18th Emergency by Betsy Byars Page A

voice sagged. “Problem one, page forty.” He took another sip of chalk. “Wait a minute, let me read this thing again.”
    Mouse let his head drop down on his book and felt the cool page against his face. His temperature, he thought now, was beyond being registered, rapidly approaching the point where the body shriveled like a raisin.
    “Benjie, are you all right?” Mrs. Romanoski asked. He lifted his head and looked at her. “You don’t look well to me.”
    “I don’t feel good either,” he said.
    “Then perhaps you should go to the office.”
    He hesitated. “All right.”
    “I’ll go with him,” Ezzie offered quickly.
    “No, Ezzie, you continue with your problem.”
    “But—”
    “Ezzie.”
    There was a silence as Mouse got up, gathered his books and walked to the door. As he went out into the hall he heard the teacher say, “All right, Ezzie, it’s a multiplication problem.”
    “Multiplication?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, that’s what I thought.”
    Quickly Mouse started down the deserted stairs to the office.

M OUSE WAS LYING ON the sofa watching a cartoon. It was the kind of old cartoon that he particularly disliked—the ones in which boxes of soap powder and tubes of toothpaste dance on little legs, but he kept watching. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and school had been over for thirty minutes. Mouse had been lying on the sofa since then imagining Marv Hammerman standing outside the school waiting for him. He knew exactly how Hammerman would look—relaxed, watchful, his hair flowing, his hands hooked in his back jeans pockets, his eyes bright, his face expressionless. Mouse had not been able to get that picture out of his mind.
    He watched some matches singing, “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” in high voices, and then there was a knock at the door. Mouse got up so quickly that he knocked a glass off onto the floor. He walked silently into the middle of the room to see if the door was locked. It wasn’t.
    The knock came again. Mouse waited, wondering if he should try to climb out on the fire escape and hide. He imagined the door bursting open and Hammerman standing there, filling the doorway.
    There was another knock. “Hey, Mouse, you in there?” It was Ezzie, and Mouse called quickly, “Yeah, come on in.” He went back and picked up the glass and the two ice cubes that had spilled onto the rug.
    “How are you feeling?” Ezzie asked.
    “Oh, all right.”
    “Hammerman was looking for you after school.”
    Mouse moistened his lips. “He told me to meet him, but I was sick. They made me go home.”
    “The boy in the black sweat shirt—you know which one he is?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, he and Hammerman came over to me after school.”
    “What did they say?”
    “Hammerman just said, ‘Where’s your buddy?’”
    “Tell me every word, Ez, don’t leave out a thing.”
    “That was every word. ‘Where’s your buddy?’”
    “So what did you say? Did you tell him I had to go home sick?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And what did he say to that?” Mouse had the briefest hope that his having to go home sick might cause some sympathy from Hammerman.
    “He didn’t say anything, but the boy in the black sweat shirt said, ‘Yeah, scared sick,’ and sort of smiled like this.”
    “What else?”
    “That was the whole conversation, Mouse. First he said, ‘Where’s your buddy?’ Then I said, ‘He had to go home. He was sick.’ Then the boy in the black sweat shirt—I found out his name is Peachie—said—”
    “Never mind. I remember it,” Mouse said quickly.
    “Well, you were the one who wanted to hear it.”
    “Once. I wanted to hear it once.” He sat down on the sofa. On the television screen a bottle of cough syrup was dancing with a bottle of cold tablets, and every time the bottle of cold tablets did a fancy step, the stopper would come off and the tablets would bounce up into the air and then back into the bottle. Mouse said, “Turn that thing off, will