5 Ways I Spent My Summer between 5th and 6th Grades

By Dick Cheney

1. The first thing I did this summer was chop down old lady Smith's cherry tree next door. It was making a mess of our driveway and the leaves were a pain to rake. I hate trees anyway. When Mrs. Smith asked me what happened to it, I told her that it was never there to begin with. She's kind of senile. This fall I'm going to uproot her flowers.

2. My friend Jane and I decided that since our parents weren't giving us enough allowance, we should make our own money. We started a lemonade stand. There was another stand down the block, but somehow a whole wad of dirt got into their pitcher (it was really cool because they never saw me throw it). Our stand then did really well. But when Jane said I wasn't splitting the money fairly, somehow her mother found out about the cigarettes Jane kept in her doll box and Jane got grounded for the rest of summer. Then I really started to make some money off it. Also, I learned that you don't really need to put lemons in the pitcher, you can just use yellowish water and a little bleach.

3. I got really, really mad at that Timmy Smith when he wouldn't let me have his toy truck. So I decided to get rid of him. I told Butch, the big guy down the street, that Timmy had beat me up for no reason, and I told Butch I might forget about the five dollars he owed me if, you know, something bad happened to Timmy. It was really cool because a day later Timmy's arms were all broken. Now he can't play with the truck, so I have it.

4. Speaking of Butch, I was kind of afraid that he might tell someone about Timmy, so I made an anonymous phone call to the police about the firecrackers in his back yard and also the liquor he was keeping in the garage. They sent him off to some juvenile camp. Now his handicapped mother has no one to go shopping for her, but the only sad part is that I guess I'll never get my five dollars back.

5. By the end of August I was getting really tired of my friends so I built a small detention center behind the garage. When Bobby Stevens said that he was going to tell on me for stepping on the cat's tail, I put him in and wouldn't let him out until he promised never to say anything bad about me again. Plus I got a twenty dollar reward from the police, because Bobby's mom had called them after the first week he was gone. All in all, it was a fun summer!