Say Cheese!

Milo has a haircut disaster, a fog machine, an escaped bearded dragon, and one photographer having a nervous breakdown. It is Picture Day at Cedar Hollow, and somebody has to save it.

Every family has a shelf. On the Ferris family shelf, in a row of little cardboard frames, is the complete photographic history of Milo Ferris, and it is a disaster from end to end.

Kindergarten: eyes shut. First grade: eyes shut, plus a caterpillar of dried yogurt on his chin. Second grade: he sneezed. Third grade: the photographer said say cheese and Milo, who was six days into a new retainer, produced a smile that his sister Junie has described as a garage door coming off its rails. Fourth grade: somebody's elbow. Fifth grade: he blinked so hard that the picture technically contains no eyeballs at all.

'It is a curse,' Milo tells people.

'It is a boy who cannot hold still,' says his mom.

Cedar Hollow Elementary does Picture Day the second Tuesday of October, in the gym, in one enormous nine-hour assembly line. Tomorrow is the second Tuesday of October. Milo has a plan this year, and the plan is: be normal. That is the entire plan. Be a normal boy with a normal face for one twelfth of one second.

What could possibly go wrong with a plan that good.