Third Grade Angels Page 5

  “They’re flying.”

  This time I thought lunch would be over before he stopped laughing. Other kids were looking over. Gerald Willis, a sixth-grader and the school bully, threw a French fry at Joey, but that didn’t stop him.

  I unwrapped my sandwich. I didn’t have all day.

  At long last, he took a deep breath. He said, “Right. Flying elephants. Big flapping ears. Doing yo-yos with their trunks.”

  “Some of them,” I corrected him. “Other ones have fishing poles.”

  His cheeks bulged with laugh balls, but he swallowed them. “Morton —” He made himself serious. “Don’t you get it?”

  “Get what?”

  “Flying elephants on your lunch box, man. That’s little kiddie stuff.” He picked up his paper bag. He wagged it in my face. “This is what a rat brings his lunch in.”

  I took a bite of my sandwich. “What do I care?”

  “That’s just it, man. You oughtta care.” He opened his bag. “If you don’t care, who will? Your mom probably got you that box, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Right. Moms. They just want to keep you a baby all your life. Suds, I’m telling ya, you gotta put a stop to it now. If you leave it up to your mom, you’ll be going off to college with a flying-elephant lunch box.”

  I looked at my lunch box. I’d had it since first grade, when I was a baby and glad of it. Most of the other kids broke their lunch boxes, or lost them, so they got new ones every year. My lunch box just kept rolling on. The elephants were fading, and some were even starting to look like hippos.

  But I loved my lunch box. It was like a brother to me. Now that I thought about it, I wasn’t even sure I could eat lunch at school without it. And as for my lunch box going off to college with me someday — well, to tell you the truth, I didn’t see anything so bad about that.

  I looked at Joey. He was wagging his head and smirking again.

  Uh-oh, I thought, it’s not just the lunch box.

  Jerry Spinelli is the author of several novels, including Third Grade Angels, The Library Card, and Maniac Magee, which won the Newbery Medal. He lives in Wayne, Pennsylvania, with his wife and fellow author, Eileen Spinelli.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Jerry Spinelli

  Illustrations copyright © 2012 by Jennifer A. Bell

  All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, the LANTERN LOGO, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Spinelli, Jerry.

  Third grade angels / by Jerry Spinelli; illustrations by

  Jennifer A. Bell. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: “George ‘Suds’ Morton competes with his third-grade classmates to earn the first ‘halo’ of the year for good behavior, but being good turns out to be more stressful than he anticipated” —

  Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-545-38772-9 (hardback) [1. Friendship — Fiction. 2. Conduct of life — Fiction. 3. Schools — Fiction.] I. Bell, Jennifer (Jennifer A.), 1977– ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.S75663Thi 2012

  [Fic] — dc23

  2012001979

  First edition, September 2012

  Cover art © 2012 by Matthew Myers

  Cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi

  eISBN 978-0-545-46960-9

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.