Free Millie and the Night Heron by Catherine Bateson

taller. Anyway, if I have to find a taller boy I’m going to be in trouble. That’s what my dad says. He says I should get used to looking down on boys. He saysthat’s the natural order of things anyway.’
    â€˜You’ll just have to wear flat shoes,’ Helen said.
    â€˜You can wear whatever shoes you want,’ Sarah said, ‘and if he really likes you, he won’t care.’
    â€˜I think boys are overrated,’ Helen said, ‘and we talk about them way too much.’
    We got the first term project that day. It was the big one:
    â€˜My Environment—What I Love, What I Hate.’
    â€˜A chance for everyone to get down and personal,’ Ms O’Grady said, smiling around the class as though she hadn’t announced the worse news in the world. ‘I expect to see some really fantastic individual takes on this subject. I expect you all to do some research, but that research can be quite original. You can interview people, use the World Wide Web, look up current environmental news items—anything you have to do to make the project your own. I certainly don’t want to see a lot of half-baked, rushed projects with no thought put into them. I know we have some excellent scholars in this class and I expect to see the evidence!’
    â€˜I hate projects,’ Rachel said, dragging her bag along the footpath after school.
    â€˜My mum hates projects,’ Helen said. ‘She said they should be banned. They’re simply too much work for the parents.’
    â€˜I don’t mind them,’ I said cautiously, ‘but I don’t think I’ve lived in this town long enough to know anything about it, so this project is going to be really hard.’
    â€˜I wonder if I could just do it on my room,’ Sarah said. ‘I mean, that’s my real environment, isn’t it? I wonder if Ms O’Grady would let me do that?’
    â€˜It can’t just be your room,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s an environmental project, not a room project.’
    â€˜Yeah, well, my room is an environment,’ Sarah said. ‘I mean, it’s got its own living systems happening in it. Or that’s what mum says, anyway. Under the bed, you know, and the apple core in my bedside table drawer—the one that went mouldy.’
    I shelved the project for the time being as too hard. I had other problems to deal with, problems I didn’t really want to talk about with Helen-Sarah-and-Rachel. Not yet.
    First, there was the sleep-over and that was okay. I was looking forward to that. I panicked a bit about what I’d take, but I talked it over with Helen and found out that I’d need:

    A pair of muck-around jeans.
One good, going-to-the-movies outfit.
A book for reading in bed on Sunday morning.
A teddy if I wanted one – Helen couldn’t sleep without hers.
My journal, of course.
My mum’s phone number in case anything went wrong.

    My real problem was a boy at school. I could hardly even say his name, not without feeling myself go red. I couldn’t write it in my journal, not properly. I called him by his initials and then disguised them by doing them in fake Elizabethan writing with lots of curls and loops:

    He had this curly mouth, curly hair and crinkly eyes, and he smiled so much that everyone called him Smiley. He was good at everything. Well, not everything. He was lousy at Maths and Italian, and he couldn’t sing to save his life. But he was great at soccer, basketball and football. I liked him because he smiled all the time and he was one of the popular kids who didn’t seem to care that he was popular.
    I had a crush on him. I knew it was a crush because I could tick off every single crush indicator on the list Helen had compiled. Helen knew all about crushes. She had her first crush when shewas in Preps, she said.

    Helen’s Seven-Point Crush Indicator List

    You look at the boy all the time.
You tease him a