8 Class Pets + 1 Squirrel ÷ 1 Dog = Chaos (3 page)

While I was still busy chewing, the dog ran by my room, never looking into the doorway. The end of the long rope that was attached to his collar bumped and went
thwap
against the walls. Across the hall I could hear the dog barking at the hamster, “There was no squirrel there with the snake. You're hiding him.”

The squirrel was still standing there in front of my cage, shaking, too dumb to move.

Apparently, I had to tell him everything. “Run now,” I said. “While the dog is in the first grade. Go back out the way you came in.”

“The door is closed now.” The squirrel's teeth were chattering from fright. “Please hide me.”

I felt sorry for him. “Go to the room next to where the hamster is. There's a rat there.”

The rat has sometimes come to visit my second-grade classroom. He's very good with his little hands, and he can open his own cage and doesn't need to wait for a child to forget to latch it. This doesn't make him smarter than me—he's just clever with his hands.

“Sweetie,” the squirrel said.

Cheeky thing! “I beg your pardon,” I snapped frostily.

“The rat's name is Sweetie.”

“I knew that,” I said. “Ask Sweetie to let you in. The dog won't be able to get at you if you're in a cage.” I couldn't resist adding, “Because inside a cage is safer than outside.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the squirrel said, waving his tail at me as he turned and ran.

I like being a rat, even though rats sometimes have a bad reputation.

For example, if a person tattles or does something mean, another person might say: “You rat!”

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.

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 direction, 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.