THE HOLES by Louis Sachar

For Handwriting Practice

1
There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in
Texas. That was over a hundred years ago. Now it is just a dry, at wasteland.
There used to be a town of Green Lake as well. The town shriveled and dried up along with the
lake, and the people who lived there.
During the summer the daytime temperature hovers around ninety- ve degrees in the shade—if
you can nd any shade. There’s not much shade in a big dry lake.
The only trees are two old oaks on the eastern edge of the “lake.” A hammock is stretched
between the two trees, and a log cabin stands behind that.
The campers are forbidden to lie in the hammock. It belongs to the Warden. The Warden owns
the shade.
Out on the lake, rattlesnakes and scorpions nd shade under rocks and in the holes dug by the
campers.
Here’s a good rule to remember about rattlesnakes and scorpions: If you don’t bother them, they
won’t bother you.
Usually.
Being bitten by a scorpion or even a rattlesnake is not the worst thing that can happen to you.
You won’t die.
Usually.
Sometimes a camper will try to be bitten by a scorpion, or even a small rattlesnake. Then he will
get to spend a day or two recovering in his tent, instead of having to dig a hole out on the lake.
But you don’t want to be bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard. That’s the worst thing that can
happen to you. You will die a slow and painful death.
Always.
If you get bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard, you might as well go into the shade of the oak trees
and lie in the hammock.
There is nothing anyone can do to you anymore.

2
The reader is probably asking: Why would anyone go to Camp Green Lake?
Most campers weren’t given a choice. Camp Green Lake is a camp for bad boys.
If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a
good boy.
That was what some people thought.

IUM Tutoring & Consulting 1/4 Edited by Kwak Sang In

fi
fi
fi
THE HOLES by Louis Sachar
For Handwriting Practice

Stanley Yelnats was given a choice. The judge said, “You may go to jail, or you may go to Camp
Green Lake.”
Stanley was from a poor family. He had never been to camp before.

3
Stanley Yelnats was the only passenger on the bus, not counting the driver or the guard. The
guard sat next to the driver with his seat turned around facing Stanley. A ri e lay across his lap.
Stanley was sitting about ten rows back, handcu ed to his armrest. His backpack lay on the seat
next to him. It contained his toothbrush, toothpaste, and a box of stationery his mother had given
him. He’d promised to write to her at least once a week.
He looked out the window, although there wasn’t much to see—mostly elds of hay and cotton.
He was on a long bus ride to nowhere. The bus wasn’t air- conditioned, and the hot, heavy air was
almost as sti ing as the handcu s.
Stanley and his parents had tried to pretend that he was just going away to camp for a while,
just like rich kids do. When Stanley was younger he used to play with stu ed animals, and pretend
the animals were at camp. Camp Fun and Games he called it. Sometimes he’d have them play
soccer with a marble. Other times they’d run an obstacle course, or go bungee jumping o a table,
tied to broken rubber bands. Now Stanley tried to pretend he was going to Camp Fun and Games.
Maybe he’d make some friends, he thought. At least he’d get to swim in the lake.
He didn’t have any friends at home. He was overweight and the kids at his middle school often

teased him about his size. Even his teachers sometimes made cruel comments without realizing
it. On his last day of school, his math teacher, Mrs. Bell, taught ratios. As an example, she chose
the heaviest kid in the class and the lightest kid in the class, and had them weigh themselves.
Stanley weighed three times as much as the other boy. Mrs. Bell wrote the ratio on the board, 3:1,
unaware of how much embarrassment she had caused both of them.
Stanley was arrested later that day.
He looked at the guard who sat slumped in his seat and wondered if he had fallen asleep. The
guard was wearing sunglasses, so Stanley couldn’t see his eyes.
Stanley was not a bad kid. He was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. He’d just
been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was all because of his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig- stealing-great-great-grandfather!
He smiled. It was a family joke. Whenever anything went wrong, they always blamed Stanley’s
no-good- dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather.

IUM Tutoring & Consulting 2/4 Edited by Kwak Sang In

fl
ff
ff
fi
ff
fl
 THE HOLES by Louis Sachar
For Handwriting Practice

Supposedly, he had a great-great-grandfather who had stolen a pig from a one-legged Gypsy,
and she put a curse on him and all his descendants. Stanley and his parents didn’t believe in curses,
of course, but whenever anything went wrong, it felt good to be able to blame someone.
Things went wrong a lot. They always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He looked out the window at the vast emptiness. He watched the rise and fall of a telephone
wire. In his mind he could hear his father’s gru voice softly singing to him.
“If only, if only,” the woodpecker sighs,
“The bark on the tree was just a little bit softer.”
While the wolf waits below, hungry and lonely,
He cries to the moo—oo—oon,
“If only, if only.”
It was a song his father used to sing to him. The melody was sweet and sad, but Stanley’s
favorite part was when his father would howl the word “moon.”
The bus hit a small bump and the guard sat up, instantly alert.
Stanley’s father was an inventor. To be a successful inventor you need three things: intelligence,
perseverance, and just a little bit of luck.
Stanley’s father was smart and had a lot of perseverance. Once he started a project he would
work on it for years, often going days without sleep. He just never had any luck.
Every time an experiment failed, Stanley could hear him cursing his dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-
great- grandfather.
Stanley’s father was also named Stanley Yelnats. Stanley’s father’s full name was Stanley Yelnats
II. Our Stanley is Stanley Yelnats IV.
Everyone in his family had always liked the fact that “Stanley Yelnats” was spelled the same
frontward and backward. So they kept naming their sons Stanley. Stanley was an only child, as was
every other Stanley Yelnats before him.
All of them had something else in common. Despite their awful luck, they always remained
hopeful. As Stanley’s father liked to say, “I learn from failure.”
But perhaps that was part of the curse as well. If Stanley and his father weren’t always hopeful,
then it wouldn’t hurt so much every time their hopes were crushed.
“Not every Stanley Yelnats has been a failure,” Stanley’s mother often pointed out, whenever
Stanley or his father became so discouraged that they actually started to believe in the curse. The
rst Stanley Yelnats, Stanley’s great-grandfather, had made a fortune in the stock market. “He
couldn’t have been too unlucky.”
At such times she neglected to mention the bad luck that befell the rst Stanley Yelnats. He lost
his entire fortune when he was moving from New York to California. His stagecoach was robbed by
the outlaw Kissin’ Kate Barlow.

IUM Tutoring & Consulting 3/4 Edited by Kwak Sang In

fi
ff
fi
THE HOLES by Louis Sachar
For Handwriting Practice

If it weren’t for that, Stanley’s family would now be living in a mansion on a beach in California.
Instead, they were crammed in a tiny apartment that smelled of burning rubber and foot odor.
If only, if only...
The apartment smelled the way it did because Stanley’s father was trying to invent a way to
recycle old sneakers. “The rst person who nds a use for old sneakers,” he said, “will be a very
rich man.”
It was this latest project that led to Stanley’s arrest.
The bus ride became increasingly bumpy because the road was no longer paved.
Actually, Stanley had been impressed when he rst found out that his great-grandfather was
robbed by Kissin’ Kate Barlow. True, he would have preferred living on the beach in California, but
it was still kind of cool to have someone in your family robbed by a famous outlaw.
Kate Barlow didn’t actually kiss Stanley’s great- grandfather. That would have been really cool,
but she only kissed the men she killed. Instead, she robbed him and left him stranded in the middle
of the desert.
“He was lucky to have survived,” Stanley’s mother was quick to point out.

The bus was slowing down. The guard grunted as he stretched his arms.
“Welcome to Camp Green Lake,” said the driver.
Stanley looked out the dirty window. He couldn’t see a lake.
And hardly anything was green.

IUM Tutoring & Consulting 4/4 Edited by Kwak Sang In

fi
fi
fi