Headscratchers / Harriet the Spy

• How Sport is able to go to an exclusive private academy on his father's shoestring budget is never explained.
  • Perhaps his mother sends the money for that, and only that. (Confirmed in Sport.)
  • That could also be why they are living on such a shoestring budget. Every possible spare dollar is going to his tuition.
• How does Harriet get away with writing such vicious things about her classmates' parents in the school newspaper?
  • They weren't that vicious. Just a bit gritty but not all that vicious.
    • This may be a subjective value judgment. Maybe publishing the fact that a classmate's father was so drunk he was falling off his chair and another classmate's mother just "smiled at him like an idiot" was acceptable at that time and place.