Free EllRay Jakes The Recess King! by Sally Warner; Illustrated by Brian Biggs

as it will go, hurls it onto the playground, and grinds it into the grass and mud with one gigantic sneaker. “
Take that
,” he yells at the book. At the book! How messed-up can you get? “Now, what are you gonna do about it?” he yells at us.
    And he beckons us toward him with both hands. Like,
“Bring it
.
”
    And so, even though this was not what we planned, and even though I, for one, do not have a whole lot to bring, we do.
    We bring it, I mean.

14
    â€œFIGHT! FIGHT!”
    Seven of us is more than three of them. Jared, Jason, and Stanley. So my side is lucky—in numbers, anyway. But the three other guys are larger than us in size and fury. Jared is just plain big and angry, even though I’m the one who should be mad. Stanley is tall. And, as I mentioned once before, Jason is kind of on the chunky side, even if it is pure muscle, like he says.
    Plus, Jason’s probably got the whole pay-back thing revving him up, because of our toilet paper adventure yesterday.
    All ten of us start to circle, not taking our eyes off one another. And as we pace, the circle gets smaller.
    It’s getting pretty intense around here.
    Jared Matthews is giving me the stink-eye.
    Armpit Noise King Marco is scowling at string-bean Stanley and his very plaid shirt.
    Stanley is darting his meanest look from Marco to Major, then back to Marco again. He probably can’t remember which one’s which.
    Buzz-cut Jason is staring hard at Corey Robinson. Corey is pale but determined-looking under the three hundred freckles on his face. It sometimes seems like Corey is made out of pipe cleaners, but the whole class knows how strong he is from all that swimming.
    It looks like Diego Romero is “reading Jared like a book,” as my Dad sometimes says. I think that means Diego knows what’s up with Jared and his hot-headed ways.
    And Nate’s red rooster crest of hair is almost standing at attention as he shifts his furious glare from Jared to Jason to Stanley. Nate’s hands are even clenched like rooster claws. He is ready to pounce.
    Yoo-hoo! Mr. Havens! Where are you? Getting a nice energy drink?
    Our circle keeps getting smaller, like it’s a spring winding tighter and tighter. It’s about to go boing . Pretty soon there will be no place left to go, and nothing else to do but fight—which means we’ll be busted big-time.
    Listen.
Running in the halls
is against the rules at Oak Glen Primary School.
    Not rinsing out your milk carton before recycling it
is against the rules.
    You can probably guess how they feel about playground brawls around here!
    I’ll admit it. Part of me wouldn’t
mind
fighting, not after what Jared did to my very expensive library book, which, P.S., I will now have to pay for. It wasn’t the book’s fault that it wasn’t a sweet and crumbly slab of gingerbread, was it?
    But I don’t like the getting-in-trouble part that comes
after
a fight.
    Not to mention what will happen to me at home. Because basically, you can at least double any scolding I get at school, and you’ll be close to what happens when my mom and dad get hold of any bad news about me.
    Also, fighting won’t help my wrecked library book any, will it?
    I think about mom and dad. I also think about how boring it is, circling around and around like the ants in
The Sword in the Stone
, who are always getting ready for war—even though they don’t know why. I try to plot how to get out of this goofy situation without looking like a chicken or a fool. But just when my brain starts to tick, tick, tick , trying to come up with an idea, the dreaded words come floating across the playground. “Fight! Fight!”
    The older boys have spotted us. And almost
all
the lunch kids on the playground race toward us. Nobody wants to miss a moment of this stupendous, ten-person battle, even though we are only third-graders.
    If it actually happens, our fight will make