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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780310568414 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Zonderkidz |
| Publication date: | 08/30/2009 |
| Series: | Faithgirlz!: The Sophie Series , #10 |
| Sold by: | HarperCollins Publishing |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 961 KB |
| Age Range: | 9 - 12 Years |
About the Author
Nancy Rue has written over 100 books for girls, is the editor of the Faithgirlz Bible, and is a popular speaker and radio guest with her expertise in tween and teen issues. She and husband, Jim, have raised a daughter of their own and now live in Tennessee.
Read an Excerpt
Sophie Loves Jimmy
By Nancy Rue
Zondervan
Copyright © 2006 Nancy RueAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-310-71025-1
Chapter One
Cynthia Cyber, Internet Investigator, leaned toward the computer screen, eyes nearly popping from her head. Could it be that a kid would actually be enough of a bully to print something like THAT for all the middle-school world to see? Impossible-and yet, there it was, a sentence that was already showing its ugly self on computers in bedrooms all over Poquoson, Virginia, and maybe even beyond. It was a sentence that could ravage the social life of its seventh-grade victim before she even checked her email."I cannot allow it!" Cynthia Cyber, Internet Investigator, cried. She lunged for the keyboard, fingers already flying -
"It's a seven-passenger van, Little Bit," said a voice from the driver's seat. "You don't have to sit in Jimmy's lap."
Sophie LaCroix jolted back from Sophie-world at several megahertz per second-or something like that. She found herself staring right into Jimmy Wythe's swimming-pool-blue eyes. She had no choice. She really was in his lap.
A round, red spot had formed at the top of each of Jimmy's cheekbones. Sophie was sure her entire face was that color.
"Do you want to sit on this side?" Jimmy said as Sophie scrambled her tiny-for-a-twelve-year-old body back into her own seat. "We could trade."
"I don't think that's what she had in mind."Hannah turned around from the van's middle seat in front of them, blinking her eyes against her contact lenses practically at the speed of sound. She was Sophie's inspiration to keep wearing glasses. "Personally, I think seventh grade's a little young to be dating. I know I'm only a year older, but-"
Mrs. Clayton didn't turn around in the front seat, but her trumpet voice blared its way back to them just fine. "There is actually a world of difference between seventh graders and eighth graders."
Yeah, Sophie thought, fanning her still-red face with a folder. Eighth graders think it's all about the boy-girl thing. I am SO not dating Jimmy Wythe. Or anybody else! EWWW. She scooted a couple of inches farther away from Jimmy.
It wasn't that Jimmy wasn't a whole lot more decent than most of the boys at Great Marsh Middle School. He was one of the three guys who made films with Sophie and her friends. They didn't make disgusting noises with their armpits and burp the alphabet in the cafeteria-like some other boys she knew. But date him-or anybody else?
I do not BELIEVE so!
"So, are you guys going out or what?" Hannah said.
"Not that it's any of your business." Oliver, the eighth grader next to her, gave one of the rubber bands on his braces a snap with his finger. Why, Sophie wondered, did boys have to do stuff like that?
"Oh, come on, dish, Little Bit," Coach Nanini said from behind the wheel. He grinned at Sophie in the rearview mirror in that way that always made Sophie think of a big happy gorilla with no hair. She liked to think of him as Coach Virile.
She had to grin back at him. "We're not going out," Jimmy said. The red spots still punctuated his cheekbones. "We're just, like, friends."
Mrs. Clayton did turn around this time, although her helmet of too-blonde hair didn't move at all. "That's very noble of you, Jimmy, to get Sophie out of the hot seat like that. You're a gentleman."
"Ooh, Mrs. C," Coach Virile said, still grinning. "Don't you know that's the kiss of death for the adolescent male?"
"It's okay," Jimmy said. He pulled his big-from-doing-gymnastics shoulders all the way up to his now-very-red ears. "It's what my dad's teaching me to be."
"Bravo," Mrs. Clayton said. "I'd like to bring him in and have him train the entire male population of the school."
Coach Virile's voice went up even higher than it usually did, which was pretty squeaky for a guy whose beefy arms stuck out from both sides of the driver's seat. "I thought I was doing that, Mrs. C."
"I wish you'd step it up a little," she said.
Sophie glanced sideways at Jimmy, who was currently ducking his head of short-cropped, sun-blond hair. I guess he is kind of a gentleman, Sophie thought. She had never heard him imitate her high-pitched voice like those Fruit Loop boys did, or seen him knock some girl's pencil off her desk just to be obnoxious. And somehow he managed to be pretty nice and still cool at the same time. The Corn Pops definitely thought so. The we-have-everything girls were always chasing after him.
"So if you're not going out," Hannah said, "why were you in his lap?"
She was turned all the way around now, arms resting on the back of her seat as if she were going to spend the rest of the trip from Richmond exploring the topic. Oliver groaned.
"Inquiring minds want to know," Hannah said.
NOSY minds, you mean, Sophie thought. But she sighed and said, "I wasn't really sitting in his lap. Well, I was, only that wasn't my plan. I didn't even know I was doing it, because I was being-well, somebody else-and Jimmy's window was a computer screen-all our stuff's piled up and blocking my window so I couldn't use it-anyway, it all started with the conference. I really got into it."
Coach Virile laughed, spattering the windshield. "We can always count on you to be honest, Little Bit."
"Let me get this straight," said Oliver. "You were pretending to be, like, some imaginary person?"
"More like a character for our next film."
Jimmy, still blotchy, nodded. "For Film Club. Sophie always comes up with the main character."
"I play around with it some before I tell the whole group," Sophie said. "I try not to get too carried away with it in school." She didn't add that if she got in trouble for daydreaming, her father would take away her movie camera.
"Ya think?" Hannah said. She put on her serious face. "A little advice: don't tell that to a whole lot of people at Great Marsh. You'd be committing social suicide."
"Especially don't let it get out on the Internet," Oliver said. "Everybody'll think you're weird."
"I am weird," Sophie said. "Well, unique. Who isn't?" That was the motto of Sophie and her friends, the Corn Flakes: Keep the power God gives you to be yourself.
"I may be weird," Hannah said, "but I do not go around acting out imaginary characters, okay?"
You wouldn't be very good at it, Sophie thought. She ran an elfin hand through her short wedge of honey-colored hair and squinted her brown eyes through her glasses.
"What?" Hannah said.
"Well," Sophie said slowly, "you might not be unique in that way, but you are somehow. Everybody is."
Hannah's eyebrows twitched. "I try not to let that get out. I'd like to get through middle school without being the punch line of everybody's jokes, thank you very much."
"Speaking of bullying." Coach Virile cleared his throat.
"Yes," Mrs. Clayton said. "What did you glean from the conference?"
"Can I 'glean' if I don't know what it means?" Oliver said.
"It means what did we learn," Sophie said. It came in handy to have a best-best friend who almost knew the whole dictionary. Fiona, she knew, would be proud.
Hannah gave Oliver a poke. "So what did you glean, genius?"
Oliver held up his folder, which had the shield of the Commonwealth of Virginia on it, and the words "Governor's Conference on Cyber Bullying." He flipped it open and read, "'Seventeen million children in America use the Internet. Twenty to thirty percent of them report being victims of bullying through email, instant messaging, chat rooms, websites, online diaries, and cell phone text messages.'"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sophie Loves Jimmy by Nancy Rue Copyright ©2006 by Nancy Rue. Excerpted by permission.
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