Ellray Jakes Walks the Plank Read Online Free

after all. I start to relax.
    “Where did you bury Zip, EllRay?” Kry asks, after popping another chocolate chip into her mouth.
    And— WHOOSH , we’re back in Oak Glen with a dead fish.
    “In my backyard,” I say, trying to look serious and sad at the same time.
    Don’t tell anyone, but really, Zip’s funeral was a little bit funny. Here is what happened.

    1. It was still raining the morning when we buried him, but we each had an umbrella. Well, everyone except Zip.
    2. And we couldn’t find a little box to put him in, so Alfie stretched Zip out on a blue plastic doll bed from this set she has. Then she covered him with a Kleenex pretend-blanket, and she put an ivy leaf over his face so she wouldn’t have to look at it again, because that was the part of Zip that looked the most dead. The rest of him almost looked okay.
    3. Then Mom put Zip and the bed into a plasticcontainer-like he was some really weird leftover.
    4. Then I dug a muddy hole in the backyard with Mom’s small gardening shovel.
    5. And then we put the plastic container in the hole, and my mom said some nice stuff about Zip, even though she barely knew him.
    6. Then Alfie said her prayer, only it got so long that Mom had to say “Amen!” just to give Alfie an excuse to stop talking. Or to shut her up, I don’t know which.
    7. I wanted to say something nice about Zip too, because after all, I was the one who really knew him–and who was responsible for him. But I didn’t want to start crying, not that anyone would even have noticed with all the rain.

    That last part about Zip’s funeral wasn’t funny, but the rest of it was. Kind of.
    It’s confusing how something can be sad and funny at the same time. Or funny and sad.
    “Well,” Cynthia says, smoothing back her already-smooth hair. “Remind me never to ask you to take care of anything, EllRay Jakes.”
    And Heather gives Cynthia an admiring grin. “Yeah,” she agrees.
    “Like I
would
,” I say back to both of them.
    But really, I don’t blame Cynthia and Heather for saying what they did.
    Zip was my job.
    I wouldn’t ask a mess-up like me to take care of anything, either.

AN EXTRA LITTLE VACATION
    It is still Monday, and we just had afternoon recess. But we have all been ready to go home for about two hours, even Ms. Sanchez. You can tell. Some of the hair that she usually wears pulled back in a shiny black bun is falling down, and there is a blue ink mark on her chin.
    A couple of the girls put bunches of little flowers from the playground ice plant in front of Zip’s empty fish bowl after lunch—to honor him, I guess. But Zip didn’t know what flowers are. He was a fish. And those flowers aren’t helping our mood any, especially my mood.
    “Ladies and gentlemen,” Ms. Sanchez says just as we are getting ready to take our dreaded weekly spelling quiz, the one that is repeated on Friday. “The first day back at school after a vacation is always hard, and today has been no exception to thatunwritten rule. It has also been a sad day for us all, for obvious reasons.”
    Half the kids in our class look at Zip’s empty fish bowl and the purple ice plant flowers when she says this, and half the kids look at me. I don’t look anywhere.
    “So I have decided to toss out our schedule for the rest of the afternoon,” Ms. Sanchez says, “and give us all a much-needed break. An extra little vacation—on
Treasure Island
.”
    Okay. Ms. Sanchez has been reading us this great book called
Treasure Island
, by Robert Louis Stevenson, on Friday afternoons. “I think it’s the first pirate story for children there ever was,” she told us before she started. And even though this book was written more than a hundred years ago, it’s pretty cool. VERY COOL , in fact, although it is a hard book to read alone when you’re only eight years old. It has been hard for me, anyway. But the thing about books is that you can skip over the hard parts and still get the idea.
    Time changes when