Farah Rocks Summer Break Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  How to Grow Crystals

  Glossary

  Glossary of Arabic Words

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Copyright

  Back Cover

  CHAPTER 1

  I see the ball coming in my direction, and I run up close to the net. I leap up and use my fist to slam it over to the other side. The players on my side cheer. But then Enrique, who’s on the other team, spikes the ball back. It sails down diagonally, unstoppable, and smacks the ground beside me.

  Final point. We’ve lost the match.

  “Nice job!” I tell the other team members, who are shrieking with joy. Enrique grins at me, and I give him a thumbs-up.

  Hot and sweaty, everyone walks over to the drink

  table. Today was the last day of school, and we are celebrating at Allie Liu’s house. She’s my Official Best Friend, and her parents invited everyone over for a huge picnic and games.

  I head to the creek that runs behind Allie’s house. I pull off my sneakers and dip my toes in the water to cool off. Then I sit on the bench under the big maple tree in Allie’s backyard. I’m cooler now, but sweat is still dripping off my face. I relax and enjoy the feeling of the grass on my bare feet.

  This isn’t a typical end-of-year party. This morning, Harbortown Elementary/Middle School held a Fifth Grade Graduation. With the other fifth graders, I walked down the center of the cafetorium, wearing a blue robe with a square hat. The principal called us up on the stage, one by one, and handed us our diplomas. At the end of the ceremony, she asked us all to stand. “Move the tassels on your cap from the right to the left,” she said.

  She explained that this meant we had officially graduated. A whoop erupted from the audience.

  Holy hummus, I thought. I’m finally finished with elementary school.

  Even now, I can’t believe it. No more lining up for gym class? No more assigned seats at lunch? No more being shushed in the hallway?

  Right now, the Lius’ yard is jammed with all my friends and their families. They even invited some of our teachers, like Mr. Richie and Ms. Loft.

  Mr. Liu and my father are grilling chicken, while our moms hand out ice cream bars. My little brother, Samir, is trying to learn how to jump rope with some other kindergartners.

  Just then, a paper airplane whirls in the air above my head, spirals down, and settles on the bench beside me.

  Someone laughs.

  “Enrique!” I shout.

  Enrique LeBrand is one of the nicest kids in school. We’ve been friends since kindergarten. He approaches me, his arms up like he’s just scored a touchdown. “Come on, that was pretty amazing!”

  “It really was!” I admit. “There’s a little breeze in the air, so that must have helped give the plane some thrust—”

  “Hey, turn off your brain!” He snatches the airplane and sits on the grass in front of me. “It’s summer vacation, Farah Rocks.”

  My name is Farah Hajjar, but my friends have been calling me Farah Rocks since basically forever. That’s because my last name, Hajjar, means “rocks” or “stones” in Arabic.

  Enrique is right. I should relax for a minute. We’re celebrating more than just the end of fifth grade, after all. A few of us—Allie, Enrique, Lauren, Adaego, and Winston—were accepted to the Magnet Academy. That’s a super hard school to get into. We’ve been hearing for years that kids who go to Magnet end up becoming scientists, astronauts, or engineers.

  Enrique hands me the paper airplane. “Open it.” He leans back on the grass, puts one leg over the other, and pillows his hands under his head.

  I open the flyer and read:

  Get ready to be MAGNET-ized!!!

  Sign up now for Camp Crystals!

  A one-week science camp to prepare you for the Magnet Academy.

  August 15–19

  Camp Crystals focuses on the earth’s rocks and minerals. We will study rock formations, classify rocks, make sandstone, and—yes!—grow crystals!

  “Wow, this sounds incredible!” I say to Enrique. “Are you signing up?”

  “Nah,” he says, squinting up at me because the sun is in his eyes. “My dad is taking me home to Puerto Rico for a vacation.”

  “For how long?”

  “Usually a vacation means the whole summer,” he says, smiling. “But talk to Ms. Loft about who might be going. She’s the one who gave me the flyer.”

  “Did I hear my name?”

  We both look up to see Ms. Loft walking toward us. She’s wearing a loose-fitting shirt with a dark patch on the sleeve. Ms. Loft had a baby almost a year ago. That kid leaves food stains on her clothes all the time.

  “I have a flyer for you too, Farah,” she says, sitting beside me and waving a paper. “I hope you can attend Camp Crystals. It’s two weeks before you’ll start sixth grade at the Magnet Academy.”

  “Oh, definitely!” I respond. “You know I love all kinds of rocks and minerals. Maybe I can bring in my collection to show—”

  She laughs and pats my shoulder. “Somehow I knew this would be right for you.” She glances at Enrique and says, “Hey, the other kids are starting a badminton game. Why don’t you go join them?”

  “I don’t play badminton,” he says.

  “There’s a sport you don’t play?” I ask. Enrique plays every sport: basketball, baseball, soccer, and football. His father puts a lot of pressure on him. He wants Enrique to get a college scholarship.

  “Well… they’re serving chocolate ice cream over there,” Ms. Loft says.

  “I don’t do chocolate,” Enrique says.

  “They have other flavors.”

  “I don’t like ice cream in general.”

  “Enrique,” she says with a sigh. “I’d like to speak to Farah in private.”

  “Oh wow,” he says, pretending to be hurt while I snicker. He stands up and walks away, muttering in a joking way, “All you had to do was ask nicely!”

  Ms. Loft turns to me, and I stop chuckling. She looks as serious as a trip to the doctor.

  “Farah,” she says, “Camp Crystals is very expensive. I know your family situation.”

  What she’s trying to say nicely, in her own way, is that my family is basically poor.

  Everyone knows my parents work a lot. Still, we don’t have much money. Part of the problem is that Samir was born three months early. Because of that, he has tons of health bills. They eat up our spare money the way Samir gobbles M&Ms when Mama is not paying attention.

  “But,” Ms. Loft continues, “I can get you a partial scholarship. The PTA at Harbortown usually helps out with the funding.”

  “How much can they give me?” I ask.

  She points to Mr. Richie, who was my math teacher last year. He’s chatting with my baba by the grill. “Mr. Richie and I nominated you. The PTA already said they’d give you four hundred dollars.”

  “Oh, that’s super!” I raise my hands above my he
ad in delight. “Four hundred bucks!”

  “Well, that’s only forty percent of the cost.”

  “Forty percent?” I ask, my hands sinking down to my lap. “That means… the camp costs…” I look at the flyer, but there are no numbers there.

  “One thousand dollars,” she says in a sad voice. Then she adds, “Plus about twenty-five dollars for fees.”

  “So then I would still need…”

  “Six hundred dollars,” she says.

  “No,” I correct her. “Six hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

  I carefully fold Enrique’s paper back up into a plane, then launch it into the air.

  It does another curlicue in the wind and lands at my feet.

  Six hundred and twenty-five bucks.

  Holy hummus.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Six hundred and twenty-five dollars?” Mama shrieks in surprise.

  It’s the first day of summer vacation. Mama has just finished mopping the floor. “We have to start the season with a clean house,” she told us this morning.

  She’s a little obsessed with cleaning, if you ask me. I am dusting. Samir is supposed to be sweeping the kitchen floor, but he stopped when Mama raised her voice.

  Honestly, it takes a lot to make her yell. Like when I fell off the back deck and almost broke my arm. That time, her voice exploded out of fear.

  Now she stands in the living room, her hands on her hips. Her mouth is wide open in shock.

  I knew this wasn’t a good idea. It probably shocked her when I casually said, “Hey, do you have an extra six hundred and twenty-five dollars? I’d like to go to a cool summer camp at Magnet.”

  “Look,” I say, putting my hands out to the side, “I’m just asking.”

  “Farah, I would love to say yes.” She sighs. “We just don’t have the money.”

  “No problem!” I say. I force my lips to clamp shut and lift up in a smile. I hope it doesn’t look too fake, like the way clowns paint weird smiles on their faces. But it’s the best I can do.

  Samir stares at me, his eyes big and concerned.

  I wink at him.

  “I’m not dying to go or anything,” I say and move the dust rag along the coffee table.

  Mama gives me a funny look like she doesn’t believe me.

  I knew what the answer would be, right? I wonder as I dust. So why do I feel so disappointed? Why do I feel like someone just snatched a piece of candy right out of my hand?

  I turn to the old desk that sits under the big window in our living room and wipe the surface. We found this desk one Friday afternoon outside someone’s house. There we were, just driving to the park, and we saw it on the sidewalk. A perfect desk, with just a few scratches. Abandoned, ready for trash collection the next morning.

  Baba called his friend Majeed, who owns a pickup truck. “Quick, quick!” Baba told him. Within an hour, they’d lifted the desk into Majeed’s truck and brought it home. Mama cleaned it really well. Baba even painted it with a fresh coat of varnish.

  But as I dust it, a sudden, unhappy thought slips into my mind. It’s a great desk, but we only have it because someone else decided it was trash.

  Mama interrupts my pity party. “I’ll talk to Baba when he gets home,” she says. “Maybe we can make it work.”

  “Don’t worry about it!” I say again in a cheerful voice.

  After cleaning, there’s still half an hour before Baba comes home. Samir and I go play in the backyard.

  “Want to jump wope?” he asks me. Being born too early left Samir with a lot of challenges. One of them is that he has speech problems, but they are getting better. Right now, the only letter he can’t pronounce is R.

  I shrug. “I guess.”

  “How about kickball?” he asks.

  “Okay,” I say. “Whatever you want. I don’t care.”

  “Come on, Faw-wah,” he says sadly.

  My attitude stinks, I realize. I am upset, but that doesn’t mean Samir needs to feel bad. It’s like when one person in class does something wrong and everyone has to miss recess.

  “Want to polish my rocks?” I ask.

  He nods happily.

  I hurry inside to get my rock polishing kit from my room. The “kit” is really just a plastic box with some liquid soap, a rag, and an old toothbrush. I add soap to the box, then fill it up with water until it’s bubbly and frothy. Meanwhile, Samir grabs my rock collection from the bottom shelf of my small bookcase.

  I keep my rocks in two old cookie tins. I started collecting the rocks back in first grade. Most are rocks I found myself. Others are ones that Baba found while working in the quarry.

  Here are my top five most special rocks:

  A geode that Allie gave me for my birthday one year

  A chunk of quartz that my second-grade science teacher let me have

  A hunk of red stone that Baba dug up in the quarry

  Limestone that Winston Suarez found in his grandmother’s backyard when they were digging to build a pool

  A smooth, rounded tiger eye stone that my fifth-grade math teacher, Mr. Richie, gave me when I got accepted to the Magnet Academy

  “This one is gwoss,” Samir says, picking up a hunk of black stone that is caked in dirt. I found it last week at the park.

  “I’ll clean it,” I say. I trade him a flat rock that’s just dusty, one that I found in our yard.

  We work quietly, scrubbing the rocks till they shine. But the whole time, I can tell my brother wants to ask me something.

  “Faw-wah, why do you want to go to the camp?” he finally asks.

  “It’d be a lot of fun for me,” I say. “Imagine if there was a Tommy Turtle camp.” Tommy Turtle is his favorite cartoon character.

  “I would love that!” Samir says.

  “That’s how I feel,” I tell him. I dig my rag into a crevice in the rock.

  “I have thwee bucks,” he says, “and six pennies.” He smiles at me. “You can have them, Faw-wah.”

  So now there are two opposite things happening inside of my heart. Number 1: I am still disappointed. But Number 2: I want to cry from happiness because I have a great brother.

  Before I can respond, we hear a weird noise in the driveway. It sounds like a giant is crunching pebbles between its teeth.

  And it’s getting closer.

  CHAPTER 3

  Samir and I run to the front of our house. I half-expect to see the Cyclops on our lawn, crunching someone’s mailbox in its jaws or noisily devouring the neighbor’s fence.

  Instead, we watch Baba slowly driving our family car—a rusty little Toyota—into the driveway. Baba shuts off the engine, looking relieved but also frustrated. When he steps out of the car, we say hi. But instead of coming over to kiss us as usual, he pops open the hood. “Hello, habibi Samir. Habibti Farah,” he calls to us. “Go inside. I’ll be right there.” And his head disappears underneath the hood.

  A few minutes later, while washing our hands in the bathroom sink, we hear Baba step into the hallway.

  “Hi, Abdallah,” Mama says.

  “Hello, my lovely beoble,” he says, looking tired. Like Mama, Baba’s first language is Arabic. Mama came to the United States when she was my age. Baba arrived when he was twenty-eight years old, so his accent is way thicker than hers. There is no p or v in Arabic, so Baba usually slips in the letter b instead.

  It’s pretty cute, honestly, especially when he says things like “Balentine’s Day.” Or “bebberoni bizza.”

  “What was that noise?” I ask him.

  “The car is habing trouble again,” he says, glancing at my mother. “Freddy at work had to jump-start it for me today. I’m lucky I made it home.”

  “Is it the battery?” Mama asks.

  “I hobe that’s all,” he says, “but it’s making a we
ird noise.” He walks into the other room to put away his uniform shirt. Mama follows him.

  I know she must’ve told him about Camp Crystals because when they return, he smiles sadly at me. “So, habibti,” he says, putting his arm around my shoulder. “This camb.”

  “Really, it’s okay,” I say.

  “I wish we could send you, my dear Farah, but it’s imbossible right now. Combletely imbossible.” He sighs heavily. “You’re not upset with your mama and baba?”

  “I already forgot about it,” I lie.

  Here’s the thing about my parents: It’s really hard to be mad at them. Even when I want brand-name sneakers but all they can afford is a discount brand. Even when I want to buy popcorn and candy at the movie theater, but Mama sneaks baggies of M&Ms and pretzels in her purse instead. My parents work really hard. So being mad doesn’t make any sense.

  Baba believes me, and we sit down to eat dinner. Mama made lentil soup. I devour it. Mama works part-time, but she always finds a way to make nice dinners for us. Sometimes I help her. The best thing I can make is tabbouleh salad. Baba likes to cook on the weekends. His favorite thing to make is pancakes and waffles. Sometimes we eat breakfast food for dinner when Baba cooks (not that Samir and I complain about that).

  While eating our soup, we talk about the weekend.

  “I promised to bring hummus for church on Sunday,” Mama says. She’s talking about St. Jude Orthodox Church. That’s where all the Arab Christian families in Harbortown go.

  “We should not talk too much about Farah getting into the Magnet Academy while we are there,” she adds.

  “Why not?” Samir asks.

  “Lana Khoury didn’t get in,” Mama says.

  “Wow,” I say, shocked. Lana and I used to get along, but not anymore. For a whole year, Lana had been talking about Magnet like she was already going there. I actually feel kind of bad.

  “It’s very competitive,” Mama says. Then she asks what else we want to do this weekend.

  “The library is doing its summer reading challenge again,” Baba says. “We could go sign them up.”