Free Only Emma by Sally Warner, Jamie Harper Page A

though—and not nearly as cute as he thinks, even though he is wearing his striped pajamas already. I guess that’s so his mom can just stuff him into bed right away to get rid of him when they finally go home.
    I am so glad that I do not have a little brother! Or a little sister either, for that matter. I am an only child, and I like it that way.

    Only Emma.
    “Give it,” I say to him again, but I know Anthony is not going to give me the puzzle piece. I’ll be lucky if he doesn’t eat it just to make me mad.
    “Make me,” Anthony says. He holds the sticky puzzle piece in the air as if it is a dog biscuit and I am a big old poodle.
    I do have curly hair like a poodle, which happens to be a very intelligent dog, in case youdidn’t know. My hair is brown, and it comes halfway down my back. Mom says that my hair is so thick that it is hard for her to get a comb through it after a shampoo.

    I brush my own hair the rest of the time, butsometimes—I admit it—I just skim the brush over the outermost hairs on my head so that they look okay.
    That’s my basic approach to a lot of things, actually.
    I wish my hair was smooth and shiny all the time, like Cynthia Harbison’s. Cynthia is my best friend at my new school, even though I know she wouldn’t say the same thing about me.
    But Cynthia’s mom can get a comb through her hair easy as pie, probably.
    I shrug my shoulders. “Keep the puzzle piece, then,” I say to Anthony. “I don’t care. I don’t even like that puzzle. I was just trying to be nice to you.”
    I
do
like the puzzle, though. It shows an orange cat—a boy—curled up next to a pumpkin, fast asleep. The
cat
is fast asleep, I mean, not the pumpkin.
    Did you know that almost all orange cats are boys? It’s true. And cats that are three colors—white, black, and brown—are usually always girls.
    It’s
science
.
    “Show me where it goes,” Anthony says, scowling. He tries to push the piece into the wrong place. He is putting kitty fur in the sky! The bumpy part of the cardboard puzzle piece bends, of course. And I hate it when puzzle pieces bend. It reminds me of sprained ankles.
    “Stop, you’re wrecking it,” I say. “That’s a very valuable puzzle.”
    It isn’t, but he doesn’t know that.
    “You just said you didn’t like it,” Anthony reminds me.
    “I don’t,” I lie. “But that doesn’t mean that I want to see you ruining it.”
    “Then show me where it goes,” Anthony says again.
    I could do what he wants, but then Anthony will just grab the next puzzle piece I reach for, so why bother? And anyway, I am tired of playingwith him. He is giving me a little headache.
    Besides, it’s not as though we’re really playing together. When kids play, they’re supposed to have fun. This is not fun.
    This is something else.
    “Nuh-uh,” I tell Anthony. “Figure it out yourself if you’re so smart. I’m busy.” I get up, walk over to my bookcase, and look at the naturebooks there as if they are the most interesting things in the world. Which they are, by the way.

    “But you
have
to play with me. Mommy said,” Anthony yells, jumping up so fast that the white wicker chair he was sitting in clunks sideways to the ground. Now, his face is pink all over.
    “No one can make me do anything I don’t want to do,” I tell him. “Anyway,” I say, “it’s my room. Don’t go knocking over the chair in my room.
Please
.” I add the
please
to be polite. And just in case my mom is listening.
    Now, Anthony’s face is almost red, he is so angry. “I can knock over anything I want,” he says. To prove it, he swings his arm back, and he sweeps the whole puzzle—that
could
have been valuable, he doesn’t know!—off the table and onto the floor.

    The box says that there are seventy-five pieces in that puzzle, and all seventy-five pieces go flyingeverywhere. Two or three of them stick to the arm of Anthony’s pajamas like magnets.
    “Oh, great,” I tell him. “Well, you’ll