8 Class Pets + 1 Squirrel ÷ 1 Dog = Chaos (2 page)

I am a hamster, and I live in Mrs. Duran's first-grade classroom. Mrs. Duran named me after a famous book. She says that makes me a literary pet.
Literary
is the biggest word I know, but I don't know what it means.

Mrs. Duran reads a lot of books to the first-graders. The boys and girls talk about what happened in the story and tell if they liked it. Sometimes they write their own stories. I don't have a pencil to write stories, so I run around in my exercise wheel instead.
Round, round, round I go. Sometimes I get so dizzy, I forget things.

Did I mention I'm a hamster?

The children also do art projects. They color, they cut with scissors, they paste. Lately, they've been very excited about some project they're doing out in the hall. I have a project, too, but it's inside my cage. Mrs. Duran gives me tissue and cardboard, and I rip them up with my teeth to make a nice and soft and cozy bed. Every morning Mrs. Duran cleans out the bed I made the day before, along with my litter, and I get to start all over again on a brand-new art project.

Maybe that's what
literary
means.

My favorite part of first grade—after snack time—is that the children and I have been learning about numbers and how to count. There are all sorts of things I can count:

1. I have 4 legs and 1 tail. (4 + 1 = 5, even though my tail is shorter than my legs.)

2. There are 2 levels in my cage. Level 1 is the top level, which has my bed and my food bowl and a mirror for me to look into. Level 2 is the bottom level, which has my water bottle and my wheel. I also have a chew toy in the shape of
an elephant. (2 levels + 1 bed + 1 food bowl + 1 mirror + 1 water bottle + 1 wheel + 1 elephant to chew on = lots of things for Green Eggs and Hamster to do.)

3. The ladder from downstairs to upstairs has 10 rungs. The ladder from upstairs to downstairs also has 10 rungs. This is because it is the same ladder. (1 ladder = 1 ladder.)

4. The number of Special Hamster Treats I can fit into my cheek pouches at one time is 8. (8 special treats = yummy.)

There is a squirrel named Twitch who lives outside. Twitch sometimes comes and sits on the window ledge to visit. Twitch is good at cramming birdseed into his cheeks, but he says birdseeds are too small to count.
I
think that Twitch is not very good at counting.

I am too good a friend to tell him so.

One day, after the children had gone home, after Mrs. Duran had gone home, after the custodian had swept the floor and turned off the lights but before it got dark, I was busy counting the numbers on the wall clock. There are usually twelve numbers—unless I count them after I've gone around in my exercise wheel. Then there are a lot more numbers.
And
they move.

This day I had counted seventeen numbers when Twitch came running into the room.

Did I say Twitch is a squirrel?

“Help, help!” Twitch called. “There's a dog chasing me.”

I didn't ask why a dog was chasing him. Sometimes details are important, but sometimes they're not. I got an idea, so I said, “Climb up on the bookshelves behind me. And hide behind the dictionary.” The dictionary is the biggest book in the room.

Twitch was up there before I could say, “Wow! You're a good climber!”

And then the dog ran into the room. Attached to his collar was a long length of rope, which dragged along behind him. “Where's that no-good squirrel?” the dog barked at me.

I scratched my ear and asked, “Did you check the room with the snake?” (There are five grades in this school, and Mrs. Shaughnessey's fifth grade, where the snake lives = the farthest room from Mrs. Duran's room.)

The dog growled, “I smell that squirrel here.”

“Are you sure you don't smell me?” I asked. “The squirrel and I are both rodents, and that makes us cousins. 1 squirrel + 1 hamster = 2 rodent cousins.”

The dog sniffed at my cage. “Maybe,” he said.

“Where's the room with the snake?”

“Fifth grade,” I said. “All the way down the hall.”

The dog left, his rope leash still trailing him. But just when Twitch started to come out from behind
the dictionary, the custodian came in. Twitch ducked down again.

“I thought I heard a dog,” the custodian said.

“He's gone to the fifth grade,” I said.

But even though animals can understand people, most people aren't very good at understanding animals.

The custodian looked around, scratched his head, and said, “Must be outside the building. Good. A dog in the school is the last thing I need with that art contest tomorrow.”

As soon as the custodian was gone, Twitch climbed back down the bookshelves. “Thanks, cousin,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”

He ran out of Mrs. Duran's room but was back before I could climb into my exercise wheel.

“Oh no!” he said. “The human has left School—and he shut the door behind him. That dog and I are both locked in here. What should I do?”

This was too much for me. I had thought of 1 plan, but I couldn't think of 2. “Go next door and ask the rabbit,” I said. “She likes to order everyone around, but she's smart. She'll think of something.”

It's not everybody that starts school in second grade.

The children in Ms. Walters's class went to first grade last year. They were in a different building in kindergarten the year before that. And most of them spent a year or two in nursery school.

Not me. I came to second grade straight from the pet shop, so that shows I'm the smartest one here. Well maybe, except for Ms. Walters.

But I'm not sure.

Ms. Walters never talks about being in first grade,
so I think she may have skipped first grade, too. But she does talk about last year's second-grade class. I'm smart enough to know that means Ms. Walters was kept back. But I am polite enough not to mention it.

I plan to finish second grade in one year. In fact, I think I may well skip third grade and go directly to fourth.

Another way I know I'm the smartest one here is that Ms. Walters tells the children their job is to learn, but she says that my job is to be cute and cuddly and not bite. Obviously, I have already learned everything there is to learn.

Sometimes the children forget to latch my cage. I help them learn by running around the classroom
and hiding under things. I leave a trail of little poops to help them find me.

Once, I made it all the way across the hall to Mr. Daly's third-grade room. Mr. Daly has fish. The fish are in a tank, and the tank is on a cart with wheels. I don't think the fish are very smart at all. They
never
escape and hide under things. They just swim back and forth, back and forth. I held my long, good-at-hearing-everything ears up against the glass to listen. But all they'd say was “We are in a school. We are in a school.”

“I know,” I said. “We all are.”

There's a squirrel who lives outside. Sometimes he comes to visit after Ms. Walters and all the children have gone home. The squirrel sits on the windowsill and makes faces and says rude things like: “If you were really smart, the humans couldn't catch you. I don't let them catch me.”

I point out to him that
I
don't have to stay outside when it's cold or rainy and that
I
don't have to find my own food.

The squirrel says squirrels are smarter than rabbits. He says the kids in the playground sometimes call one another “dumb bunny.” Nobody, he says, ever calls another person “dumb squirrel.”

I think the squirrel is making this up. I've never
heard anybody say “dumb bunny.” One time, though, I heard one of the third-graders call me “Mr. Fuzz-butt” instead of “Miss Lucy Cottontail.”

This is one of the reasons I'd like to skip third grade. But I don't tell the squirrel that.

Besides, this just shows how dumb that third-grader was: He couldn't even read the sign over my cage. I'm surprised Ms. Walters ever let him out of second grade.

One day, after the children had spent most of the afternoon learning something that had to do with crayons and glitter sticks, I was taking an afternoon nap when I heard a dog barking. He sounded so close, it was as if he was in the building. But that couldn't be. Dogs don't go to regular school. They have their own school to go to because they aren't smart like rabbits and children.

But the next thing I knew, in ran that squirrel. If dogs aren't smart enough to go to school with the rest of us, squirrels
definitely
aren't smart enough. They'd be kept back for . . . like . . . three years in a row and have to sit in the corner the whole time.

“Help!” the squirrel said.

“Go away,” I said.

“There's a dog chasing me,” the squirrel said.

I told him, “Then you shouldn't have done whatever it was you did to make him chase you.”

“I didn't do it on purpose,” the squirrel said.

I chewed at an itchy spot on my foot. “If you were as smart as you think, these things wouldn't happen.”

The squirrel said, “I told Green Eggs and Hamster you were too stuck up to help me.”

I may be smart, but I am not stuck up.