Think about these questions while you read:
What point of view is the passage written in? How do you know?
Extra: What is different about this narrator? Can you tell who it is?
“Holy cow!” Mr. Monroe yelped as he opened the refrigerator door. He took this funny-looking white thing out of the fridge and held it at arm’s length. “Peter, come down here!”
“What is that?” I whispered.
“Beats me,” Chester answered. “It looks like a white tomato.”
“Very funny,” I said, as Pete came into the kitchen.
“Peter, have you been playing with your chemistry set in here?”
“No, Dad, why?”
“I thought this might be one of your experiments. Do you know what it is?”
“Gee, Dad, it looks like a white tomato.”
Just then, Mrs. Monroe and Toby came in the door.
“What’s all the fuss about?” Mrs. Monroe asked.
“We were just trying to figure out what this is.”
Toby pulled it down so he could get a better look. “Well,” he said, “it looks to me like a white tomato.”
“There’s one way to find out,” said Mrs. Monroe, who always was the practical one. “Let’s cut it open and see what’s inside.”
Everybody gathered around the table. I jumped up on a chair, and in all the excitement, no one noticed that I had my paws on the table (which under normal circumstances was discouraged, to say the least). Chester wasn’t so lucky.
“Chester, get off the table,” Mrs. Monroe said. Chester jumped onto Toby’s shoulders, where he stayed to view the proceedings. Mrs. Monroe took her sharpest knife and cut cleanly though the thing. It fell into two halves.
“It’s a tomato, all right,” said Mrs. Monroe. “Here are the seeds.”
“But it’s all white,” Toby observed.
“And look,” said Pete, “it’s dry.”
“So it is,” Mr. Monroe said, as he picked up one of the halves. “There is no juice at all. Well, Ann, what do you think?”
“It’s gone bad, I guess, though I’ve never heard of a tomato turning white before. Come on,” she said, clearing the table, “Let’s throw it out and have breakfast. And Harold, get your paws off the table.”
Rats.
