Diary of a Cheesy Kid

Cobalt's father must have gotten a raise, because by the time Cheese enters third grade, Cobalt is gone. Moved. To a place outside of town called Los Pegasus. To a house with a big front yard with a tree, Cheese hears.

In November of third grade Cheese goes through the worst period in all his eight years. He has surgery. He goes into the hospital and they put him to sleep and the doctor turns the upside down valve in his stomach right side up. The good news is that he stops throwing up. The bad news is that he has to miss three weeks of school.

He drives his mother crazy. “Celestia help me” every ten minutes. On the second day after returning home from the hospital, he tries to sneak off to school. So his mother creates an alarm. She places the alarm in front of the front door. If her son ever tries to leave, the alarm goes off. The alarm is Patty Melt.

Patty is seventeen months old by now. She speaks very little at this point, but one thing she does say is “Bye bye.” She says it distinctly, in fact, she shouts it, and she says it whenever she sees someone leaving the house. Each morning Mother Sandwich padlocks the back door. Then she wheels the playpen up against the front door and places Patty inside. Then she goes about her chores, ready to come running whenever she hears “Bye bye!”

It happens only once. Mrs. Sandwich comes running to find her son halfway out the door and Patty yelling “Bye bye!” at the top of her lungs. She also finds a chocolate cupcake mashed in Patty's hoof. A bribe.

Once Cheese understands that escape is impossible, he considers other ways to spend his time. This is critical, because time sits on Cheese's hooves like an elephant. He hates to wait. He hates waiting more than anything else.

To Cheese, waiting means basically this: not moving. He hates waiting in lines. He hates waiting for the bathroom to clear out. He hates waiting for answers, for toast to pop up, for bathtubs to fill, for soup to heat, soup to cool.

Most of all he hates sleep, the curse of the ponies. Every night he protests it, every morning he gets out of it as soon as he can. In fact, as far as Cheese is concerned, he doesn’t really sleep. He merely waits all night until it’s time to get up. If pressed, he will admit to going to bed, but not to sleep.

Relatives and other grown ups have discovered that they can amuse themselves by asking him, “So Cheese, when did you go to bed last night?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“And when did you go to sleep?”

“I didn’t.”

“You mean you didn’t sleep all night?” “Nope.”

Whenever his uncle Swiss comes over, he proclaims at full voice: “Aha, there he is! The Sleepless Wonder!”

Then there are the sitting things: watching movies on the projector and reading books and the hours in the classroom. Like sleeping, these too are non movers, but not entirely. For as long as they keep his interest, as long as they make him think, Cheese is moving. Of course, you wouldn’t know it to look at him, since the moving part is out of sight, behind his unblinking eyes. His brain.

This is how Cheese at the age of eight imagines the inside of his head: a moving part, like a hoof or a knee. He imagines that when he’s interested, when he’s thinking, his brain is moving, stretching itself, leaning this way and that, flexing. When his brain stops moving, that is, when he’s bored, off goes the movie projector, closed goes the book, tuned out goes the teacher.

Cheese's blessing has been this: Boredom has not happened often.

But it happens a lot during his three weeks of convalescing. Every day he looks out the front window at the kids going off to school. Not only is he not allowed to go to school, he is forbidden to do anything more active than walk across a room. His world shrinks to the living room sofa. He soon becomes fed up with movies and books. Fed up with jigsaw puzzles and watercolors. Fed up with feeling the stitches of his operation. Minute after minute, day after endless day he stares out the front window, and the elephant lowers itself onto his hooves.

Cheese turns from the window. He feels an urgent need to play with his baby sister. He plays with her for an hour or two and makes her laugh, and then, because still he cannot go to school, he decides that school must come to him.

He will give himself a test