child a glass jar containing about two inches of a wet blue substance—she explained that it was oatmeal dyed blue. Ramona was first to say “Yuck.” Most people made faces, and Yard Ape made a gagging noise.

“OK, kids, quiet down,” said Mrs.Whaley.

When the room was quiet, she explained that for science they were going to study fruit flies.

The blue oatmeal contained fruit-fly larvae.

47

“And why do you think the oatmeal is blue?”

she asked.

Several people thought the blue dye was

some sort of food for the larvae, vitamins maybe. Marsha suggested the oatmeal was

dyed blue so the children wouldn’t think it was good to eat. Everybody laughed at this guess. Who would ever think cold oatmeal

was good to eat? Yard Ape came up with the right answer: the oatmeal was dyed blue so the larvae could be seen.And so they could—

little white specks.

As the class bent over their desks making

labels for their jars, Ramona wrote her name on her slip of paper and added, “Age 8,”

which she always wrote after her signature.

Then she drew tiny fruit flies around it before she pasted the label on her very own jar of blue oatmeal and fruit-fly larvae. Now she had a jar of pets.

“That’s a really neat label, Ramona,” said 48

Mrs. Whaley. Ramona understood that her

teacher did not mean tidy when she said

“neat,” but extra good. Ramona decided she liked Mrs.Whaley after all.

The morning was so satisfactory that it

passed quickly. When lunchtime came,

Ramona collected her lunch box and went

off to the cafeteria where, after waiting in line for her milk, she sat at a table with Sara, 49

Janet, Marsha, and other third-grade girls.

She opened her lunch box, and there, tucked in a paper napkin, snug between her sandwich and an orange, was her hard-boiled egg, smooth and perfect, the right size to fit her hand. Because Ramona wanted to save the

best for the last, she ate the center of her sandwich—tuna fish—and poked a hole in

her orange so she could suck out the juice.

Third graders did not peel their oranges. At last it was time for the egg.

There were a number of ways of cracking

eggs.The most popular, and the real reason for bringing an egg to school, was knocking the egg against one’s head. There were two ways of doing so, by a lot of timid little raps or by one big whack.

Sara was a rapper. Ramona, like Yard Ape,

was a whacker. She took a firm hold on her egg, waited until everyone at her table was watching, and whack—she found herself 50

with a handful of crumbled shell and some-

thing cool and slimy running down her face.

Everyone at Ramona’s table gasped.

Ramona needed a moment to realize what

51

had happened. Her egg was raw. Her mother had not boiled her egg at all. She tried to brush the yellow yolk and slithery white out of her hair and away from her face, but she only succeeded in making her hands eggy.