EllRay Jakes Is Magic
Read EllRay Jakes Is Magic Online
Authors: Sally Warner
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VIKING
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First published in the United States of America by Viking,
an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2014
Text copyright © 2014 by Sally Warner
Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Brian Biggs
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Warner, Sally, date.
EllRay Jakes is magic / by Sally Warner; illustrated by Brian Biggs.
pages cm
Summary: Third-grader EllRay, a “shrimpy, goof-up kid,” discovers magic all around him when he and his schoolmates participate in the Oak Glen Primary School talent show and work together on a wedding shower gift for their teacher.
ISBN: 978-0-698-13939-8
[1. Teachers—Fiction. 2. Talent shows—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Magic tricks—Fiction. 5. Behavior—Fiction. 6. Family life—Fiction. 7. African Americans—Fiction.] I. Biggs, Brian, illustrator. II. Title.
PZ7.W24644Elw2014 [Fic]—dc23 2013018236
Manufactured in China
Designed by Nancy Brennan
To Dane Vincent Clark, of Boston, Massachusetts,
and
Austin Christopher Blevins, of Fall River, Wisconsin,
two of my favorite readers! — S.W.
To Liam! —B.B.
4 “YOUR AMAZING FIRST MAGIC SET, WITH TOP HAT, WAND, AND DVD!”
12 MAKING THINGS OKAY WITH ALFIE
1KEEPING AN OPEN MIND“Settle down, captive children,” Ms. Sanchez says with a smile. It is after lunch on a Friday in April, but it feels like summer in here. Even though we’re in a stuffy classroom, you can almost smell the chlorine in the air.
Our teacher’s joke lately is to call us “captive children,” because she knows we want to be outside playing, not stuck in our chairs like lumps of Play-Doh.
We take our seats in slow motion, not wanting to let go of the good time we just had during recess. All us third grade boys played hard, after cramming down our food as fast as we could. We played King of the Mountain, our latest fun thing, even though there aren’t any mountains—or even pointy hills—on our playground. But there is a sloping lawn near where we eat lunch, so we make that work.
“Move it, swim boy,” Jared Matthews says, hip-checking Corey Robinson for no reason.
Big mistake. Corey—one of my one-and-a-half best friends—ended up being King of the Mountain the longest today. He’s quick. He’s probably going to be an Olympic swimmer some day, which is pretty cool.
Corey turns around fast, and after some invisible, mysterious move, gigantic Jared is staggering backward. “Oops. Sorry, dude,” Corey says, eyes wide and hands up to show his innocence.
And Jared doesn’t say a word. In fact, I think he just learned something: to stay out of Corey’s way.
My
half
-best friend is Kevin McKinley. He is the only boy in our class with brown skin like mine, but sometimes he hangs out with Jared and Stanley Washington now instead of Corey and me. That’s new. It stinks.
The girls mostly huddled in the shade after lunch, because it was hot out. Girls don’t like to sweat, in my opinion. They whisper and giggle and do whatever it is girls do when they’re together. But Kry Rodriguez and Fiona McNulty joined in the
game for a while, even though Fiona often claims she has weak ankles.
Kry can do whatever she wants, even boy stuff, and no one says anything bad about her. I don’t know how she pulls that off, because a couple of girls in our third grade class—Cynthia Harbison and her personal assistant Heather Patton, to be exact—can be pretty strict about what is boy stuff and what is girl stuff. Kry has long, shiny black bangs that hang past her eyebrows in a perfect straight line, but she can still see.