Terrible Terrel

by Whoopi Goldberg

  For Ma, who always dances…

  Text copyright © 2010 by Whoopi Goldberg

  Illustrations © 2010 by Maryn Roos

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Jump at the Sun Books, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Jump at the Sun Books, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.

  ISBN 978-1-4231-4646-9

  Visit sugarplumballerinas.com,

  www.jumpatthesun.com, and

  www.hyperionbooksforchildren.com

  E2-20200225-PDJ-PC-VAL

  Table of Contents

  Sugar Plum Ballerinas

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Terrel's Guide to Ballet Terms

  Sugar Plum

  Ballerinas

  Book One: Plum Fantastic

  Book Two: Toeshoe Trouble

  Book Three: Perfectly Prima

  Book Four: Terrible Terrel

  Chapter 1

  I stand in our kitchen, surveying a mass of grocery bags with satisfaction. Shopping mission accomplished in record time, thanks to me, Commander Terrel.

  Dad puts the last bag on the counter. “You sure you got this, sweetheart?” he asks me.

  I nod. “Edward can help,” I say.

  My brother Edward, who is leaning against the counter messing with his phone, looks up but doesn’t object. Danny, Cheng, and Tai fled to their rooms the second we got back from the store. Danny, who’s twenty-two, said that after all that shopping, he couldn’t stand to look at food ever again, but I notice he took an entire package of cookies into his room with him.

  “Okay,” Dad says. “I’m going to get a haircut.”

  “Now?” I ask. Who gets a haircut at seven o’clock at night?

  “Last appointment of the day,” Dad says. “Take care of your sister, Edward.”

  I roll my eyes. Like I need Edward to take care of me. I am the taking-care-of-things person in this house, and everyone knows it. Besides, Edward is only twelve. That’s just three-and-a-quarter-years older than me.

  Dad kisses me on the top of the head and leaves.

  Time to get to work.

  “Atten-tion,” I say.

  Edward shakes his head at me. “Do you have to do that ‘attention’ thing?”

  “Apparently, I do,” I say, staring at his thumbs, which are still jumping around the keyboard of his phone.

  He sighs, puts the phone away, and salutes. “Yes, ma’am. Where do we start?”

  I smile. That’s more like it.

  You might wonder why this older brother actually listens to me. Actually, all of my older brothers listen to me. Why? Because they know what’s good for them.

  Our mom died when I was only six. So, I am in charge of keeping the house running smoothly. Nobody makes me; I do it because I like it and I’m good at it. Some people are good at spelling, or at running. I, personally, am an organizing genius (if I do say so myself). My friends come to me when they need help, because I can think through problems and find answers. Even when I was little, I could see what needed to be done, and then get it done.

  I assign each of my brothers (except the oldest one, Waylon—he has his own apartment now) a cleaning job every week. When we go shopping, I call the shots, sending them each out on cereal or banana missions while my dad and I pack things neatly into the shopping cart. I keep a big yellow binder full of vital information, such as when Edward needs to get his field-trip permission slip back to school, when my dad needs to write the rent check, when Tai needs to have his science project done, and how much toilet paper we have left.

  At first, my brothers and my dad were not happy about having a little kid boss them around. Since they didn’t understand why they should let me run everything, I went on strike. I hid the binder under my bed, sat back, and watched everything fall apart.

  Which it did.

  “We’re out of soy milk,” Tai hollered at breakfast one day.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Is it the thirty-first already?” Dad said, pushing his glasses up on his nose as he stared at the calendar. “Our rent is almost late!”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “I can’t find my homework!” Edward yelled from the living room. “There are stupid papers all over the floor!”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “No toilet paper!” Danny howled from the bathroom.

  “Interesting,” I said, flipping the pages of my puzzle magazine.

  Needless to say, in three days they had surrendered and promised to listen to me in the future.

  So, now everything runs smoothly. No problems. No surprises. I love it. Dad is always saying that they’d never survive without me. This makes me feel good. It’s also true.

  Edward leans over and starts taking things out of a shopping bag. He holds up a jar of peanut butter. “Third cupboard, right?”

  “Second cupboard, lower shelf,” I say correcting him. The lower-shelf part is important. Although my organizing ability is enormous, I am quite small. Any food that I might need to get by myself has to go on a lower shelf, and peanut butter is definitely something I need. “But do the frozen food first.”

  I put the spaghetti in the middle drawer, where it belongs. Although I like putting groceries away, it’s not as much fun as usual. Something’s bugging me. It takes a minute for me to figure out what it is.

  “Hey, Edward. Why do you think Dad’s getting his hair cut so late?”

  Edward takes out a handful of crackers and starts eating them as he puts the box away. “I dunno, T.,” he says. “Who cares when he gets his hair cut?”

  I care, because I know for a fact that Dad usually gets his hair cut every six weeks on a Saturday afternoon while I’m at ballet.

  “Maybe the barber is going on vacation,” Edward says.

  Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. “Yeah, probably,” I say.

  With both of us putting things away, unloading the groceries goes fast. When we’re done, I make myself a bowl of Applesauce Surprise—my own special concoction that’s made with applesauce, raisins, cinnamon, and gummy worms all mixed up together. I sit at the kitchen table, chomp down on a gummy worm—and start doing my homework.

  Dad comes home with pizza for dinner. But he also has a shopping bag stuffed under his coat as if he’s trying to hide it.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” he says. “I just picked up a few new shirts on the way home.”

  Okay. Now that’s really weird. Dad hates shopping for clothes. I don’t remember him ever buying new clothes, except when Uncle Charlie got married and Dad had to buy black socks to wear with his rented tuxedo.

  After I’m supposed to be in bed, I walk by Dad’s room. He’s standing in front of his mirror. He smiles, then stops, then smiles again. It looks like he’s practicing his smile. I stand in the shadows and watch him do this for about five whole minutes.

  I hope he’s not losing his mind, I think as I walk back to bed. Organizing four boys and a dad is hard enough without the dad being crazy.

  Chapter 2

  Epatha and I sit outside
on the steps of the Nutcracker School of Ballet even though it’s late November and it’s freezing. A gust of wind makes the dried brown leaves scuttle across the ground. Epatha’s hair flies out in all directions. I pull my coat tighter around me. I almost mention Dad smiling in the mirror the other night to Epatha. But he didn’t do anything weird today. Maybe he just had something stuck in his teeth.

  Epatha interrupts my thoughts. “Have you seen those posters for Sleeping Beauty?” she asks. “It looks fabulous. Fantastico. Fabuloso.”

  As usual, Epatha is speaking in English, Italian, and Spanish all at once (she lives with not only her mom, dad, and older sisters, but also her Puerto Rican grandma and her Italian grandma).

  “Yeah, I’ve seen them. Everyone’s seen them,” I say. The posters are plastered all over the place.

  Epatha pulls out a roll of strawberry-flavored hard candy and offers me a piece. As I pop it into my mouth, she squints thoughtfully. “I would totally love to go. But I’ll bet it costs a billion trillion bucks a ticket.”

  I nod. I kind of wish she hadn’t brought it up. It would be amazing to go, but I’m sure we can’t afford it. I know exactly how much we spend on groceries each week. And if we spend that much on groceries, I’m sure we don’t have a spare billion trillion bucks.

  JoAnn thumps up the street toward us. Her leg has been in a lime green cast since she tripped on her skateboard last week, but she moves even faster with crutches than she did without them. The other two triplets, Jessica and Jerzey Mae, struggle to keep up with her.

  “What are you crazy girls doing out here in the cold?” JoAnn asks. The crutches must be making her arms even stronger, because somehow she hauls me up into a standing position. I allow myself to be dragged up the remaining stairs and into the school. The others follow.

  Even though JoAnn won’t be able to dance for a while, she comes to class to see us. When we’re dancing, she sits on the side of the room and reads. Usually.

  “Please tell me she brought a book today,” I mutter to Jessica.

  Last ballet class, JoAnn forgot her book, so she spent the whole class watching us like a hawk, then whispering hints to each of us about what we were doing wrong. “Your arm’s supposed to be higher, T.,” she told me. “Hey, Brenda—watch your back leg on those jumps,” she hissed. By the end of class, we all wanted to clobber her, broken leg or not.

  “She has at least two,” Jessica says. “Jerzey and I each brought one in case she forgot.” JoAnn even got on Jessica’s nerves last time, and that’s not easy to do.

  Epatha looks around the room as if she’s lost something. “Hey, where’s Mason?” she asks.

  “You mean Mr. Ballet?” JoAnn asks. Mason, the triplets’ little brother, has been coming to our class for a while. It turns out he’s some kind of ballet prodigy, picking up all the moves without even having to think about it. He even saved the triplets’ dance at our recital by taking JoAnn’s place after she wrecked her leg.

  “He got so ballet crazy after that recital that Mom signed him up for a boys’ ballet class,” Jessica says as we enter the school’s waiting room. “She found one that’s not far from here and meets at the same time as ours.”

  I’m suddenly aware of someone glaring at me. “Hi, Midget,” says that stuck-up-looking kid wearing a pink tiara. Tiara Girl hates all of us for no reason. Okay, fine—she was so obnoxious to us from the start that I started doing stuff like tying knots in her sneaker laces when she wasn’t looking; so maybe now she has a little bit of a reason.

  She’s especially snotty to me. I think it’s because I’m younger and shorter than the other girls in the class. Brenda thinks it’s because I’m better at ballet than Tiara Girl is and she’s jealous. It doesn’t matter. It’s like having an annoying fly in the room with you for a few hours a week—no big deal. Although I admit sometimes I wish I had a flyswatter.

  “Back off, Tiara Noggin,” Epatha says before I can open my mouth. It’s nice to have someone stick up for me, although I’m quite capable of taking care of myself (I do have a bunch of older brothers, after all). It saves me the trouble of having to hide a rotten banana in Tiara Girl’s dance bag.

  We sit on the benches and start to dig around in our bags for our ballet slippers. Al and Brenda walk in together.

  “Guys hi,” Brenda says, talking backward as usual. “There out freezing it’s.”

  Al’s hat is a puffy silver cone that covers her from her head almost down to her eyeballs. “I know, I know,” she says, peeling it off. “It’s part of a new outfit Mom’s making. She says it’s a statement about the consumer society vacuuming out everyone’s brains. But it also happens to be extremely warm, and I lost my other hat at the ice rink.”

  Al’s mom is a fashion designer. We’re used to seeing Al’s mom in dramatic outfits, but Al doesn’t usually wear silver cones on her head; she mostly dresses like a normal kid.

  Ms. Debbé, our teacher, appears in the doorway. It must be weird-hat day, because she’s wearing an orange and red fabric turban that’s so tall I’m amazed she fits through the doorway. A long skirt made of the same material swirls around her ankles, and a big chunky orange necklace is draped around her neck.

  “Wow,” Epatha breathes. She is a big fan of bright colors. “I totally want a turban like that.”

  “Right,” says JoAnn. “I can just see you outside playing kickball at recess with that thing on your head.”

  Ms. Debbé thumps her walking stick on the floor for attention. “Ladies—the class, it begins!” She turns and heads up the stairs, and we follow.

  Chapter 3

  Before long, we’ve warmed up and done our barre exercises. Now we’re leaping across the floor. My heart races as I bound across the room, stretching my legs out as far as I can.

  I love ballet. It’s a very organized art form. It’s not like baseball, where you’re never quite sure where the ball you hit will go. You do a plié, and it will be a plié, unless you screw it up, which I don’t. You do a chassé, and it will be a chassé. We always start our classes at the barre, then do floor work. The order never changes. You always know what you’re going to be doing.

  The sky outside glows yellow. The smell of crisp, fresh air drifts in through the window that’s cracked open. Just a few more minutes of class left. My brother Cheng will be waiting for me outside, as always. My family is going grocery shopping tonight, which is one of my favorite things to do. I feel a little smile creep onto my face. Life is pretty darned good.

  “Chaîné turns, ladies,” Ms. Debbé calls. “Two at a time, if you please.”

  We all head over to the sides of the room and arrange ourselves in two bunches. My friends and I stand in one group, because we always do.

  The music starts. “Ready? Go!” says Ms. Debbé.

  We spin across the floor two at a time. Epatha goes first, along with a red-haired girl from the other group. Then Brenda goes, then Jerzey, then Jessica, then Al. Then it’s my turn. I look at the other group to see who I’ll be spinning with. Of course—Tiara Girl.

  I don’t mind. I’ll show off my turns against hers any day. She glares at me. Frankly, if she acted like a human, I wouldn’t know how to act. I glower back at her, because that’s what I always do, and we start turning.

  She’s taller than me—just like everyone else, since I’m the youngest one in the class—and has longer legs. But I can spin faster. We’re both trying to get to the other side of the room first. I can see her pulling ahead of me. No way. With a burst of energy, I spin, spin, spin until I reach the other side of the room just a fraction of a second ahead of her.

  Tiara Girl tosses her head, as if to pretend she didn’t just lose the chaîné turns Olympics. I ignore her, act like kicking her butt in a race is no big deal. But inside I’m jumping up and down and singing, Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyaaaah!

  “It is not a race, ladies,” Ms. Debbé says in her thick French accent. “Ballerinas, they are graceful, yes? They are not bomber planes running
across the sky.”

  I picture a bomber with little legs galloping overhead and almost laugh out loud.

  After the last girls spin their way across the floor, Ms. Debbé shuts off the music and claps her hands for attention. “Now,” she says, “please sit for one moment.”

  We sit in clusters around Ms. Debbé, which gives us a good view of her feet. She’s wearing orange and red sandals that are so bright they look radioactive.

  Epatha can’t contain herself. “Amazing shoes, Ms. Debbé,” she says, staring at them as if she were mesmerized.

  Ms. Debbé looks surprised. “Why, thank you, Miss Epatha.” She smiles, then continues. “You may know that the Ballet Company of London will be performing in town for the next several weeks.”

  Lots of heads nod. As I said before, you’d have to be dead not to have seen the posters.

  “I encourage you to go if you can. There is nothing like live ballet to inspire your dancing. This ballet, the Sleeping Beauty, is a Very Important Ballet. And this performance, it will be glorious.” Ms. Debbé sweeps her arm in a half circle for emphasis, her shawl fluttering.

  Glorious. I’ve never seen a ballet—I mean, a real ballet, with sets and costumes and everything. Our school shows are fun to dance in, but I would not call them glorious. For the show last summer, most of us had to wear big fuzzy purple monster costumes. It is safe to say that we did not look even a little bit glorious. All of a sudden, seeing a glorious ballet seems like the most important thing in the world.

  “Also,” Ms. Debbé continues, “the holidays, they are almost upon us. And of course we will have our annual holiday party. It will be the Saturday before Christmas. If you think you know an adult who could help organize it, please do let me know after.…”

  Epatha raises her hand. “My parents can probably make some food for it.”

  “Very good, Epatha. Thank you. Now…”

  Across the room, Tiara Girl’s hand shoots into the air.

  “My aunt can organize the whole party,” she says in a loud voice. “She’ll make sure everything’s done right,” she adds. She gives Epatha one of her trademark snotty looks, as if to say Epatha’s parents would screw things up for sure.