Ralph S. Mouse Read Free Page A

his parka and picked Ralph up carefully so he wouldn’t smash his tiny ribs. “You mean you want to stay at school?”
    â€œYes,” said Ralph, suddenly frightened by his decision. “There must be someplace I can hide.”
    Ryan thought a moment. “Well, there’s one of Melissa Hopper’s boots. You could hide there.”
    â€œDoesn’t she wear her boots?” asked Ralph, picturing himself squashed in the toe of a boot by the foot of Melissa, whoever she was.
    â€œNot if she can help it,” said Ryan. “Melissa hates boots, so she leaves them at school. That way her mother can’t make her wear them.”
    A sensible girl, thought Ralph.
    Mrs. Bramble came bustling back into the lobby. “Ryan, what on earth are you doing on your knees? You should be on your way out to the highway, or you’ll miss your bus.”
    â€œJust checking the floor for dust,” fibbed Ryan, as he quickly slid Ralph into his parka pocket. “Bye, Mom.” And he ran out the door and went crunching through the snow to the highway.
    Ryan must have had second thoughts about taking Ralph to school. He said, “I guess Miss K won’t mind.”
    â€œWho’s Miss K?” asked Ralph.
    â€œMy teacher,” explained Ryan. “Her real name is Miss Kuckenbacker, but she told us to call her Miss K, because calling her Miss Kuckenbacker would take up too much classroom time.”
    â€œOh,” said Ralph, mystified.
    To Ralph, school was a strange and mysterious place. When he had been a very young mouse, Ralph had pictured school as something like a bus, because mothers and fathers who arrived at the hotel with several children after a long, hot drive across the Sacramento Valley or the long, winding ride over the Sierra Nevada often said, “I’ll be so glad when school starts.” Ralph had naturally concluded that because a school started, it must also move like a car.
    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.
    â€œThis Miss K,” said Ralph, as Ryan reached the bus stop. “Is she OK?”
    â€œYeah, 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 .
    â€œSome 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