Just Like Me by Nancy Cavanaugh Read Free Book Online Page A

article,” Avery said.
    â€œWhat article?” Vanessa asked.
    â€œNothing,” I said quickly.
    The last thing I needed was for Vanessa to know about the whole Ms. Marcia thing.
    Thankfully, everyone went back to admiring their own photos—oohing and aahing over all the cute ones. And no one asked any more questions about the Ms. Marcia project.
    Then Gina asked Jen, “How did you get these pictures?” And that’s when I realized Gina hadn’t held up any of her photos for us to see.
    â€œWe wanted every camper to make a life collage, so when you registered for camp, we asked your parents to send some photos.”
    I looked at Gina’s pile of pictures and noticed how small it was. From what I could see, most of the photos she had were really recent ones. I wondered why her mom hadn’t included lots of baby pictures like all the other moms had.
    â€œAre you ready to see what your collage could look like?” Jen asked.
    We all looked up, and Jen flipped over a poster that had been lying facedown on the front table. She hung it on the wall. It was her life collage, which she’d made as an example. I had to admit that it looked pretty cool! Her photos were glued all around the poster board. She’d written something by each one. And she’d added a lot of cool doodles and fun decorations.
    I looked down at my photos and started getting ideas right away about how I wanted to arrange my collage. I separated my pictures into piles. There were holiday photos, school photos, and lots of pictures of family vacations. A trip with my dad to Starved Rock. A day at the zoo for Mom and me. The three of us ice skating downtown at Christmastime. But then I saw a photo I didn’t want to see.
    It was of me in the orphanage in China. It was the photo the Chinese officials had sent my parents before they came to China to get me.
    Bundled up in thick, puffy clothes, I sat outside a run-down building in a tattered and worn baby walker, holding a plastic ball. My short hair stuck straight up, and I had bug bites on my cheeks.
    The photo looked like a police mug shot.
    The thing about the picture was that I knew Avery and Becca had the exact same photo. Avery’s photo sat in a frame on her dresser, and Becca’s hung in a frame in the front hall of her house. Mine was in the life book my mom had made for me.
    The caregivers at the orphanage in China must’ve put all the babies in the same clothes with the same plastic ball and sat them in the same secondhand walker to take the same photo. I wondered how many other Chinese girls had a photo exactly like mine. Probably a million.
    This photo always gave my stomach a weird feeling.
    I wondered if Avery’s and Becca’s moms had included this photo in their envelopes. If Avery and Becca put their photo on their collages, and I put mine on mine, everyone would see what we looked like when we were orphans. Everyone would see that we looked exactly alike.
    â€œOh, Becca, look at this!”
    Avery had found it. Her orphanage picture. She held it up for Becca to see. “Look, Julia!” she said, turning it toward me.
    It was too late. Now everyone would know.
    Becca shuffled her photos around on the table, looking at the ones underneath those she’d already seen.
    â€œYeah, I’ve got mine too!” Becca yelled as she found the photo and held it up. “What about you, Julia?”
    â€œNo, my mom didn’t send that one,” I said, sliding the photo facedown underneath a picture of me dressed up as a pumpkin for Halloween.
    I thought Gina might have seen me hide the photo, but I didn’t care. I was not going to admit to having this photo, and I was not going to include it on my life collage.
    Thankfully, Jen told us we’d better get busy so we’d be able to finish our collage before morning activity ended. So with the orphanage photos forgotten, at least for the moment, we all got back to