Free Jasper John Dooley, Left Behind by Caroline Adderson, Ben Clanton Page B

did, he got to take a jujube from the crystal bowl on the coffee table. He liked the red ones best, then the green, then the orange, then the yellow. He didn’t like the black ones at all. But if Jasper let Nan win, which he did when he felt sorry for her, she always picked a black jujube. Black jujubes were her favorite. When all the jujubes were gone, they stopped playing cards.
    Thinking about Wednesday made Jasper feel funny, not watery like he had in the car, but like all the air was seeping out of him. He called from his bed, “Mom! Mom! Mo-o-om!!!!”
    Mom came. “What’s the matter, Jasper?”
    â€œI feel funny,” Jasper said.
    Mom laid her hand across his forehead. “You don’t have a fever. Does your tummy hurt?”
    â€œIt doesn’t hurt,” Jasper said. “It just feels
pththth
.”
    â€œWhat’s
pththth
?”
    â€œIt’s like when my beach ball leaked. Do I look all flat?”
    Mom sat on the bed. “You look like you miss Nan. But this week will go by so fast, Jasper John Dooley. Before you even know it, Nan will be back.”
    â€œMaybe I should stay home from school tomorrow and work on my lint collection,” Jasper said.
    Mom didn’t think he should stay home. She said the best cure for missing somebody was just to get on with things. “I don’t know if this will make you feel any better,” she said, “but I bet Nan really misses you, too.”
    It did make him feel better. Nan was lying in her bed somewhere thinking about Wednesday, too. But where? Where was she lying?
    â€œWhere is Alaska, anyway?” Jasper asked.

Chapter 2

    In the morning Jasper found a big book lying open where he usually ate his cereal. “Is this a new place mat?” he asked.
    â€œIt’s an atlas,” Dad said. “Mom told me you wanted to know where Alaska was.” He showed Jasper on the map.
    â€œWhy is it a different color?”
    â€œThis huge orange country is Canada. Alaska is green because it’s part of the United States, most of which is down here, under Canada,” Dad said.
    â€œHow did Alaska get way up there?”
    â€œThat’s too complicated to explain right now,” Dad said. “Eat your cereal or you’ll get the lates.”
    Jasper put his bowl of cereal over Alaska and began to eat. Nan was probably eating her cereal now, too, in one of the cruise ship’s ten restaurants. She would be eating all by herself because she didn’t know anybody. With Jasper’s bowl right on top of her, she wouldn’t feel so lonely. But what about all the other people way off by themselves?
    â€œDoes everybody in Alaska feel lonely?” he asked.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œThey’re so far away.”
    â€œEverybody in Alaska is fine,” Dad said, looking at his watch. “Are you done?”
    Jasper finished his cereal and got to school on time.
    It was Monday. On Monday after Star of the Week, they wrote stories, which Jasper liked. He liked writing long, long, long stories. If he wrote a long, long, long story, he got to go up to Ms. Tosh’s desk and staple the pages together.
    Jasper started a story about a little iceberg that got separated from the other icebergs. It was floating all alone in the ocean, feeling very sad. Finally, it found a place to dock, but it was still so far away from its family that it couldn’t cheer up. Jasper wasn’t even halfway down the page when he started to
pththth
again, so he ripped the story up.
    He needed to write something that was the opposite of Nan so he wouldn’t think about how she was away for a whole week and wasn’t even coming back for Go Fish on Wednesday. The opposite of Nan was all the things she didn’t like. She really didn’t like mice, or snakes, or loud noises, or wind messing up her hair. He couldn’t think of anything to write about wind or loud noises. He’d