The Hundred Dresses

The hundred dresses by Eleanor Estes

Have you ever judged a person only because he or she is poor?  The hundred dresses is a story about this very topic. It is short but can lead you to think about it a lot.

Wanda Petronski is from a poor family living in a shabby house uphill away from town. Everyday, she comes to school in the same clean but faded  blue dress. She barely speaks to anyone and has no friends.  She was assigned to the worst seat at the corner of Room 13, where normally the most naughty kids were assigned to. Wanda stopped attending school for a few days.  As an almost  invisible girl, no one noticed her absence except Peggy and Maddie and the teacher.

Peggy is a pretty and popular girl who’s from a wealthy family and Maddie is Peggy’s best friend.

The reason they noticed Wanda’s absence was rather harsh. It’s not from caring, but from missing the fun of doing their daily dress game. 

The dress game starts from a bright blue day, when all the girls met on the way to school and started to circle and  comment on a beautiful new dress one girl was wearing that day. Suddenly, with a very soft voice,  Wanda mentioned that she has a hundred dresses all lined up in her closet. As a poor girl who was only seen in her faded blue dress, this was obviously a lie to all her classmates.

Ever since then, Wanda was stopped by Peggy and other girls everyday on her way to school, and was asked the same question “how many dresses do you have?”Then Wanda would answer “100,”  and all the girls would laughed.

This was the so-called dress game.  

Maddie didn’t think this was right, but she lacked courage to correct it. Because she is also from a poor family she feared other girls will also tease her.

On the third day of Wanda’s absence. The teacher announced 2 things:

First, Wanda has left the school and moved to another city.

Second is to reveal the winner of the annual drawing contest. Wanda, surprisingly , was announced the winner. She submitted 100 sketches of 100 beautiful dress designs. 

All the girls now understand that Wanda never lied and felt guilty, especially Peggy and Maddie. 

这下所有的女生都知道她们冤枉Wanda了，每个人都觉得很内疚。 特别是Peggy和Maddie。

They tried to reach out to Wanda with mail and apologize but did not get a response. At Christmas time, Room 13 got mail from Wanda. She sent good wishes to  everyone and would like to give her 100 dress sketches as gifts to her classmates.

Two sketches were especially assigned to Peggy and Maddie.

Later,  Maddie noticed that, in these 2 sketches, the models looked just like her and Peggy. And they realized how nice Wanda has always been to them.