Hokey Pokey
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2013 by Jerry Spinelli
Jacket art copyright © 2013 by Shutterstock
Map copyright © 2013 by David Leonard
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spinelli, Jerry.
Hokey Pokey / by Jerry Spinelli. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Ever since they were Snotsippers, Jack and the girl have fought, until one day she steals his bike, and as he and the Amigos try to recover it, Jack realizes that he is growing up and must eventually leave the “goodlands and badlands of Hokey Pokey.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-97570-6
[1. Play—Fiction. 2. Growth—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S75663Ho 2013
[Fic]—dc23
2012004177
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
To Norristown
“Daddy, what does tomorrow mean?”
—Madison Stokes, age 4
Hershey, Pennsylvania
November 22, 2008
“Kids. They live in their own little world.”
—Jack’s father
Saturday morning
WHAT IS HOKEY POKEY?
A place
A time
A square snowball treat
A circle dance
NIGHT
A
LL NIGHT LONG
Seven Sisters whisper and giggle and then, all together, they rush Orion the Hunter and tickle him, and Orion the Hunter laughs so hard he shakes every star in the sky, not to mention Mooncow, who loses her balance and falls—
puh-loop!
—into Big Dipper, which tip-tip-tips and dumps Mooncow into Milky Way, and Mooncow laughs and splashes and rolls on her back and goes floating down down down Milky Way, and she laughs a great moomoonlaugh and kicks at a lavender star and the star goes shooting across the sky, up the sky and down the sky, a lavender snowfire-ball down the highnight down …
down …
down …
down …
TODAY
…
TO
H
OKEY
P
OKEY
…
… where it lands, a golden bubble now, a starborn bead, lands and softly pips upon the nose of sleeping Jack and spills a whispered word:
it’s
and then another:
time
Something is wrong
.
He knows it before he opens his eyes.
He looks.
His bike is gone!
Scramjet!
What more could he have done? He parked it so close that when he shut his eyes to sleep, he could smell the rubber of the tires, the grease on the chain.
And still she took it. His beloved Scramjet. He won’t say her name. He never says her name, only her kind, sneers it to the morning star:
“Girl.”
He runs to the rim of the bluff, looks up the tracks, down the tracks. There she is, ponytail flying from the back of her baseball cap, the spokes of the wheels
—his
wheels—plumspun in the thistledown dawn.
He waves his fist, shouts from the bluff: “I’ll get you!”
The tracks curve, double back. He can cut her off!
He sneakerskis down the gullied red-clay slope, leaps the tracks, plunges into the jungle and runs—
phloot!
—into a soft, vast, pillowy mass.
Oh no! Not again!
He only thinks this. He cannot say it because the front half of himself, including his face, is buried in the hippopotamoid belly of Wanda’s monster. This has happened before. He wags his head hard, throws it back, and
—ttthok!
—his face comes free.
“Wan-daaa!” he bellows. “Wake up!”
Wanda stirs in a bed of mayapples.
“Wanda!”
The moment Wanda awakes, her monster vanishes in a puff of apricots, dropflopping Jack to the ground. He’s up in an instant and off again.