Ellray Jakes Walks the Plank by Sally Warner Page A

Alfie,” I remind her—and I remind myself, because I secretly really do like him. He is very unusual for a goldfish. He has a white spot on his stomach, and you can just tell how smart he is. Also, I think he knows me now. “And his name’s Zip, not Swimmy,” I remind Alfie. “You’lljust confuse him if you start calling him by the wrong name.”
    Zip is actually Ms. Sanchez’s goldfish, and Ms. Sanchez is my third grade teacher at Oak Glen Primary School, in Oak Glen, California. Oak Glen is about an hour away from San Diego if the traffic is bad, which my dad says it always is.
    Ms. Sanchez’s boyfriend won Zip for her at a church festival two weeks ago when he tossed a ping-pong ball into a bowl of water the size of a softball. Ms. Sanchez says this is a lot harder to do than it looks.
    And then Ms. Sanchez brought her new fish to our classroom so it wouldn’t be alone all day. She says Zip will be our class mascot, and that having an official pet will also “help remind us of other living things.”
    I think there are plenty of “other living things” in our class already, like fifteen girls and ten boys, only
ten
, and I am reminded of them every single day.
    But whatever!
    When it was time for our school’s spring break, I volunteered to take care of Zip at my house forthe whole week. Ms. Sanchez was going to fly to Texas to see her family, but
my
family wasn’t going anywhere, because our dad had geology classes to teach at a college in San Diego.
    Our family’s vacations almost never come out even, except in the summer.
    A goldfish is probably the only thing in the whole universe Alfie isn’t allergic to, so this was going to be my big chance to see what it was like having a pet in the house. And I was happy to volunteer to take care of Zip, because I kind of felt sorry for him, not getting to go to Texas with Ms. Sanchez just because he’s a fish.
    He can’t help that.
    Maybe I’ll get extra credit from Ms. Sanchez for taking such good care of her new pet, our class mascot. I could use some extra credit, that’s for sure.
    My name is EllRay Jakes, and I am eight years old, and I am having the worst semester EVER .
    But that means things can only get better, right?

TWO SHAKES
    Since we can’t go on vacation, my mom got the idea of “taking a vacation at home.” So far … it has been pretty fun, I have to admit. Here is how we’ve spent our time.
    1. Alfie and I take turns choosing what cartoon show to watch in the morning, which means that every other morning we get to watch something good.
    2. Also, we have been on a couple of picnics with Mom, and two hikes, until Alfie complained that her feet were too short to hike any more. Ever again.
    3. And we went to see a movie one afternoon, but it was for four- year-olds like Alfie, noteight-year-olds like me. The popcorn was good, though.

    4. We even went to the San Diego Zoo one day, and then we surprised my dad by visiting his office at the college. It really
was
a surprise for him, too! And when my mom went to get a cup of coffee, Alfie sat on the office photocopy machine and copied her own rear end. Luckily, she was wearing shorts at the time. And then I dropped a giant box of paper-clips on my dad’s office floor, and they went
everywhere
.

    5. Dad said he had a meeting pretty soon after that, so Mom and Alfie and I went home.
    “Swimmy is confused already,
EllWay
,” Alfie tells me, pronouncing my name wrong, as usual. “And I
like
the name Swimmy. It’s in my favorite book by Leo Lionni. And our family should be the ones who get to name him, because we’re the ones who decorated his fish house.”
    This part of her crazy explanation is actuallytrue. Ms. Sanchez already bought Zip a bigger bowl, because his old softball-sized one was so small, and Zip was growing. My mom is the one who bought him a castle to swim through.
    Mom writes fantasy books for grown-ups. That’s why she loves castles. And that’s also why Alfie and I have