Read Sky Jumpers Series, Book 1 for Free Online Page A

potato forward. One twist of my wrist, and the potato didn’t touch the knife at all. The second twist of my wrist actually worked well. I relaxed my shoulders and smiled.
    I pushed the potato in a bit farther and gave the handle another twist. One of the knobby parts of the potato that rivaled my dad’s thumbs for size and sturdiness twisted from underneath and knocked the knife upward. I didn’t even have time to react, so I was still pushing when the knob cleared the knife. With the force of my push, the potato part went forward too far, the forked sticks splintered, and the handle flew out of my hand. It, along with the potato, skidded across the cement floor and came to rest right in front of Ellie.
    I couldn’t move—I could only stare at the potato, and then down at where a sharp splinter of wood had lodged itself in my palm. My vision blurred as I stared at the bead of blood that slowly oozed out of my wound.
    Silence crowded the room. Awkward silence. Unnerving silence. Eventually I pulled my eyes to what was even more painful than my hand—my broken potato peeler.
    Mrs. Romanek looked from my invention to me, then glanced at Mr. Hudson like she was embarrassed he was in the room to witness such a spectacular failure of one of her students.
    “Sometimes inventions don’t work out like you planned.” Mr. Hudson smiled his kind smile, like he understood I’d tried my best. I blinked back tears and tried to swallow the emotion pushing its way up. Not only had Mr. Hudson been my inventions teacher for two years, but he’d come to every Inventions Day since I was four. He knew my history with inventing. And at that moment, it felt like a history that was impossible to change.
    “Hope,” Mrs. Romanek said.
    I looked away from Mr. Hudson and tried to focus on my teacher. “Yes?”
    “We’ve talked about Harvest Festival projects for months! The concept drawings I approved were better than this. And you had four weeks to work on it during Harvest Break! Did you just blow it off and throw something together at the last minute?”
    Actually, it had been longer than the two months we’d worked on the project in class. I’d been planning my invention triumph since last year, when my weed-pulling invention turned disastrous. Every pair of eyes in the room focused on me, and my face burned. Was it worse to tell her I’d worked on it for so long, or would I look less stupid if I said I did it last night? In the end, honesty won out and I blurted, “I tried really hard!”
    Mrs. Romanek shook her head and looked down. I couldn’t tell if she was more disappointed in me or inherself for not producing better results from a student. After what seemed like an eternity, she looked up and met my eyes. “I’m sorry, Hope, but I can’t allow this”—she gestured toward my pile of sticks—“at the inventions show. You won’t be able to enter an invention this year.”
    It felt like the ceiling collapsed on me, and all I could hear was the shocked gasps from my classmates. I stumbled toward the others, dropped to the floor, and told myself it didn’t matter. But I didn’t believe myself. Of course it mattered! And not just to Mrs. Romanek and Mr. Hudson, or to my dad, or for my grade—it mattered more than anything else to
everyone
. And I couldn’t do it.
    “Carina Toriella,” Mrs. Romanek called out, her voice sounding a world away.
    The pulsing of the blood in my brain was so strong and my insides were so hot, I couldn’t hear anything going on around me. I stared out the high window at the Shovel—a rock formation at the very top of the mountain that looked like a shovel without its handle—which marked the direction we went to sky jump. I wanted to go there, above the Bomb’s Breath, where I could escape everything. Where goals I spent months working on didn’t fall apart with one wrong twist of my wrist.
    When Carina finished showing her invention, she sat next to me and put her hand on my knee.