Jasper John Dooley, Left Behind

by Caroline Adderson

  For Nana and Baba, who left us behind — C.A.

  Text © 2013 Caroline Adderson

  Illustrations © 2013 Ben Clanton

  ISBN 978-1-77138-075-1 (ebook)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of Kids Can Press Ltd. or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  This is a work of fiction and any resemblance of characters to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Kids Can Press Ltd. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters (e.g., Band-Aids).

  Kids Can Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative; the Ontario Arts Council; the Canada Council for the Arts; and the Government of Canada, through the CBF, for our publishing activity.

  Published in Canada by

  Kids Can Press Ltd.

  25 Dockside Drive

  Toronto, ON M5A 0B5

  Published in the U.S. by

  Kids Can Press Ltd

  2250 Military Road

  Tonawanda, NY 14150

  www.kidscanpress.com

  Edited by Sheila Barry

  Designed by Rachel Di Salle

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Adderson, Caroline, 1963–

  Jasper John Dooley left behind / written by Caroline Adderson ; illustrated by Ben Clanton.

  (Jasper John Dooley ; 2)

  ISBN 978-1-55453-579-8 (bound)

  I. Clanton, Ben, 1988– II. Title. III. Series: Adderson, Caroline, 1963–. Jasper John Dooley ; 2.

  PS8551.D3267L44 2013 jC813’.54 C2012-905447-X

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter 1

  On Sunday morning Jasper John Dooley’s Nan left on a holiday. Dad carried her big suitcase out of her apartment, and Mom carried Nan’s small suitcase. Jasper took her purse. He rapped the jaws of the lion-head knocker that guarded Nan’s place and said in a loud, liony voice, “Have a good trip, Nan!”

  In his Jasper voice he asked, “Where are you going, anyway, Nan?”

  “She’s going on the trip of a lifetime,” Dad said. “A cruise to Alaska.”

  “You mean on a boat?” Jasper said, going ahead to press the elevator button.

  “On a ship,” Nan said. “A huge ship.”

  “You’re going on a ship trip?”

  Everybody laughed. Then the elevator came, and they all got in. Jasper pressed “L” for lobby. “Why didn’t you tell me about the ship?” he asked Nan.

  “I did. I told you last Wednesday when you were over.”

  As they rode down, Nan told him about the ship again. “It has a swimming pool, a ballroom and ten restaurants. Imagine! Ten restaurants on one ship.”

  “Oh, right,” Jasper said. “Now I remember. But I didn’t know you were going on it. I thought it was something you saw on TV.”

  “She’s really going,” Mom said.

  The elevator pinged and opened, and they all stepped out into the lobby. It looked like a jungle because of all the plants. A jungle with an elevator.

  “It’s going to be a wonderful week,” Mom said.

  “Week?” Jasper said. “Week? You’re going to be back on Wednesday, aren’t you, Nan?”

  Every Wednesday after school Jasper went to Nan’s to play Go Fish for jujubes.

  Nan didn’t answer. Maybe she hadn’t heard him. Sometimes he had to get right up close for her to hear what he was saying. Then he thought of something else. Jasper liked going to the pool, and he really liked going to restaurants. He loved playing with balls — kicking them or trying to stand on them or balancing them on his head. He loved stuffing them up his shirt and saying, “Boy, I ate so so so so much.”

  “Can I go with you on the cruise, Nan?”

  Everybody laughed again.

  “What’s so funny?” Jasper asked.

  “It’s an Elder Cruise, Jasper,” Nan told him.

  “What’s that?”

  “That,” Dad said, “is eight hundred old people looking at icebergs.”

  “How old do you have to be to go on the cruise?” Jasper asked.

  “About seventy-eight,” Nan told him.

  The car was parked out front. Dad put the suitcases in the trunk. When they were all in the car, they drove away from Nan’s apartment, Nan and Jasper together in the backseat. “But you’ll be back on Wednesday, right?” Jasper said.

  “She’ll be gone the whole week, Jasper,” Mom said from the front seat. “She’ll be home next Monday.”

  “Nan! What about Go Fish? Nothing is as fun as playing Go Fish for jujubes!”

  Nan sighed. “That is true, Jasper. That is true.”

  “Jasper,” Dad said, “Nan has been planning this trip for a long time. If you keep talking like this, she won’t want to leave.”

  “Don’t leave!” Jasper cried. “Don’t leave me behind!”

  He grabbed Nan’s hand and kissed the freckly brown spots on the back of it. Nan laughed and laughed. Then she asked for her purse, which was on the floor at Jasper’s feet. He passed it to her, and she took a tissue out and dried her eyes. Jasper couldn’t tell if they were sad tears or tears from laughing so hard. He took another tissue and pretended to dry his own tears with it. Pretending to cry made him feel all watery inside. For the rest of the drive, he held Nan’s hand and sniffed it. Her perfumey smell was so nice.

  Dad and Mom left Jasper and Nan on the dock while they went to drop off the suitcases and park the car. The ship was huge, just like Nan said. It looked like Nan’s apartment building lying on its side, except it was white and it floated. Nan seemed worried when she saw how big it was. “Maybe you’re right, Jasper. Maybe I’m too old to be taking a trip by myself.”

  Jasper looked around at the other people going up the ramp to the ship. Everybody had white hair except the people with gray hair. Many people walked with canes. Jasper pointed at one of the people with canes. “You’re not so old, Nan. Look at him.”

  Nan smiled. “You always say the right thing, Jasper,” and she kissed him seven times, once for every day of the cruise.

  When Mom and Dad came back, Nan kissed them good-bye, too, and started up the ramp. Jasper waved and called, “Bye, Nan! Bye!” There were lots of people waving and calling good-bye at the same time. Jasper wanted to make sure Nan saw him so he took the tissue from his pocket and waved it. Just before Nan stepped onto the ship, she turned and blew kisses to Jasper.

  They stayed a few more minutes after Nan got on the ship. Jasper waved with the tissue, then put it in his pocket in case any of Nan’s kisses had got caught in it. He kept on waving with his hand, hoping Nan would see him through one of the cruise ship’s
tiny windows. He waved so hard his arm almost fell off.

  Then Nan was really, truly gone.

  Back at the car, Jasper looked at himself in the side mirror. He saw four lipstick flowers on one cheek and three lipstick flowers on the other. Usually, lipstick flowers made him yuck. Today they made him sad.

  “What about that ship, Jasper?” Dad asked.

  Jasper said, “What ship?”

  Later that night, after he went to bed, Jasper thought about his Wednesdays at Nan’s. If Jasper won at Go Fish, which he almost always 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?”

  “I feel funny,” Jasper said.

  Mom laid her hand across his forehead. “You don’t have a fever. Does your tummy hurt?”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” Jasper said. “It just feels pththth.”

  “What’s pththth?”

  “It’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.”

  “Maybe 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?

  “Where 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.

  “It’s an atlas,” Dad said. “Mom told me you wanted to know where Alaska was.” He showed Jasper on the map.

  “Why is it a different color?”

  “This 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.

  “How did Alaska get way up there?”

  “That’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?

  “Does everybody in Alaska feel lonely?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re so far away.”

  “Everybody 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 already written three stories about Hammy, the little brown hamster in the cage at the back of the classroom. He decided to write about a snake.

  His story was called “A Long, Long, Long Story by Jasper about a Snake.” The snake in the story was six miles long. Jasper wrote in his biggest printing until the story was six pages. Then he put up his hand and asked to staple his pages together.

  “Go ahead,” Ms. Tosh said.

  The stapler was one of Jasper’s favorite things in the classroom, along with the cozy pillows in the Book Nook that you could hide under until somebody accidentally sat on you. And Hammy the hamster. Every Friday one of the kids got to take Hammy home for the weekend.

  Jasper brought his story to Ms. Tosh’s desk where there were even more things that he loved: the heart mug filled with spare pencils, the sticker shoebox, the electric pencil sharpener with a window that showed all the shavings inside.

  Jasper piled his six pages on the desk. He took the stapler and ker-chunked one corner. Since the story was so long, six pages long, he ker-chunked the other corner, too. He put in four more staples along the side, just in case. Ker-chunk. Ker-chunk. Ker-chunk. Ker-chunk. Maybe a staple right in the middle would be good in case a big wind came up and blew through the classroom window and mixed the pages of everybody’s stories together. Jasper gathered the pages off the desk and held them flat against his body. With the stapler open, he positioned it right in the middle of all the pages and ker-chunked hard.

  “Owwwwww!!!!!!!”

  All the kids looked up from their writing. Ms. Tosh came running. “Jasper! What have you done?”

  All the kids said, “Ms. Tosh! Jasper stapled his story to himself!”

  The nurse! He needed the nurse!

  “Let’s move slowly, Jasper,” Ms. Tosh said. “Careful, careful.”

  All the way down the hall Jasper shuffled, his story stapled to his tummy.

  “My goodness!” the nurse exclaimed when they got to the sickroom. She didn’t wait for an explanation. She put an arm around Jasper and led him over to the cot. He and his story lay down. Ms. Tosh wished him luck and went back to the class.

  “What happened, Jasper?” the nurse asked.

  “My Nan went away on a cruise. She went on a huge white ship with eight hundred old people. To look at icebergs.”

  “I see,” the nurse said.

  Jasper sniffed. “After that, I started going pththth. Because she left me. So I already had a hole in me. Now I have three!”

  “Three?”

  “A staple makes two holes,” Jasper told her.

  “Of course.”

  The nurse gave Jasper a tissue to wipe his eyes. Then she pointed at the ceiling and said, “What’s that?” When Jasper looked up, she unstapled him. He didn’t feel a thing. She asked him to lift his shirt, and there they were — two tiny holes in his tummy. The pththth hole from being left behind didn’t show at all.

  “Do they hurt?” the nurse asked as she dabbed the holes with a wet cotton ball.

  “No,” Jasper told her.

  The nurse handed him a box of different kinds and colors of Band-Aids.

  “Take your time,” she said, when Jasper couldn’t make up his mind which Band-Aid to choose. “I’m just going to walk around the school and see if anybody else has stapled himself.”

  After she left, Jasper took all the Band-Aids out of the box and held each one against his tummy. It was as much fun as picking a sticker from the shoebox on Ms. Tosh’s desk. In the end, he chose a Band-
Aid the color of a green caterpillar.

  “Good choice,” the nurse said when she came back.

  She put the Band-Aid on Jasper, then asked to read the story that he’d stapled to himself. She laughed and laughed. Jasper felt pleased that he’d written such a funny story. Then the bell rang for recess, and he sat up on the cot.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” the nurse asked.

  “Yes!”

  Jasper thanked her and ran outside and around the school until he found his friend Ori, who was in his class and lived across the alley and one house down. Ori was playing with some other kids. When Jasper lifted his shirt to show off his Band-Aid, everybody crowded around him. Everybody wanted to see. He lifted his shirt again and again. He felt so so so so popular!

  Nothing happened the rest of the day except when Jasper hid under the pillows in the Book Nook and Isabel sat on him and screamed. Jasper forgot all about stapling his story to his tummy until after school when he saw Mom waiting. As soon as Jasper saw her, he remembered that Nan was away and that he had three holes in himself. He clutched them and bent over.

  “Are you okay?” Mom asked, hugging him. “Does it hurt?”

  “I stapled my story to myself!”

  “I know. The nurse phoned and told me.”

  “Why didn’t you come and pick me up?” Jasper asked.

  “She said you were fine. She said you were outside playing.”

  “I was fine,” Jasper said. “But now I’m not. I’m wounded. I don’t think I can walk.”

  “Here,” Mom said, crouching down. Jasper got on her back.

  They lived a block from the school. Out of all the kids in the class, Jasper lived the closest. Even so, out of all the kids, it was always Jasper who got the lates. Ori lived the second closest to the school, across the alley and one house down from Jasper, and he never got the lates. Usually they all walked home together — Jasper and Ori and Mom.

  “You should see Jasper’s Band-Aid,” Ori told Jasper’s mom. “It’s green!”

  “I can’t wait,” Mom said.