Ramona the Pest (7 page)

More mud clung to her boots with each step. “Look at my elephant feet!” she called out. Her boots were becoming heavier and heavier.

Henry gave up his struggle. “You're going to get stuck!” he yelled.

“No, I'm not!” insisted Ramona, and discovered she was unable to raise her right boot. She tried to raise her left boot, but it was stuck fast. She grasped the top of one of her boots with both hands and tried to lift her foot, but she could not budge it. She tried to lift the other foot, but she could not budge it either. Henry was right. Miss Binney was not going to like what had happened, but Ramona was stuck.

“I told you so!” yelled Henry against the traffic rules.

Ramona was becoming warmer and warmer inside her raincoat. She pulled and lifted. She could raise her feet, one at a time,
inside her boots, but no matter how she tugged and yanked with her hands she could not lift her precious boots from the mud.

Ramona grew warmer and warmer. She could never get out of this mud. Kindergarten would start without her, and she would be left all alone in the mud. Miss Binney would not like her being out here in the mud, when she was supposed to be inside singing the dawnzer song and doing seat work. Ramona's chin began to quiver.

“Look at Ramona! Look at Ramona!” shrieked the kindergarten, as Miss Binney, in a raincoat and with a plastic hood over her hair, appeared on the playground.

“Oh dear!” Ramona heard Miss Binney say.

Drivers of cars paused to stare and smile as tears mingled with the rain on Ramona's cheeks. Miss Binney came splashing across the street. “My goodness, Ramona, how are
we going to get you out?”

“I d-don't know,” sobbed Ramona. Miss Binney could not get stuck in the mud, too. The morning kindergarten needed her.

A man called out from a car, “What you need is a few boards.”

“Boards would only sink into the muck,” said a passerby on the sidewalk.

The first bell rang. Ramona sobbed harder. Now Miss Binney would have to go into school and leave her out here alone in the mud and the rain and the cold. By now some of the older boys and girls were staring at her from the windows of the big school.

“Now don't worry, Ramona,” said Miss Binney. “We'll get you out somehow.”

Ramona, who wanted to be helpful, knew what happened when a car was stuck in the mud. “Could you call a t-tow t-truck?” she asked with a big sniff. She could see herself being yanked out of the mud by a heavy
chain hooked on the collar of her raincoat. She found this picture so interesting that her sobs subsided, and she waited hopefully for Miss Binney's answer.

The second bell rang. Miss Binney was not looking at Ramona. She was looking thoughtfully at Henry Huggins, who seemed to be staring at something way off in the distance. The traffic sergeant blew his whistle summoning the traffic boys to return from their posts to school.

“Boy!” Miss Binney called out. “Traffic boy!”

“Who? Me?” asked Henry, even though he was the only traffic boy stationed at that intersection.

“That's Henry Huggins,” said helpful Ramona.

“Henry, come here, please,” said Miss Binney.

“I'm supposed to go in when the whistle
blows,” said Henry, as he glanced up at the boys and girls who were watching from the big brick building.

“But this is an emergency,” Miss Binney pointed out. “You have boots on, and I need your help in getting this little girl out of the mud. I'll explain to the principal.”

Henry did not seem very enthusiastic as he splashed across the street, and when he came to the mud he heaved a big sigh before he stepped into it. Carefully he picked his way through the muck and the puddles to Ramona. “Now see what you got me into,” he said crossly. “I told you to keep out of here.”

For once Ramona had nothing to say. Henry was right.

“I guess I'll have to carry you,” he said, and his tone was grudging. “Hang on.” He stooped and grasped Ramona around the waist, and she obediently put her arms around
the wet collar of his raincoat. Henry was big and strong. Then, to Ramona's horror, she found herself being lifted right out of her beautiful new boots.

“My boots!” she wailed. “You're leaving my boots!”

Henry slipped, slid, and in spite of Ramona's weight regained his balance. “You keep quiet,” he ordered. “I'm getting you out of here, aren't I? Do you want us both to land in the mud?”

Ramona hung on and said no more. Henry lurched and skidded through the mud to the sidewalk, where he set his burden down in front of Miss Binney.

“Yea!” yelled some big boys who had opened a window. “Yea, Henry!” Henry scowled in their direction.

“Thank you, Henry,” said Miss Binney with real gratitude, as Henry tried to scrape the mud from his boots on the edge of the
curb. “What do you say, Ramona?”

“My boots,” said Ramona. “He left my new boots in the mud!” How lonely they looked, two bright spots of red in all that
mud. She could not leave her boots behind, not when she had waited so long to get them. Somebody might take them, and she would have to go back to shoving her feet into Howie's ugly old boots.

“Don't worry, Ramona,” said Miss Binney, looking anxiously toward the rest of her morning kindergarten growing wetter by the minute as they watched through the fence. “Nobody is going to take your boots on a day like this. We'll get them back when it stops raining and the ground dries off.”

“But they'll fill up with rain without my feet in them,” protested Ramona. “The rain will spoil them.”

Miss Binney was sympathetic but firm. “I know how you feel, but I'm afraid there isn't anything we can do about it.”

Miss Binney's words were too much for Ramona. After all the times she had been forced to wear Howie's ugly old brown boots
she could not leave her beautiful new red boots out in the mud to fill up with rain-water. “I want my boots,” she howled, and began to cry again.

“Oh, all right,” said Henry crossly. “I'll get your old boots. Don't start crying again.” And heaving another gusty sigh, he waded back out into the empty lot, yanked the boots out of the mud, and waded back to the sidewalk, where he dropped them at Ramona's feet. “There,” he said, looking at the mud-covered objects with dislike.

Ramona expected him to add, I hope you're satisfied, but he did not. He just started across the street to school.

“Thank you, Henry,” Ramona called after him without being reminded. There was something very special about being rescued by a big, strong traffic boy in a yellow slicker.

Miss Binney picked up the muddy boots, and said, “What beautiful red boots. We'll
wash off the mud in the sink, and they'll be as good as new. And now we must hurry back to the kindergarten.”

Ramona smiled at Miss Binney, who was again, she decided, the nicest, most understanding teacher in the world. Not once had Miss Binney scolded or made any tiresome remarks about why on earth did Ramona have to do such a thing. Not once had Miss Binney said she should know better.

Then something on the sidewalk caught Ramona's eye. It was a pink worm that still had some wiggle left in it. She picked it up and wound it around her finger as she looked toward Henry. “I'm going to marry you, Henry Huggins!” she called out.

Even though traffic boys were supposed to stand up straight, Henry seemed to hunch down inside his raincoat as if he were trying to disappear.

“I've got an engagement ring, and I'm
going to marry you!” yelled Ramona after Henry, as the morning kindergarten laughed and cheered.

“Yea, Henry!” yelled the big boys, before their teacher shut the window.

As she followed Miss Binney across the street Ramona heard Davy's joyful shout. “Boy, I'm glad it isn't me!”

W
hen the morning kindergarten cut jack-o'-lanterns from orange paper and pasted them on the windows so that the light shone through the eye and mouth holes, Ramona knew that at last Halloween was not far away. Next to Christmas and her birthday, Ramona liked Halloween best. She liked dressing up and going trick-or-treating after dark with Beezus. She liked
those nights when the bare branches of trees waved against the streetlights, and the world was a ghostly place. Ramona liked scaring people, and she liked the shivery feeling of being scared herself.

Ramona had always enjoyed going to school with her mother to watch the boys and girls of Glenwood School parade on the playground in their Halloween costumes. Afterward she used to eat a doughnut and drink a paper cup of apple juice if there happened to be some left over. This year, after years of sitting on the benches with mothers and little brothers and sisters, Ramona was finally going to get to wear a costume and march around and around the playground. This year she had a doughnut and apple juice coming to her.

“Mama, did you buy my mask?” Ramona asked every day, when she came home from school.

“Not today, dear,” Mrs. Quimby answered. “Don't pester. I'll get it the next time I go down to the shopping center.”

Ramona, who did not mean to pester her mother, could not see why grown-ups had to be so slow. “Make it a bad mask, Mama,” she said. “I want to be the baddest witch in the whole world.”

“You mean the worst witch,” Beezus said, whenever she happened to overhear this conversation.

“I do not,” contradicted Ramona. “I mean the baddest witch.” “Baddest witch” sounded much scarier than “worst witch,” and Ramona did enjoy stories about bad witches, the badder the better. She had no patience with books about good witches, because witches were supposed to be bad. Ramona had chosen to be a witch for that very reason.

Then one day when Ramona came home
from school she found two paper bags on the foot of her bed. One contained black material and a pattern for a witch costume. The picture on the pattern showed the witch's hat pointed like the letter
A
. Ramona reached into the second bag and pulled out a rubber witch mask so scary that she quickly dropped it on the bed because she was not sure she even wanted to touch it. The flabby thing was the grayish-green color of mold and had stringy hair, a hooked nose, snaggle teeth, and a wart on its nose. Its empty eyes seemed to stare at Ramona with a look of evil. The face was so ghastly that Ramona had to remind herself that it was only a rubber mask from the dime store before she could summon enough courage to pick it up and slip it over her head.

Ramona peeked cautiously in the mirror, backed away, and then gathered her courage for a longer look. That's really me in there,
she told herself and felt better. She ran off to show her mother and discovered that she felt very brave when she was inside the mask and did not have to look at it. “I'm the baddest witch in the world!” she shouted, her voice muffled by the mask, and was delighted when her mother was so frightened she dropped her sewing.

Ramona waited for Beezus and her father to come home, so she could put on her mask and jump out and scare them. But that night, before she went to bed, she rolled up the mask and hid it behind a cushion of the couch in the living room.

“What are you doing that for?” asked Beezus, who had nothing to be afraid of. She was planning to be a princess and wear a narrow pink mask.

“Because I want to,” answered Ramona, who did not care to sleep in the same room with that ghastly, leering face.

Afterward when Ramona wanted to frighten herself she would lift the cushion for a quick glimpse of her scary mask before she clapped the pillow over it again. Scaring herself was such fun.

When Ramona's costume was finished and the day of the Halloween parade arrived, the morning kindergarten had trouble sitting
still for seat work. They wiggled so much while resting on their mats that Miss Binney had to wait a long time before she found someone quiet enough to be the wake-up fairy. When kindergarten was finally dismissed, the whole class forgot the rules and went stampeding out the door. At home Ramona ate only the soft part of her tuna-fish sandwich, because her mother insisted she could not go to the Halloween parade on an empty stomach. She wadded the crusts into her paper napkin and hid them beneath the edge of her plate before she ran to her room to put on her long black dress, her cape, her mask, and her pointed witch hat held on by an elastic under her chin. Ramona had doubts about that elastic—none of the witches whom she met in books seemed to have elastic under their chin—but today she was too happy and excited to bother to make a fuss.

“See, Mama!” she cried. “I'm the baddest witch in the world!”

Mrs. Quimby smiled at Ramona, patted her through the long black dress, and said affectionately, “Sometimes I think you are.”

“Come on, Mama! Let's go to the Halloween parade.” Ramona had waited so long that she did not see how she could wait another five minutes.

“I told Howie's mother we would wait for them,” said Mrs. Quimby.

“Mama, did you have to?” protested Ramona, running to the front window to watch for Howie. Fortunately, Mrs. Kemp and Willa Jean were already approaching with Howie dressed in a black cat costume lagging along behind holding the end of his tail in one hand. Willa Jean in her stroller was wearing a buck-toothed rabbit mask.

Ramona could not wait. She burst out the front door yelling through her mask,
“Yah! Yah! I'm the baddest witch in the world! Hurry, Howie! I'm going to get you, Howie!”

Howie walked stolidly along, lugging his tail, so Ramona ran out to meet him. He was not wearing a mask, but instead had pipe cleaners Scotch-taped to his face for whiskers.

“I'm the baddest witch in the world,” Ramona informed him, “and you can be my cat.”

“I don't want to be your cat,” said Howie. “I don't want to be a cat at all.”

“Why not, Howie?” asked Mrs. Quimby, who had joined Ramona and the Kemps. “I think you make a very nice cat.”

“My tail is busted,” complained Howie. “I don't want to be a cat with a busted tail.”

Mrs. Kemp sighed. “Now Howie, if you'll just hold up the end of your tail nobody will notice.” Then she said to Mrs. Quimby, “I promised him a pirate costume, but his older
sister was sick and while I was taking her temperature Willa Jean crawled into a cupboard and managed to dump a whole quart of salad oil all over the kitchen floor. If you've ever had to clean oil off a floor, you know what I went through, and then Howie went into the bathroom and climbed up—yes, dear, I understand you wanted to help—to get a sponge, and he accidentally knelt on a tube of toothpaste that someone had left the top off of—now Howie, I didn't say you left the top off—and toothpaste squirted all over the bathroom, and there was another mess to clean up. Well, I finally had to drag his sister's old cat costume out of a drawer, and when he put it on we discovered the wire in the tail was broken, but there wasn't time to rip it apart and put in a new wire.”

“You have a handsome set of whiskers,” said Mrs. Quimby, trying to coax Howie to look on the bright side.

“Scotch tape itches me,” said Howie.

Ramona could see that Howie was not going to be any fun at all, even on Halloween. Never mind. She would have fun all by herself. “I'm the baddest witch in the world,” she sang in her muffled voice, skipping with both feet. “I'm the baddest witch in the world.”

When they were in sight of the playground, Ramona saw that it was already swarming with both the morning and the afternoon kindergartens in their Halloween costumes. Poor Miss Binney, dressed like Mother Goose, now had the responsibility of sixty-eight boys and girls. “Run along, Ramona,” said Mrs. Quimby, when they had crossed the street. “Howie's mother and I will go around to the big playground and try to find a seat on a bench before they are all taken.”

Ramona ran screaming onto the play-
ground. “Yah! Yah! I'm the baddest witch in the world!” Nobody paid any attention, because everyone else was screaming, too. The noise was glorious. Ramona yelled and screamed and shrieked and chased anyone who would run. She chased tramps and ghosts and ballerinas. Sometimes other witches in masks exactly like hers chased her, and then she would turn around and chase the witches right back. She tried to chase Howie, but he would not run. He just stood beside the fence
holding his broken tail and missing all the fun.

Ramona discovered dear little Davy in a skimpy pirate costume from the dime store. She could tell he was Davy by his thin legs. At last! She pounced and kissed him through her rubber mask. Davy looked startled, but he had the presence of mind to make a gagging noise while Ramona raced away, satisfied that she finally had managed to catch and kiss Davy.

Then Ramona saw Susan getting out of
her mother's car. As she might have guessed, Susan was dressed as an old-fashioned girl with a long skirt, an apron, and pantalettes. “I'm the baddest witch in the world!” yelled Ramona, and ran after Susan, whose curls bobbed daintily about her shoulders in a way that could not be disguised. Ramona was unable to resist. After weeks of longing she tweaked one of Susan's curls, and yelled,
“Boing!”
through her rubber mask.