“Meet me in the bushes at recess,” Jasper whispered, lifting the glasses frames.
“Okay. Can we get married then?”
“Maybe,” Jasper said. “But don’t bring any other girls with you.”
“Isabel and Jasper?” Ms. Tosh said. “Please stop whispering.”
At recess, Jasper waited behind the bushes at the back of the schoolyard where the playground monitor hardly ever went. Ori, Leon and Paul C. were crouched on the other side waiting for Isabel, too.
She came alone. “Here you are, Jasper John!” She sounded so happy to see him. But she wouldn’t be happy for long.
“Let’s get married!” she said.
“First, I have to do something,” Jasper said.
“What?” Isabel asked. “What? What? What?”
Jasper blew two raspberries, which was the signal for the other boys to jump out from behind the bushes with the jam and grab hold of Isabel. She shrieked in surprise.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked in an unterrified voice.
“I’m going to dip your hair in jam!” Jasper shouted. He laughed an evil laugh — “Ha ha ha ha!” — as he came toward her, unscrewing the lid.
Isabel tilted her head so it would be easier for Jasper to get her hair in the jar. Jasper circled her, cackling and dipping. Isabel cackled, too. He dipped the sides and the back. Her bangs were too short to dip. When he finished dipping, he stepped back to look at Isabel. Runny jam dripped off the ends of her hair. Her shoulders were soaked with it.
Isabel ripped her arms free from Ori and Paul C.’s grip. She snatched the jar.
“Ha ha ha ha!” she said, dumping the jam over Jasper’s head.
Chapter 13
Isabel thought it was wonderful to sit in the hall on a piece of newspaper with Jasper. The newspaper was because they were dripping with jam. Everybody who walked by stopped and said, “Oh, my goodness! What happened? Call an ambulance!”
And every time Isabel crowed out, “It’s not blood! It’s jam! Ha ha ha ha!”
Jasper did not think it was wonderful. He thought it was sticky and embarrassing. His shirt was pasted to his body with jam. Yuck! Sharing the newspaper meant he had to sit right up against sticky Isabel. Yuck! And Isabel kept leaning even closer to him with her tongue out, trying to lick the jam off his face.
Yuck, yuck, yuck!
Finally, Mrs. Kinoshita came. She stared down at them with crossed arms. “To the bathroom. Now. Clean yourselves up. Don’t jam up my office.”
Isabel and Jasper obeyed her right away.
When they got back from the bathroom, Isabel ran straight to the big chair in Mrs. Kinoshita’s office, the one across from her desk. She climbed up in it and swung her feet. She loved the office! She’d been there so so many times.
“Welcome back, Isabel,” Mrs. Kinoshita said. “Hello, Jasper.”
“Sit beside me, Jasper John,” Isabel said, patting the place beside her. “There’s lots of room.”
The times Jasper had been to the office he had tried not to sit in that chair. He didn’t like it when his feet didn’t touch the ground. He told Isabel, “I prefer to stand.”
Mrs. Kinoshita folded her hands on her desk. She liked to get to the bottom of things. “So what happened out there?”
“Jasper asked me to get married at recess,” Isabel said, pushing her wet hair off her face.
“I did not!” Jasper said.
“Then why did you want me to meet you behind the bushes?”
“So I could dip your hair in jam.”
“And why did you want to do that, Jasper?” Mrs. Kinoshita asked.
Isabel answered. “I guess he likes girls with red hair. And I like boys with red hair. That’s why I dumped the jam on him.”
“She came into the boys’ bathroom to clean up,” Jasper said.
“Isabel,” Mrs. Kinoshita said. “I told you not to do that anymore.”
“I just wanted to be with Jasper,” Isabel said. “Are you going to make us stay in at lunch? Can we stay in together? We were both bad together so I think we should stay in together.”
“We weren’t bad together,” Jasper said. “First I was bad, then you were.”
“Staying together would be more of a reward than a punishment, Isabel,” Mrs. Kinoshita said. “You will stay in separately. After you finish eating lunch, Jasper will go to the classroom. Isabel, you will come here and sit with me.”
Isabel stuck her bottom lip over her toothless place.
“And before you go back to your class, both of you need to choose a clean top out of the Lost and Found.”
“Jasper!” Isabel sang. “We get to play Dress Up!”
Jasper tucked in his chin and crossed his eyes.
He asked, “Can I have my jam back?”
Dad was waiting for Jasper and Ori after school. Jasper came running. “Where’s Mom?”
“I came home early. You’ll never guess what I found.”
“What?” Jasper asked.
“Mom. Asleep on the sofa. She’s had a hard few weeks, you know.”
“I know,” Jasper said.
“Jasper had a hard few weeks, too,” Ori said. “But his life is going to be so much easier now!”
They all walked home — Dad, Jasper and Ori.
“Explain,” Dad said.
Jasper said, “I had to stay in at lunch.”
“Because he dipped Isabel’s hair in jam,” Ori said.
“Is that what you wanted that jam for, Jasper?” Dad asked.
“Yes. To make her NOT in love with me. But it didn’t work. It just made me sticky. It just made her love me more.”
“The thing is,” Ori said, “she tried to lick him again.”
“Then at lunch, something happened. I was eating with Ori and Leon and Paul C. Isabel was eating at the next table. With Zoë and Margo and Bernadette.”
“I had pudding in my lunch,” Ori said. “Vanilla.”
“He doesn’t like vanilla,” Jasper said.
They stopped at the alley where Ori always turned to go to his own house. “What does this have to do with Jasper’s life getting easier?” Dad asked.
“There was some jam left. So I gave it to Ori to put in his pudding. To make it strawberry.”
“It was good!” Ori said.
“So I asked to taste it,” Jasper said. “And it was. So so so so good! Then Leon wanted to try it and Paul C., too.”
“And then Jasper’s life got much easier!” Ori said. “Because Isabel saw. She saw us sharing a spoon. And she stood up and shouted ‘Yuck!’ across the lunchroom. She said, ‘I’m going to the principal’s office anyway. I’m going to tell her what you did. Then I’m going to ask her if I can lie down in the nurse’s room because I think I’m going to throw up!’”
Dad laughed and laughed.
“Then, after lunch? It was reading time,” Ori said. “Isabel asked Ms. Tosh if we could go back to our old reading buddies. She said she didn’t want to be buddies with Jasper anymore.”
“Ori’s my reading buddy again!” Jasper sang.
“Yeah!” the boys cheered.
“And not only that,” Ori said. “Zoë told me they didn’t want to play babies with us ever again!”
The boys hugged good-bye, they were so happy. Then Dad and Jasper walked the rest of the way home. Jasper said he was so happy that he thought he might cry. He said, “What I need right now is a potholder.”
They went quietly into the house in case Mom was still asleep. She was. She was stretched out on the sofa with the little blue notebook lying on the floor beside her. Jasper picked it up and showed it to Dad.
“This book explains why Mom is so tired,” he whispered.
Dad took it and flipped through the pages. “Wow.”
Jasper nodded.
“I feel bad,” Dad said.
“Why?”
“Most of these things are things she does for us, Jasper. But what do we do for her?”
“A lot,” Jasper said, spreading his arms wide. “We love her so so so so much!”
Chapter 14
The girls didn’t bother Jasper and Ori and Leon and Paul C. again. Not that week, anyway. But on Monday after school, a Very Dangerous thing happened. When Ori and Jasper came out to meet Mom, Isabel was there with Mandy. “Look!” Ori said.
Jasper heard it before he saw it — a loud, buzzing sound.
“Be careful, Izzy,” Mandy was saying. “Can’t you see you’re scaring everybody?”
The buzzing came from the remote-control car that Isabel was zooming around the schoolyard.
Ori rushed over. “Can I try, Isabel? Can I?”
“Just a second, Ori,” Isabel said, steering the car so it circled faster and faster around them. Then she handed the control to Ori and showed him how it worked.
Ori drove the car. It stopped and started like it was running out of gas.
“Like this,” Isabel said, snatching the control back and sending the car buzzing off in a cloud of dust.
“Wow!” Ori said.
“Ori,” Mom called. “We’re leaving.”
“Just a second! One more try!”
Isabel let him, and while Ori was driving, she asked, “Do you want to come to my house for a playdate, Ori?”
“Can we play with your car?” Ori asked.
“Sure! We can play anything you want. What’s your phone number?”
Ori did the Very Dangerous thing then. He told Isabel his phone number. And she repeated it back until she memorized it.
“Ori!” Mom called.
“Bye, Ori!” Isabel called after him. “Bye! See you tomorrow, Ori! See you!”
“Stop shouting at him, Izzy,” Mandy said. “Can’t you see he’s running away?”
Ori ran all the way to where Jasper and Mom were waiting for him at the corner of the schoolyard.
Jasper leaned close to Ori, his friend and neighbor and reading buddy and fellow knight. He leaned close enough to smell Ori. Ori smelled like celery. Then —
“Yuck!” Ori roared when he felt Jasper’s wet tongue on his cheek. “Yuck!”
“Jasper!” Mom said. “I can’t believe it! Did you just lick Ori?”
Ori wiped his cheek and yucked again.
“Why did you do that?” Mom asked Jasper. “Why?”
Before he could answer, Ori said, “I know why.”
He smiled at Jasper, and Jasper smiled back.
“Can Jasper come to my house for a playdate?” Ori asked.
Jasper John Dooley, NOT in Love Page 5
