Walking to the Moon

'My name is Lenny and I love walking to work. It makes me happy. I am twenty-two years old but when I walk to work people laugh at me. When I watch cartoons on the TV, I laugh because its funny but they laugh at me and shout at me saying I am stupid. Mum says I should ignore them but they make me feel sad. I try to be nice and smile but the kids run up and try to trip me and hit me and say bad words. They throw things at me. If you do not believe me, look at the scar near my eye. See it? That was done by a stone the size of my fist. My face got all hurtful and my eye went dark with blood. I cried and ran away. The big policeman came and let me ride in his car and asked lots of hard questions and said he would tell the mums and dads of the kids not to throw stones. They still did and Mum said a rude word about them and said their mums and dads gave lots of presents to bad kids and none to good kids.I walk to my work at the mushroom factory in Cable Street. I enjoy my work. Mr Armitage is the boss. He tells me to stand by the conveyor belt and pick out the brown and black mushrooms as they go past. These are bad. He says I am the best mushroom sorter he as ever seen and always gives me and the others a smile when he says that. Mr Armitage is nice. He says I am money in the bank. The others laugh and look sad when he says that to them. When I am picking out the bad mushrooms, I like that I can add and think about how many mushrooms I am sorting. And how many my friends are sorting. The small numbers make patterns in my head and I use them to count big things like where the stars are and how small things can get.I go and see Mike my friend on Saturday. I met him on the internet. I have lots of friends on the internet and we talk about numbers and what you do with them. Mum will not let me see the friends I make chatting. She says they may be bad and want me to take my trousers down and I must only allow Doctors do that when she is with me.That is silly. Mike has said he is not interested in my trousers and says I am the best in the world at looking at shapes and breaking them up into many small boxes, and adding them up to say how big or small things are. The words he writes are too hard for me to understand but he is showing me lots of new ways of playing with the numbers in my head. He says I can look at any figures and get answers quicker then a machine. Mike says he going to help me get work going to the moon. I have money for a train ticket and he says he will meet me at the station. And has asked me have I told my mum about meeting him.He says I can still walk to work but I will miss counting the mushrooms. If I tell the kids that say bad things to me that I am going to walk to the moon they may be nice to me. I will tell them when I walk home tonight. And I can tell my mum my big surprise. I bet she will be happy.'