Ralph S. Mouse - Beverly Cleary [5]
As Ralph had grown more sophisticated from listening to children, he came to understand that children moved. Schools stood still. Later on he learned that some grown-ups called “teachers” also went to school. Some of these teachers stayed in the hotel during the summer. As far as Ralph could see, teachers behaved like ordinary people except that, unlike parents, they said, “Oh, dear, school will soon be starting.”
Ralph found a clue as to what teachers did in that mysterious place from a television commercial shown several times a day. In it, a woman who said she was a teacher held a tube of toothpaste in her hand as she walked around saying, “Toothpaste doesn’t excite me. Good checkups excite me.”
This remark puzzled Ralph, however. When he had lived upstairs, he had once tasted toothpaste when a careless guest left the cap off a tube. He found himself foaming and frothing at the mouth as he skittered around frantically trying to find water while one of the maids ran down the hall shrieking, “Mad mouse! Mad mouse!” No, Ralph could not agree with the television teacher. Toothpaste was exciting.
“This Miss K,” said Ralph, as Ryan reached the bus stop. “Is she OK?”
“Yeah, she’s pretty good.” Ryan stamped his feet to keep them warm. “She thinks up interesting things to do for language arts. Like our school is named the Irwin J. Sneed Elementary School, and last week she had us write a composition about who we thought Irwin J. Sneed was and why the town of Cucaracha, California, named its school after him.” Ryan scooped up a handful of snow, squeezed it into a ball, and threw it at the branch of a pine tree. Snow slid off the branch and fell with a soft plop.
“Some kids made Irwin J. Sneed a monster from outer space,” continued Ryan, “but I made him a horse thief back in the gold-rush days when Cucaracha was a mining town. I said he was the first person to go to jail in Cucaracha, so they named the school after him. Miss K gets real excited about Cucaracha being a gold-rush town with a lot of history.”
“Oh,” said Ralph, puzzled. “Who was Irwin J. Sneed really?”
“Just some old guy on the school board when the school was built way back in the 1970s,” explained Ryan, as he made another snowball.
Ralph could make no sense of this information at all.
As the snowball made more snow plop from a branch to the ground, Ryan had a sudden thought. “I better be careful about talking to you at school, or people will think I’m nuts.”
“Maybe some of them could understand me,” suggested Ralph. “They might even like to see me ride my motorcycle.”
Ryan considered. “You better not go showing off. Somebody might steal your motorcycle, or maybe everybody would start bringing mice and motorcycles to school. I don’t think that would be a good idea, a whole school full of mice tearing around on motorcycles. One mouse can get by, but not a lot of mice. You know how some people get all worked up about mice.”
As the school bus came rumbling down the highway, Ralph had to agree from his hotel experience that Ryan was right. One mouse, or even two or three, could get by. Many mice could not. “Say,” he said, “you don’t suppose there are already mice in this place.”
“No,” said Ryan, as the bus stopped in front of him. “Mr. Costa keeps our school too clean for mice.”
Of course, Ralph’s feelings were hurt.
“Remember to keep out of sight,” were Ryan’s last words to Ralph as he climbed on the bus.
Deep inside the parka pocket, Ralph felt sad, brave and noble, frightened and bewildered. He felt sad because there had been no time to say good-bye to Matt. He felt brave and noble because his going out into the strange world would