Surprises According to Humphrey

by Betty G. Birney

  Mrs. Tugwell served the Thomases lemonade and cookies, and they all laughed and shared stories about me, Garth and A.J.

  “When you called and asked if A.J. could help look for Humphrey, I said, ‘We’re all going,’” Mr. Thomas said. “We had to help out our little buddy.”

  “I found him!” DeeLee bragged.

  And I was GLAD-GLAD-GLAD she had.

  While the families talked, Garth and A.J. stayed unusually quiet.

  “Why don’t you take A.J. to your room?” Garth’s mom asked.

  “Okay.” Garth didn’t sound very enthusiastic. “Can we take Humphrey along?”

  “Yes,” said Garth’s mom. “But be gentle with him. He’s been through a lot today.”

  This was a very smart woman.

  Once we were in Garth’s room, the boys got quiet again.

  “It wasn’t my idea to call you,” Garth finally said. “My dad made me.”

  “I’m glad he did. My sister found Humphrey, didn’t she?” A.J. replied.

  “Along with my brother,” Garth snapped back.

  They were quiet again. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have spun on my wheel to entertain them, but I was far too weak.

  “What’s that?” A.J. asked after a while.

  “My guitar,” answered Garth.

  “Can you play it?”

  “Sure.” Garth took the guitar out of its case, fooled around with the strings, then began to play “Down in the Valley.”

  “You really can play,” said A.J.

  “I told you I could.” Garth’s voice had an edge to it. He started playing another song.

  “I wish I could play.” A.J. sounded wistful. “Can I try it?”

  Garth thrust the guitar at A.J. “Okay.”

  A.J. tried to play, but it sounded AWFUL-AWFUL-AWFUL! We hamsters have sensitive ears, and mine were hurting from the terrible sounds that came out of the guitar.

  He stopped abruptly, thank goodness, and handed the guitar back to Garth.

  “Here,” he said. “I’m no good.”

  “Nobody’s good in the beginning,” said Garth. “I’ve been practicing for months.” He started strumming again, and it sounded good.

  “Honey, we’re going home.” A.J.’s mom poked her head in the door. “Garth’s parents said you can stay if you’d like.”

  “Okay,” said A.J.

  “Okay with you, Garth?” asked Mrs. Thomas.

  “Sure,” Garth answered, but he didn’t sound as if he meant it.

  After A.J.’s mom left, Garth and A.J. were quiet for a while, which wasn’t normal for them. They stared at my cage, and finally Garth said, “Maybe Humphrey’s ready for another spin.”

  My stomach did a somersault at the thought of meeting up with Sweetums again, but this time, Garth put me in the ball and let me roll around his bedroom floor. I was pretty tired of rolling, but I was also worried about coming face-to-face with another cat or a dog or some other dangerous creature. It was time for me to take charge of my hamster ball!

  Garth strummed the guitar, but I hardly noticed. I already knew how to make wide turns, but now I wanted to try sharp turns. I spun my body to the right as fast as my legs would go, but the ball wobbled rather than moving very far.

  A.J. laughed. “Look at Humphrey Dumpty.”

  Garth laughed, too. “He looks a little seasick.”

  Once the ball stopped wobbling, I decided to try again. I remembered seeing some boys on skateboards one time. They could leap up in the air and land, reversing the direction of their boards. I took a deep breath and leaped up, turning my body at the same time. The only thing that happened was I hit my head on the ball and did a double somersault, which is a pretty good trick, but not what I was aiming for.

  Meanwhile, I heard A.J. ask Garth if he could teach him to play the guitar.

  “I’ll try,” said Garth. He didn’t sound too convinced.

  As the boys sat side by side on the bed, Garth showed A.J. where to put his fingers and how to strum the strings.

  It still sounded terrible, horrible and VERY-VERY-VERY bad!

  “I’m hopeless,” said A.J.

  “You could be good.” Garth sounded a little friendlier. “Try it again.”

  I was already trying again. This time I didn’t hit my head, and I kept my balance as I leaped to the right. And what do you know? The ball made a faster turn to the right. It was still circular, but I felt more in control.

  A.J.’s guitar playing was way out of control.

  “I give up.” A.J. handed the guitar back to Garth.

  Garth picked out a few notes. “It sounded terrible when I tried in the beginning, too. You just need practice.”

  Suddenly, A.J. jumped up and pointed right at me. “Hey, look at Humphrey! That’s so cool!”

  What I was doing was pretty cool, if I do say so myself. First, I made a tight left-hand circle. Then I leaped to the right and did a tight right-hand circle.

  Garth and A.J. got down on their knees and watched me. “That’s amazing!” A.J. exclaimed. “How’d he figure that out?”

  “I think he was practicing,” Garth said. “Now he could be in the hamster ball Olympics!”

  “You know what? You could throw the ball better if you practiced,” said A.J. “Don’t you ever play catch with your dad?”

  “Dad said he’s not very good at playing ball,” Garth told him.

  “Oh,” said A.J. Then after a while he added, “Maybe I could practice with you. You could help me with the guitar and I could help you with softball.”

  “You really think I could get better?” Garth asked.

  “Sure,” said A.J. “Look at how good Humphrey is at ball!”

  And I was very good, indeed. Sweetums would have a hard time keeping up with me now.

  Garth’s dad popped his head in the doorway. “We’re ordering pizza for dinner. You like pepperoni?” he asked A.J.

  “Sure!”

  “If you want to spend the night, your mom said she’d drop your clothes off,” Mr. Tugwell added.

  “Okay with you, Garth?” A.J. asked.

  “Okay!”

  I was glad to hear that Garth answered without a bit of hesitation.

  Garth took me out of the hamster ball and put me back in my cage. While the family ate pizza, I took a long nap, and I dreamed about beautiful guitar music instead of space aliens or cats.

  The next afternoon, A.J. talked Garth into coming outside. “We’ll just toss the ball around,” he said.

  “I won’t be good,” Garth warned him.

  “Maybe not, but you’ll get better than you are now,” A.J. said. “Just like the guitar. Or the hamster ball.”

  I was happy they left me in the house. Although I had a new technique, I wasn’t anxious to come nose to nose with Sweetums again. She might still be looking for dessert.

  Even though I was inside, I could still hear Garth and A.J. laughing and shouting in the yard.

  “Nice catch,” A.J. said once. “Way to go!”

  I spun on my wheel with pure joy. Even without a Plan, I’d managed to help my friends. That was the best trick I’d learned all day.

  PRACTICE: Doing the same thing over and over in order to get better at it (and all I can say is, if you play the guitar the way A.J. does, you’d better practice a lot). Practice always pays off, especially when steering a hamster ball.

  Humphrey’s Dictionary of Wonderful Words

  No Surprises

  Well, well, if it isn’t Humphrey.” That’s what Miss Victoria, the bus driver, said when she picked Garth and me up at the bus stop on Monday morning. “The best-behaved student on the bus!”

  That was NICE-NICE-NICE to hear.

  Things went so well between Garth and A.J. over the weekend that they sat next to each other and acted like best friends again.

  As the bus approached Longfellow School, my whiskers began twitching and my fur began itching. Would Og still be there when I got back? Or had he been whisk
ed away to the faraway planet of Spurling?

  I’m happy to say, he was there! Nothing at all had changed in Room 26, thank goodness.

  “Greetings, green and faithful friend,” I greeted Og.

  “BOING-BOING!” was his response.

  Mrs. Brisbane walked over to the table by the window where Og and I live. “Are you guys glad to see each other?” she asked. “Humphrey, I was afraid Og would miss you over the weekend, so I took him home with me.”

  Whew! She saved him from an alien kidnapping and she didn’t even know it.

  “Lucky frog,” I said. “The Brisbanes don’t have a cat.” I told him the whole story about Sweetums.

  So there we were, back on the shelf by the window, and everything looked completely normal in Room 26. But the events of the past week made me realize how quickly things can change. Fire alarms can jingle jangle, best friends can become foes and things from outer space can invade.

  During the morning recess, Principal Morales stuck his head in the door and said, “Did you bring it?”

  “Oh, no! I forgot again,” Mrs. Brisbane replied.

  “Okay. I don’t want to bug you. Maybe tomorrow?”

  “I’ll try,” said Mrs. Brisbane, and the principal moved on.

  After he left, Mrs. Brisbane said something very surprising. “It was only a little white lie.” She said it softly to herself, but I heard it plainly. A little white lie.

  I had no idea what she was talking about, but I’d never heard anything good about a lie. Even more confusing was the fact that Mrs. Brisbane would lie at all. She might be sad or even mad, but she was always honest.

  I couldn’t puzzle over what she said for long because my friends returned from recess. For the first time in a while, Garth came in with a big smile on his face. Tabitha slapped him on the back and said, “Good game!” Then A.J. high-fived Garth.

  I guess all that practice over the weekend paid off, and I was GLAD-GLAD-GLAD.

  But I didn’t feel so happy later in the day. Mrs. Brisbane became extremely annoyed when Heidi Hopper blurted out answers—not once, not twice, but three times! (I was a little annoyed with her, too.) If Mrs. Brisbane had talked to her parents, it hadn’t done any good.

  After lunch, our teacher announced that we were going to have a surprise guest! That got my brain spinning as fast as my wheel. Could it be a magician like the surprise guest at Richie’s party? Or maybe it would be Firefighter Jeff to help us practice Stop-Drop-Roll. (I hoped it would be him.) Just as I was getting excited, I realized that the guest could be somebody not so nice. It could be Mrs. Wright and her really loud whistle. Or it could even be a space alien!

  I decided to wait in my sleeping hut. A small hamster can’t be too careful.

  It wasn’t long before the mystery was solved, and no one was more surprised than Miranda—because the surprise guest turned out to be her father! I was almost as surprised as she was.

  Mrs. Brisbane introduced him to the class and said, “Mr. Golden is an accountant. That means he works with numbers all day long. So he volunteered to spend the afternoon helping us with our math drills for the exams coming up.”

  Mrs. Brisbane is perfectly fine at teaching us all about numbers and the things you can do with them, but it was interesting to see the way Mr. Golden taught. He and my friends played a cool quiz game that just happened to use all the math that would be on the test. Paul, who usually only comes into Room 26 for math in the morning, joined us for the fun. Even Pay-Attention-Art paid attention, and so did I.

  I’d had a pretty exciting day, and by the time the last bell rang, I was looking forward to a quiet evening and nice, long doze.

  Then I remembered the room cleaning. Would Aldo be back? Or would the space alien return? Would she be taking us with her?

  I suddenly didn’t feel like dozing, not one bit.

  “Og? You know what to do?” I asked my friend later that night. It was dark outside, and someone would be coming to clean the room any minute.

  He splashed around, which I decided meant “yes.”

  I’d used the time since school was out wisely and come up with a Plan.

  I waited, I watched, I wiggled my whiskers.

  And then I heard the squeaking of the cleaning cart.

  “Remember,” I told Og, “it’s Aldo, we yell, ‘Welcome back!’ If it’s you-know-who, we hide and stay perfectly still.”

  As usual, the lights were blinding when they were first switched on, but I made out the silhouette of someone too short to be Aldo. It was HER! I dove down and burrowed under the bedding in my cage, completely covering myself.

  Things were quiet from Og’s direction, so I figured he remembered his part of my scheme, which was to crouch down and hide behind a big rock.

  If we both stayed perfectly still, the creature might not notice us and forget all about taking us back to the mother ship.

  I could hear her moving chairs around, sweeping, probably dusting, emptying the two wastebaskets. I even heard her make that strange, otherworldly sound. Was that music—or vibrating signals from the mother ship?

  “Yo,” I heard her say. “Yeah, still cleaning.”

  Then she paused. “No. Just a few more days. Thursday’s the big day for Aldo. Talk later.”

  I heard a click. There was more shuffling, then the lights went out and I heard the door close.

  She was gone. That was good.

  She was moving on soon. That was good, too.

  But if Thursday was Aldo’s big day, did that mean he was moving on with her? Because that was a VERY-VERY-VERY bad idea.

  “DID YOU HEAR THAT?” I asked Og once the coast was clear.

  “BOING!” I knew that was a “yes.”

  “Aldo’s big day is Thursday. Does that mean she’s taking him to Spurling with her that soon?”

  Og couldn’t answer that question and neither could I. And I certainly couldn’t sleep, not for the rest of the night.

  My friends worked hard the rest of the week. In addition to Mr. Golden, Sayeh’s dad and Tabitha’s mom all came in to help the class with math.

  While they multiplied and divided, I worried about Aldo and a different problem: Heidi Hopper.

  There hadn’t been any improvement in her behavior, but every day she asked Mrs. Brisbane if she could PLEASE-PLEASE-PLEASE bring me home for the weekend. And every day Mrs. Brisbane told her she needed to see some improvement in the hand-raising situation before I could come home with her.

  I didn’t want Heidi to be disappointed, so I worked on a Plan to help her remember to raise her hand. So far in my notebook I’d written

  A PLAN TO HELP HEIDI

  1.

  I hadn’t thought of one single thing, and I guess Mrs. Brisbane hadn’t, either.

  On Wednesday, tears welled up in Heidi’s eyes when Mrs. Brisbane told her it wasn’t looking so good for the weekend.

  “I just need a sign that you’re trying,” the teacher said. “Couldn’t you raise your hand just once?”

  Heidi nodded, but she didn’t seem sure she could do it.

  Neither was I.

  Thinking about Heidi took up a lot of my time during the days, but in the evenings, I only had one thing on my mind: the alien. She said Aldo’s big day was Thursday. By the time she arrived to clean on Wednesday night, I’d been spinning on my wheel for two hours straight, trying to whirl away my worries.

  When she turned on the lights, I crawled under my bedding to hide. I’m quite sure Og slipped behind his rock.

  I heard the usual sounds of sweeping and wastebasket emptying. Suddenly, there was that strange humming noise. The mother ship was calling!

  “Hey, what’s happening, Max?” the strange being said in a cheery voice. “Long time, no talk.”

  I took a big chance and poked my head out of the bedding.

  “Oh, you’ll never guess where I am.” The space alien sat in Sayeh’s chair and pulled her hood back. Her hair wasn’t in a ponytail tonight. It was long and stra
ight.

  “Longfellow School! I’m not kidding,” she said. “I’m cleaning.”

  She paused and laughed some more. “Seriously. I’m helping out my uncle Aldo.”

  Uncle Aldo? Aldo was an alien’s uncle?

  “He cleans here at night and goes to school during the day.” She hesitated. “Yeah, he wants to be a teacher. But he ran into problems with Spanish. So he’s got this huge exam and he’s freaked out about it,” she explained. “He got a tutor to help him study at night. Since I’m on break, I said I’d help him out.”

  “Og?” I asked in a shaky voice. “Are you getting all this?”

  Og dove into the water side of his tank and splashed loudly.

  The alien—I mean Aldo’s niece—stopped talking. She adjusted the thing that was hanging on her ear. Maybe she wasn’t talking to the mother ship at all. Maybe she was just talking on a phone attached to her ear. What a relief!

  “I’m happy to help out Uncle Aldo. He’s always been so great to me, taking me to the county fair and bowling, always ready to listen to my problems,” she explained.

  Yep, that sounded like Aldo, all right.

  “He’s the one who encouraged me to apply to med school at Spurling. Yeah. I start in June.”

  She stood up and started to pace around the room as she talked.

  “It’s really weird to be back at this school. It’s the same as when I was here, only different.” She examined the decorations on the bulletin board. “Everything seems smaller than I remember.” Then she gasped. “Max, I can’t believe it, but this is Mrs. Brisbane’s class! I had Mrs. Brisbane! She was awesome! She was my favorite teacher.”

  She was staring at a big bunch of cutout flowers that Mandy had made. It was labeled, To Mrs. Brisbane.

  “I can’t believe I’m in Mrs. Brisbane’s room,” she repeated. “She made me believe I could do whatever I set my mind to—even being a doctor.”

  She listened for a while and then said, “Oh my gosh, I’d better get back to work! I’m only halfway done.”

  Still talking, she strolled over to my cage, reached in her pocket and pulled out something. I gasped, but then I saw it wasn’t a ray gun. It was just a piece of broccoli. “I’m supposed to give the classroom hamster a treat from Uncle Aldo. There’s a frog here, too. Uncle Aldo told me to talk to them, but I feel kind of silly doing that. I wish we’d had pets when I was in Mrs. Brisbane’s class. Anyway, I’ve got to run. Talk to you later. Bye!” She tapped her ear and stopped talking.