by Sarah Weeks
“I’ve got an idea. Let’s plant it,” Audrey said.
I didn’t move.
“Come on. Let’s plant it, so it won’t die.”
“I don’t care if it dies,” I said.
Audrey looked over at me.
“Oh,” she said, and stood up, taking a quick step backward. I guess she finally realized who it had belonged to.
We stood there for a minute, looking at it. Then I walked over to the tree, and after snatching off the few remaining bits of tinsel, I took hold of the dangling cord and yanked off the lights, which I flung as far as I could into the weeds. There was nothing Christmassy about it anymore. Now it was just a tree—a tree that needed to be planted or it would die. For some reason I thought about Arthur then. About his notebook full of observations and his round glasses and what he’d said about the splinter. I crouched down and took hold of the edges of the red pot.
“Pull it out,” I said.
Audrey grabbed the tree by the middle of its thin trunk and easily tugged it free of the pot.
“Now what?” she said.
We carried the tree back to Sapphy’s trailer, where Audrey helped me dig a hole. Together we planted it in a sunny spot beside the porch.
“It looks pretty scrawny now, but maybe by Christmas it’ll look good enough to decorate,” Audrey said as she patted down the earth around the trunk.
I shook my head. “We’re going to have a real Christmas tree next year,” I told her. “Not this one. A big fat one, just like always.”
I went inside to get a pan of water to pour around the tree. There was a note on the table from my mother saying that she and Sapphy had gone to pick up the new puppy. When I came back outside, I had Audrey’s broken glasses in my hand.
“Maybe we could tape them back together,” I said as I handed them to her.
“Maybe,” she said. But instead she squatted down, and using her fingers, she dug a small hole in the freshly turned earth beneath the little tree and pushed the glasses down into it.
“Come on,” said Audrey as she stood up and brushed the dirt off her hands. “I’ll teach you how to kick that pop machine if you want.”
“Okay,” I said.
As we set off for the laundry shed together that afternoon, I tipped my head back and looked up at the sky. It was clear and bright and a normal-as-cornflakes shade of blue I hadn’t seen in a very long time.
“I should warn you,” Audrey told me. “No matter how you do it, that machine only gives orange.”
“I like orange.”
“I know,” she said. “Me too.”
Acknowledgments
With special thanks to Laura Geringer, Jill
Santopolo, Nancy Princenthal, Joseph LeDoux, Tom
Wilinsky, Dan Lebson, and as always, David
About the Author
SARAH WEEKS is an award-winning author of many books for children. Her novel SO B. IT was named an ALA Notable Book and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. She has also written the popular Guy series, including REGULAR GUY, GUY WIRE, GUY TIME, and MY GUY, which is soon to be a feature film by Disney. Sarah Weeks grew up in Michigan and now lives in New York City with her two teenaged sons. You can visit her online at www.sarahweeks.com.
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Credits
Cover art © 2008 by Photodisc Photography / Veer Incorporated
Cover design by Martha Rago
Copyright
JUMPING THE SCRATCH. Copyright © 2006 by Sarah Weeks. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition September 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-197879-1
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