8 Class Pets + 1 Squirrel ÷ 1 Dog = Chaos Read online

  I never tattle, and I’m not mean.

  Sometimes when the parents of the students first meet me, they ask Miss Krause: “Does he bite?”

  Miss Krause answers: “Does your dog bite? Would you keep him if he did? No, Sweetie doesn’t bite.”

  Then she’ll hand me a treat to show them. I stand up on my back feet and wiggle my pink nose. (I have heard people say this is cute, and I’m working hard to impress them.) Then I take the treat very gently from Miss Krause and I eat it, holding it with my fingers.

  Another thing people say, if something is dirty and worn, is that the thing is ratty. I am not dirty or worn looking. I have white fur, and I spend a good deal of time grooming it. (Since the fur is mine and since I am a rat, the fur is ratty—but it is also clean and neat.)

  And if someone has messy hair, people call it a rat’s nest. There you have me: I am a bit messy because I love to chew on things. (Not fingers—but just about everything else.)

  Every year, the first story Miss Krause reads to the incoming first-graders is Cinderella. Some of the children complain that they already know the story, but Miss Krause says she wants to start the year with a story that has a good rat role model. The rat in Cinderella is the hero of the story because he drives the coach that carries Cinderella to the ball. Without the rat coachman, Cinderella wouldn’t even meet the prince.

  I love to hear stories—even when the hero is someone else besides a rat.

  My friend Twitch the squirrel often comes after school to visit me. (He’s too shy to sit on the window ledge when the children are there because they move too fast when they see him.) Twitch calls me “cousin” and tells me stories about Outside. I tell him stories made up from bits and pieces of the ones I’ve heard from Miss Krause and the children.

  In my stories the hero is often a rat.

  In Twitch’s stories the bad guy is always an owl.

  One day Twitch came, not to the window ledge, but running into the library.

  “Help!” he said.

  I started to say, “What’s—” But before I could finish asking, a dog ran in.

  Rats can’t see very well, which is why, when we are loose in a room, we like to stay near the walls. But we are excellent at sniffing. I could smell the dog right away. He smelled angry. And then I heard him.

  “There you are!” the dog barked at Twitch. “You’ll make a tasty supper!”

  In stories, that would be called showing a character’s intentions.

  I guess owls aren’t the only ones who can be bad guys in a squirrel’s story.

  Twitch ran up the leg of the table where my cage sits. He grabbed hold of the bars of my cage and said, “Cousin! Help!”

  “Back off!” I yelled at the dog, trying to make my voice big and fierce.

  The dog was not impressed. His barks were a lot scarier than my squeaks. He jumped at us. He wasn’t tall enough to be able to jump onto the table where Twitch and I were, but he almost made it. He jumped again, and got a little higher—so that the nails of his front paws scratched the wood of the table as he tried to hold on but couldn’t.

  Twitch said to me, “The rabbit says you can open your cage and let me in.”

  “Good idea!” (That rabbit is very smart.)

  I j iggled the latch.

  The dog jumped again. His front part landed on the table, but the weight of his back end made him slide off again. For a moment he got tangled up in his own long, long leash. But only for a moment. He took a few steps away to get a running start.

  “Twitch!” I said. “Let go of the door. I can’t swing it open with you holding on.”

  Twitch let go, I swung the door open, and Twitch ran in. I slammed the door shut.

  Safe!

  The dog leaped, and this time he landed on the table.

  But he was going so fast, he slid and rammed right into the cage, knocking us into the display of art books Miss Krause had set up.

  Books and cage and Twitch and I went flying off the back edge of the table.

  I was dizzier than the time Miss Krause put me in an exercise ball and one of the boys kicked it across the reading area. Except nobody was calling for a time-out for this dog.

  The cage had landed on its side, and I could see that the door had not only popped open, it was bent back. It would not close. The cage was no longer someplace to be safe from the dog.

  The dog was looking a bit confused to find the cage wasn’t on the table anymore, but then he spotted us on the floor, and he jumped down.

  “Run!” I yelled to Twitch.

  A SCHOOL OF NEON TETRAS

  (third-grade fish)

  We are in a school.

  We are in a school in a school.

  We are tickled by that idea.

  The people who come to look at us call us neon tetras. We don’t know about that—we just know that we are.

  Each of us has bright blue stripes and bright red stripes. We shine in the dark. We are very beautiful. Even one of us would be very beautiful. But we aren’t one. We are a school.

  We live in the water. Of course. We don’t understand how other creatures live out of the water and breathe the air. But some of them do.

  Our water is surrounded by glass that gives it a square shape. Living in the water with us are some plants and a catfish who eats the slime off the sides of the glass. She does not have blue stripes, she does not have red stripes, she is not beautiful, and she doesn’t have much to say. But she keeps our water clean.

  Sharing the water with us, but not living, is a shipwreck and a miniature man with a treasure chest that opens and closes. In the treasure chest are sparkly gems. On the floor of our square pond are sparkly stones. Neither the gems nor the stones are as sparkly as we are.

  We dart back and forth in our glass-enclosed pond and around the shipwreck.

  We are a school.

  Outside of the glass that forms the boundary of our pond is a man who feeds us fish flakes and frozen brine shrimp. (Yum! Frozen brine shrimp!)

  There are also little men out there who press their faces against our glass. Our man who feeds us calls these little men “boys and girls.” He says to them, “Boys and girls, do not tap on the glass. Do not lean on the cart and make it move.” Sometimes they do anyway, when he’s not looking.

  When they do, we dart back and forth.

  Our favorite part of the day is global studies. The globe the little men study is a big round thing that shows the world. Most of the world is water.

  That idea tickles us.

  So, beyond our pond there is the room with the man and the little men and the globe; beyond that, there is more glass, which is called “windows.” Beyond that glass is the world, and now we have seen on the globe that most of this is water.

  One of the air-breathers who sometimes looks in through the windows is a creature that calls himself squirrel.

  One day the squirrel came swimming through the air into our room. He came with another creature, a small white creature with a long pink tail. But they were not in a school, because they were not the same. They did not look the same, and they did not move the same.

  The squirrel said, “Help! The dog is going to eat us.”

  We said, “There is protection in a school.”

  The second creature, the one who was not a squirrel, put his ear up to the glass that protects us from the air. We said again, so that he could hear, “There is protection in a school.”

  The nonsquirrel repeated this for the squirrel.

  The squirrel said, “What?”

  We said, “When you swim in a school, only some get eaten, while the rest stay safe. You need to find a school.”

  When his friend told him this, the squirrel said, “Neither one of us wants to get eaten.”

  A creature bigger than either of them entered the room.

  Bigger often eat smaller.

  This big creature said, “Stop running, you sorry waste of fur!”

  The squirrel darted in one di
rection, and the squirrel’s friend darted in another.

  “In a school!” we told them.

  The big noisy creature followed the squirrel, knocking into one of the desks where, during the day, one of the little men sits. The desk tipped over, and books and papers and pencils fell out.

  The big noisy creature continued to follow the squirrel. The big noisy creature had something trailing from him, the way sometimes a crab will have seaweed trailing from itself. It was long and white, and it got wrapped around things, and it knocked over a big plant by the man’s desk. Dirt and leaves fell out.

  The big noisy creature tried to follow the squirrel up onto the man’s desk, and that sent more books and papers and pencils onto the floor. A picture of the man’s family fell as well, and his souvenir mug from MarineLand—which looks like a wondrous place.

  The squirrel went up the stand that holds the globe. But then he stepped onto the globe. The globe spun. The squirrel spun. The squirrel flew through the air and landed on the big noisy creature’s head.

  The big noisy creature was so startled, he made his own water right there on the floor.

  The squirrel and his friend darted out the door.

  “In a school!” we called after them.

  The big noisy creature followed them.

  But the long white thing that was not seaweed must have gotten wrapped around the cart that makes our pond move, the cart that the little men are not supposed to lean on.

  We began to move, dragged along by the big noisy creature. Our pond swayed and bumped behind him as he ran.

  We continued to swim, safe, in a school, in a school.

  LENORE

  (fourth-grade parrot)

  Hola!

  That’s one of my favorite words because I come from Puerto Rico, and that’s how people there say “hello.” The Spanish for “please” is por favor, and “thank you” is gracias. Those three words cover a variety of situations.

  Another of my favorite words is “Nevermore” because that’s a refrain in a poem called “The Raven.” A refrain is a word you say over and over. I like to say words over and over.

  But I don’t like to say, “Polly wants a cracker.” I don’t know why some people think I should.

  My name isn’t even Polly. My name is Lenore, and it comes from that same raven poem.

  But I’m not a raven. I am a blue and gold macaw, which is a kind of parrot.

  Luckily, I love poetry. My owner—her name is Rosa DaSilva—she says that since we both come from Puerto Rico, poetry is in our blood. (Along with our accents, I guess.) Here is a poem I have been working on:

  Sitting in the trees,

  I sometimes sneeze

  as loud as you please.

  With a beak as big as mine,

  you need to draw the line,

  or a sneeze will rattle your knees.

  Okay, okay, I’m still working on it.

  Some of those fourth-graders, believe me, their poems aren’t any better.

  Good poetry or bad, I like being in school with Rosa and the kids.

  When Rosa first got me, she’d leave me home while she went to the school to teach. All day long, nobody else was there: Mr. DaSilva works in a bank; the DaSilva kids go to their own schools. Being alone made me crazy. I started to pluck my feathers. That made Rosa crazy. She was like, “Eeek! I’m going to end up with a bald bird!”

  Now she brings me to the classroom where she teaches. The kids there call her Mrs. DaSilva instead of Rosa. When we’re in school, I have to remember to call her Mrs. DaSilva, too.

  Such a chore, such a bore:

  Not Rosa, por favor.

  It’s Mrs. DaSilva in school.

  That is the rule

  if I wanna be cool.

  This is hard to remember. I also have to remember there are other words I’m not supposed to say in school, either.

  I think school has too many rules.

  Sometimes if Rosa and her family have to go someplace and stay out late, she’ll leave me here in the classroom overnight. That’s okay; I don’t mind. Once in a while.

  That’s how I got to meet the squirrel.

  This is what happened: One day this squirrel, he comes running in—I’ve seen him before, but I don’t know his name—and he’s got this big ugly dog chasing him.

  And the dog’s got a fish tank on a rolling cart chasing him.

  The squirrel, he can’t fly, but he knows up is safer than down. He goes running up the stand that holds my cage, then he sits on top and yells down to the dog, “You’re ugly, and your mother has fleas.”

  I don’t know about the mama with the fleas, but I think to myself, Surely this dog can’t argue about ugly.

  Señor Dog, he’s jumping up in the air, trying to tip the cage over, and he goes, “Yeah, you rodent? You come down here and say that.”

  The water in the fish tank is going slosh! slosh!

  “Whoa, chicos!” I tell them. “Careful of the innocent bystander!”

  There’s a little rat, too, but Señor Dog isn’t interested in him—just the squirrel. The rat calls up to the squirrel, “I’ll get help so there’s more of us, like the fish said.”

  The dog keeps barking, so I start squawking. The squirrel is making my cage sway like the boat that brought me here. I say to the squirrel, “You ever hear the term seasick?”

  Next thing I know, the rat comes running back in with a hamster and a rabbit.

  It’s like a convention of small mammals.

  Plus fish.

  But the dog, he ignores them all and keeps yapping at the squirrel.

  And those small mammal guys, they don’t know what to do. They’re just running around in circles. The rat squeaks, “Somebody do something!” The hamster is trying to count how many of them there are, but every time somebody moves, he loses track and has to start all over. The rabbit is full of useless advice. She’s all like: “Don’t let him get you!”

  I think the squirrel already thought of that.

  The fish look like they’re beginning to get seasick, too.

  Then Wham! Bam! That clumsy dog knocks my cage down.

  My feathers are ruffled, but I don’t get hurt, because I land on a pile of papier-mâché fruits and vegetables the kids have been making for some sort of art contest.

  “Sorry!” the squirrel says to me as he dashes for the door, but the dog, he’s so rude, he never says a word of apology. He’s just all: “Get back here, you . . . you . . . squirrel!”

  The fish, still dragged along behind on that bumping, swaying, sloshing cart, are all like, “Glug, glug.”

  The rat and the others, they start to follow.

  I squawk:

  “Hola! Don’t leave me here on the floor

  as you go out the door,

  without even a ‘Nevermore.’”

  The rat is the only one left, slowest because he’s always staying close to the walls, not wanting to cross the open space of the room.

  So he comes back and unlatches my cage.

  NANCY

  (art room turtle)

  Sometimes people who come to visit Mrs. Hinkle’s room get confused. They ask, “Is he a turtle or a tortoise?”

  Mrs. Hinkle says, “Nancy is a she, not a he. And she is a turtle.”

  Mrs. Hinkle and I, we think there’s a big difference between turtles and tortoises. We can’t see how people get confused.

  By the end of a year of art class, Mrs. Hinkle’s students will never again be the kind of people who get confused about this.

  Tortoises live on dry land, but we turtles spend most of our time in the water, but sometimes we like to have dry land to crawl up on. My beautiful glass case has both, along with a nice heat lamp to keep me warm. Mmmm. Nice and warm and cozy. Mmmmm . . .

  I’m sorry. I fell asleep there under the lamp.

  Where was I?

  Oh yes, I am a mud turtle, so I’ll never grow bigger than six inches. This makes me the right size for Mrs. Hinkle to som
etimes take me out of my glass case and set me on the table so the boys and girls can see me better. “Don’t poke at Nancy or try to pick her up,” Mrs. Hinkle says. “She’s very shy.”

  It’s nice to have someone else around to explain that you’re not unfriendly but only shy.

  Mrs. Hinkle teaches art.

  Even though I’m shy, I like that the children ask if I can come out of my case so they can use me as a model. Mrs. Hinkle gives me a piece of melon or lettuce to munch on so that I will stay still and not explore the table too much while my picture is being drawn.

  I like to have my picture drawn.

  But I also like to draw my own pictures.

  Sometimes Mrs. Hinkle pours food coloring onto a piece of foil and lets me walk through it. Then she sets down a piece of art paper and I walk onto that, leaving colored footprints with my little webbed feet.

  “We don’t put paint on a turtle’s shell,” Mrs. Hinkle says. “But a little bit of food coloring won’t hurt Nancy’s feet.”

  One afternoon, after waking up from a nap and finding that all the children—and Mrs. Hinkle, too—had left, I was admiring all the new pictures Mrs. Hinkle had hung up that day. The children had been very excited and had talked about the artist who would be visiting the next day—an artist who was going from school to school to judge pictures and give out prizes for the best pictures. I think the best pictures are the ones with me in them.

  But all of a sudden there was a commotion in the hall, so I pulled myself into my shell in case there was danger.

  Good thing, because the noise came into the classroom. A dog was barking, a parrot was squawking, a squirrel was shouting, “Help! Help! The nasty, smelly dog wants to eat me!” and a hamster, a rabbit, and a rat were yelling, “Run, Twitch, run!” The wheels of the cart the dog was pulling went squeak! squeal! And the fish in the tank on the cart were yelling in their tiny fish voices, “School! School!”