I sat in my room trying to figure out the best way to say goodbye. Sending cards was corny. Balloons were too girly. Flowers were too sad. There was only one obvious option left.

A party!

I was going to need Benny and Ahuva’s help.

“Do you agree that we need to make a goodbye party?” I asked them. They both nodded and Benny said “Of course. We were just trying to figure out how to say goodbye ourselves.”

“Should we make it here in our house?” I asked.

Ahuva ran to ask our mother and she gave her automatic approval. She even offered to order pizza for us. She said she wanted to come obviously. Excellent.

Now there was the matter of the invitations.

“I’ll type them up ” I said. I was very good at typing.

Two days later I wheeled around the class and gave out the invitations.

“No way ” Rafi said. “You’re seriously leaving the pages of Jr.?”

“Yup ” I said. “It’s time to move on. For now it’s time to say goodbye.”

“Wait a second. If you’re leaving the magazine does that mean I’m leaving the magazine too?”

“Rafi ” I said as TJ did a bit of a pop-a-wheelie. “You weren’t exactly the star of the show. You’re just a guy in the class.”

“But will I even exist once I leave Jr.?” he asked me.

Rafi’s questions were getting way too complicated for me. I gave out the rest of the invitations and everyone was pretty excited. Rafi even agreed to take care of getting some good entertainment for the party. And during recess everyone came up with a plan — they wanted to do a runoff — meaning at the end of the party they’d just run off the page shalom!

I couldn’t concentrate during class though. Rebbi kept looking at me and for a second I thought he was tearing up. It was all pretty emotional.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I kept on thinking about how I wanted to say goodbye. You see the runoff while a great idea wasn’t exactly going to work for me. I told myself it wasn’t the biggest deal. I mean I could wheel off the page instead of running. It’s not like I was new to being different. I could even do an awesome pop-a-wheelie with TJ. Maybe even the best one I’d ever done.

But it felt kind of stale. I mean Gavriel Farber was coming with his brand-new kallah and there I’d be Nonny Bear same as ever etched for eternity in my chair. (Excerpted from Mishpacha Jr. Issue 682)