The Candy Smash by Jacqueline Davies

have to memorize and recite a poem every year. I'm quite good at it. The best in my class." She looked down at the framed poem in her hand. "This is a very nice poem. Did E. E. Cummings write it?"
    Evan bent his head toward his grandmother.
    "Yes. He wrote it just for you."

Chapter 16
Front-Page Layout
front-page layout (n) the way in which text and pictures are arranged on the front page of a newspaper so that all the space is used and the headlines catch the reader's attention
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    Jessie knew in her heart that today was going to be a great day. She closed her closet door and picked up her backpack from beside her bed. Then she grabbed the grocery bag that held twenty-eight copies of
The 4-O Forum.
She had gotten up early this morning to finish printing and folding them. They were ready to go!
    She reached in the bag and pulled out one of the copies of the paper. She held it up so she could admire the front page. It was perfect! The headline was a grabber, the columns of type were neat and straight, and the whole page was filled, which was really important because there should never be empty space in a real newspaper.
    That had been tricky. Yesterday, when she'd finished laying out the front-page article, including all her terrific pie charts, she'd still had a box of empty space to fill. It wasn't all that big, just about three inches in the last column, but Jessie knew she couldn't leave it empty. What could she fill it with?
    Then she'd had a brilliant idea. She would put Evan's poem in that space. It fit perfectly! And she could just imagine how thrilled he would be to have his writing published in a newspaper. For everyone to see. He would probably shout with excitement. She decided to make it a surprise.
    Then she turned the paper over and looked at the back page. She had written the double article about the candy heart mystery
and
the secret on the bathroom wall just like a chapter from an Encyclopedia Brown book. The reader could solve the mystery because all the clues were sprinkled throughout the newspaper in pictures and articles. But you had to go to the back page of the newspaper to find the answer. Jessie couldn't help smiling when she saw the answer printed in a framed rectangle on the back page. It was a masterpiece!
    "Jessie, did you strip your bed like I asked?" called Mrs. Treski from downstairs. Monday was laundry day in the Treski household, and each child was responsible for taking the sheets off the bed and bringing them down to the laundry room.
    "I don't have time!" shouted Jessie, not wanting to wait even one more minute to get to school with her blockbuster newspaper.
    "You have plenty of time. Do it now, Missy Miss!"
    There was no point in arguing with her mother. Especially about laundry. She put down the grocery bag and dropped her backpack to the floor. Then she pulled the bed away from the wall so she could take off the blanket and sheets.
    Something fell to the floor.
    Jessie peered down into the space between the bed and the wall. There was a folded-up piece of paper on the floor. With a sinking heart, Jessie reached down and picked it up.
    It was the twenty-seventh survey, the one she hadn't been able to find on Thursday! Jessie sat down hard on the bed. The image of Langston shouting NUMERATOR ON TOP, DENOMINATOR ON BOTTOM ! jumped into her mind. She had used a denominator of twenty-six for all her calculations, but now the correct number was twenty-seven! That meant that every statistic in her front-page story was wrong. The whole article was a mistake! And there wasn't time to fix it before school.
    Everything was ruined.
    Who did this?
she wanted to scream, shaking the piece of paper as if it were somehow at fault. She knew that no one was to blame, but still she wanted to be angry at
someone.
Quickly she looked at the survey to see if she could tell whose it was.

    Jessie stared and stared at the creased paper. She didn't recognize the handwriting, but that wasn't surprising.
    Who