Title Page

Beverly Cleary

I L L U S T R AT E D B Y

Tracy Dockray

viii

Contents

1. Trouble in the Park 1

2. Mrs. Quimby’s Secret 19

3. The Hole in the House 35

4. The First Day of School 48

5. Owl Trouble

64

6. Parents’ Night

84

7. Alone in the Dark 107

8. Ramona Says a Bad Word 128

9. Mr. Quimby’s Spunky Gal 150

About the Author

Other Books by Beverly Cleary

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

viii

1

Trouble in the Park

Ramona Quimby, brave and fearless, was

half running, half skipping to keep up

with her big sister Beatrice on their way

home from the park. She had never seen her

sister’s cheeks so flushed with anger as they were this August afternoon. Ramona was

sticky from heat and grubby from landing in

the sawdust at the foot of the slides, but she was proud of herself. When Mrs. Quimby

1

had sent the girls to the park for an hour, because she had an errand to do—an

important errand, she hinted—she told

Beezus, as Beatrice was called, to look after Ramona.

And what had happened? For the first

time in her six years Ramona had looked

after Beezus, who was supposed to be the

responsible one. Bossy was a better word, Ramona sometimes thought. But not today.

Ramona had stepped forward and defended

her sister for a change.

“Beezus,” said Ramona, panting, “slow

down.”

Beezus, clutching her library book in her

sweaty hand, paid no attention.The clang of

rings, the steady pop of tennis balls against asphalt, and the shouts of children grew

fainter as the girls approached their house

on Klickitat Street.

Ramona hoped their mother would be

2

home from her errand, whatever it was. She

couldn’t wait to tell what had happened and

how she had defended her big sister. Her

mother would be so proud, and so would

her father when he came home from work

and heard the story. “Good for you,

Ramona,” he would say. “That’s the old

3

fight!” Brave little Ramona.

Fortunately, the car was in the garage and

Mrs. Quimby was in the living room when

the girls burst into the house.“Why, Beezus,”

said their mother, when she saw the flushed

and sweaty faces of her daughters, one angry and one triumphant.

Beezus blinked to hold back the tears in

her eyes.

“Ramona, what happened to Beezus?”

Mrs. Quimby was alarmed.

“Don’t ever call me Beezus again!”

Beezus’s voice was fierce.

Mrs. Quimby looked at Ramona for the

explanation, and Ramona was eager to give

it. Usually Beezus was the one who

explained what had happened to Ramona,

how she had dropped her ice-cream cone

on the sidewalk and cried when Beezus

would not let her pick it up, or how she

tried, in spite of the rules, to go down a slide 4

headfirst and had landed on her face in the sawdust. Now Ramona was going to have a

turn. She took a deep breath and prepared

to tell her tale. “Well, when we went to the park, I slid on the slides awhile and Beezus sat on a bench reading her library book.

Then I saw an empty swing. A big swing,

not a baby swing over the wading pool, and

I thought since I’m going to be in the first grade next month I should swing on the big

swings. Shouldn’t I, Mama?”

“Yes, of course.” Mrs. Quimby was impa-

tient. “Please, go on with the story. What

happened to Beezus?”

“Well, I climbed up in the swing,”

Ramona continued, “only my feet wouldn’t

touch the ground because there was this big

hollow under the swing.” Ramona recalled

how she had longed to swing until the

chains went slack in her hands and her toes

pointed to the tops of the fir trees, but she 5

sensed that she had better hurry up with her story or her mother would ask Beezus to tell it. Ramona never liked to lose an audience.

“And I said,‘Beezus, push me,’ and some big

boys, big bad boys, heard me and one of

them said—” Ramona, eager to be the one

to tell the story but reluctant to repeat the words, hesitated.

“Said what?” Mrs. Quimby was baffled.

“Said what, Ramona? Beezus, what did

he say?”

Beezus wiped the back of her wrist across

her eyes and tried. “He said, ‘J-j-j—’ ”

Eagerness to beat her sister at telling what had happened overcame Ramona’s reluctance. “He said, ‘Jesus, Beezus!’ ” Ramona

looked up at her mother, waiting for her to

be shocked. Instead she merely looked sur-

prised and—could it be?—amused.

“And that is why I never, never, never want to be called Beezus again!” said Beezus.

“And all the other boys began to say it,

6

too,” said Ramona, warming to her story now that she was past the bad part. “Oh,

Mama, it was just awful. It was terrible. All those big awful boys! They kept saying,

‘Jesus, Beezus’ and ‘Beezus, Jesus.’ I jumped out of the swing, and I told them—”

Here Beezus interrupted. Anger once

more replaced tears. “And then Ramona

had to get into the act. Do you know what

she did? She jumped out of the swing and

preached a sermon! Nobody wants a little

sister tagging around preaching sermons to a bunch of boys. And they weren’t that big

either. They were just trying to act big.”

Ramona was stunned by this view of her

behavior. How unfair of Beezus when she

had been so brave. And the boys had seemed big to her.

Mrs. Quimby spoke to Beezus as if

Ramona were not present. “A sermon! You

must be joking.”

Ramona tried again. “Mama, I—”

7

Beezus was not going to give her little sister a chance to speak. “No, I’m not

joking. And then Ramona stuck her thumbs

in her ears, waggled her fingers, and stuck

out her tongue. I just about died, I was so

embarrassed.”

Ramona was suddenly subdued. She had

thought Beezus was angry at the boys, but

now it turned out she was angry with her

little sister, too. Maybe angrier. Ramona was used to being considered a little pest, and

she knew she sometimes was a pest, but this

was something different. She felt as if she

were standing aside looking at herself. She

saw a stranger, a funny little six-year-old girl with straight brown hair, wearing grubby

shorts and an old T-shirt, inherited from

Beezus, which had Camp Namanu printed

across the front. A silly little girl embarrassing her sister so much that Beezus was

ashamed of her. And she had been proud of

8

herself because she thought she was being

brave. Now it turned out that she was not

brave. She was silly and embarrassing.

Ramona’s confidence in herself was badly

shaken. She tried again. “Mama, I—”

Mrs. Quimby felt her older daughter

deserved all her attention. “Were they boys

you know?” she asked.

9

“Sort of,” said Beezus with a sniff. “They go to our school, and now when school

starts all the boys in the sixth grade will be saying it. Sixth-grade boys are awful.”

“They will have forgotten by then.” Mrs.

Quimby tried to be reassuring. Beezus

sniffed again.

“Mama, I think we should stop calling her Beezus.” Even though her feelings were

hurt, and her confidence shaken, Ramona

had a reason of her own for trying to help

Beezus.

Whenever someone asked Beezus where

she got such an unusual nickname, Beezus

always answered that it came from Ramona.

When she was little she couldn’t say Beatrice.

Now that Ramona was about to enter first

grade, she did not like to remember there

was a time when she could not pronounce

her sister’s name.

“Just because I have an Aunt Beatrice, I

10

don’t see why I have to be named Beatrice, too,” said Beezus. “Nobody else has a name

like Beatrice.”

“You wouldn’t want a name like every-

one else’s,” Mrs. Quimby pointed out.

“I know,” agreed Beezus, “but Beatrice.”

“Yuck,” said Ramona, trying to be help-

ful, but her mother frowned at her. “How

about Trissy?” she suggested hastily.

Beezus was rude. “Don’t be dumb. Then

they would call me Sissy Trissy or something.

Boys in the sixth grade think up awful names.”

“Nobody ever calls me anything but

Ramona Kimona.” Ramona could not help

thinking that an awful nickname might be

interesting to have. “Why not just be

Beatrice? Nobody can think up a bad nick-

name for Beatrice.”

“Yes, I guess you’re right,” agreed Beezus.

“I’ll have to be plain old Beatrice with her plain old brown hair.”

11

“I think Beatrice is fancy,” said Ramona, who also had plain old brown hair but did

not take it so hard. Agreeing with Beezus—

Beatrice—gave Ramona a cozy feeling, as if

something unusually pleasant had taken

place. Beezus honored Ramona with a

watery smile, forgiving her, at least for the moment, for preaching a sermon.

Ramona felt secure and happy. Agreeing

was so pleasant she wished she and her sister could agree more often. Unfortunately,

there were many things to disagree about—

whose turn it was to feed Picky-picky, the

old yellow cat, who should change the paper

under Picky-picky’s dish, whose washcloth

had been left sopping in the bathtub because someone had not wrung it out, and whose

dirty underwear had been left in whose half

of the room. Ramona always said Beezus—

Beatrice—was bossy, because she was older.

Beatrice said Ramona always got her own

12

way, because she was the baby and because she always made a fuss. For the moment all

this was forgotten.

Mrs. Quimby smiled to see her girls at

peace with one another. “Don’t worry,

Beatrice. If the boys tease you, just hold your head high and ignore them. When they see

they can’t tease you, they will stop.”

The two sisters exchanged a look of

complete understanding. They both knew

this was the sort of advice easy for adults to give but difficult for children to follow. If the boys remembered, Beezus might have to

listen to “Jesus, Beezus” for months before

they gave up.

“By the way, Ramona,” said Mrs.

Quimby, as Beatrice went off to the bath-

room to splash cold water on her face,“what

did you say to the boys in the park?”

Ramona, who had flopped back on the

couch, sat up straight. “I told them they

13

were not supposed to take the name of the Lord in vain,” she said in her most proper

Sunday School voice. “That’s what my

Sunday School teacher said.”

“Oh, I see,” said Mrs. Quimby.“And what

did they say to that?”

Ramona was chagrined because she knew

her mother was amused, and Ramona did

not like anyone to be amused when she was

serious.“Wasn’t I right? That’s what I learned in Sunday School.” She was filled with

uncertainty by her mother’s amusement, as

well as by her sister’s anger over the incident.

“Of course, you were right, dear, although

I don’t suppose a bunch of boys would pay

much attention.” Mrs. Quimby’s lips were

not smiling, but amusement lingered in her

eyes. “How did the boys answer?”

Ramona’s confidence wilted completely.

She was seeing that little girl in the park

who was not the heroine she thought she

14

was after all. “They laughed,” Ramona admitted in a small voice, feeling sorry for herself. Poor little Ramona, laughed at and

picked on. Nobody understood how she

felt. Nobody understood what it was like to

be six years old and the littlest one in the family unless you counted old Picky-picky,

and even he was ten years old.

Mrs. Quimby gave Ramona a big hug.

“Well, it’s all over now,” she said.“Run along and play, but please don’t play Brick Factory this afternoon.”

“Don’t worry, Mother. I don’t have any

bricks left.”

Ramona felt that her mother should be

able to see that running along and playing

was impossible on a hot summer afternoon

when everyone Ramona’s age had gone to

the beach or the mountains or to visit a

grandmother. The two weeks the Quimbys

had spent in a borrowed mountain cabin in

15

July now seemed a long time away. Who was she supposed to play with?

Summer was boring. Long and boring.

No bricks left for the game of Brick Factory, which she and her friend Howie had

invented, nobody to play with, and Beezus

with her nose in a book all day.

Not having any place to run along to,

Ramona sat looking at her mother, thinking

that her fresh haircut and touch of eye

shadow made her look unusually nice this

afternoon. She wondered if her mother

would tell her father about the incident in

the park and if they would have a good

laugh over it when they thought Ramona

could not hear. She hoped not. She did not

want her father to laugh at her.

Seeing her mother looking so nice made

Ramona recall the reason for the trip to the park.“What was your errand that you didn’t

want to drag us along on?” she asked.

16

Mrs. Quimby smiled a different smile,

exasperating and mysterious. “Sh-h-h,” she

said, her finger on her lips. “It’s a secret, and wild horses couldn’t drag it out of me.”

Ramona found secrets hard to bear. “Tell

me, Mama! Mama, please tell me.” She threw her arms around her mother, who had a

good smell of clean clothes and perfumed

soap. “Please, please, please! ” Learning a big juicy secret would help make up for

Ramona’s unhappy afternoon.

Mrs. Quimby shook her head.

“Pretty please with a lump of sugar on

it?” Ramona felt she could not bear not

knowing this very minute.

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret any-

more,” said Mrs. Quimby.

That, Ramona felt, was just about the

most exasperating sentence ever spoken by a

grown-up.

18

2

Mrs. Quimby’s Secret

Mrs. Quimby, wearing a dress instead

of old slacks, had gone off on

another mysterious errand. She promised

not to be away long, and Beezus and

Ramona promised to stay out of trouble

while she was out, a promise easier for

Beezus to keep than for Ramona. Beezus

disappeared with a book into the room the

girls shared. Ramona settled herself at the

19

kitchen table with paper and crayons to draw a picture of the cat on the label of a

can of Puss’n Boots cat food. Ramona

loved that jaunty booted cat, so different

from old Picky-picky, who spent most of

his time napping on Beezus’s bed.

The house was quiet. Ramona worked

happily, humming a tune from a television

commercial. She used a pencil to draw cat

fur, because she could draw finer lines with it than she could with a crayon. She used her crayons for Puss’n Boots’s clothes, but when she came to his boots, she discovered her red crayon was missing. Most likely she had left it in her room.

“Beezus, have you seen my red crayon?”

The girls had made an agreement that

Ramona could call her sister Beezus at

home, but in public she had better remem-

ber to call her Beatrice or look out!

“Um-hm.” Without looking up from her

20

book, Beezus waved her hand in the direction of Ramona’s bed.

Peace between the sisters could not last.

Ramona saw the broken remains of her red

crayon lying in the middle of her bed.“Who

broke my crayon?” she demanded.

“You shouldn’t leave your crayon on

other people’s beds where it can get sat on.”

Beezus did not even bother to look up from

her book.

Ramona found this answer most annoy-

ing. “You should look where you sit,” she

said, “and you don’t have to be so bossy.”

“This is my bed.” Beezus glanced at her

sister.“You have your own half of the room.”

“I don’t have anyplace to put anything.”

“Pooh,” said Beezus. “You’re just careless

and messy.”

Ramona was indignant.“I am not careless

and messy!” Picky-picky woke up, leaped

from Beezus’s bed, and departed, tail held

21

straight. Picky-picky often made it plain he did not care for Ramona.

“Yes, you are,” said Beezus. “You don’t

hang up your clothes, and you leave your

toys all over.”

“Just because the clothes bar is easy for

you to reach,” said Ramona, “and you think

you’re too big for toys.” To show her sister that she did pick up her things, she laid the 22

pieces of her broken crayon in her drawer on top of her underwear. She had lost interest in crayoning. She did not want to color boots

with the rough ends of a broken crayon.

“Besides,” said Beezus, who did not like

to be interrupted when she was deep in a

good book, “you’re a pest.”

Pest was a fighting word to Ramona, because it was unfair. She was not a pest, at 23

least not all the time. She was only littler than anyone else in the family, and no matter

how hard she tried, she could not catch up.

“Don’t you call me a pest,” she shouted, “or I’ll tell Mama you have a lipstick hidden in your drawer.”

Beezus finally laid down her book.

“Ramona Geraldine Quimby!” Her voice

and manner were fierce.“You’re nothing but

a snoop and a tattletale!”

Ramona had gone too far. “I wasn’t

snooping. I was looking for a safety pin,” she explained, adding, as if she were a very good girl, “and anyway I haven’t told Mama yet. ”

Beezus gave her sister a look of disgust.

“Ramona, grow up!”

Ramona lost all patience. “Can’t you see I’m trying?” she yelled at the top of her voice. People were always telling her to

grow up.What did they think she was trying

to do?

24

“Try harder,” was Beezus’s heartless

answer. “And stop bothering me when I’ve

come to the good part in my book.”

Ramona shoved aside her stuffed animals

and threw herself on her bed with Wild

Animals of Africa, a book with interesting pictures but without the three grown-up

words, gas, motel, and burger, which she had taught herself from signs but was unable to

find in books. The book fell open to the

page that she had looked at most often, a full-page colored photograph of a gorilla.

Ramona stared briefly and intensely at the

gorilla, taking in his mighty body covered

with blue-black hair, his tiny eyes, the dark caves of his nostrils, his long and powerful arms with hands like leather that hung

almost to the ground. With a satisfying

shiver, Ramona slammed the book shut.

She wouldn’t want to meet that old gorilla

coming down the street or swinging through

the trees of the park. She let the book fall open again. The gorilla was still there, staring out of the page with fierce little eyes.

Ramona slammed the gorilla in again.

When Ramona was bored, she enjoyed scar-

ing herself.

“Ramona, do you have to keep slamming

that book?” asked Beezus.

Ramona slammed the book a few more

times to show her sister she could slam the

26

book all she wanted to.

“Pest,” said Beezus, to show Ramona she

could call her a pest if she wanted to.

“I am not a pest!” yelled Ramona.

“You are too a pest!” Beezus yelled back.

Ha, thought Ramona, at least I got you

away from your old book. “I’m not a pest,

and you’re just bossy!” she shouted.

“Silence, varlet,” commanded Beezus.

“Yonder car approacheth. Our noble mother

cometh.” People talked like that in the books Beezus was reading lately.

Ramona thought Beezus was showing

off. “Don’t you call me a bad name!” she

shouted, half hoping her mother would hear.

In a moment Mrs. Quimby appeared in

the doorway. She looked angry. Beezus shot

Ramona an it’s-all-your-fault look.

“Girls, you can be heard all over the

neighborhood,” said Mrs. Quimby.

Ramona sat up and looked virtuous.

27

“Beezus called me a bad name.”

“How do you know?” asked Beezus.

“You don’t even know what varlet means.”

Mrs. Quimby took in the two girls on

their rumpled beds, Ramona’s toys heaped

in the corner, the overflowing dresser. Then, 28

when she spoke, she said an astonishing thing. “I don’t blame you girls one little bit for bickering so much. This room is much

too small for two growing girls, so of course you get on one another’s nerves.”

The sisters looked at each other and

relaxed.Their mother understood.

“Well, we’re going to do something

about it,” Mrs. Quimby continued. “We’re

going to go ahead and build that extra bed-

room onto the house.”

Beezus sat up, and this time she was the

one to slam her book shut. “Oh, Mother!”

she cried. “Are we really?”

Ramona understood the stress on that last

word.The extra room had been talked about

for so long that neither sister believed it

would actually be built. Mr. Quimby had

drawn plans for knocking out the back of the closet where the vacuum cleaner was kept

and extending the house into the backyard

29

just enough to add a small bedroom with the closet-turned-into-a-hall leading to it.

Ramona had heard a lot of uninteresting

grown-up talk about borrowing money

from a bank to pay for it, but nothing had

ever come of it. All she understood was that her father worked at something that sounded

boring in an office downtown, and there was

never quite enough money in the Quimby

family. They were certainly not poor, but her parents worried a lot about taxes and college educations.

“Where will we get the money to pay

back the bank?” asked Beezus, who under-

stood these things better than Ramona.

Mrs. Quimby smiled, about to make an

important announcement.“I have a job that

begins as soon as school starts.”

“A job!” cried the sisters.

“Yes,” said their mother. “I am going to

work from nine in the morning till two in

30

the afternoon in Dr. Perry’s office.That way I can be here when Ramona gets home from

school.And on my way home from talking to

Dr. Perry, I stopped at the bank and arranged to borrow the money to pay for the room.”

“Oh, Mother!” Beezus was all enthusi-

asm. Dr. Perry was the woman who had

given the girls their checkups and their shots ever since they were born. “Just think!

You’re going to be liberated!”

Ramona was pleased by the look of

amusement that flickered across her mother’s face. Ramona wasn’t the only one who said

things grown-ups thought funny.

“That remains to be seen,” said Mrs.

Quimby,“and depends on how much help I

get from you girls.”

“And you’ll get to see all the darling

babies!” Beezus loved babies and could

hardly wait until she was old enough to baby-sit. “Oh, Mother, you’re so lucky!”

31

Mrs. Quimby smiled. “I’m going to be Dr. Perry’s bookkeeper. I won’t be taking

care of babies.”

Ramona was less enthusiastic than

Beezus. “Who will take care of me if I get

sick?” she wanted to know.

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