other Pee Wees. And her pen pal was not even in this country!She was all the way across the ocean, in Germany!
    “Someday I’m going to Germany to visit her,” Rachel went on. “As soon as I can speak German.”
    Mrs. Peters’s new badge was not going over big, thought Molly. Some of the Pee Wees were crawling under the table, and some were yawning. This had never happened before! What if the Pee Wees rebelled! Her dad had told her about workers who didn’t like things in the office and went on strike! Were the Pee Wees going to strike?
    “That’s very good, Rachel,” said Mrs. Peters above the scuffle. “We won’t have pen pals in Europe, but since you’ve had experience, you can help us with our project.”
    Another word like
learn
.
Project
. Projects were even more work than learning!
    “We are going to learn to write a proper letter and then write to them and wait tohear back. And maybe someday we will even get to meet our pen pals in person.”

    Who wanted to meet perfect strangers,thought Molly. Even if you wrote to them, you didn’t really know them. They might be mean and nasty. Maybe they would even be like Roger White. Roger was a Pee Wee Scout, but he could be mean. His pen pal might hate him!
    “Do we write just one letter to get our badge?” asked Jody George. Jody was one of Molly’s favorite Scouts. He was in a wheelchair, but he could do almost as many things as the other Pee Wees. Surely he wouldn’t have any trouble writing a letter. You could do that from a wheelchair just fine. Even from a bed.
    Jody was friendly and had good parties at his house and a good CD collection. He took lots of trips with his family. And he was smart.
    “It’s not the number of letters we write,” Mrs. Peters said with a frown. “It would be nice to write back and forth to them and maybe write a few letters to other people.Maybe one to your grandma if she is out of town and one to an author of your favorite books.”
    “My favorite author