The Hard-boiled Egg Fad

3

The Hard-boiled Egg Fad

With all four members of the family leaving at different times in different directions, mornings were flurried in the Quimby household. On the days when Mr. Quimby had an eight o’clock class, he left early in the car. Beezus left next because she walked to school and because she wanted to stop for Mary Jane on the way.

Ramona was third to leave. She enjoyed these last few minutes alone with her mother now that Mrs. Quimby no longer reminded her she must be nice to Willa Jean.

“Did you remember to give me a hard-boiled egg in my lunch like I asked?” Ramona inquired one morning. This week hard-boiled eggs were popular with third graders, a fad started by Yard Ape, who sometimes brought his lunch. Last week the fad had been individual bags of corn chips. Ramona had been left out of that fad because her mother objected to spending money on junk food. Surely her mother would not object to a nutritious hard-boiled egg.

“Yes, I remembered the hard-boiled egg, you little rabbit,” said Mrs. Quimby. “I’m glad you have finally learned to like them.”

Ramona did not feel it necessary to explain to her mother that she still did not like hard-boiled eggs, not even when they had been dyed for Easter. Neither did she like soft-boiled eggs, because she did not like slippery, slithery food. Ramona liked deviled eggs, but deviled eggs were not the fad, at least not this week.

On the bus Ramona and Susan compared lunches. Each was happy to discover that the other had a hard-boiled egg, and both were eager for lunchtime to come.

While Ramona waited for lunch period, school turned out to be unusually interesting. After the class had filled out their arithmetic workbooks, Mrs. Whaley handed each 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. “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 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, 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 with a handful of crumbled shell and something cool and slimy running down her face.

Everyone at Ramona’s table gasped. Ramona needed a moment to realize what 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. Her eyes filled with tears of anger, which she tried to brush away with her wrists. The gasps at her table turned into giggles. From another table, Ramona caught a glimpse of Yard Ape grinning at her.

Marsha, a tall girl who always tried to be motherly, said, “It’s all right, Ramona. I’ll take you to the bathroom and help you wash off the egg.”

Ramona was not one bit grateful. “You go away,” she said, ashamed of being so rude. She did not want this third-grade girl treating her like a baby.

The teacher who was supervising lunch period came over to see what the commotion was about. Marsha gathered up all the paper napkins from the lunch boxes at the table and handed them to the teacher, who tried to sop up the egg. Unfortunately, the napkins did not absorb egg very well. Instead, they smeared yolk and white around in Ramona’s hair. Her face felt stiff as egg white began to dry.

“Take her to the office,” the teacher said to Marsha. “Mrs. Larson will help her.”

“Come on, Ramona,” said Marsha, as if Ramona were in kindergarten. She put her hand on Ramona’s shoulder because Ramona’s hands were too eggy to touch.

Ramona jerked away. “I can go by myself.” With that reply, she ran out of the cafeteria. She was so angry she was able to ignore the giggles and the few sympathetic looks of the other children. Ramona was mad at herself for following a fad. She was furious with Yard Ape for grinning at her. Most of all she was angry with her mother for not boiling the egg in the first place. By the time she reached the office, Ramona’s face felt as stiff as a mask.

Ramona almost ran into Mr. Wittman, the principal, which would have upset her even more. He was someone Ramona always tried to avoid ever since Beezus had told her that the way to remember how to spell the kind of principal who was the principal of a school was to remember the word ended in p-a-l, not p-l-e, because the principal was her pal. Ramona did not want the principal to be her pal. She wanted him to mind his own business, aloof and important, in his office. Mr. Wittman must have felt the same way because he stepped—almost jumped—quickly aside.

Mrs. Larson, the school secretary, took one look at Ramona, sprang from her desk, and said, “Well, you need a little help, don’t you?”

Ramona nodded, grateful to Mrs. Larson for behaving as if eggy third graders walked into her office every day. The secretary led her into a tiny room equipped with a cot, washbasin, and toilet that adjoined the office.

“Let’s see,” said Mrs. Larson, “how shall we go about this? I guess the best way is to wash your hands, then dunk your head. You’ve heard of egg shampoos, haven’t you? They are supposed to be wonderful for the hair.” “Yow!” yelped Ramona, when she dipped her head into the washbasin. “The water’s cold.”

“It’s probably a good thing we don’t have warmer water,” said Mrs. Larson. “You wouldn’t want to cook the egg in your hair, would you?” She rubbed and Ramona snuffled. She rinsed and Ramona sniffed. Finally Mrs. Larson said, “That’s the best I can do,” and handed Ramona a wad of paper towels. “Dry yourself off the best you can,” she said. “You can wash your hair when you get home.” Ramona accepted the towels. As she sat on the cot, rubbing and blotting and seething in humiliation and anger, she listened to sounds from the office, the click of the typewriter, the ring of the telephone, Mrs. Larson’s voice answering.

Ramona began to calm down and feel a little better. Maybe Mrs. Kemp would let her wash her hair after school. She could let Willa Jean pretend to be working in a beauty shop and not say anything about her Sustained Silent Reading. One of these days Willa Jean was sure to catch on that she was just reading a book, and Ramona wanted to postpone that time as long as possible.

Toward the end of lunch period, Ramona heard teachers drift into the office to leave papers or pick up messages from their boxes. Then Ramona made an interesting discovery. Teachers talked about their classes.

“My class has been so good today,” said one teacher. “I can hardly believe it. They’re little angels.”

“I don’t know what’s the matter with my class today,” said another. “Yesterday they knew how to subtract, and today none of them seems able to remember.”

“Perhaps it’s the weather,” suggested another teacher.

Ramona found all this conversation most interesting. She had blotted her hair as best she could when she heard Mrs. Whaley’s big cheerful voice speaking to Mrs. Larson. “Here are those tests I was supposed to hand in yesterday,” she said. “Sorry I’m late.” Mrs. Larson murmured an answer.

Then Mrs. Whaley said, “I hear my little show-off came in with egg in her hair.” She laughed and added, “What a nuisance.”

Ramona was so stunned she did not try to hear Mrs. Larson’s answer. Show-off! Nuisance! Did Mrs. Whaley think she had broken a raw egg into her hair on purpose to show off? And to be called a nuisance by her teacher when she was not a nuisance. Or was she? Ramona did not mean to break an egg in her hair. Her mother was to blame. Did this accident make her a nuisance?

Ramona did not see why Mrs. Whaley could think she was a nuisance when Mrs. Whaley was not the one to get her hands all eggy. Yet Ramona had heard her say right out loud that she was a show-off and a nuisance. That hurt, really hurt.

Ramona sat as still as she could with the damp paper towels in her hands. She did not want to risk even the softest noise by throwing them into the wastebasket. Lunch period came to an end, and still she sat. Her body felt numb and so did her heart. She could never, never face Mrs. Whaley again. Never.

Mrs. Larson’s typewriter clicked cheerfully away. Ramona was forgotten, which was the way she wanted it. She even wanted to forget herself and her horrible hair, now drying into stiff spikes. She no longer felt like a real person.

The next voice Ramona heard was that of Yard Ape. “Mrs. Larson,” he said, as if he had been running in the hall, “Mrs. Whaley said to tell you Ramona didn’t come back after lunch.”

The typing stopped. “Oh, my goodness,” said Mrs. Larson, as she appeared in the doorway. “Why, Ramona, are you still here?”

How was Ramona supposed to answer?

“Run along back to class with Danny,” said the secretary. “I’m sorry I forgot all about you.”

“Do I have to?” asked Ramona.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Larson. “Your hair is almost dry. You don’t want to miss class.”

Ramona did want to miss class. Forever. The third grade was spoiled forever.

“Aw, come on, Ramona,” said Yard Ape, for once not teasing.

Surprised by sympathy from Yard Ape, Ramona reluctantly left the office. She expected him to go on ahead of her, but instead he walked beside her, as if they were friends instead of rivals. Ramona felt strange walking down the hall alone with a boy. As she trudged along beside him, she felt she had to tell someone the terrible news. “Mrs. Whaley doesn’t like me,” she said in a flat voice.

“Don’t let old Whaley get you down,” he answered. “She likes you OK. You’re a good kid.”

Ramona was a little shocked at hearing her teacher called “old Whaley.” However, she squeezed comfort from Yard Ape’s opinion. She began to like him, really like him.

When they reached their classroom, Yard Ape, perhaps thinking he had been too nice to Ramona, turned and said to her with his old grin, “Egghead!”

Oh! There was nothing for Ramona to do but follow him into the room. Sustained Silent Reading, or DEAR, as Mrs. Whaley called it, was over, and the class was practicing writing cursive capital letters. Mrs. Whaley was describing capital M as she wrote it on the board. “Swoop down, swoop up, down, up again, and down.” Ramona avoided looking at her teacher as she got out paper and pencil and began to write the capital letters of the alphabet in careful, even script. She enjoyed the work, and it soothed her hurt feelings until she came to the letter Q.

Ramona sat looking at the cursive capital Q, the first letter of her last name. Ramona had always been fond of Q, the only letter of the alphabet with a neat little tail. She enjoyed printing Q, but she did not like her written Q. She had made it right, but it looked like a big floppy 2, which Ramona felt was a dumb way to make such a nice letter.

Ramona decided right then and there that she would never again write a cursive Q. She would write the rest of her last name, uimby, in cursive, but she would always, no matter what Mrs. Whaley said, print her capital Q’s.

So there, Mrs. Whaley, thought Ramona. You can’t make me write a cursive Q if I don’t want to. She began to feel like a real person again.