Souto-Manning shares her journey as a second-grade teacher-researcher, offering insights into the relationship between a reading program that is (over)determined by scores, multiple-choice questions, and book levels, and the ways children, parents, and teachers worked together to maintain their commitment to a more equitable community of learners. She explains how participants found wiggle room within the constraints of Accelerated Reader, a program that commodified and (over)simplified early literacy, and how they negotiated ways to foster meaningful early literacy practices while challenging social, cultural, racial, and political discourses that often separate children as friends and readers. (Contains 1 footnote.)