EllRay Jakes Rocks the Holidays! Read online

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  BY Sally Warner

  ILLUSTRATED BY

  Brian Biggs

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

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  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published in the United States of America simultaneously by Viking and Puffin,

  imprints of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2014

  Text copyright © 2014 by Sally Warner

  Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Brian Biggs

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Warner, Sally, date-

  EllRay Jakes Rocks the Holidays! / by Sally Warner; illustrated by Brian Biggs.

  pages cm

  ISBN: 978-0-698-15325-7

  [1. Schools—Fiction. 2. Christmas—Fiction. 3. Family life—California—Fiction. 4. African Americans—Fiction. 5. California—Fiction.] I. Biggs, Brian, illustrator. II. Title.

  PZ7.W24644Elj 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2013048390

  Version_1

  For my Canadian friends,

  Nan and Wayne Cannon —S.W.

  For Phyllis —B.B.

  CONTENTS

  1 RAINY SATURDAY

  2 BLENDING IN

  3 HURT FEELINGS?

  4 A FEW THINGS I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT

  5 THE OPPOSITE OF SKIN COLOR

  6 BRAINSTORM!

  7 DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

  8 PRINCIPAL HAIRY JAMES

  9 HANGING OUT IN THE KITCHEN

  10 OFFICIALLY BROWN

  11 CHALLENGE

  12 TICKLISH?

  13 THURSDAY’S CHALLENGE

  14 PAYING CLOSE ATTENTION

  15 BEING SINGLED OUT

  16 LAST CHALLENGE

  17 AN OAK GLEN WINTER WONDERLAND

  18 A NOT–SO–PERFECT CHRISTMAS

  1

  RAINY SATURDAY

  “This rain is wrecking my weekend,” I tell Mom. I am staring out the kitchen window after a TV-and-cereal breakfast. We have all the lights on, it’s so dark outside.

  My dad and I usually do chores together on Saturday mornings. We eat a secret doughnut, too. But he’s in sunny Arizona, looking at a meteorite. He’s a rock scientist.

  The way I learned it, it’s called a meteoroid when it whizzes through space. That same space rock is a meteor—or shooting star—when it enters Earth’s atmosphere and starts to burn up. And whatever is left is called a meteorite once it’s on the ground.

  You’re welcome.

  I memorized all that, and I still didn’t get to go to Arizona! My dad’s giving a lecture at a university in Phoenix on Monday, that’s why.

  “The rain’s not wrecking your whole weekend,” Mom reminds me, wiping her hands on the clean kitchen towel she throws over her shoulder. “Corey’s spending the night with us, remember? He’ll be here at five. I’m making chili dogs.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say, smiling. Good old freckle-face Corey Robinson! One of my two best friends in the third grade at Oak Glen Primary School. And chili dogs!

  “I get to have nobody,” Alfie says, kicking the leg of our kitchen table.

  Alfie is my little sister. She’s four. She is kind of a golden color. But she can cloud up fast, especially on a rainy Saturday in December.

  “It’s not fair,” Alfie says, giving the kitchen table leg an extra-hard kick. “Ow,” she cries, rubbing her small red sneaker.

  “Santa’s watching,” I warn. “Don’t forget, Alfie. He’s making a list.”

  I am planning on using that sentence a lot this December, to keep Alfie from having too many meltdowns. They wear us out. Once we had to leave a movie before it even started, all because of Raisinets.

  Alfie is against them.

  “Santa is not making a list,” Alfie says. “He doesn’t even have a key to our house! Tell Santa not to make a list, Mom—or I’m calling 9-1-1. Because that’s spying.”

  “You’d better not call 9-1-1, or you’ll be in big trouble, young lady,” Mom says, opening the freezer door. “You don’t play around with that. Say. I have an idea,” she says, her face hidden for a second by freezer mist. “How about if we make some of our famous oatmeal cookies for tonight? Corey loves them. And it’ll be fun.”

  This is good news, because Mom’s oatmeal cookies are epic. I brought a big batch to school once, and everyone loved them. Ms. Sanchez even took a bunch of them home in her plastic lunch container.

  “I get to smash the eggs,” Alfie says, her brown eyes sparkling. “Not EllWay.”

  That’s how she says my name.

  “You break eggs gently, you don’t smash them,” Mom says, putting some sticks of butter in the microwave to soften. “And we’ll put them into a separate bowl first, this time,” she adds.

  Last time we made cookies, pieces of eggshell got into the cookie dough. That’s what Mom’s remembering.

  My stomach is growling already!

  “Mom?” I say, after the first two trays of cookies are in the oven, the timer’s ticking, and a worn-out, cookie-dough-spattered Alfie is curled up on the family room sofa with her blankie, her thumb, and the newest Fuzzy Kitties DVD.

  “Hmm?” she says, stirring milk into her coffee.

  “Why did we move to Oak Glen?” I ask.

  “Wait, what?” Mom says, surprised.

  “Oak Glen,” I repeat. “How come we moved here from San Diego?”

  It happened when I was five years old. I wasn’t exactly paying attention then.

  To anything.

  I couldn’t ask this question if Dad was here, by the way. He’d prickle up and say, “Why? What happened?” See, there aren’t too many families with brown skin in Oak Glen, and I sometimes get the feeling my dad is kind of ready for something to go wrong—even though nothing has. And I think he’s the one who wanted us to move here.

  “Why?” Mom asks. “What happened?”

  I sigh. “Nothing happened,” I say. “I was just wondering.”

  Rainy mornings do that to me.

  But if Mom takes my rainy morning question in a bad way, she will probably call Dad on his cell. And even if he were busy talking to an actual space alien who’d hitched a ride to Earth on that Arizona meteorite, he would take her call.

  And then the uproar would begin—like it did a couple of months ago. That’s when Alfie told Mom and me that she was feeling mad at Suzette Monahan, her friend-enemy at Kreative Learning and Playtime Day Care. And yes, we know they spelled “creative” wrong.

  It turns out that Suzette was secretly charging other girls a penny to touch Alfie’s hair, just because it’s different from theirs.

  WHOA. Get back!

  Like Alfie was part of a petting zoo!

  Alfie’s moral of the story was that she should have gotten all those pennies. But I told her she had other reasons to be mad abou
t what happened. I said that her hair was her own private property, and those girls should just keep their hands to themselves.

  And to tell her teachers if it happened again.

  But Mom told Dad, and Dad called the day-care ladies.

  After four phone calls and one parents’ meeting, the grownups decided to call the whole thing a misunderstanding. “Everyone moved on,” was the way Mom put it.

  But I think my dad “moves on” slower than other people.

  I just don’t want the prickly-dad-uproar thing to happen again, that’s all. You can’t be a blend-in guy—my main goal in life!—if you’re at the center of a tornado.

  “Why did we move to Oak Glen,” Mom says, repeating my original question. “Well, as you know, we were living in San Diego when you were little, honey,” she says. “And we needed a bigger house after Miss Alfie came along.”

  “I know the living-in-San-Diego part,” I say.

  “So we were looking and looking for a new place, but it was a tough search,” Mom continues. “You had just started kindergarten, EllRay. But one weekend, we decided to take a break and head up to Julian, to enjoy some of their apple pie.”

  Julian is a pretty mountain town with famous apples that is halfway between Oak Glen and Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, a really cool area our family loves, especially Dad and me. It’s our special place. Anza-Borrego has everything!

  1. An oasis.

  2. Bighorn sheep.

  3. A badlands.

  4. Mud caves.

  5. Lots of earthquake faults, and you can even see where some of them split the rocks.

  It’s awesome.

  “We stopped in Oak Glen on our way home,” Mom says, remembering. “For gas, I think it was. And your dad really liked the way the place looked, so we popped into a real estate office before heading back down to San Diego.”

  I try to picture this, but it’s hard to think of dad “popping into” any place. He’s the type of guy who likes to think things through—mostly until you don’t even feel like doing them anymore.

  “I know, I know,” Mom says, laughing as if she’s just read my mind. “But you have to understand this about your father, EllRay. He can act on impulse when the spirit moves him. And once he realized how much bigger a house and yard we could afford in Oak Glen, and how good the schools were, he was sold.”

  “But what about you?” I ask, sneaking a look at my mom.

  “I just wanted our search to be over, at that point,” she says, still laughing. “I liked Oak Glen. And your dad promised he wouldn’t mind the commute. He listens to audio books,” she adds, sounding a little jealous.

  “But you guys didn’t know anyone here,” I point out.

  “We don’t have family in San Diego anymore, either,” Mom reminds me. “Of course, I missed my old hair salon so much that I finally decided to keep driving down to the city for my appointments. And I knew I’d miss my old Balboa Park writing group, but I have to admit that I’ve gotten a lot more actual work done since we moved. Fewer meetings, more writing.”

  “But didn’t it bother Dad that there weren’t that many brown faces walking down the street? I mean brown legs,” I say, trying to correct myself.

  Mom laughs. “As a matter of fact, we happened to see a number of brown faces that first day,” she says. “Maybe that gave us a mistaken impression. We were both exhausted at that point, what with your dad’s teaching and you two little rascals to take care of. He just threw himself into the house hunt, and ta-da! But we’ve all made good friends here,” she adds. “And your dad feels that Oak Glen is becoming more diverse every year.”

  Not this year’s third grade class at Oak Glen Primary School, I think, frowning.

  But that’s okay, because skin color isn’t the reason I choose my friends.

  “EllRay?” Mom is saying. “Everything is okay, isn’t it, honey? I mean, you’d tell me if—”

  “I’d tell you if,” I say, nodding.

  Before I’d tell my dad, I add silently.

  “Everything’s okay, Mom,” I tell her as the oven timer dings and my stomach starts growling again. “Honest.”

  And it is. But man, I hope she doesn’t mention this conversation to Dad.

  2

  BLENDING IN

  “Pass me that brown crayon over there, okay?” I say to Corey, who is hunched over his white paper plate, dotting in a few of the three hundred freckles that cover his face. He swims every single day except Thanksgiving and Christmas, so he’s outside all the time.

  These round paper plates are for our self-portraits. A self-portrait is a picture you make that stars yourself, Ms. Sanchez says. It’s like a selfie that you draw, Emma McGraw explained to Corey and me. She’s a girl in our third grade class.

  Corey is frowning, and his tongue is sticking out. He says drawing is hard, and his face shows it. He could swim a mile, easy, but sitting-down stuff knocks him out. “I want the dark brown crayon,” I add, to make things easier for him.

  It is Tuesday afternoon, and it’s still raining. From big to little, all I can think of right now is Christmas, and next weekend, and my after-school oatmeal cookie snack, and finishing this goofy drawing of myself before the buzzer sounds so I don’t have to work on it at home.

  Our drawings are for the P.T.A. meeting. It is being held this Thursday night in the Media Center, which used to be called the library, someone said. Each month, a different class’s artwork decorates the walls—in case the parents get bored, I guess.

  This month comes our all-school holiday assembly. After that comes Christmas vacation, which we are supposed to call “Winter Break.”

  Today, our teacher, Ms. Sanchez, is standing in the corner of the room, laminating some old drawings and paintings for the Media Center walls, to go with our paper-plate faces. She must think the drawings and paintings look more important that way.

  So we kids are basically on our own for a while.

  “But you’re not dark brown, EllRay,” Fiona McNulty says, looking up from her own self-portrait. “You should start with raw sienna. Then maybe use some burnt sienna, and a little chestnut for your cheeks, and then brown, but only for shading. Pass me the pink sherbet crayon, please, so I can do my cheeks.”

  Fiona is the best artist in our class. Maybe in any class at Oak Glen.

  Or the world, for all I know.

  She knows every color by name, like they are her own private pets.

  “Ha ha,” Jared Matthews cackles. “Burned sienna, EllRay. You’re burned. Like toast, dude.”

  And his friend Stanley Washington pushes his glasses up on his nose, and he laughs, too. Most of the time, Stanley is like Jared’s echo.

  “Hey,” Emma McGraw objects, and she stops drawing circles for her tangly hair. I can tell by her serious expression that she thinks Jared is making some crack about me having brown skin. She likes to stick up for the underdog, Ms. Sanchez said once, a couple of weeks after school started, and maybe Emma thinks she’s doing that now.

  For one crazy second, I thought “underdog” meant a dog wearing underpants. That’s why I remember it so well.

  But having brown skin does not make me an underdog! And Jared’s not talking about color, so Emma can just relax. Like, forever. When us guys say “burned,” we mean insulted. And “toast” means that you’re done.

  Over.

  DESTROYED.

  Emma doesn’t have to go turning it into some big deal.

  Anyway, if it were a big deal, I could defend myself—even though like I said before, all I want in the whole wide world is to blend in.

  And I keep getting singled out! I hate that.

  “Burnt sienna is an official crayon color. They just spell ‘burned’ the old-fashioned art way,” Fiona informs us, and like I said, she ought to know. She says she has all one-hundred-twenty official Cray-ola colors at home.

  Fiona likes crayons better than markers, by the way. She says you can blend crayon colors together—the way she dr
aws, anyway. Her blending-in skills are real feathery and gentle. Us boys mostly just lay the crayon colors on thick and fast, like there’s a contest happening.

  We like to get it over with.

  Jared can’t even use a crayon without making it snap in half!

  Fiona says her favorite crayon color of all time is called inch worm, which is a green that our class doesn’t have. We mostly have only the basic colors, and on top of that our crayons are kind of nubbly by now, not pointy the way they were last September.

  But I guess nubbly, boring crayons are good enough for our paper-plate faces. Ms. Sanchez chose these plates, by the way, because they look like they have built-in frames where the outside circle part sticks out. I think we’re going to glue red or green holiday glitter on the edges later. Glitter is Ms. Sanchez’s best friend, she sometimes says.

  She just means for art projects, though.

  But it’s true: glitter makes any goofy thing we make look like we did it on purpose. I’m not sure the Media Center lady will like getting glitter on her floor, though.

  “Can I use the burnt sienna after you, EllRay?” Kevin McKinley asks. He is the only other boy in Ms. Sanchez’s class with brown skin. He’s my other best friend, but not because of that. Well, not only because of that.

  “You should start with sepia, Kevin,” Fiona advises. “And then use brown, maybe with some salmon for your cheeks. Because your skin is darker than EllRay’s. Only I don’t know if we have sepia,” she worries aloud. And she starts pawing through the crayons on our table for Kevin.

  What’s amazing is that Fiona is usually the shyest kid in our class. Art makes her brave, but only while we’re doing it. Which isn’t very often.

  “Maybe I don’t want salmon on my cheeks,” Kevin mutters, scowling. “Mind your own business, Fiona,” he adds, louder. And I don’t blame him! Who is Fiona McNulty to go around saying what color a person’s skin is?