Diary of a Cheesy Kid

Second grade is no more than a minute old when Cheese gets off on the wrong foot with his teacher.

He asks her how many days of school are left. Not in this year but in all remaining eleven years. The teacher, whose name is Mrs. Twirl, thinks it is the most annoying, untimely question she has ever heard. Here she is, all bright and shiny for first day, and this kid in the front row can’t wait till he graduates from high school. It’s insulting and disrespectful. She comes closer than she ever has before to saying, “That’s a dumb question.” Instead, she says, “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be out of school soon enough.”

Cheese has no intention of worrying about it. And he certainly doesn’t want to be out of school. He simply wants to hear her say a really big number in the thousands, so he can feel that his days in school will never come to an end. He has thought every teacher starts out the school year like Miss Meadow, but now he guesses he was wrong.

In the meantime he is packed off to the far back, third last seat, as Mrs. Twirl assigns seats in a different way, name starting with the last letters of the alphabet, go in the front, first letters go farther down into the class.

The next bad thing he does is laugh. This might have been okay, but, Cheese Sandwich being Cheese Sandwich, he doesn’t stop laughing. And when he does stop, it isn’t long before he begins again.

Part of this is his own fault. Cheese is an all purpose laugher. Not only do funny things make him laugh, but nearly anything that makes him feel good might also make him laugh. In fact, sometimes bad things make him laugh. He laughs as naturally as he breathes.

One day in the playground, a third grader, angered by the sound of Cheese laughing, grabs Cheese by the leg and pulls that leg behind his neck. The higher he pulls the leg toward the shoulder blade, the louder Cheese laughs, even through his tears. In the end the third grader becomes frightened and gives up.

Of course, Cheese's classmates know what an easy laugher he is, so whenever they wish to be entertained, all they have to do is get Cheese's attention and stick out a tongue or pretend to pick and flick a booger. For half the class the entertainment is not in hearing Cheese laugh but in seeing him get in trouble.

Mrs. Twirl does not like children. Although she never says this, everyone knows it. Everyone wonders why somepony who does not like children ever became a teacher in the first place. As the years have gone by, Mrs. Twirl herself has begun to wonder, once a year, at home, she wonders aloud why she ever became a teacher, but there is never an answer from her husband or her three cats.

It is widely believed that Mrs. Twirl never smiles. In fact, this is not true. She smiles perhaps five or six times a year, but her face is so stone chiseled into a permanent scowl that her smile appears to be merely a tilting of the scowl.

It is therefore impossible to tell if Mrs. Twirl is really mad by looking at her face. The key is her hooves. Anger makes her hooves clench. As her anger rises, the gnarled hooves begin to churn over each other as if she is washing them in gritty soap.

Nothing makes Mrs. Twirl madder than sloppiness. She has had many sloppy students before, but Cheese is in a class by himself. Especially with a pencil, his numbers are a disaster. His fives look like eights, eights look like zeros, fours look like sevens.

At least there are only ten numerals. The alphabet gives him twenty six letters to butcher. And once she starts teaching cursive, she might as well try to teach a pickle to write. His o’s are raisins, his l’s are drunken chili peppers, his q’s are g’s and his g’s are q’s.

And lines! The colt never saw a blue line he couldn’t miss. Over the line, under the line, perpendicular to the line, his letters swarm willy nilly across the page like ants on a picnic blanket.

The teacher asks for a volunteer to help Cheese. Cobalt volunteers. For a half hour each day Cobalt sits with Cheese and shows him how to make better letters and numbers. After a week, Cheese's writing is worse than ever. Cobalt is fired.

After two months of the worst penmanship she has ever endured, the teacher wrings her hooves and calls out to the class: “Your writing is atrocious!”

Cheese beams, not knowing the meaning of the word. “Thank you!” he calls back.

“My writing is atrocious!” he announces to his parents at the dinner table that day. His father, seeing how proud his son is, replies, “One thousand congratulations.”

His mother gives him a star.

In all ways that teacher, Mrs. Twirl can see, this Sandwich colt is a shambles. She shudders to think what must happen when he is in the same room with a coloring book. He is even at odds with his own body, not rare among second graders, certainly, but this colt takes the cake. Hardly a day goes by in which he does not fall flat on his face for no apparent reason.

When he isn’t laughing he’s flapping his hoof in the air. He’s forever asking questions, forever volunteering to answer. For every right answer, five are wrong. The more he gets wrong, the more he wants to answer. The better to be seen back in his first-of-the-alphabet desk, he sometimes crouches on his desk like a baseball catcher, stabbing his hoof into the air and grunting aloud.

It is unthinkable to Mrs. Twirl that such a mediocre to poor student could actually like school, so she concludes that his antics and reckless enthusiasms are merely ploys to annoy her.

Even so, she might forgive him, forgive him the sloppiness and the clumsiness and the endless laughing and the general annoyance that he is, forgive him for being a child, had he possessed the one thing for which she has a weakness: brilliance.

Brilliance is the one thing that makes Mrs. Twirl happy. In fourth grade in her own childhood, in the second report period, she got all A’s and won a prize in her school’s science fair. Ever since, she has had the highest regard for academic achievement. In all her years of teaching, she could name only nine students who deserved to be called “brilliant.”

Cheese is not one of them. Quizzes, tests, projects, he never earns an A, and only one or two B’s. He might earn more C’s if she could understand his answers. Typically, she throws up her hooves and gives him a D.

And so, in all these ways Cheese grinds down the patience of Mrs. Twirl. He is the greenboard against which her stick of chalk is reduced day by day. By December it is a nub.

And then he ruins her eraser.

Mrs. Twirl has long loved her eraser. It is so much better than the cheap, flimsy things that come through school supplies. Its deep, firm pad of felt soaks up chalk dust like a sponge. It is the princess of greenboard erasers. Ten years ago she put out her own money for it, and she expects it to last for ten more. Every Friday she takes it home and claps it against the fire pit in her yard. No one but her is allowed to touch it. For that matter, no one but her is allowed to touch the greenboard or the chalk.

One day she comes back late from lunch to find Cheese writing at the greenboard. The students in their desks let out a collective gasp. Cheese merely smiles at her and keeps on writing.

“Stop!” she screeches.

He stops. He looks at her, his eyes round as bits. Then, quicker than she can think, he grabs the eraser and begins swiping at the greenboard.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” she screams.

The words hit Cheese like a bear paw. His body flinches in three directions, he drops the eraser to the floor and throws up all over it.

“Out! Out! Out!” screams Mrs. Twirl. She stands in the doorway pointing down the hall. “Get out of my classroom and never come back!”

Cheese gets out.

In a daze he leaves the room and walks down the hallway. He flinches one final time as the classroom door slams shut behind him. He walks until he comes to the door at the end of the hall. He opens it and goes outside and keeps on walking. He walks for a long time, feeling behind his head the pointing hoof of Mrs. Twirl.

In time he finds himself home. His mother is looking at him with alarm. She is asking him where his winter coat is. She’s telling him that he is trembling.

Mrs. Twirl tells the principal it was a mistake. She was merely pointing to the principal’s office, she says, sending him there. The principal says mistake or not, no teacher can banish a student from school. Mrs. Twirl says she simply lost her temper, as anyone would have done if they had had to put up with that student. The principal says a teacher isn’t just anyone, and he scolds her in the privacy of his office.

When Mrs. Sandwich goes to the principal and asks if it’s true that her son was told never to return to school, the principal laughs and says it was all a mistake and of course he is most welcome to come back. Cheese is back at school next day before the janitor.

For the rest of the school year Mrs. Twirl wrings her hooves and combs the stores and catalogs for another 'princess' eraser. With her own money she buys Cheese a yellow plastic beach bucket. She tells him he is never to go anywhere inside her classroom without it. Cheese never throws up into the yellow bucket, but he does use it to carry around his collection of interesting stones and pieces of colored glass.