Jasper John Dooley, NOT in Love

  For Lucy H. — C.A.

  Text © 2014 Caroline Adderson

  Illustrations © 2014 Ben Clanton

  ISBN 978-1-77138-167-3 (epub)

  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.

  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 and Yasemin Uçar

  Designed by Marie Bartholomew

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Adderson, Caroline, 1963–, author

  Jasper John Dooley not in love /

  written by Caroline Adderson ; illustrated by Ben Clanton.

  (Jasper John Dooley ; 3)

  ISBN 978-1-55453-803-4 (bound)

  I. Clanton, Ben, 1988–, illustrator II. Title. III. Series: Adderson, Caroline, 1963– . Jasper John Dooley ; 3.

  PS8551.D3267J37 2014 jC813’.54 C2013-904117-6

  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 Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter 1

  Jasper John Dooley and Ori were playing knights with Leon at lunch. They ran around in the bushes at the back of the schoolyard where the playground monitor couldn’t see them. Jasper and Ori waved sticks. They chased Leon, who didn’t have a stick. Chasing people with sticks wasn’t allowed at their school. If a real dragon showed up, they probably wouldn’t be allowed to chase it with sticks either. The principal would say it was Very Dangerous. Jasper and Ori ran after their dragon, but Leon was too fast. “Hey!” Jasper shouted. “Slow down or we’ll never slay you!”

  “What’s slay?” Leon shouted back.

  “Kill!” Ori shouted. “But when you’re talking about dragons, you’re supposed to say ‘slay’!”

  Leon stopped running. Jasper caught up and flicked his stick across Leon’s stomach. Leon let out a terrible roar.

  “Sorry,” Jasper said.

  Leon wrapped his arms around his middle. He crumpled on the ground, rolling around and roaring “Agh! Rawr! Grrr!”

  Finally, he stopped. Jasper and Ori peered down. “Are you okay, Leon?”

  “No,” Leon said. “I’m dead.”

  Jasper laughed. “That’s one dragon for me,” he told Ori. He told Leon, “You can get up now.”

  Leon didn’t get up. He lay there like he was really dead. Even when Jasper and Ori dropped their sticks and tickled Leon, he wouldn’t stop being dead. Even when they said the playground monitor was coming over, Leon wouldn’t get up. So Jasper and Ori ran off before the monitor got there and asked who slayed Leon.

  They went to climb on the jungle gym for the last ten minutes of lunch. Zoë and Isabel were on the swings. As soon as they saw the boys, they wanted them to play babies. The two girls loved playing babies, but the two boys would only play if the girls had something to pay them with. Leftover Halloween candy was good, or cookies from their lunches.

  “No cookies, no babies,” Jasper said.

  Isabel smiled, showing she had no front teeth. From her pocket she took two small, square packets of jam like you get in restaurants.

  “The thing is,” Ori said to Jasper, “I’d be a baby for jam.”

  So would Jasper.

  Isabel was always Ori’s mother and Zoë was always Jasper’s. The babies lay down in the grass and wa-wa-waed while the mothers went to collect food. Food was pinecones and twigs. The babies only got their candy or cookie at the end, for playing properly.

  While Jasper and Ori were wa-wa-waing in the grass, the playground monitor came over and said, “I don’t know what’s going on today. There’s another boy lying on the ground over there.” She pointed to the bushes at the back of the playground.

  “Wa-wa-wa-wa!” the boys cried so she wouldn’t ask who slayed Leon.

  A few minutes later the two mothers showed up with pinecones. They got down on their knees and hauled their babies onto their laps. Jasper hated this part.

  “Wa-wa-wa-wa!” he cried. “Wa-wa-wa-wa!”

  Zoë pushed a pinecone in Jasper’s face. He was supposed to pretend to eat it. Ori was pretending, but Jasper got an idea. “I want my jam now,” he said.

  “No. You’ll run away,” Zoë said.

  “I won’t. I’ll run away if you don’t give me my jam.”

  Zoë took a jam packet from Isabel. She said she would feed it to Jasper. She peeled off the cover and used a twig as a spoon. Jasper opened his mouth and ate a twigful of the sweet jam. Like a real baby, he grabbed the twig and smeared jam around his mouth. Then he said, “Do you see what’s on my face?”

  “Jam,” Zoë said.

  “No, it’s blood,” Jasper said. “I’m a bad baby!”

  Ori jumped up, too, and said, “We’re bad, bad babies!”

  The girls screamed and ran away. And then the bell rang.

  After lunch, Ms. Tosh asked everybody to get together with their reading buddies. Jasper and Ori were reading buddies. They were reading buddies, knights, friends and neighbors. Ori lived across the alley and one house down from Jasper.

  Before anybody else could, Jasper and Ori dove into the Book Nook at the back of the classroom and stretched out on the cozy pillows.

  “You read first,” Ori said.

  Jasper grabbed a book. But instead of reading out loud to Ori, he started chewing on the book. “I’m still a bad baby,” he told Ori. “And I eat books.”

  “Don’t,” Ori whispered. “Stop.”

  Leon, who wasn’t dead anymore, turned around at his table. When he saw Jasper eating his book, he laughed and pointed so that everybody in the class turned to look.

  Ms. Tosh didn’t laugh. She said, “Ori, go read with Zoë. Jasper, you read with Isabel.” She said it in a way that made both boys obey her right away.

  “Just for today, right?” Jasper said.

  “Until I say so,” Ms. Tosh said.

  At least Jasper got to stay in the cozy Book Nook. Isabel came over and plopped down on the pillow beside him with her legs stretched out. She was a very freckly girl. She even had freckles on her legs.

  “You read first, Jasper John,” she said, smiling and showing the no-teeth space in her mouth
.

  Jasper’s book was about a dog that could skateboard. As soon as he started reading, he was interested. Isabel was interested, too. Jasper knew she was interested because as he read, Isabel leaned in close to him. She leaned so close Jasper could smell her. She smelled like strawberries.

  He thought she was trying to see the page he was reading. Maybe she needed glasses, because she leaned in close enough to —

  “Yuck!” Jasper roared when he felt Isabel’s wet tongue on his cheek. “Yuck!”

  And Ms. Tosh said, “Jasper John Dooley! You’ve disrupted us enough for one day!”

  Chapter 2

  When Jasper John Dooley was the Star of the Week, everybody in the class wrote Compliments to him. Ms. Tosh stapled them all together in a book that Jasper took home with him. The Compliment at the end said: I love you, Jasper.

  Back when Jasper was Star of the Week, he didn’t know who had written the I-love-you Compliment. But now he knew. It must have been Isabel.

  Jasper stayed away from Isabel for the rest of the day. After school, Mom was waiting to walk him and Ori home. She always walked them home because Ori’s mom was busy with Ori’s baby sister. “How was your day?” she asked.

  “Terrible,” Jasper said. He was still wiping his cheek, trying to make the goopy feeling of being licked go away.

  “Terrible? What happened?”

  “Our reading buddies got changed,” Ori said. “I’m not Jasper’s reading buddy anymore.”

  “Come on,” Jasper said. “Let’s go.”

  They started walking.

  “Who’s your buddy now?” Mom asked Ori.

  “Zoë.”

  “Who’s yours, Jasper?” Mom asked.

  “She’s following us,” Jasper said.

  Mom looked back. Jasper had seen Isabel out of the corner of his eye. Now he pretended to be walking like a monkey, bent over and scratching under his arms. That way he could secretly peek at Isabel from under his arm without her knowing. If Isabel saw him peeking at her, she would probably think he loved her, too.

  Mom stopped and waited for Isabel to catch up. “I hear you’re Jasper’s new reading buddy.”

  “Yes,” Isabel answered. “Today is the best day of my life!”

  “Keep walking,” Jasper said to Ori.

  It was hard to walk like a bent-over monkey peeking under your own arm, but Jasper did it all the way to the corner of the schoolyard. All the way he watched Isabel smile at Mom without any front teeth and Mom smile back with teeth. Luckily, he was too far away to hear what they were talking about.

  “Today’s the best day of Isabel’s life,” Ori said to Jasper. “She got to lick you.”

  Jasper looked around for a sword to slay his friend with.

  “Now she’s coming over with your mom,” Ori said.

  Jasper hid behind a telephone pole. When Mom and Isabel reached him, Isabel said to the telephone pole, “Bye, Jasper! See you tomorrow, Jasper!”

  Then she ran away.

  Mom laughed. She, Ori and Jasper crossed the street. At the alley, Ori waved and went home to his house. Jasper waved back. He was glad Ori hadn’t told Mom that Isabel had licked him. He was so so so embarrassed.

  At home, Mom made Jasper a snack. While she was cutting up carrot sticks, she told him, “Isabel invited you over for a playdate.”

  “A what?”

  “You know what a playdate is. She asked for our phone number. So her mother could call. When I told it to her, she repeated it back until she memorized it. She said she’d remember it forever.”

  Mom was smiling while she told this to Jasper, the way she had smiled at Isabel while they were talking.

  Jasper flopped down on the kitchen floor and groaned.

  “Don’t you think it would be fun to have a playdate with somebody besides Ori?”

  “Ori is my best and closest friend. He lives just across the alley and one house down. If something so so so embarrassing happened to me at school, he wouldn’t tell anybody about it. That means he’s a good friend. And we’re both knights.”

  “Can’t Isabel be a knight?”

  “No. She’s a girl. All girls do is stay inside and brush their hair.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Mom asked. She put the carrot sticks on the table and went to the fridge for the dip.

  “I mean when they’re at home,” Jasper said from the floor. “At school, they play babies.”

  “Well, I’m a girl. I do all kinds of things.” She spooned the dip out into a little bowl.

  “What things?” Jasper asked.

  “There’s your snack,” Mom said. “I guess you think it got there all by itself.”

  Jasper sat up on the kitchen floor, but the phone started ringing, so he flopped down again. “Don’t answer it!”

  Mom stepped right over him and went to the phone.

  “If it’s about the playdate?” Jasper said. “Tell her I can’t come.”

  “She’ll want to know why,” Mom said.

  Jasper closed his eyes tight. “Tell her I’m sick.”

  But it wasn’t Isabel or her mom calling. It was Jasper’s Nan. Isabel’s mom didn’t call until after supper, when Jasper was in the basement scraping the dryer screen to get more lint for his collection. Jasper wasn’t there to say “No, no, no, no!” to the playdate, so Mom went ahead and said “Yes.”

  That night Dad came into Jasper’s room to say goodnight.

  “I hear you have a playdate with a girl tomorrow,” he said.

  “I’m not going,” Jasper said. “I feel sick.”

  Dad put his hand on Jasper’s forehead. “You do feel hot.”

  “Do I?” Jasper said. “Oh, good!”

  Dad asked him to stick out his tongue. He studied it, nodding and hmming. “Yes. I know what you’ve got.”

  “What?” Jasper asked.

  “A terrible disease. Girl-itis. I used to get it a lot myself.”

  “I’m dying of it!” Jasper groaned. He rolled around on the bed clutching his stomach. “Agh! Rawr! Grrr!”

  “I don’t get it,” he told Dad. “At school? All she ever does is tell on me. I’m not even her baby. I’m Zoë’s baby. And now we have to have a playdate!”

  Chapter 3

  The next morning, Jasper got the lates for school and had to rush. He forgot all about the playdate. At recess and lunch, he was so busy playing knights with Ori and Leon in the bushes at the back of the schoolyard where Isabel couldn’t find them that he didn’t think about the playdate. After school, Mom was waiting, but when Jasper went over to her, Isabel came out of nowhere and grabbed his hand.

  Jasper remembered the playdate then.

  Mom was there to walk Ori home. Jasper had to go with Isabel! He kept his arms crossed tight so Isabel couldn’t hold hands with him. As they walked, he looked over his shoulder and saw Mom and Ori walking in the opposite direction. He felt all watery inside, like he would never see them again.

  Mom turned and waved. “Have fun!” she called.

  Ori turned, too. He pretended he had a sword in his hand and was stabbing himself with it.

  Isabel lived farther from school than Jasper and Ori did. The whole way she kept trying to make Jasper uncross his arms, pulling his wrist and tickling him, so she could hold his hand. She talked and talked.

  “What do you want to do, Jasper? Are we going to play babies? We don’t have to. We can play lots of things. We can play anything.”

  “Don’t talk so much, Izzy,” her mother said. “And don’t pull on him like that. Can’t you see you’re scaring him?”

  Isabel’s mother didn’t have any freckles. Also, she had all her teeth.

  Isabel’s house was about twice the size of Jasper’s house. Isabel’s dog was about a million times bigger than Jasper’s, because Jasper didn’t
have a dog. It ran to the door to greet them, a huge black and brown dog that came up to Jasper’s chin. Isabel hugged it and let it lick her freckly cheeks with its big slobbery tongue. Jasper finally uncrossed his arms so he could cover his face with his hands.

  “This is Rollo. You can ride him. Get on, Jasper.”

  “No, thanks,” Jasper said.

  “Let’s go upstairs.”

  Isabel rode down the hall on the back of the giant dog. Jasper followed, staying far enough behind that he wouldn’t get clobbered by Rollo’s big waggy tail. At the bottom of the stairs, Isabel said, “Sit, Rollo.” The dog sat and she slid off his back. “Race you!” she screamed to Jasper just before she bolted up.

  Isabel got to the top first.

  “You had a head start,” Jasper said.

  “What do you want to do?” Isabel asked.

  “Let’s brush our hair,” Jasper said. The sooner they finished brushing, the sooner he could go home and stop worrying about getting licked by Isabel or her dog.

  Isabel seemed excited about hair brushing. She left Jasper in her room while she raced off for the brush.

  Jasper was surprised that Isabel’s room wasn’t pink. It was lots of colors, but what Jasper noticed most was the set of drums in the corner. There was even a stool to sit on while you played. He went over and tapped his fingers on a drum. Nothing.

  “Your drums are broken,” Jasper told Isabel when she came back with the brush and a big tube of something that looked like lime Jell-O toothpaste.

  Isabel laughed. “You have to turn them on.” She pressed a button. “Try it now.”

  Jasper picked a drumstick off the floor and tapped the cymbal. It made a soft chunka sound.

  “Like this,” Isabel said, attacking the drums with the hairbrush. The room filled with crashing and thumping. It sounded like the whole house was falling down.

  “Izz-y!” Isabel’s mother shouted from downstairs.

  “Never mind,” said Isabel. “Let’s get brushing.”

  She dragged Jasper over to the bed and made him sit cross-legged while she knelt in front of him. She brushed his hair so hard Jasper squinched his eyes closed. Jasper felt something cold and wet on his head. “What’s that?” he asked.