EllRay Jakes Rocks the Holidays! (2 page)
Read EllRay Jakes Rocks the Holidays! Online
Authors: Sally Warner
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For my Canadian friends,
Nan and Wayne Cannon —S.W.
For Phyllis —B.B.
4 A FEW THINGS I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT
17 AN OAK GLEN WINTER WONDERLAND
1RAINY 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 about 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.
