February 25
by Janine Stephenson
We're wrapping up the weekend now. I'm tired. We had an official meeting with all of the committees and talked a bit about how it all went. But we didn't get very far because we're all so exhausted. I don't know how much sleep I got over the past few days, but it wasn’t much. Since I'm organizing the canvassing, I had to stay here and work. By 3 p.m. things got so slow that I wanted to go out back and take a nap. We have a mattress propped up in the closet that Craig uses when he works late. I almost took it out of storage to sleep on it, but then, I thought that it wasn't such a good idea. What if a reporter saw me?
We really ought to get rid of the mattress completely, but there are so many news crews around that we can’t throw it out. If we leave it outside for the garbage man to pick up, people will just think the worst. So now, we're stuck with a mattress that no one is using and no one wants. We'll have to sneak it out of here in the dead of night.
Our committees agreed that if we wanted to take off tomorrow, we could. Grease Pit stopped by and congratulated us on a job well done. He said he had no reports of troubles and there will be lots of positive stories from the papers. Then he showed the story where I was mentioned. The article explained how Becca and I came to the storefront and highlighted the fact that we were 18. The reporter only used just a little bit of what we said, but it was neat.
Grease Pit told me that AP stories show up in newspapers around the country, which means that a bunch of papers ran it. I called my Mom and asked if it was in her paper. She said that she'd been trying to get a hold of me all day and yes, I was in her paper. Our relatives bought a bunch of newspapers so they could see the articles too.
Becca very reluctantly called her parents. They saw it in the paper too. Becca talked with them for a long time. I let her have the room to herself. By the end of it, she looked like she had been crying. She said that her parents didn't agree with her, but they were still very proud of her. Since they don't get along, I knew how much that meant to her.
