Meng Jia is Not the Color PINK

Chapter One

In just ten minutes, our entire class is getting on a plane for our flight to China.

I, Meng Jia, am one very excited third grader.

My best friend, Ok Taecyeon, is going to sit next to me.

Right now, he's sitting at the desk next to me, pretending to be an alarm clock.

All I hear now is a quiet tick tock, tick tock, but I'm absolutely positively sure that he has something else planned.

We always sit together when our class flies to some faraway place.

In fact, we've been sitting together since we first met in preschool, but that's another story.

Finding my passport and tickets is not easy because I, Meng Jia, am one very messy third grader.

I quickly pull things out of my desk--the book I'm going to use for my report, half a roll of strawberry licorice, my sticker book, two headbands, seven rubber bands, eleven paper clips, two workbooks, and finally, my passport and tickets, which I put in a specially decorated case. (I used a lot of my stickers on it.)

"Bzzzzzzz. Squawk." Taecyeon starts rocking back and forth.

I hit him on the head with my passport and tickets. "Okay. What are you doing this time?"

"I'm a cuckoo bird alarm clock and my tail feathers are caught." Taecyeon bobs back and forth.

Having Ok Taecyeon as my best friend sure makes life more fun.

So does having Mr. Cohen as my teacher.

"Get ready to board." Mr. Cohen flicks the light off and on to signal the end of one activity and the beginning of another.

All of the chairs on the classroom are lined up so that it looks like a real plane, with aisles to walk down the places for the pilot, co-pilot and flight attendants.

Mr. Cohen is always the pilot. He says that's because he's the only one in the room with a driver's license but I know the real reason he's always the pilot. It's because he wants to make sure that we get to where we're supposed to go. Once he let Roger Hart be the pilot, but when we got there, Roger announced that he had taken us to Disneyland instead of Zaire.

So now, Mr. Cohen is the pilot all the time and he picks different kids to be co-pilot and flight attendants. When my turn comes, I want to be co-pilot. I don't want to have to pass out the little packets of peanuts, because some of the boys act so immature, making monkey sounds and stuff.

Not Taecyeon though. He and I spend the time reading the ROOM 3-B IN FLIGHT magazine. (Everyone writes articles for it.) We also do the crossword puzzle that Mr. Cohen makes up.

Well, actually, to be honest, sometimes Taecyeon makes monkey sounds, too.

The class lines up, waiting for our passports to be checked by Mr. Cohen.

Kim Hyuna looks at the photo of her passport. "I hate this picture of me. I don't know why we couldn't just bring one from home."

Every time we start studying a new country, we "fly" there, and every time we do, Hyuna complains about the picture on her passport.

"You look perfectly good," I tell her, looking at her school picture.

We all use our school pictures, except for Wang Jackson  who came to school after the pictures were taken. Her passport has a picture that Mr. Cohen took with his instant camera.

Hyuna shake her head. "I am perfectly good. I just look really terrible in my picture."

I choose to ignore Hyuna correction. "You know that Mr. Cohen wants our make-believe passports to look like the real thing. Remember when he showed us his real passport. It looked awful, and he doesn't really look that bad."

Hyuna makes a face and grins. "Jia, just because you forgot which day the picture we're going to be taken and your picture looks like you jumped out of bed, threw on any old clothes and combed your hair with a rake, doesn't mean that the rest of us don't care about how we look in our photos."

I look at Hyuna's picture. Her long blond hair is perfectly combed, with a really pretty multicolored ribbon barrette.

I look at my picture.

Brown eyes, freckled nose . . . . My pink, slightly messy hair is held back with two bagel-shaped barrettes.

I'm wearing normal, nonpicture-taking- day clothes. In fact, I'm wearing my favorite things . . . . a very long T-shirt that my aunt Pamela brought back from a trip to London and a pair of black stirrup pants. (Even though it doesn't show, I remember which pants I was wearing. I, Meng Jia, have a very good memory.)

I don't look so bad, and anyway, I forgot that the pictures were being taken that day, even though Mr. Cohen told us a billion times, even though he had written two billion reminders on the blackboard.

So I'm a little forgetful.

And Kim Hyuna isn't always totally right. I don't comb my hair with a rake. Maybe my fingers sometimes but never a rake.

"I'll like your picture." Taecyeon grins at me. "It look exactly like you, not just the way you look but the way you act."

"You mean messy." Hyuna laughs.

I want to pull off the stupid little bow that she's wearing on her head.

"Don't you dare." Taecyeon pulls on my arm.

I like the way Taecyeon usually knows what I'm thinking and I usually know what he's thinking.

Mr. Cohen checks our passports, looks at our boarding tickets, and then Joe Sugg leads us to our seats.

Once everyone is seated, Joe shows us how to fasten our seatbelt a and tells us want to do in case of an emergency.

Mr. Cohen gets on his make-believe microphone and tells us to get ready for the trip of a lifetime.

And off we go-into the wild blue yonder.

The third grade is on its way to China. . .