Happily Ever Emma Read Free Page A

activity papers are almost like games. They’re usually for rainy Friday afternoons, not Monday mornings, when you’re supposed to work like crazy to make up for having relaxed your brain all weekend. “And it’s dinosaur themed,” Ms. Sanchez adds, which makes the boys in our class very happy.
    “Yes!” Corey whispers, pumping his fist in the air. He sits next to me.
    Jared Matthews glares at him, then sits up importantly in his seat, because dinosaurs are “his thing,” as he likes to tell everyone. It is obvious that Jared intends to be the best dinosaur word-search kid in our class.
    Jared’s real thing is being a bully, in my opinion, and bossing smaller kids around—which means just about everyone, because he is so huge. Jared has swirly brown hair, large hands, and lots of freckles.
    Annie Pat and I are a little scared of Jared, because he has a very bad temper.
    Not this morning, though! This morning, Jared is all smiles. He grabs his word-search paper eagerly and scrabbles in his desk for his yellow highlighter pen.
    “And—you may begin,” Ms. Sanchez says, sinking into her desk chair. She starts correcting a stack of papers.
    I look down at the list of words at the bottom of my word search. Some of the words, like Jurassic, carnivore, and herbivore, are about dinosaurs, and some of the words— Triceratops, Allosaurus, and Raptor —are the names of dinosaurs.
    But I can’t concentrate. “Cool. Is he handsome?” Annie Pat had said when I told her about my mom’s date.
    I look at the big square block of letters that form the word search, and my headache starts to pound again, and my stomach churns. Were those the only four words Annie Pat could think of to say? She didn’t get it at all!
    “Stop daydreaming, Emma,” Ms. Sanchez says, glancing over at me.

    So I look at my word search again. The letters all blur together, though, and they do not start forming any of the given words at all. But next to me, Corey is drawing wavy yellow lines up and down, back and forth across his block of letters, and he’s gleefully checking off words at the bottom of the page.
    Check.
    Check.
    Check!
    And Jared seems to be working even faster than Corey.
    So I start drawing a yellow line through anything that even looks like a word. Lopisol, greenop, and nodub. Oonah, rigneg, and rorance.
    Corey glances over at my paper and begins to look nervous.
    Hey, this is fun! It’s so much fun that I start to giggle, and Corey shoots me a dirty look. Now he is falling further behind Jared.
    But I don’t even care. Maybe Ms. Sanchez will ask me to use my words in a sentence. “The greenop grazed in the rorance forest, until the nodub lopisol came along and ate him right before the meteor hit,” I’ll tell everyone, just as if it really happened.

    And how can anyone say it didn’t happen? Do people actually think that Triceratops knew they were called Triceratops? Maybe they thought of themselves as greenops, instead.
    “Emma?” a voice behind me says.
    Wow! How did Ms. Sanchez sneak up behind me?
    I try to hide my fake words from her eyes. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute, please, Miss Lopisol ,” she murmurs. “In the back of the room. Eyes on your papers, people,” she calls out to the kids who are now staring at me: Annie Pat, who is looking worried, and EllRay, who is looking sympathetic, and Cynthia, whose eyes are shining with excitement.
    Sometimes Cynthia Harbison

    reminds me of a jackal. My favorite nature book says that jackals are “opportunistic carnivores.” I think that means they’ll pounce on any animal that’s down— like Cynthia does with me—and then eat it.
    I slink to the back of the class, behind Ms. Sanchez. She takes me gently by the shoulder. “What’s up, Emma?” she says, which reminds me so much of that cartoon guy Elmer Fudd for a second that I start to giggle again. I think I’m nervous.
    “Sorry,” I say, trying to make my mouth obey me and stop laughing.
    Ms.