Oren’s Button Dare — Every afternoon after the last bell, Oren slipped into the school greenhouse, tapped his lucky coat button three times, and misted the big rosette succulent before the gardening club arrived. Read the full story →
Every afternoon after the last bell, Oren slipped into the school greenhouse, tapped his lucky coat button three times, and misted the big rosette succulent before the gardening club arrived. The button was cracked, brown, and boring to everyone else, but it had come from his dad’s old field jacket, so Oren kept it in his pocket for brave emergencies. He liked quiet jobs: pump, shhh, pump, shhh, with the warm dirt smell rising around him.
Until one day, Dax dared him to drop the button into the succulent’s center “for exactly one second.” Oren’s stomach fizzed. He reached over the pointed leaves, missed, and plink! The button vanished into the tight green spiral. Because of that, he poked with the mister straw, which made the plant squirt a fat cold drip straight onto Dax’s nose. Because of THAT, Dax yelped, bumped the tray, and sent three plant labels clattering like tiny cymbals.
At the racket, Ms. Vale hurried in. Oren swallowed. “I dropped something important,” he said, before Dax could invent a weasel story. Ms. Vale handed him tweezers, and Oren eased the button free without snapping a single leaf. Next time the greenhouse smells like warm dirt, see if you can spot the spiral where Oren’s brave little plink disappeared.
