Bea Garcia: The Curse of Einstein’s Pencil

Chapter 1 MY MAGIC PENCIL
This is my pencil. It may not look magic, but it is. Mrs. Grogan said so. She told the whole class.
Mrs. Grogan didn’t mean fairy-tale magic. She didn’t mean that I could wave my pencil in the air like a wand and turn my little brother into a frog.
Abracadabra!
She meant drawing magic, that I could turn my brother into a frog in a picture.
But wouldn’t it be fun if I really could turn him into a frog? He would be good at jump rope and basketball. It would be easy for him to get second helpings of dessert. Of course, if my brother was a frog, his favorite dessert would be fly pie. Yuck.
Anyway, Mrs. Grogan wasn’t talking about pictures of frogs. She was talking about this picture that I drew of Mount Everest, the highest place on Earth.
Bea is an artist!
Ignore that monster on top. That’s Bert. I wish I’d never drawn him.
This is me, Bea Garcia.
She’s a star!
She’s a star!
She’s a star!
She’s a star!
She’s a star!
She’s a star!
Just kidding! I’m not really a movie star.
But I really am an artist.
I draw pictures of everything, especially my dog, Sophie. And flowers and stars and kangaroos and birds and EVERYTHING.