Portrait Collection: Dawn's Book
All the way in Palo City, CA, Dawn has received the same assignment as all the eighth-graders at Stoneybrook Middle School: to write her autobiography. Here’s what we learn about Dawn Read Schafer:
My nemesis was born on February 5th at 6:45am.
When Sunny Winslow first moved into Dawn’s neighborhood, Dawn was super judgy about Sunny and her parents being total hippies, and didn’t start to like Sunny until they were in a scary situation and Sunny stayed cool and calm and used Morse Code to help rescue their mothers from an elevator.
For Granny and Pop Pop’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, Dawn’s parents flew them out to San Francisco, where they met Dawn’s family for a weekend of tourism and celebrating. At first Dawn is disappointed because her grandparents aren’t overly lovey-dovey and they tease each other a lot, and she thinks it means they don’t love each other. But she soon realizes that if you can’t tease the person you’re married to, life is going to feel one million years long. Meanwhile, Dawn’s parents are lovey-dovey with each other, and we all know how that turned out.
When she’s twelve, Dawn becomes obsessed with fire safety because she is scared that her house might burn down. It doesn’t — but the Austins’ house does catch fire while she’s baby-sitting Clover and Daffodil, and she manages to get them out safely and call the fire department. She gets a Community Hero medal from the Palo City mayor, but she laments the fact that she can’t prevent her parents from getting divorced. They announce their separation a few weeks after the medal ceremony.
Dawn’s most shameful baby-sitting moment is with Sandra Lazar (who we’ve never heard of before, nor will we hear of her again), who is struggling with reading. While taking down a phone message, Dawn snoops a little and sees a letter from Sandra’s school saying that she’ll need to repeat second grade. Dawn then accidentally lets this info slip to Sandra, who doesn’t know yet (because her parents don’t want her to spend all summer worrying about it). Dawn rightfully feels like a real asshole, but never tells anyone what happened and just hopes they don’t notice that the Lazars stop calling.
When Dawn gets her graded autobiography back from her teacher, she gets an A- for content and a B for presentation, which I think is pretty accurate for Dawn! She cares about important things (aka the environment) but she could work on her presentation (not being super judgy and screaming at people like in Dawn Saves the Planet).
