Excellent Emma Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - Ka-Pow!

  Chapter 2 - Typical Boy Behavior

  Chapter 3 - Good at Something

  Chapter 4 - Is That a Threat Or a Promise?

  Chapter 5 - In Training

  Chapter 6 - Best Friends

  Chapter 7 - So Harsh

  Chapter 8 - Think Slow

  Chapter 9 - A Big, Dead Bug

  Chapter 10 - The Jumping Contest

  Chapter 11 - Running

  Chapter 12 - The Good Old-Fashioned Three-Legged Race

  Chapter 13 - Awards

  Chapter 14 - Almost Like a Daughter

  Other Books about emma

  Only Emma

  Not-So-Weird Emma

  Super Emma

  Best Friend 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

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632,

  New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in 2009 by Viking, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  Text copyright © Sally Warner, 2009 Illustrations copyright © Jamie Harper, 2009

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

  ISBN : 978-1-101-56457-8

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For the excellent Yane Willi—S.W.

  For Ros—J.H.

  1

  Ka-Pow!

  Ka-pow!

  “Take that, Lettice Wallingford,” I whisper under my breath—and the liquidambar pod bounces away toward Oak Glen Primary School, where I am in the third grade.

  I aim the scuffed toe of my red sneaker at the small pod—which is also called a sweet-gum ball, even though that name is like cheating, because it makes the spiky pod sound like something good to eat—and I kick it again, as hard as I can.

  Lettice. What a stupid name, I think, as I watch the pod roll to a stop in front of me on the sidewalk. “Hello, my name is Lettice,” I say in a fakey-English voice, trying it out.

  “And these are my best friends, Asparagus and Baked Potato.”

  Lettice Wallingford is eight years old, just like me. She is fancy Annabelle’s favorite English niece. Annabelle is my dad’s new English wife. Well, she’s not so new anymore, I remind myself, taking aim at the pod again, because they’ve been married for two years, ever since I was six. They get to live in London, England, while I, Emma McGraw, am stuck here with my mom in boring old Oak Glen, California.

  Lettice is “almost like a daughter” to Annabelle, my dad keeps telling me. And pretty soon, Lettice will probably start seeming like a daughter to him.

  Ka-pow!

  Lettice probably thinks she’s so great, just because she’s a champion horseback rider who won a silver cup last weekend. My dad told me all about it in his latest e-mail, like he thought I’d be interested.

  Thanks, Dad. That was just what I needed to read on my computer screen on a rainy December night.

  “I could win a silver cup if I had a beautiful horse,” I say under my breath. “Anyone could, probably. That’s not so wonderful.”

  But my dad—who I haven’t even seen for eight months!—seems to think it is extremely wonderful, and that Lettice and I would really, really like each other.

  “Right, like Lettice Wallingford is so amazing,” I say sarcastically, kicking the poor innocent pod once more. “Just because she has a horse, and she is probably really cute, and she speaks with an English accent.

  “I hate her,” I whisper, and hot tears fill my eyes.

  Well, maybe I can’t really blame Lettice for her accent, I think, trying to be a little bit fair. After all, she lives in Engand. They probably don’t even call it an English accent there. They just called it talking.

  Ka-pow!

  “I still hate her,” I decide, and I wipe a tear away with the back of my hand. “Lettice is a champion now, and I’ll bet she gets to see my dad all the time, because of stupid, fancy Annabelle. They probably have tea parties together, with chocolate cupcakes, my favorite. And now Daddy is going to start comparing me to Lettice,” I tell myself. “And I’m not that good at anything. Anything that shows, anyway. How am I supposed to compete?”

  Grown-ups don’t hand out silver cups to a kid just because she wants to be a nature scientist when she grows up. Or because she’s brave when her parents get divorced and her father moves to a whole different country.

  Ka-pow!

  “What are you doing?” a croaky voice asks, seeming to come out of nowhere. “Trying to kick the spiky ball all the way to school?”

  It is EllRay Jakes, the smallest kid in my third-grade class. I am only second smallest, which is something to be grateful for, I guess. “Maybe I am,” I tell him. “I wasn’t really thinking about it. You can have it, if you want.”

  “But we’re almost there,” he says, pointing to the school’s crowded front steps.

  “So don’t take it,” I tell him, shrugging. “I don’t care if you want it or not.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want it,” EllRay tells me quickly, and he picks up the battered spiky ball and jams it into his backpack, which already looks full. “Thanks, Emma.”

  “Oh, leave me alone!” I say. All of a sudden, I am pretty sure I am about to start crying again, because EllRay’s friendly, smiling face is only making things worse. And crying is something I could never live down at school.

  It isn’t even eight thirty in the morning yet! This is going to be a lo-o-o-ong day.

  “Hey, what’d I do?” EllRay asks, confused. “You can have it back if you—”

  “I said, leave me alone,” I shout, and I start running as fast as I can toward the school’s front steps.

  And that’s pretty fast!

  2

  Typical Boy Behavior

  “Why can’t you come to my birthday party? I don’t get it,” Jared says to Corey on the playground that same afternoon. But he sounds mad, not sad. Sad is definitely the way a girl would sound in the same situation.

  It is recess, but my best friend, Annie Pat Masterson, and I didn’t feel like running around on the still wet playground or hanging on the cold, drippy chain-link fence like the other girls in my class, even though most of them are nice, especially Kry Rodriguez. Instead, we are practicing making faces at each other at the third-grade picnic table. But the boys are goofing around and talking under a nearby tree, so we have also been listening to what they’re saying.

  As future nature scientists, Annie Pat and I have noticed that a group of boys can easily ignore one or two girls, but three or more girls make them nervous. Then, they become as alert as a herd of zebras when a bunch of lionesses go strolling by.

  It is windy and cool out today, the first Monday in December. I am wearing m
y new green sweater, and Annie Pat is wearing her very cute red hoodie, which matches her hair almost perfectly, but the boys are not noticing us at all. Eavesdropping conditions are ideal!

  “Why won’t you come to my birthday?” Jared asks again, scowling at Corey.

  “I told you,” Corey says, sounding nervous. “I have swim practice that afternoon. There’s this big meet coming up in January. My mom says we’re still gonna get you a present, though, so don’t worry.” He ruffles his hand through his white-blond hair.

  “But you always have swim practice,” Jared argues, ignoring the part about the birthday present.

  “Yeah,” Stanley chimes in, loyal as ever to Jared. “Why do you have to keep practicing and practicing? Don’t you already know how to swim? My mom says I’m a real good swimmer, and I’m going.”

  Stanley might know how to swim, but it’s different for Corey, I’m pretty sure. He is already a champion swimmer, and he’s only going to get better as he grows up, our parents say. Although what you would do all day long as a grown-up swimming champion, I don’t know.

  “Hey, Stanley,” EllRay Jakes says. “Can you stick your tongue out like this? Like a tube? Watch me!”

  Boys like to try to do crazy things with their bodies. Annie Pat and I look at each other and start to crack up—but silently. We don’t want to waste this opportunity to study another species at close range.

  “No, I can’t,” Stanley says, not even trying. “But I can wiggle my ears and bend the tops of my fingers funny.”

  “I can stick out my tongue like a tube,”

  Corey tells them.

  “Shut up,” Jared says, still angry about the party. “You think you’re better than us, just because you win prizes for swimming, and—”

  “You shut up,” EllRay interrupts, even though Jared wasn’t talking to him, and even though EllRay is small and Jared is big. But EllRay and Corey are friends.

  “My cousin broke two of his fingers playing basketball,” Kevin reports. This news comes completely out of nowhere. “And now one of them is bent funny forever.”

  “You liar,” Jared says. “You don’t even have a cousin who plays basketball.”

  “Yeah, I do,” Kevin tells him, almost apologetic. “He lives in Idaho, dude. His name’s Bryan McKinley, and I can prove it. Ask my mom, if you don’t believe me.”

  “Well, how come I never met him?” Jared asks, outraged.

  “There’s dinosaur tracks in Idaho,” EllRay says, excited. “Or somewhere like Idaho. I saw a picture once.”

  Now, this is typical boy behavior, to forget all about birthday parties and hurt feelings and broken fingers and being called a liar just because you happen to be reminded of some oddball fact—if EllRay’s even telling the truth, which he might not be. Maybe he’s just trying to change the subject to avoid a fight, which would actually be pretty smart.

  “I don’t know,” Stanley says, sounding doubtful. “Bryan never said anything about there being any dinosaurs in Idaho. And I saw him on the fourth of July.”

  “They’re not real dinosaurs, dummy,” Corey says, laughing.

  “You mean they’re fake dinosaur tracks?” Stanley says. “What’s so great about that?”

  “Even I could make fake dinosaur tracks,” Kevin says. And he’s probably already planning how to do it—just to impress Jared.

  “They’re real tracks, but they’re from a long time ago,” EllRay says stubbornly. “I don’t know what kind of dinosaur it was, though.”

  “Well, I know they’re not pterodactyl tracks,” Jared says in a loud voice, eager to be boss of the conversation once more. He is an expert on dinosaurs, to hear him tell it. “Because pterodactyls fly, so they never leave footprints on the ground. They probably don’t even have feet.” He says this as if the prehistoric creatures are still buzzing around, bumping into helicopters and stuff.

  By now, Annie Pat and I can barely keep from giggling out loud.

  “They had to land sometime ,” EllRay insists.

  “Nuh-uh,” Jared says.

  “Then pterodactyls are like hummingbirds,” Kevin says, suddenly pretending to be the expert. “Big hummingbirds.

  Because if a hummingbird stops flying, it dies.”

  Now, I happen to know that’s not true, because I’ve seen hummingbirds sitting on flowers and telephone wires lots of times. Not for very long, true, but they were definitely alive while they were sitting there.

  Kevin sounds pretty sure of himself, though, so no one argues with him. “Yeah,” Jared finally says. “Pterodactyls are exactly like hummingbirds.”

  I don’t think even Kevin believes this one, but the boys’ conversation seems to have run out of fuel. A few of them are finally eating their snacks and are too busy to talk.

  “So what are you getting me for my birthday?” Jared asks Corey.

  “Huh?”

  “You said your mom was still gonna get me a present even though you can’t come to my party,” Jared reminds him.

  “Oh, yeah,” Corey says. “Well, I don’t know yet. But it’ll be something really good, so don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” Jared tells him.

  “Yeah,” Kevin chimes in. “Like Jared’s so worried .”

  “I don’t get it, though,” Jared says. “If you really wanted to come to my party you would. And it’s gonna be great! So how come you won’t be there?”

  And—the boys are back where they started. Each boy said what he wanted to say, and nobody’s crying or mad, and they’re all still friends, pretty much.

  That’s actually a very good thing about boys.

  It’s the exact opposite with girls. I guarantee there was some girl-drama out on the playground or at the chain-link fence this recess, and both Annie Pat and I will hear about it within five minutes of sitting down in Ms. Sanchez’s class, even though we’re all supposed to be perfectly quiet.

  And that drama won’t be over for at least a week.

  But the bell’s about to ring.

  Br-r-r-r-r-n-n-n-n-g!

  3

  Good at Something

  “There will be a big announcement at the end of class,” our teacher, Ms. Sanchez, tells us with a mysterious smile. “But for now, please hand out the rulers, Stanley. And Heather, kindly pass out the boxes of colored markers,” she adds. A this-is-going-to-be-fun! look is on her face. “It’s time for art.”

  Ms. Sanchez is the prettiest teacher at Oak Glen Primary School, which is only one reason we’re lucky to have her. She pulls her shiny black hair back into a soft bun, and she wears really cute clothes. A second reason we’re lucky to have her as our teacher is that she’s nice, and a third reason is that she’s engaged, which is fun for us to talk about when things get boring. Fun for the girls, anyway.

  In fact, Ms. Sanchez is so engaged that her twinkly diamond ring nearly hypnotizes her, she looks at it so much! She also reads a lot of magazines about brides. The girls all want to get invited to her wedding, whenever it will be, but my mom says we shouldn’t get our hopes up.

  I am always getting my hopes up—about everything. Why not? It’s free!

  And it’s fun.

  Annie Pat has been a little more cautious recently about getting her hopes up about things, but I think that’s probably because her mom just had a baby. Annie Pat is tired from all the crying at night, in my opinion.

  The man Ms. Sanchez is going to marry is named Mr. Timberlake, but he’s not the same Mr. Timberlake who’s on MTV. Her Mr. Timberlake works in a sporting-goods store. Kevin says he and his dad bought a baseball bat from him once, but I think Kevin made that up.

  Mr. Timberlake is as handsome as Ms. Sanchez is beautiful, thank goodness. They match.

  The coolest thing so far about Ms. Sanchez and Mr. Timberlake is that one time they went skydiving together. Nobody in class actually saw them do it, but it’s true, because she told us. In fact, the boys in our class are hoping that Ms. Sanchez marries Mr. Timberlake up in the air,
halfway between the airplane and the ground!

  I think that would be a dumb thing to do, and also very dangerous. There would have to be a minister jumping out of the plane, too, to marry them, and a fourth person to take pictures.

  And Ms. Sanchez’s beautiful lacy veil might get tangled up in all those parachute strings. The whole wedding could easily be a disaster, and that is no way to start being married! Being married seems to be hard enough when you start out the normal way—judging from my own mom and dad, who got divorced when I was two.

  I hate divorce, which is why I’m never getting married.

  Annie Pat’s parents seem happy, though. So far, so good, anyway.

  Since it’s Friday today, Ms. Sanchez has obviously decided to squeeze in an art lesson instead of trying to teach us Spanish, which is what she usually does on Friday afternoons. At this school, it’s music and art on Fridays—but only when there’s nothing better to do. That’s the way they look at things here in Oak Glen, I guess.

  My old school was Magdalena, which was girls only. Magdalena is twenty miles away from Oak Glen Primary School, but it might as well be a million miles away, and not just in distance. At Magdalena, we got to have music and art every single week. Orchestra and chorus! Painting and drawing and collage and ceramics!

  But then my mom lost her job as librarian for a big company two years ago, right about the time Dad got remarried, and Mom and I had to sell our house and move to a condo in Oak Glen to save money. Now Mom works at home correcting things other people write. She says she likes it okay, though.

  Ms. Sanchez probably feels guilty because our class hasn’t done any art at all since Thanksgiving, when we each used a pattern to cut out an autumn leaf for a fluttery Open House tree—which, I heard from a fourth-grader, is something that Ms. Sanchez’s class does every year. And then we wrote our names on the leaves in our most perfect cursive, and we got to use glitter paint, even though you can tell Ms. Sanchez hates glitter, because it gets all over the place. And she also hates glue bottles, because they’re always stopped up.