Ramona was filled with the glory of losing her first tooth and love for her teacher. Miss Binney had said she was brave! This day was the most wonderful day in the world! The sun shone, the sky was blue, and Miss Binney loved her.

She felt good from making a lot of noise, she felt good from the hard work from walking so far in her tin can stilts, she felt good from calling a grown-up pieface and from the triumph of singing backwards from ninety-nine to one. She felt good from being out after dark with the rain on her face and the streetlights shining down on her.

No family is perfect. Get that idea out of your head. And nobody is perfect either. All we can do is work at it. And we do.

Nobody understood what is was like to be six-years-old and the littlest in the family.

Pest was a fighting word to Ramona, because it was unfair. She was not a pest, at least not all the time. She was only littler than everyone else in the family, and no matter how hard she tried, she could not catch up.

Ramona felt sad and somehow lonely, as if she were left out of something important, because her family was in trouble and there was nothing she could do.

She knew her mother and father loved one another, but, sometimes when they were tired and hurried, or when they had long, serious conversations after the girls had gone to bed, she wondered and worried, because she knew other children whose parents had stopped loving each one another. Now she knew everything was all right.

Grown-ups often forgot that no child likes to be ordered to be nice to another child.

It was a warm September day, and Ramona, neat and clean, with lunch bag in hand, half skipped, half hopped, scrunching through the dry leaves on the sidewalk.