Happily Ever Emma Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - Extremely Horrible News!

  Chapter 2 - Anthony the Barbarian

  Chapter 3 - Nuclear Acid

  Chapter 4 - Word Search

  Chapter 5 - Happily Ever Emma

  Chapter 6 - Guilt Sandwich

  Chapter 7 - A Bad Night on Candelaria Road

  Chapter 8 - Short And Sweet

  Chapter 9 - Our Date With Dennis

  Chapter 10 - Do-Over

  Chapter 11 - Explaining Things to Anthony Scarpetto

  Other books about emma

  Other books about emma

  Only Emma

  Not-So-Weird Emma

  Super Emma

  Best Friend Emma

  Excellent Emma

  Viking

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2010 by Viking, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  Text copyright © Sally Warner, 2010

  Illustrations copyright © Jamie Harper, 2010

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Warner, Sally.

  Happily ever Emma / by Sally Warner ; [art by Jamie Harper].

  p. cm.

  Summary: Eight-year-old Emma is upset to learn that her mother is dating,

  but not passing along a message about a cancelled date makes Emma feels worse.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-56459-2

  [1. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction.

  3. Single-parent families—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction.] I. Harper, Jamie, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.W24644Hap 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009049436

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  for Jane, Signe, Cathy, and Penny,

  from way back when—S.W.

  For Heather—J.H.

  1

  Extremely Horrible News!

  No matter how bad your school week was, there is always Friday night to look forward to. School can’t follow you home, no matter how hard it tries.

  I am a person who really likes Friday night, because my mom and I usually go out for dinner then—or to the library and out for an ice cream cone, if Mom has run out of money for the week. Once we skipped the ice cream, and we still had fun.

  Which is why I cannot believe what my mom just said.

  “Huh?” I say, goggling at her like a telescope-eyed goldfish.

  I want to be a nature scientist when I grow up, and so I try to be as exact as possible when I talk about nature-y things.

  Mom blushes a little, which she hardly ever does. “I said that I was going to drop you off at the Scarpettos’ house tonight, Emma. For supper and a DVD.”

  The Scarpettos! “Supper and a DVD with Anthony ?” I say, trying not to squawk. “But I wanted to go Christmas shopping tonight!

  And he’s only four years old, Mom. What are we going to eat, anyway, weenies and frozen French fries? And what DVD are we going to watch, that cartoon about robots again?”

  See, I know Anthony Scarpetto. And I actually like him—as much as an eight-year-old girl can like a four-year-old boy who isn’t a relative. Anthony stayed at our house once for a few days, and I even got to babysit him after that, which is how I know about the robot DVD. We watched it twice.

  Of course, Anthony’s mom was at home when I babysat him at his house, since I am still basically a kid. She was cleaning out the garage. But it counts as a real babysitting job, because I got paid.

  I’m saving up to buy a nuclear microscope. They cost millions of dollars, but you have to start someplace.

  “I don’t know what Norah has planned for your supper,” Mom says, sounding a little annoyed. “Probably spaghetti, knowing Anthony.”

  “But Mom,” I say, “it’s Friday! Friday night is our night, yours and mine. And you didn’t even warn me.” My mouth was watering for Chinese food. Slippery shrimp. And now this! “This is extremely horrible news,” I tell her.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” Mom says. She finally looks guilty, and she also looks . . .

  I stare at her, and she blushes some more.

  “You’re all dressed up,” I say. It sounds like I am accusing her of something even worse than not taking me out for yummy Chinese food, a meal that I thought about all the way through a not-so-great week at Oak Glen Primary School. The school she made me go to, by the way.

  I used to go to Magdalena School, which was private, girls only. Well, it still is private and girls only, I guess. But I’m not going there now. My mom lost her job in San Diego, and last summer we moved to a condo—which is not as good as a house, I don’t care what anyone says.

  Now my mom looks nervous. She wipes an invisible lipstick smudge from the corner of her mouth and slides her gaze away from mine. Lipstick!

  “Where are you going, anyway?” I ask, scowling.

  “Out for dinner, Emma,” Mom tells me. “With a friend.”

  “What friend?” I ask. “Why can’t I come, too?”

  “Because—”

  “I won’t talk,” I promise. “I’ll just eat, that’s all. Slippery shrimp.” My mouth waters just saying the words.

  “Don’t interrupt me again, young lady,” Mom says, raising her warning finger.

  “Okay,” I mumble. “But why can’t I go out with you guys? How come I have to go over to Anthony’s house?”

  “Because I’m going on a date, that’s why,” my mother blurts out.

  She confesses.

  I am outraged. “A date?” I say. “But—but you’re already married, Mom!”

  “I—am—not,” Mom says, almost biting off the words. “Your father and I have been divorced for more than four years, Emma. And what’s more, you know perfectly well that your father got remarried two years ago. To Annabelle. In England.”

  “I don’t know it perfectly well,” I say, trying to sound calm. “Nothing’s perfect, Mom. Like you always say. And maybe Annabelle doesn’t even count.”

  “Now, how do you figure that?” Mom asks, as if she really wants to know.

  “They eloped,” I say, spelling it out for her. “So we didn’t even get to go to the wedding. We don’t have any proof.”

  “Well,” Mom says, “I agree that you should have been there, Emma. But I’m not all that sorry I missed it.” Now she is even smiling a little.

  “And anyway,” I say, trying to ignore the smile, “I don’t believe in divorce.”

  I heard Cynthia Harbison’s mom say this once—to a couple of mothers in front of school. She sounded pretty sure of herself.

  “I never used
to believe in divorce either,” my mom snaps back. “Nevertheless, I’m here to tell you that it exists whether I want it to or not.”

  I am a little scared of how angry she looks. Who is she mad at, though? Me? My dad?

  Annabelle?

  Divorce?

  My mom scoops me into a hug. “Look, Emma,” she says, her voice muffled by my tangly brown hair, which will never look like TV hair in a hundred years. “This is just one Friday night. There will be plenty of others. And you always have fun with Anthony.”

  “Yeah, but he can be extremely aggravating, Mom,” I inform her.

  “Oh, Emma,” Mom says, laughing. “Where did you come from, sweetie?”

  “San Diego,” I tell her a little sourly. “Remember?”

  Mom shakes her head and sighs. “Well, grab your puffy jacket,” she says, glancing at her watch. “We can look at some pretty Christmas lights on the way to Anthony’s house, if you hurry. I think that big house on the corner finally got those funny-looking reindeer hoisted up onto the roof.”

  “I wish we still had a house,” I grumble. “I wish we had funny-looking reindeer.”

  “Don’t start in on that,” my mother says, raising her warning finger again. “You know perfectly well we never got around to putting up decorations even when we did have a house.”

  “Not perfectly well,” I say again.

  “You’re telling me,” my mom says, laughing some more.

  2

  Anthony the Barbarian

  “My mother is on a date,” I tell Anthony gloomily, trying out the word—not that my mom’s so-called social life is any of his business. I am sitting amid what looks like a sea of LEGOs on his bedroom floor. Anthony Scarpetto has toys in boxes he hasn’t even opened yet! And he has a million relatives, and a mom and a dad who are still married to each other, and everybody loves him.

  I guess people love me, too, only they’re scattered all over the world.

  Well, scattered all over London, England.

  “A date? Like Barbie?” Anthony asks, interested. His brown eyes sparkle.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Except Barbie isn’t real.”

  “She is too real,” Anthony tells me. “Natalie at school has one. I seen it.”

  “‘I saw it,’” I say, correcting him.

  “So you know Barbie’s real,” he says, probably wondering why I am arguing with him.

  Spend five minutes with Anthony and you too will feel like you just walked into a wall.

  “Can you take this apart?” he asks, giving up on the mysterious LEGO lump he has been wrestling with so hard that his plump cheeks are even pinker than usual. “I need the blue one in the middle,” he says, pointing to it.

  “They’re all the same shape, Anthony,” I tell him wearily.

  “Ant,” he says.

  “What?” I ask, trying to pry apart the LEGOs, which seem to be stuck together with glue. Or oatmeal.

  “My name’s Ant, now,” he says, sneaking a look at me out of the corner of his eye to see how I am taking this stupendous news. “We all have nicknames in Miss Becky’s class,” he adds, trying to sound grown-up.

  “What about Natalie?” I say, still working on the stuck LEGOs.

  He frowns, suspicious. “How do you know Natalie?” he asks.

  “You just told me about her,” I say. “And she doesn’t have a nickname.”

  “Yes she does,” Anthony says. “Natalie is her nickname. Her real name’s Nat.”

  “Gnat?” I say, wasting a joke on him. But gnats are very interesting insects. More interesting than you’d think! They do not eat after they are larvae. They only live long enough to lay their eggs and die.

  That would be kind of like kids never eating anything after middle school, not even pizza or French fries. Poor gnats.

  “Nat,” Anthony repeats, nodding.

  I try to figure out how to explain nicknames to him. “A nickname is usually shorter than a person’s name,” I finally say. “Unless you’re someone like Conan the Barbarian, and then it’s longer. But ‘Pete’ is a nickname for ‘Peter,’ for example. And ‘Liz’ is short for ‘Elizabeth.’”

  “Maybe I could be ‘Ant’ for short, and ‘Anthony the Barbarian’ for long,” Anthony suggests, sounding a little shy.

  “That nickname’s already been taken by Conan,” I tell him.

  Anthony sighs. “So what’s your nickname?” he asks.

  “I don’t have one.”

  “I’ll give you one,” Anthony says. “For free!” He’s a generous little guy, in a weird way.

  “No thanks,” I say. “What’s for dinner, do you know?” I ask, trying to change the subject. “Is it slippery shrimp, by any chance?”

  Dinner smells more like macaroni and cheese, cheese being one of Anthony’s favorite food groups, but a person can always hope.

  “Slippery shrimp?” Anthony asks, and he starts to laugh. “Yeah, Emma—like that’s a real thing people eat!”

  “They do eat slippery shrimp,” I tell him. “It’s Chinese food, Anthony. Which means Chinese people eat it all the time.”

  “Slippery Chinese shrimp. Oh, sure,” Anthony says, still laughing. He shakes his curly black head like the world’s youngest geezer. “There’s no such thing, Emma. The End.”

  Anthony has started saying “The End” lately, when he wants something to be over. I think he got it from books.

  “Forget I said anything,” I tell him just as the gummy LEGOs pop apart. “There,” I say, handing him the blue one. “Now are you happy?”

  “I was happy before, even,” Anthony says. “I’ve been happy ever since my mom said you were coming over to play tonight.”

  “Oh, Anthony,” I say, melting a little.

  “Ant,” he reminds me patiently. “Call me Ant, okay? Just for tonight? And I’ll call you Em.”

  “Please don’t,” I tell him, but it’s too late. The mind of Anthony Scarpetto has already hopped ahead to something else. Now, he is busily peeling some unknown goo off the bottom of his red sneaker.

  Yick.

  “Okay,” I murmur, shuddering. “Call me Em, if you have to. But just for tonight,” I say, echoing his earlier words.

  And, looking at the goo, I start wondering how my mom’s date is going right about now—but then I make myself stop.

  “The End,” I whisper to myself.

  3

  Nuclear Acid

  “Watch out, Emma! We’re a train, and you’re standing right on the track,” a boy’s hoarse voice behind me yells when I am almost in front of Oak Glen Primary School. It is Monday morning. I walk to school, because our condo on Candelaria Road is only six blocks away.

  Corey Robinson is the boy who is yelling. He’s afraid of arithmetic, but he is a champion swimmer already, even though we’re only in the third grade. Sometimes his blond hair turns green when they put too much chlorine in the pool where he trains.

  “Yeah,” another boy’s voice calls out. “And there’s dangerous stuff on board.” It’s Stanley Washington, who is usually a cautious kind of guy. Like EllRay Jakes, he says “Present” instead of “Here” sometimes, when Ms. Sanchez takes attendance. It always gets a laugh, but we’re pretty easy to entertain in Ms. Sanchez’s class. Epecially first thing in the morning.

  “It’s nuclear acid,” EllRay roars, bringing up the rear of the imaginary train. I guess he’s supposed to be the caboose.

  As I have said before, EllRay is little in size but large in noise.

  “There’s no such thing as nuclear acid,” I shout after them as they whoop-whoop-whoop their way up the concrete steps that lead to the front hall-way where the school offices are.

  Boys like yelling in hallways because they’re so nice and echo-y. (The halls are nice and echo-y, not the boys.) Another thing about boys is that they’re extra brave when there’s a whole bunch of them together, like now. But if I bumped into Corey or Stanley or EllRay on the playground, and whoever-it-was was alone, he wouldn’t be yelling �
��nuclear acid” at me and be expecting me to get out of his way, that’s for sure.

  Well, I guess girls are the same, being braver in groups than they are when they’re alone. Not that a girl would invent something like nuclear acid as a way of having fun. That’s pure boy.

  I stand in front of the school under the pepper tree and wait for my friend Annie Pat Masterson to arrive, being careful not to step on any nuclear acid that might have spilled on the sidewalk, ha ha. It was supposed to start raining last night, only it didn’t. All that rain is still waiting somewhere up in the sky, which means that the air will just get heavier and heavier until something finally happens.

  Like—ka-boom!

  Meanwhile, most of us kids will be either too hot or too cold today, depending on what wrong thing we wore to school. And in addition to the almost-bad weather, it’s Monday, which makes everything worse—for kids and for teachers, probably.

  Monday is bad the way Friday is good, when you’re in primary school.

  “I’m freezing,” Annie Pat Masterson says ten seconds after joining me under the pepper tree. Every so often, a tiny red berry plonks down onto our heads, and we shake it off, fast, just in case it’s an insect and not a berry.

  Annie Pat is wearing skinny jeans today, and a red turtleneck shirt, and a pullover sweater that matches her navy-blue eyes perfectly. Her red pigtails—not the same color red as the turtleneck—look extra springy in the damp morning air. She shivers, demonstrating how cold she is.

  “Well, I’m too hot,” I say, adjusting my puffy pink jacket so that some cool air seeps down my neck.

  “But I’m just right,” a chirpy, confident voice says as its owner comes skipping up behind us.

  It’s Cynthia Harbison—doing her Goldilocks imitation, I guess. Cynthia is a girl who’s perfect every day, in every way.