8 Class Pets + 1 Squirrel ÷ 1 Dog = Chaos by Vivian Vande Velde Page A

the door propped open.
    I noticed the big banner:
WELCOME!
    This is the same banner that tells the children School is open again after the summer.
    Someone was obviously telling me School was open for me to escape from the dog.
    Didn’t I say the people here love squirrels?
    So for the first time in my life, I ran into School.
    That owl veered away and flew off into the evening.
    But the dog followed me in.

GREEN EGGS AND HAMSTER
(first-grade hamster)

    I am a hamster, and I live in Mrs. Duran’s first-grade classroom. Mrs. Duran named me after a famous book. She says that makes me a literary pet.
Literary
is the biggest word I know, but I don’t know what it means.
    Mrs. Duran reads a lot of books to the first-graders. The boys and girls talk about what happened in the story and tell if they liked it. Sometimes they write their own stories. I don’t have a pencil to write stories, so I run around in my exercise wheel instead.Round, round, round I go. Sometimes I get so dizzy, I forget things.
    Did I mention I’m a hamster?
    The children also do art projects. They color, they cut with scissors, they paste. Lately, they’ve been very excited about some project they’re doing out in the hall. I have a project, too, but it’s inside my cage. Mrs. Duran gives me tissue and cardboard, and I rip them up with my teeth to make a nice and soft and cozy bed. Every morning Mrs. Duran cleans out the bed I made the day before, along with my litter, and I get to start all over again on a brand-new art project.
    Maybe that’s what
literary
means.
    My favorite part of first grade—after snack time—is that the children and I have been learning about numbers and how to count. There are all sorts of things I can count:
    1. I have 4 legs and 1 tail. (4 + 1 = 5, even though my tail is shorter than my legs.)
    2. There are 2 levels in my cage. Level 1 is the top level, which has my bed and my food bowl and a mirror for me to look into. Level 2 is the bottom level, which has my water bottle and my wheel. I also have a chew toy in the shape ofan elephant. (2 levels + 1 bed + 1 food bowl + 1 mirror + 1 water bottle + 1 wheel + 1 elephant to chew on = lots of things for Green Eggs and Hamster to do.)
    3. The ladder from downstairs to upstairs has 10 rungs. The ladder from upstairs to downstairs also has 10 rungs. This is because it is the same ladder. (1 ladder = 1 ladder.)
    4. The number of Special Hamster Treats I can fit into my cheek pouches at one time is 8. (8 special treats = yummy.)
    There is a squirrel named Twitch who lives outside. Twitch sometimes comes and sits on the window ledge to visit. Twitch is good at cramming birdseed into his cheeks, but he says birdseeds are too small to count.
I
think that Twitch is not very good at counting.
    I am too good a friend to tell him so.
    One day, after the children had gone home, after Mrs. Duran had gone home, after the custodian had swept the floor and turned off the lights but before it got dark, I was busy counting the numbers on the wall clock. There are usually twelve numbers—unless I count them after I’ve gone around in my exercise wheel. Then there are a lot more numbers.
And
they move.
    This day I had counted seventeen numbers when Twitch came running into the room.
    Did I say Twitch is a squirrel?

    â€œHelp, help!” Twitch called. “There’s a dog chasing me.”
    I didn’t ask why a dog was chasing him. Sometimes details are important, but sometimes they’re not. I got an idea, so I said, “Climb up on the bookshelves behind me. And hide behind the dictionary.” The dictionary is the biggest book in the room.
    Twitch was up there before I could say, “Wow! You’re a good climber!”
    And then the dog ran into the room. Attached to his collar was a long length of rope, which dragged along behind him. “Where’s that no-good squirrel?” the dog barked at me.
    I scratched my ear and