Jazz Off-Key

by Dandi Daley Mackall

Overview

Written by bestselling author Dandi Daley mackall, in this series girls use Internet technology to unite and connect in powerful new ways. Discover a world where girls come together from completely different backgrounds and beliefs to start a journey of faith and self-discovery. When Jazz gets her big break—her own one-woman art show for Big Lake’s Spring Fling celebration—she’s ecstatic … until Kendra, her special needs sister, ruins her paintings by trying to make them happier and more colorful. Jazz discovers she can’t control her anger, and her rage at family and friends grows to the point that she recognizes the need for Christ to cover her sins and change her from the inside. DANDI DALEY MACKALL won her first writing contest when she was ten years old with fifty words on why she wanted to be a batboy. She won, but they wouldn’t let a girl be a batboy. It was her first taste of rejection. She bounced back and has since published 400 books. Dandi lives in rural West Salem, OH, and enjoys her husband and kids, who will still, on occasion, be up for a game of family softball.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780310831761
Publisher:	Zonderkidz
Publication date:	09/13/2009
Series:	Faithgirlz!: Blog On! Series , #7
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishing
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	9 - 12 Years

About the Author

Dandi Daley Mackall loves God, children, words, and animals. Her nearly 500 books for children and grown-ups have sold more than four million copies worldwide. She won the ECPA Christian Book Award for Best Children’s Book 2015 and multiple Mom’s Choice Awards, as well as ALA Best Book, NY Public Library Top Pick, Children’s Book Council Award of Excellence, and the Helen Keating Ott Award for Contributions to Children’s Literature. Her novel My Boyfriends’ Dogs is now a Hallmark Movie. Dandi writes from rural Ohio, where she lives with her family, including horses, dogs, cats, and an occasional squirrel, deer, or raccoon.

 

Read an Excerpt

Jazz Off-Key

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By Dandi Daley Mackall

Zondervan

Copyright © 2007 Dandi Daley Mackall
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-71265-7

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Chapter One

Jasmine Fletcher dipped her brush into the color she'd invented, "grownck"-a mixture of gray, brown, and black-and applied the final touch to her latest masterpiece. It had taken her all month, but she'd finally created a textured abstract that captured the smell of the school cafeteria. She called it Hot Lunch.

All she had left to do was sign her painting. She traded to a fine-point brush, chose grownck, and painted the letters: "J-A-Z-"

"Jasmine?" The knock and door opening struck at the exact same moment, the moment of her signing Jazz. The last Z jerked and slid like a lightning bolt down the side of her painting.

"It's ruined!" she cried, frantically reaching for a paint rag. She felt, rather than saw, the presence of her mother behind her.

"Jasmine, I'm not your answering service."

"How could you be? You don't wait for answers. You just barge on in," Jazz muttered, dabbing at the stray streak of paint. She'd caught it before it dried, so the damage wasn't too bad. She could fix it.

"What did you say, Jasmine? Don't mumble."

Jazz didn't feel like getting into it with her mother. They'd been at each other more than usual lately, and the whole week of Easterbreak stretched in front of them. She wiped off the last bit of paint, wadded her rag, and turned to face her mother.

Tosha Fletcher was synonymous with style and sophistication. She wore a tailored pinstripe skirt and jacket, and her hair curved magically into a knot at the base of her neck. Jazz's hair waved and curled at all angles, and that was the way she liked it. Her mother, of course, hated it.

"Did you want something?" Jazz asked, trying to control her voice.

"I want you to take care of your own business and let me conduct mine."

"That's what I was doing ... until I was so rudely interrupted." Jazz knew as soon as the words were out of her mouth that they were fighting words. But she couldn't take them back now, even if she wanted to.

"Interrupted?" Mom's dark eyes narrowed. The skin around her jaw tightened. "Let me tell you about interrupted. That's the fourth call from that man. Foley? Or whatever his name is."

"Farley." If she'd really talked to him four times, she should have gotten his name straight, Jazz thought. For once, she kept her thoughts to herself.

"I have work to do, Jasmine. I can't spend the entire weekend fielding phone calls for my daughter. I've left messages all over the house for you to call him back. Why haven't you?"

Jazz had seen the notes. She just hadn't gotten the nerve to call him back. A month earlier she'd practically twisted his arm to get him to hang one of her paintings in his gallery. "Gallery" wasn't exactly the right word for Mr. Farley's shop. He sold frames and craft kits and how-to booklets, along with a few prints.

"Well? Why haven't you called him back? Apparently, he's going to keep calling until you do. What does he want?"

"You're the one who talked to him. Didn't he tell you?" But Jazz felt pretty sure she knew why he was calling. That was why she kept putting off calling him back. When Mr. Farley had agreed to hang her painting in his store, he'd given the experiment one month. The month was up. It was time for her to take back her painting. She'd really had high hopes of selling it too.

"Jasmine, don't take that tone with me." Her mother took in a deep breath.

Jazz started to defend herself. Then instead, she turned her back on her mother and stuck her brushes into the cleaning jar. "Mr. Farley just wants me to pick up my painting."

"Then go pick it up."

Jazz sloshed her brushes in the jar and watched the clear liquid take on the tint of grownck.

"Now, Jasmine! Before that man calls here again."

Jazz sighed. "All right." She might as well get it over with. Besides, any creative juices had dried up under the piercing glare of her mother.

Jazz stepped out of her house into sunshine that surprised her. In Big Lake, Ohio, the sun went into hibernation sometime in October and, with rare and coveted exceptions, didn't show its face again until May. Yet here it was only the second week in April, and Jazz found herself squinting at the intense sunlight.

"Heads up!" Ty shouted.

Jazz knew her little brother well enough to assume there was a ball headed for her. She ducked just as the baseball whizzed by. "Ty!" she cried.

"Sorry about that," Ty said, walking up the sidewalk, his leather mitt in hand.

Mick, or Michaela, Ty's best buddy, also a seventh grader, jogged up from the opposite direction. She wore jeans and a Cleveland Indians shirt and cap. "Jazz! Are you okay?" She slid off her glove and tossed the ball back to Ty.

"I hear there's a great ball field at the park. No windows. No innocent bystanders." Jazz tried to soften her words with a smile, but she was too wound from her latest mother encounter.

Mick glanced at Ty. "Want to go to the park?"

"Sure."

Mick looked at her watch. "We've got almost two hours." She grinned at Jazz. "See you at noon."

Jazz had almost forgotten about the blog meeting. She and some friends ran a website called That's What You Think! The others blogged. Jazz drew cartoons. Mick was webmaster. Two hours would give her plenty of time to pick up her painting at Farley's Frames, bring it home, and still whip up a cartoon for this week's blog.

She started down the jonquil-lined sidewalk. The gardener had planted clusters of red tulips closer to the house. Jazz inhaled the sweet scent of blossoms and buds. She complained a lot about the show-off grandeur of The Fletcher Estate, but on mornings like this it was hard not to enjoy the cultivated grounds. Two mourning doves called back and forth, their soulful notes reminding Jazz of the whistle sound she and Ty used to make by blowing into their folded hands.

As she turned toward town, she gazed up at the blue sky through tree limbs dotted with pale green. The view helped her unclench, slow down. She could see God here. Feel God in the sun on her face and the cool breeze reaching inside her jacket. Hear God in the honking of geese in the distance. Smell God in the new life of spring all around her. Jazz had tried hard not to believe in God. It had only been a couple of months ago when she'd given in and admitted to herself that the world must have been created. And the Master Creator, the Artist, was God.

Since coming to the realization that there really was a Creator God, Jazz had experienced moments like this, times when she sensed God's presence. She was grateful for these brief windows to God in the middle of her crazy life. It made her wish she could have God all the time-not just when she felt touched by nature.

By the time Jazz reached Farley's Frames on Main, her little window of peace was a thing of the past. She'd had to wait forever to get across Highway 42. A couple of idiotic guys gave her a hard time when she cut through Big Lake College. And a minivan splashed her as she crossed Main Street.

Jazz paused outside the shop and collected her thoughts. A month wasn't very long to hang a painting in a gallery. So what if nobody had bought her painting? Was that any reason to yank it off the wall and make her take it back home? People had to get used to seeing original art in Farley's store. That took time. If she could just convince Mr. Farley to leave the painting where it was for another month, maybe a buyer would turn up.

Determined to make Farley see the light, Jazz marched up the steps and into the little shop. Although she used to visit Farley's Frames every day, lately, she'd only gone in on shipment days when he got in prints from New York. She liked to be the first to go through them.

Over half of the store was dedicated to Mr. Farley's frame business. On the back wall partial frames were displayed like nestling Ls. Bins of prints and craft packets took the center of the store.

Jazz's painting had the best spot in the shop, high over the checkout counter, where every paying customer had to look at it, like it or not. Farley, knowing his clientele, had asked Jazz for something realistic or impressionistic, rather than abstract. Jazz had given him the impressionistic painting she'd done of Storm Novelo, one of her friends on the blog team. Storm was mestiza, part Mayan and part Spanish, and Jazz had painted her in the spirit of her ancestors, suggesting a tribal village in the background. Jazz would have preferred giving Mr. Farley one of her abstracts, but the painting of Storm didn't look half bad displayed against the beige wall with dark rafters above.

"Admiring your own work?" Mr. Farley always startled Jazz a little bit. He was tall, bone thin, with deep-set, hollow eyes that would have looked right at home in a skeleton. "I was about to give up on you, Jasmine."

"Sorry, Mr. Farley. I've been busy. Painting and all. I know why you've been calling, and-"

"You do?"

"But it's only been a month, and that's not very long in the art world." Jazz was talking fast. She wanted to get in her whole argument for keeping her painting on display.

"Yes. That's what I wanted to talk to you about."

"But would it be such a big deal to keep the painting where it is for another month? A lot of artists have to wait years to be discovered. A month isn't long! How many customers do you even have in here in a month?"

Mr. Farley opened his mouth to answer, but Jazz cut him off.

"What else would you put there? I mean, my painting has as good a chance of selling as another Norman Rockwell or some of those motel-wall paintings of ships and flowers you hang around here. How many still-life vases can one store handle? Besides, what about promoting the arts? Isn't it your civic duty or something? I'll bet there's a big tax deduction you can take for leaving my painting up." Jazz's mother was very big on tax deductions.

"Wait a minute, Jasmine."

"Mr. Farley, please!" Jazz tried to rein in her desperation, but it was morphing into anger and she couldn't stop it. "Thirty more days! That's all I'm asking! One lousy spot on your whole stinking wall? Why can't you-?"

"Jasmine Fletcher!" Mr. Farley shouted. Jazz had never heard the man speak above a whisper. She stopped in midsentence. "I'm agreeing with you, Jasmine. I fully intend to keep your painting displayed."

"You do?"

"That's what I've been trying to tell you. It's true that nobody has purchased the painting. But there has been interest."

"There has? Interest? In my painting?"

"What I'd like to do is increase visibility."

Jazz didn't get it. "Increase what?"

"Big Lake is having its Spring Fling celebration next weekend."

Jazz and her family never joined in, but she knew the town had a big Easter-egg hunt and a pancake breakfast put on by the Lion's Club. "I don't-"

"I'd like to have an open house Friday evening. And I want to display your work. Jasmine, how would you like to have your own one-woman art show?"

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Jazz Off-Key by Dandi Daley Mackall Copyright © 2007 by Dandi Daley Mackall. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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