One Space for a Star
A missing sponge stamp becomes a small art-room mystery. After solving it, two friends make a comic and consider how its pictures should match the story's clues and actions.
Play the quiz as a gameLaleh had printed blue stars around three sides of the art room's welcome poster. One corner remained blank, but the star-shaped sponge stamp had vanished. She checked beneath the scattered scraps on the table beside the door. Her red apron brushed the table edge as she searched. "It couldn't have walked away," she said.
Mateo stopped sorting paper and looked around. A narrow trail of blue drops crossed the pale floor toward the sink. He crouched beside the first drop, then followed the trail with his eyes. "Something blue went that way," he said. Laleh hurried to the sink, where a cleaning cloth lay in a damp heap.
A blue mark with five points showed near the cloth's edge. Laleh lifted the cloth. There was the stamp! "Now I remember," she said. "I used it to wipe up a paint drip. Then I carried it here to rinse it. I put the cloth over it while I cleared space on the drying rack."
They squeezed the extra water from the stamp and dried it with a towel. Soon, the poster had its final star. Laleh gave a small, relieved smile. "You noticed what I stepped right over," she told Mateo. Neither the blue drops nor the cloth had seemed important until they looked closely.
That afternoon, Mateo made a comic about their mystery for the class newsletter. In the first panel, he drew Laleh wearing her red apron at the table beside the door. The caption beneath the picture read, "One space left." But his second panel showed Mateo standing upright and pointing toward a blue spot on the ceiling.
Laleh tapped that panel. "The clue wasn't above us. You crouched beside the drops on the floor." Mateo studied his picture. A reader following his drawn finger would look upward, away from the real clue. "I'll revise it," he said. He drew himself low to the ground, with his eyes directed along the blue trail toward the sink.
The last panel showed Laleh lifting the cloth beside the sink, just as she had done. However, Mateo had drawn her with an enormous grin and both eyebrows raised. "That looks like I won a swimming race," Laleh said. "I was mostly glad we could finish." Mateo changed the grin to a small smile and lowered her eyebrows.
They pinned the finished comic beneath the welcome poster. The drawings could not leave blue drops on anyone's shoes, but they could lead another pair of eyes toward the same discovery.