Ramona's World (11 page)

Ramona kissed her sister. “Mo-mo” was Roberta's way of saying “Ramona.” She set Roberta down, handed her the little blanket, ran for a Kleenex, wiped her nose, and threw all the torn pages in the fireplace. Then, as she heard the Quimby car pull into the driveway, she picked up her book. Roberta was holding her blanket against her face with one hand while she sucked the thumb of her other hand and watched Clawed carefully wash the tip of his tail. I did it, thought Ramona. I baby-sat. I was responsible. Worn out by her responsibility, she opened her book and pretended she had been reading all along, but she was thinking, One more day and Clawed will go home.

“I can see that the three of you got along just fine,” commented Mrs. Quimby as she came into the room.

“Yes, and you were gone a long time,” answered Ramona.

Mrs. Quimby glanced at her watch. “Only fifteen minutes. There was more traffic than I expected.”

Only fifteen minutes. It had seemed like hours to Ramona.

“Roberta looks ready for a nap,” said Mrs. Quimby as she picked up the baby—“oopsy-daisy”—and carried her off to her room.

Ramona laid down her book and watched Beezus take off her jacket and unwind her muffler. “I was just thinking . . .” she said, and paused.

“Good for you,” said Beezus.

Ramona ignored this and said, “I was just thinking—how do you get to be a cheerleader?”

E
arly in February the weather changed to wind and snow. Mrs. Pitt managed to shovel a path on the sidewalk in front of her house. Then schools were closed for almost a week. Ramona and Daisy were too busy coasting on the Thirty-seventh Street hill on Mr. Quimby's old sled, “a real antique,” Beezus called it, to think about anything that had happened at school.

That was why Ramona was surprised when school reopened and gray envelopes of class pictures were handed out. Feeling sure that Bill had snapped her picture a second before she made a face, she opened her envelope expecting to see herself cute and perky, maybe a little bit pretty. But no. She wasn't cute. She wasn't perky or the least bit pretty. She was a plain, ordinary girl making an ugly face. Ashamed, she shoved her envelope into her book bag.

Unfortunately, everyone in the class had, in addition to a big picture and several smaller pictures, a sheet of pictures of each member shown slightly larger than a postage stamp. Everyone pointed to Ramona's picture and snickered.

Susan said much too nicely, “It's too bad about your picture, Ramona.”

Daisy, who was always kind, said, “Don't worry about it, Ramona. We all know you don't really look like that.”

Yard Ape was silent. Ramona was suddenly cross with him for not paying attention to her, not even on the bus. It wasn't her fault Mrs. Meacham confiscated his note and embarrassed him in front of the class.

Ramona tossed her hair to show her class she didn't care what they thought. When she returned home that day, she hid her pictures and hoped her family would never find them.

This lasted for about a week until one evening at dinner Mrs. Quimby asked, “Ramona, what happened to your school pictures? Howie's grandmother says he has his.” There were no secrets in this neighborhood.

Ramona took a big bite of potato. She wasn't supposed to talk with her mouth full.

“You don't like your picture,” guessed Beezus.

Ramona chewed her potato more than potato needed to be chewed.

“Come on, Ramona,” said her father. “We love you no matter how you look. Go get them.”

Ramona swallowed, sighed, and fetched the gray envelope, which she thrust at her father. He pulled out the individual pictures and passed them around to the family, who, as Ramona expected, laughed. She put on her you-hurt-my-feelings expression and said, “You're being horrid to me.”

“I think this is a great picture.” Mr. Quimby smiled at his middle daughter. “It captures the real Ramona.”

“It does not!” contradicted Ramona.

“Your Grandpa Day is going to love this,” said Mrs. Quimby, “and so will your Aunt Bea.”

“Mom, that's
mean
! That picture is awful. I hate it.” Ramona wondered if this was all worth a tantrum and decided it wasn't. Maybe she was outgrowing tantrums. Instead she explained about Roberta and the peas. She concluded with, “If Roberta had eaten her peas, I would have had a nice picture. At least I don't spit on the floor like Roberta.”

Mrs. Quimby reached over and patted Ramona's hand. “We all know you are nicer than your picture,” she said.

“Except sometimes,” said Beezus.

Ramona ignored her sister. “All the kids at school except Daisy laughed at me,” she went on, “and now our relatives will, too.” She was beginning to run out of reasons to feel sorry for herself.

Beezus spoke up. “What difference does it make? When we take our family picture for our next Christmas card, you can smile twice as hard to make up for your school picture.”

This led to a discussion of how the family should pose for their Christmas-card picture even though Christmas was months away. After that no more was said about Ramona's picture. At school everyone seemed to have forgotten it, too, perhaps because Mrs. Meacham brought out a box decorated with hearts that Ramona could see had been used in the many classes Mrs. Meacham had taught in years past. Mrs. Meacham made a little speech about not hurting anyone's feelings. Everyone must give a valentine to everyone else in the class. Ramona had heard this speech from previous teachers and knew the problem could be solved by buying kits that held enough valentines for an entire class, silly valentines with words such as “Bee my valentine” with a picture of a bee, or “I choo-choose you for my valentine” with a bear driving a locomotive. For special friends some people might enclose a candy heart with “Be my valentine” or “I love you” printed on it. For extraspecial friends fourth graders, usually girls, made valentines decorated with heart stickers and paper lace. This was the part of Valentine's Day Ramona liked best.

That week after dinner Ramona worked on her valentines. Of course she made Daisy's first, with a big pink heart surrounded by yellow daisies, which she drew with the colored pencils her father had bought her. She made another with pink and red hearts for Janet and another, a plain valentine with just one heart, for Howie. It looked too plain, so she drew a hammer, a saw, and some nails around the heart. Howie would like that.

The evening before Valentine's Day she addressed her store-bought valentines, leaving Yard Ape to the last because she wasn't sure she should even give him one, no matter what Mrs. Meacham said. Then she discovered she had no more valentines left. Would Mrs. Meacham notice if she skipped Yard Ape? Yes. Mrs. Meacham never missed a thing. Eagle-eyed Mrs. Meacham might even stay after school, open the box, and go through the valentines to make sure everyone remembered everyone else.

Ramona tapped her nose with her red pencil while she tried to think. Roses are red, violets blue—no, that wouldn't do. Everyone said that. Roses are pink, you sti— No. She was cross with Yard Ape but not that cross.

“Bedtime, Ramona,” said Mr. Quimby.

The third time her father spoke to her, Ramona was still trying to think of a valentine for Yard Ape, something not too icky-sweet but not really mean. She found Beezus propped up on her bed studying. Ramona sat down on her bed, kicked off her shoes, and began to pull off her socks by the toes. She sighed noisily to get her sister's attention, which was not the same as interrupting her when she was studying.

Beezus looked up from her book. “Something bothering you?” she asked.

Ramona explained her dilemma, which Beezus did not see as a problem. “Just give him one of your school pictures with the funny face you made. That way he won't know if you gave it to him because you like him or because you don't like him.”

Sensible Beezus. Ramona wished she had thought of this herself. She found a picture, stuffed it in an envelope, printed
DANNY
on the front, brushed her teeth, and went to bed hoping the class would have chocolate-chip cookies at the Valentine's Day party the next day.

The next afternoon, after the bell rang for the last period, the room mother of Mrs. Meacham's class arrived with a tray of cookies (peanut-butter, Ramona's next-to-favorite) and cartons of pink punch. Mrs. Meacham opened the valentine box and asked the valentine monitors to distribute the envelopes.

As Ramona ate her cookies, she sorted through her valentines. Several looked interesting and a couple were lumpy, which meant they had candy hearts inside. Then she found the one she had been looking for, an envelope addressed in Yard Ape's uphill scrawl. She felt uneasy. Had she made a mistake in giving him her picture? She bit into a cookie and glanced across the aisle in time to see Yard Ape pull her photograph out of the envelope. She stopped chewing. He looked at her picture, grinned, and put the picture in his shirt pocket.

Ramona quickly looked away and tore open his envelope. She pulled out, not a valentine, but a sheet of tablet paper without a single heart. Printed in big letters that ignored lines were the words:

IF YOU ARE EATING PEAS THINK OF ME BEFORE YOU SNEEZE

Signed,
Yard Ape
PRESIDENT

An original poem! A poem Mrs. Meacham didn't have a chance to read. Ramona looked at Yard Ape and smiled. He smiled back. Then she carefully folded his valentine smaller and smaller until it was small enough to fit into the little box in which she kept her baby teeth at home. She would keep it forever.

S
pring finally came. Rain no longer fell every day. Lawn mowers whirred through the shaggy winter grass. People went to the park again. Everyone, especially Ramona, felt good. One evening, late in May, the Quimby family was enjoying an unusually quiet dinner. The telephone did not ring. Roberta had been fed and, worn out from pulling herself to her feet by hanging on to chairs, was asleep. Beezus and her father were talking about something—Ramona wasn't paying attention because she was busy examining the new calluses beginning to form on the palms of her hands. The girls at school, those who enjoyed swinging on the rings, were once more comparing calluses. This thought gave Ramona an idea.

“You know what I would like to do on my birthday?” she asked, and did not wait for an answer. “Have a birthday party in the park. We can play on the rings and skip playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and all those babyish games.”

“I think we can manage that if Beezus will help with Roberta,” agreed Mrs. Quimby, and added, “If it doesn't rain.”

“Sure. I'll help,” said Beezus. “The park is a good idea. That way the house doesn't get messed up.”

Although she knew what Beezus said was true, Ramona ignored her sister and said dreamily, “Just think. I'll be a teenager.”

“Aren't you getting ahead of yourself?” asked Mr. Quimby.

“No, you won't,” said Beezus. “You will be ten years old.”

“That's a teenager, sort of,” said Ramona. “Zeroteen. That's a double-digit number.”
Double-digit
sounded serious and important. “And next year I'll be oneteen and the year after twoteen, then thirteen and fourteen.” Her family looked amused, but Ramona did not care. She was too busy with her plans. “And I don't want a birthday cake,” she continued. “I want a big bowl of whipped cream.” Ramona liked thick, soft, fluffy, sweet whipped cream much more than she liked cake, which was sometimes dry and with thin frosting.

“Think of the calories,” said Mrs. Quimby, who thought a lot about calories since Roberta was born.

“And the cholesterol,” said Mr. Quimby, who sometimes said he should begin to watch his diet.

“Whipped cream will make your face break out in spots,” said Beezus, who spent a lot of time looking at herself in the mirror.

Ramona considered all these worries ridiculous, so she ignored them. She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and thought of a big bowl of whipped cream. On a table in the park. Surrounded by birthday presents. With the sun shining through the fir trees.