The Elephant in the Room by Holly Goldberg Sloan

Author:Holly Goldberg Sloan [Sloan, Holly Goldberg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

22.

Mateo went up to his room after Sila left and took out his homework. It was always the first thing he did after school, because he wasn’t allowed to play video games until his mother could see he’d done everything that was due the next day.

But on this afternoon when he looked at the assignments, he found he had trouble concentrating on the work because he was going to see an elephant on Saturday. And with Sila, who until recently had never seemed to him to be interesting in any way.

Elephants, he knew, were amazing animals and this trip was going to be something very different from a regular weekend.

Mateo put the schoolwork aside and went online to begin reading about elephants. He was intrigued to learn that at one time elephants had been transported on trains, which endlessly fascinated him. He found a picture of an elephant getting off a Ringling Brothers Circus train in 1963 and there were little kids sitting on a curb very close by, which seemed dangerous. Mateo studied the picture, taking in every detail. He then found pictures of elephants in Africa, with people on safari. He was interested in the details of their camouflage clothing.

Then he started thinking about Saturday. Why did Sila ask him to go with her? Could he trust her to be nice to him? What if it was some kind of trap? The kids at school had teased him in the past and he had learned to keep his guard up. Thinking about Saturday was now making him anxious.

He had been at his desk for more than two hours when his mother knocked on the door, announcing it was dinnertime. He looked at her and saw that there were stains on the bottoms of her pant legs. That must have happened when she dropped the teacup.

Mateo hated it when he broke something. His mother was not expecting to see Sila, which was maybe why she dropped the cup. Or it was possible that she didn’t have a good grip on the handle and the accident was just bad muscle control.

Or it could have been both things, because sometimes there was a main factor and a contributing factor as well. The world was more complicated than people thought.

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