Playground Blues

Nelly Greenwood showed me her pink shiny sandals on the playground today at recess. She said, “look at my shiny pink sandals.” And I said, “Those sure are shiny.” And then she said, “I bet you wish you had pink shiny sandals instead of those ugly brown sandals.”
I looked down at my ugly brown sandals and she was right. They are ugly. And brown. And they are falling apart and there are stringy bits around the edges of the Velcro straps.
Nelly’s sandals have buckles. And on the back by her ankle they have tiny bows. I wish I had tiny bows on my sandals.
Nelly danced on her tippy toes showing her shiny sandals to everyone on the playground. They matched her pink shirt and her sparkly shirt that had a heart on it. My shirt is black and says ‘Home of the Gerbils” on it with a picture of a gerbil with a baseball bat on it. It has holes under the armpits.
Nelly has a lot of sparkly things. So do her friends. Jessica Klement has a sparkly backpack and Jasmine Yodders has a sparkly pencil case. My mom says that I don’t need sparkly things. She says my things work just fine the way they are and that I shouldn’t ask for things I don’t need.
Sometimes when I go to the store I just look at all the sparkly things and touch them and sometimes little pieces of the sparkles come off on my fingers and so I put them into my pockets. Sometimes the sparkles get lost in my pockets because they’re so small but sometimes I’m able to find them and I put them into my retainer container that I keep under my bed. Most of them get lost in my pockets. I bet my pockets are the sparklyist of everyone’s’.
Well Nelly just kept on dancing on her tippy toes and saying “why are your sandals so ugly?” and she said it in such a snooty voice and I just stood there watching her sandals sparkle in the sun. Well Nelly tippy toe danced over to me and she was so close I could tell that she had salami for lunch. She looked at me good and hard and said “why don’t you just go put yourself into the trash bin because that’s where you and your sandals belong!” and so I shoved Nelly real hard and she tripped over the tanbark and fell and hit her head on the swing set.
Now Nelly has a pink bump on her face to match her shiny sandals.