1 Ch1-Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa

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Chapter 1 Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa "Me llano A.J. y odio la escuela." That's "My name is A.J. and I hate school" in Spanish. Miss Holly translated it for me. She's the Spanish teacher at Ella Mentry School. "It's not fair," I said as our class walked down the hall to the language lab. "Why

do we have to learn a whole nother lan- guage?" "Nother' isn't a word, Arlo," said Andrea Young. "You can't even speak English correctly." Andrea is this girl in my class with curly brown hair who thinks she knows everything. She calls me by my real name because she knows I hate it. "Nother' is too a word," I told her. "Is not." "Is too." We went back and forth like that for a while. Andrea said she looked up "nother" in the dictionary once, and it wasn't there. She's probably the only kid

in the world who keeps a dictionary on her desk so she can look up words and show everybody how smart she is. "'Another' is a word," Andrea said, "but not 'nother.'" "Oh yeah?" I said. "If 'nother' isn't a word, then why did you just say it?" Nah-nah-nah boo-boo on her. Andrea was wearing this dumb hat that she made all by herself in her knit- ting class. Andrea takes classes in every- thing. She probably even takes a class in how to be annoying, because that's the one thing she's good at. After walking a million hundred miles, we finally got to the language lab. What a

dumb name. Labs are supposed to have test tubes and mad scientists and hunch- backed guys named Igor who limp. Our language lab is just a plain old room where we learn Spanish. What's up with that? "Isn't learning Spanish fun?" Andrea said to her crybaby friend Emily. "I hope Miss Holly teaches us—" She didn't get the chance to finish her sentence because at that very second Miss Holly danced in the door. Miss Holly was playing a guitar and she had a big basket of fruit on her head. She was singing some crazy song and spin- ning around and stamping her feet. Her

red dress had pic- tures of reindeer on the back. On the front were blinking lights and the words "Happy Holidays!" When she finished the song, Miss Holly yelled, "Olay!" which is the name of the stuff my mom smears on her face at night. "iFeliz Navidad!" Miss Holly said. "Happy Hanukkah! Kwanzaa Yenu Iwe Na Heri!" "What the heck does that mean?" I asked.