Chapter 1

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DEDICATION For every child who notices what needs to be done — and does it.

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Nadia noticed things. She noticed when Mrs. Okafor next door struggled to carry her groceries. She noticed when the park bench had a broken slat. She noticed when the little kids at the bus stop looked cold because nobody had built a shelter there.

"You notice too much," her older brother Darius said. "It stresses you out."

Most of the kids said things like "help my mom" or "be nice to my sister." Nadia wrote a list. It had fourteen items.

Miss Roshan looked at the list and laughed — not in a mean way, in an amazed way. "Nadia, this is wonderful. But you can't do all of this alone."

"I know," Nadia said. "That's why I need a club."

The next day at school, she stood on a bench during recess — even though you weren't supposed to stand on benches — and made an announcement.

"I'm starting the Helping Hands Club. It's for kids who want to fix things in our neighborhood. Not big things. Small things. Things that grown-ups are too busy to notice."

Marcus, who was in her class, raised his hand. "What kind of things?"

"Like Mrs. Okafor's groceries. Like the broken bench in the park. Like the bus stop that doesn't have a roof."

"We can't build a roof," said Lily, frowning. "We're seven."

"We can ask someone who CAN build a roof. Helping doesn't mean doing everything yourself. It means noticing what needs to be done and making sure it gets done."

Six kids signed up that day. Nadia wrote their names in a special notebook with a green cover. She drew a picture of two hands on the front — one big, one small, reaching toward each other.

The Helping Hands Club was born.

Their first meeting was at Nadia's kitchen table, with juice boxes and a plate of her dad's famous date cookies. Nadia had prepared an agenda, which she had learned about from watching her parents go to their Bahá'í Feast meetings.

— The old man on Pine Street never comes outside anymore. — The community garden has weeds everywhere. — The little free library on Oak Avenue is empty. — The mural on the school wall is peeling.

Nadia wrote everything down. "We can't do all of this at once. Let's pick one thing and do it really, really well."

They voted. The community garden won.

"Perfect," Nadia said, snapping her notebook shut. "Operation Green Thumbs starts Saturday."

Marcus raised his hand again. "Do we get T-shirts?"

"If we do a good job," Nadia said, "we'll deserve them."

She went to bed that night feeling a fizzy, sparkly feeling in her stomach. She didn't know the word for it yet. The word was purpose.

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The community garden on Birch Street was a mess.

It had been beautiful once. Nadia's dad remembered it — raised beds full of tomatoes and sunflowers, a little path made of stepping stones, a bench where old Mr. Petrov used to sit and read his newspaper.

But Mr. Petrov had moved to a care home last year, and the people who used to tend the garden had gotten busy or moved away, and now the beds were full of weeds, the path was hidden under dead leaves, and the bench had a bird nest on it.

"This is going to take forever," Lily said, staring at the wreckage.

"No it's not," Nadia said. "There are six of us. If each person clears one bed, that's six beds. If each person pulls weeds for thirty minutes, that's three hours of work done in thirty minutes. That's math."

"I don't like math," said Marcus.

"You like cookies. My dad said he'll bring cookies at lunchtime if we fill four trash bags with weeds."

Marcus picked up a pair of gardening gloves. "I love math."

They worked all morning. It was harder than any of them expected. Weeds have roots that go deep, and soil that hasn't been turned in a year is packed hard as clay. Lily got a blister. A boy named Jordan found a worm and screamed. Nadia's hands were black with dirt and her back ached and she had never been happier.

Because something was happening. The garden was coming back.

Under the weeds, the soil was rich and dark. The raised beds, once cleared, were perfectly good. The stepping-stone path emerged from the leaves like a secret being told. Even the bench, once the bird nest was carefully relocated to a nearby tree, was solid and inviting.

At lunchtime, Nadia's dad arrived with cookies and lemonade, and the kids sat on the ground in the half-cleared garden and ate and drank and admired their work.

"It doesn't look finished," Jordan said.

"It's not finished," Nadia said. "But it looks STARTED. And starting is the hardest part."

That afternoon, something unexpected happened. Mrs. Okafor from next door came over with a bag of flower bulbs. "I heard children laughing," she said. "I came to see what was happening. When I saw you working on this garden, I cried. My husband planted those tomato beds fifteen years ago."

"Would you like to help us?" Nadia asked.

Mrs. Okafor's face broke into the biggest smile Nadia had ever seen. "I would like nothing more."

Then Mr. Chen from the apartment building brought a rake. Then a teenager named Sofia showed up with hedge clippers. Then Nadia's mom appeared with a tray of sandwiches and a sun hat.

By the end of the day, there were fourteen people in the garden. Six kids and eight adults, all working together, all talking and laughing and pulling weeds and planting bulbs.

Nadia stood at the edge and watched. She was seven years old and covered in dirt and her back hurt and she had a blister forming on her right thumb and she felt like she was glowing.

She underlined the last part twice.

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The garden was only the beginning.

Over the next few weeks, the Helping Hands Club met every Saturday. They kept a list of neighborhood needs in Nadia's green notebook, and every week they picked one thing to work on.

"You didn't fix my steps," Mr. Yoder said to Nadia. "Your parents did."

"We noticed your steps," Nadia said. "That's our job. Noticing."

Mr. Yoder looked at her for a long time. "You know," he said, "when I was your age, people noticed each other more. We knew our neighbors. We watched out for each other. Somewhere along the way, we stopped."

"We're starting again," Nadia said.

Week four was the biggest project yet. The mural on the school wall — a painting of children from all over the world holding hands, done by a local artist ten years ago — was peeling and faded. The Helping Hands Club couldn't repaint it themselves. But they could do something else.

Two weeks later, the artist wrote back. Her name was Carmen Reyes, and she was seventy-three years old, and she said Nadia's letter was the best thing she had received in years.

She came on a Saturday with buckets of paint and twenty years of experience and a smile that could light up a stadium. The Helping Hands Club helped her prep the wall — sanding, washing, taping edges — and then watched as she began to restore her own work, adding new details, new faces, new colors.

"Can we help paint?" Jordan asked.

"Absolutely," Carmen said. "Everyone gets a brush."

The mural took three Saturdays to finish. When it was done, it was even more beautiful than the original. Carmen had added new children to the painting — and if you looked closely, six of them looked remarkably like the members of the Helping Hands Club.

Nadia stood back and looked at the wall. There she was — a tiny painted girl with curly dark hair and a green notebook, holding hands with children from every corner of the world.

She closed the notebook and went to help her friends clean the paintbrushes.

There was always more to do. And that, Nadia was learning, was the whole beautiful point.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Crimson Ark Publishing creates stories about kids who make the world better, one small act at a time.