Copyright © 2013 Marieke Krootjes; all rights reserved. Published with permission.
Stuff I’m Not Supposed to Tell Anybody by Catarina Rodriguez y Osuna (age 11)
The new school year had only just started. My new school! The Carlos Cory School for Gifted Orphans. That’s right; everybody here is an orphan, just like me. And getting in is a gift indeed, this is a great place. The gardens are really big, and we are even supposed to ride horses and stuff. There are a lot of interesting things to be found in the gardens as well, and I’ve already found the vegetable garden, and I can use the kitchens if I clean up (of course I will, I’m not a baby!) and most kids and grown-ups are real friendly. I like to make them treats. I couldn’t help it that my pudding exploded that one time and I had to clean up the whole kitchen, and I found where the good knives were kept and then I rearranged the herbs to taste rather than to alphabet and I had to undo that, which is really stupid, ‘cause who places cardamom and camomile that close together, they are like totally different and you would never use them together and…
Okay, well, anyway, that’s stuff everybody should know. But there are also things no one is supposed to know, because it is secret. This is how it started, on September 21st:
