Free Rocky by Ellen Miles

Dear Allyson,
    Hi, how are you? My name is Lizzie Peterson. I’m in fourth grade at Littleton Elementary School. My teacher, Mrs. Abeson, is the one who came up with this pen-pal project. She is super-nice and never, ever yells. My best friend, Maria, is in my class. She and I have a dog-walking business. I have two brothers, both younger. Their names are Charles and the Bean (well, his real name is Adam). They are both okay, I guess, though sometimes annoying. My dad is a firefighter and my mom is a newspaper reporter. We have a puppy named Buddy — he is the BEST …
    Lizzie dropped her pencil and reached down to scratch Buddy between the ears. He loved that. When she stopped, he pushed against her hand for more. Buddy really was the best. He was a mutt, small and brown with a heart-shaped white spot on his chest, and Lizzie could not possibly love him any more than she did. He was the sweetest, cutest puppy ever — and Lizzie had known a lot of sweet, cute puppies. That was because her family fostered puppies: they took care of puppies who needed homes, just until they found the perfect forever family for each one.
    Fostering puppies was exciting and fun and also hard work. Sometimes it was really sad, like when they had to give up a puppy they’d fallen in love with. But Lizzie loved it. She loved how each puppy had his or her own personality. She loved playing with the puppies and helping train them. And she loved finding them homes.
    She looked down at the letter she had started. She would have to tell Allyson, her new pen pal, all about fostering puppies. But first, couldn’t she make her letter a little more interesting? She wanted to be the kind of pen pal someone would want to write to for years and years, like Mrs. Abeson’s pen pal.
    Her teacher had told the class all about Marisol, the pen pal she had started writing to when they were both ten years old. Marisol lived in Spain, and her father was a bullfighter! Thirty years later, Marisol and Mrs. Abeson still wrote to each other, and they had visited each other many times. That was why Mrs. Abeson had decided that their class should have a pen-pal project.
    Earlier that week, during Language Arts, Mrs. Abeson had picked pen-pal names out of a hat. She read out the name of a boy or girl for each boy or girl in Lizzie’s class. Lizzie had squeezed her eyes shut hard and wished for a girl her age who lived in an exotic place, like New Zealand or Ecuador. Her wish had come true — at least, sort of, when Mrs. Abeson had told her that her new pen pal would be Allyson, a girl in fourth grade who lived on a sheep ranch in Montana.
    Maria, Lizzie’s best friend, had also gotten a girl pen pal. Her name was Becky, and she lived in Kansas. BOR-ing!
    Lizzie looked at her letter again. What if Allyson, her new pen pal, thought she was boring? She needed to jazz things up a little. She would probably never meet Allyson, and even if she did it would be years from now. Why not make herself, and her life, sound a little more interesting? She started her letter again.
    Dear Allyson,
    My name is Lizzie, but my friends call me Sarabeth. I have two younger brothers, named Sebastian and Wolfgang, and an older sister named Delicata. She is very beautiful. My father is the fire chief in our city, and my mother is editor of the newspaper. We have five dogs: a puppy named Buddy and four older dogs named Henry, Beezus, Ramona, and Ralph. We also have three cats, two turtles, a guinea pig, and several hamsters. For my next birthday I might get a llama …
    Lizzie smiled. That was more like it! Allyson was going to be thrilled to have such an interesting, exciting pen pal. “What do you think, Buddy?” Lizzie asked. She sat down on the kitchen floor and pulled him into her lap. Then she read her letter to him. It sounded even better when she read it out loud.
    The letter wasn’t done yet, though. Mrs. Abeson had said they should tell their pen pals about themselves and their