Monkey June Stories

Story Two

Monkey June was a girl who liked monkeys. Actually, I think ‘liked’ is not the right word. I don’t even know if ‘loved’ is the right word. Monkey June loved, loved, loved, loved, LOVED monkeys.

Every part of her room was decorated with some kind of monkey. Everything she used had some kind of monkey on it. Everything she wore had some kind of monkey on it. She had monkey hair clips, monkey pins for her sweater, monkey tattoos (the temporary kind, of course) for her skin…I think you get the picture. 

Some people get obsessed with things, but Monkey June was way beyond obsessed with monkeys—I mean, it was even part of her name (and I’m sure you remember how that happened).

Monkey June’s friends were not obsessed with monkeys—or with anything, really. Her best friend Carolyn really liked horses, and she even had one—a real live horse—and she knew how to ride horses, but she wasn’t obsessed with them. 

Monkey June’s other best friend Marilyn really loved traveling and visiting new places, but she wasn’t obsessed with travel. She was actually at home most of the time.

Monkey June’s newest friend Phil wasn’t obsessed with anything, either. Monkey June thought that maybe he needed something to be obsessed with—or at least something to be interested in. He was new in town and it didn’t seem like he had any hobbies or interests. She was still trying to figure out how to help him find something, though. 

One day, Monkey June was having a normal day at school. It was probably a lot like one of your normal days at school. There were classes, teachers, lessons, a surprise quiz (ick!), and a strange incident in the lunchroom that involved an angry custodian and a missing mop and bucket—but those things have nothing to do with this story, so I’m not going to waste time telling you about them.

(I will take a moment here to say that if you’re not familiar with the word ‘custodian’, it’s just a fancy way to say ‘janitor’. Or maybe ‘janitor’ is a less fancy way to say ‘custodian’. I can never remember.)

So Monkey June was having a perfectly ordinary, somewhat boring, typically unremarkable day at school, when…in her last class of the day, suddenly…this happened…

Monkey June reached into her pencil case to grab a pencil (to take her second surprise quiz of the day—eww!) and found that there were no pencils there to grab.

That’s weird, she thought. I know I had at least four pencils this morning. Two red ones and two blue ones. My luckiest pencils! With monkey pencil-toppers on all of them, of course.

She looked into her pencil case. No pencils. No pencil-toppers. No nothing. Just air that smelled like pencils.

Monkey June looked at the outside of the case to be sure she had the right one. A smiling monkey face looked at her from the outside of the case. It was definitely hers.

But where were her lucky pencils?

She looked around the room and saw that all of the other students were already working on the surprise quiz (yuck!). At any moment now Monkey June knew that her teacher would notice that she wasn’t working on the surprise quiz (boo!) and say something like, “June, are we having some kind of problem today?” (Some teachers liked to pretend that it was ‘we’ having a problem when they knew it was really just ‘you’ having the problem. No one has ever figured out why they do that.)

Suddenly, Monkey June saw something that nearly shocked the eyeballs right out of her head: the girl at the desk next to her was working on the surprise quiz (ugh!)—and she was using a red pencil with a monkey pencil-topper on it!

That girl had stolen her pencil!

Or…maybe not. Monkey June knew it was never a good idea to ‘jump to conclusions’. He mother used that strange phrase all the time. When Monkey June first heard it, she imagined jumping onto a big, wet log that was floating by on a river or something—but it turned out to mean that it’s not a good idea to immediately think you know what’s going on when you don’t really know yet what’s going on. (No logs or rivers were involved at all.)

Monkey June put her thinking cap on. (It wasn’t a real cap, of course, but an imaginary one that she liked to imagine putting on when she needed her thoughts to slow down a bit and stop jumping to conclusions.) She wondered—as slowly as possible—how that girl could have ended up with her pencil.

She didn’t know the girl. She didn’t think she had ever seen her before. Maybe she was new at their school. Or maybe she had been in Monkey June’s class all year but she had been sitting somewhere else, and Monkey June had just never noticed her before that day. 

Maybe Monkey June had dropped a pencil earlier that day without noticing it, and the girl had simply found it and picked it up. Who wouldn’t want to pick up a cool pencil like that?

That seemed unlikely, though. And her imaginary thinking cap nearly flew off of her head when Monkey June noticed that there were three more pencils sticking out of the girl’s backpack—two blue ones and one red one—and all of them had monkey pencil-toppers on them!

Monkey June was just about to jump out of her seat, point at the girl, and shout ‘THIEF!'—but her thinking cap must have still been on her head because she she was able to slow down, calm down, and think before doing anything crazy.

Just then, the teacher noticed that Monkey June was the only kid in class not working on the surprise quiz (ergh!)—and he got up from his desk and started walking in her direction. She needed to think fast! She imagined her imaginary thinking cap shrinking to the size of a bottle-cap and flying back into her bag. Then she turned to the girl sitting next to her and whispered, “Excuse me. Do you have a pencil I can borrow? I can’t seem to find mine.”

“Sure,” the girl said casually, looking up from the surprise quiz (yerch!). She grabbed one of the pencils out of her bag (a blue one) and handed it to Monkey June. She was super calm while she did it; she didn’t give Monkey June any guilty looks or strange comments. She just smiled and looked like a normal girl helping out a kid who sat next to her by loaning her a pencil. Then the girl turned her attention back to the surprise quiz (mrmph!).

Monkey June didn’t even look up at the teacher who was still walking towards her. She just pointed her face at the surprise quiz (insert your own noise of frustration here) and got to work. Her teacher stopped, shook his head as thought he thought he might have imagined something earlier, and then quietly turned around and went back to his desk.

After class, Monkey June saw the girl in the hallway just outside of the classroom and caught up with her.

“Excuse me again,” Monkey June said, “I forgot to give you your pencil back.”

The girl turned and looked at Monkey June with another friendly smile on her face. “Oh, you can keep it. My friend gave me four of them this morning. Don’t you just love the cute little monkey things on them? I’ve got plenty, so you can have that one.”

“Thanks,” Monkey June said, and before she could say anything else, the girl continued off down the hall to do whatever she did at the end of a school day.

“That was very strange,” Monkey June said to herself as she stood in the busy hallway staring at the blue pencil in her hand with the monkey pencil topper on it. “There must be some explanation for this. I’ve never even seen that girl at school before. Is she new here? And who would give a new girl pencils that didn’t belong to them? That belonged to me? And did that person steal them or just find them? The more I think about it the more confused I get!”

“Why are you talking to yourself in the middle of the hallway?” her best friend Marilyn asked her. She must have walked up and noticed Monkey June standing there in a fog of confusion.

“Just trying to solve a mystery,” Monkey June said.

“Mysteries sure do seem to find you a lot," Marilyn said. “Well, don’t miss pick-up while you’re solving this one. See you tonight!”

With that Marilyn waved and smiled and headed to the parent pick-up area. Monkey June remembered that her mom was taking Marilyn, Carolyn, and Monkey June to do some shopping after school. They were even planning to get some food at Monkey June’s favorite restaurant. Suddenly, Monkey June had an idea…

She ran off down the hall as fast as she could, and turned right at the end of the hall where she had seen the mysterious pencil-girl turn just a few moments before. As she rounded the corner she almost ran into the girl.

“OH!” Monkey June said. “Sorry. I was looking for you. Do you want to go shopping with me and my friends after school today? We’re going to grab some food at Shenanigans too.”

“Sure!” the girl said. “Is that the place that has bowling and air hockey and indoor mini golf and axe throwing and laser tag and a kids’ play area and all that? Sounds fun! I’ll run outside and check with my mom. My name’s Maisie, by the way. What’s yours?”

“Monkey June,” said Monkey June. “And yes, that’s the place. I’m not allowed to do the axe throwing. The rest of it is great, though!”

“What an interesting name!” Maisie said as she ran off to talk to her mother.

As it turned out, Maisie’s mother already had plans for their family for dinner that night, but Monkey June told her she’d be welcome to join them some other time.

At home that night, as she was getting ready for bed, Monkey June asked her mom for advice. She told her about how her pencils had gone missing and how a girl named Maisie had suddenly had them, but that the girl had gotten them from a friend of hers somehow.

“None of it makes sense,” Monkey June said. “Why would someone take my pencils just to give them to someone else?”

“Well,” her mother said, “you may never know. Maybe she found them and didn’t need them, so she gave them to someone else. Maybe she took them and then felt guilty, but didn’t want to face you, so she gave them away. You did the right thing, though, not jumping to conclusions and getting mad at that new girl. Do you remember learning about what Jesus said we should do when someone takes something from us?”

“Give it to them,” Monkey June said. “And to go ahead and give them more. It sounds like a crazy thing to do, but sometimes someone else needs something more than you do, so it makes sense to just give it to them. Plus, even if they are being mean and trying to upset you by taking your stuff, you kinda make it not as fun for them when you just agree to let your stuff get taken.”

“True,” her mother agreed. “And it teaches you at least as much as it teaches them. You learn to get along with people, even when they aren’t trying to get along with you, and that makes the world a bit nicer instead of a lot uglier. If we all went around being mad at mean people or rude people all day, we’d just be grumpy-faced grumps all the time, and no one wants to live life as a grumpy-faced grump.”

Monkey June never did find out who found (or took) the pencils before passing them along to Maisie, but she did eventually get Maisie to go shopping with her and Marilyn and Carolyn, and they even got to go to Shenanigans together. Monkey June appreciated any situation that ended up making her a new friend, and Maisie was happy to make three new friends at the same time so soon after starting at her new school.