Diary of a Cheesy Kid

Before arriving in first grade, he has learned his letters. Some of them, anyway. And of course he has seen his name from time to time. But he has never traced it on see through paper. He has never tried to copy it, has never hitched a ride on a pencil point, feeling the shape and movement of his name’s letters.

Now, as he moves the pencil across the blue lines of the paper, he feels a thrill. He stares at his name, and it is as if he is staring at himself. As if the Cheese Sandwich that was born six years ago is here and now, by his own hoof, in some small way being born all over again.

He rushes up to the teacher. He shoves the paper in her face. “Look! It’s me!”

She takes the paper. At the top is his name as she has spelled it out for him to copy, as she has done for all of the students. Below that is his own attempt. If she didn’t know what it was supposed to say, she could never read it. The confusion of pencil lines on the paper makes no more sense than the playpen doodlings of a two year old.

The joy streaming up from his face makes her smile. She lays a hoof on his head. “To be perfectly precise about it,” she says, “it is not you, it is your name. Your name is very important. It represents you.”

“What does ‘represents’ mean?” he says.

“That means it takes your place. It sort of substitutes for you. Even when you yourself are not in a particular place, your name can be there. And so it’s important to write it properly.” She hands the paper back to him. “And to write it properly, you must practice. Use both sides.”

A hundred sides would not have made a difference. Collecting papers before recess, she discovers that she still cannot read Cheese Sandwich's name. Of itself, this is no big deal. He certainly isn’t the first sloppy writer she has come across. In the past she has had straight A students who could not seem to write a legible word. On the other hoof, sometimes poor penmanship indicates a problem with motor skills. For the colt's sake, she hopes he is simply sloppy.

Recess! At exactly 10 A.M. Cheese bursts onto the playground with the other  first, second and third graders. For the first minute he is disappointed. He expected recess to be something different, something new. It turns out to be simply free time. Recess turns out to be just another name for life as he has always known it. Only shorter. His first recess lasted six years. This one is fifteen minutes. He means to make the most of it.

He dashes back into school. No one stops him. No one sees him. No one has ever run back into school during recess. He pulls his giraffe hat from the cubbie and runs back out to the playground.

“Hey, there he is!” somepony shouts. “The kid the hat!"

In seconds, there's a crowd around him, ponies reaching up to touch the hat, ponies calling, “Can I wear it?”

And then the hat is gone, snatched from his head. A colt has it, he’s running off with it, jamming it onto his own head. Now other hooves are reaching, grabbing, snatching. The hat goes from head to head. The kids are screaming, laughing. A second grader runs off with it. He goes galloping around the playground. The brown and yellow hat bobs on his head like a real giraffe. Cheese laughs aloud. He enjoys the spectacle so much that he forgets the hat is his.

And then a tall red maned colt, a fourth grader, stands in front of the galloper, holding out his hoof. The second grader takes off the hat and hands it over. The red maned fourth grader looks at the hat carefully. Instead of putting it on his head, he sticks his arm into it, all the way up to his shoulder. With his hoof inside the head, he makes the giraffe nod and seem to talk. He walks over to one of his equally tall friends. He makes the giraffe’s mouth clamp onto his friend’s nose. Everypony laughs. Cheese laughs. Even the recess duty teacher laughs.

The colt turns to the first graders, who are keeping their distance. “Whose hat is this?”

Cheese runs forward. He trips over a foot and falls flat on his face. Everypony laughs. Cheese laughs. He comes up to the tall red maned colt. He stands much closer than a first grader normally gets to a fourth grader. He looks directly up into the tall colts face and proudly announces, “It’s my hat.”

The colt smiles. He shakes his head slowly. “It’s my hat.”

Cheese just stares up. He is fascinated by the colts face. He has never seen a face smile and shake itself no at the same time.

And he realizes that apparently there has been a mistake. Perhaps the tall colt was at the zoo on the same day Cheese was there. Perhaps he bought the giraffe hat first and left it behind by mistake. Whatever, there is no mistaking what the colt said: “It’s my hat.”

Cheese is sad. He has really come to love the hat that he thought was his. But he is not sad too, because he can tell how happy it makes the tall colt to get his hat back.

The colt is still smiling down at him. Cheese already knows that smiles do not like to be alone, so he sends his best smile up to join the one above. “Okay,” he says cheerfully.

The smile on the tall colts face twists and changes. Cheese does not know it, but he has just cheated the colt. The colt expected Cheese to make a fuss, to try to get his hat back, maybe even to cry or pitch a fit. The colt  loves to see first graders pitch fits. It’s fun. And now he is cheated of his fun, cheated by this smiling, agreeable little insect in front of him.

The tall colt takes off the hat. He pokes Cheese in the forehead with one of the giraffe’s horns. “It’s not mine, you dummy.” He wags his head and snickers. He turns to his friends. “First graders are so dumb.” His friends laugh. He throws the hat to the ground. As he walks off, he makes sure to step on it.

Cheese picks up the hat. Pieces of grit cling to the fuzzy surface. Suddenly the tall colt turns and looks back. Cheese drops the hat in case the boy wishes to step on it again. But the colt only laughs and goes away.

Cheese's mother is waiting for him after school. All the way home he jabbers about his incredible first day.

“Do you like your teacher?” she asks him.

“I love my teacher!” he says. “She called us ‘young citizens’!”

She pats the top of his hat, which makes him almost as tall as her. “One thousand congratulations to you.”

He beams "Do I get a star?"

“I believe you do.” His mother always carries with her a plastic Baggie of silver stars. She takes one out, licks it and presses it onto his right front leg. “There.”

As he bows his head to look at the star, the hat topples from his head. His mother picks it up. She puts it on her own head. Cheese howls and claps. She wears it the rest of the way home.

Later, Cheese sits on the front step waiting for his father to come home from work. His father is a taxi pony. He trots all day on his job, pulling a carriage to take ponies to there destinations. The family cannot afford a new taxi carriage, so Mr. Sandwich buys used ones. Every time he buys one he gets excited. “She’s a real honeybug,” he says. And then, a month or two later, every time, the honeybug starts to go bad. A wheel falls off. The breaking system fails. The breeching dee breaks. He keeps patching it up with duct tape, chicken wire and chewing gum. Pretty soon everything is patches except Mr. Sandwich's faith in his honeybug.

The day always comes when Mrs. Sandwich whispers to her son, “It’s another clunker.” Cheese giggles and nods, but he never says the word “clunker” to his father, as that might hurt his feelings. It is never long after Mrs. Sandwich says “clunker” that the carriage breaks down completely, usually on a rainy morning on the way to work. The carriage simply refuses to move another inch over the face of this earth, and even Mr. Sandwich knows that it is beyond the help of even a thousand new plugs of chewing gum. The next day he gets rid of it and begins shopping for a new honeybug.

This cycle has happened four times so far, which is why the mother and son, between the two of them, call the current carriage “Clunker Four.”

Cheese hears Clunker Four long before he sees it. It makes a high squeal that reminds him of elephants at the zoo. He runs to the curb as the carriage rounds the corner and rattles to a stop. As usual there is a smell of something burning in the air. “Daddy,” he cries out, jumping into his father’s arms, “I went to school!”

“And a star to prove it,” says his father, hoisting him into the house.

Cheese talks about his first day at the dinner table and after dinner and right up until bedtime. As always, the last thing his mother says to him at night is, “Say your prayers.” While she hides his giraffe hat in the trunk with the comforters and fancy tablecloth, Cheese transfers the star from his hoof to his bed frame. He climbs into bed and tells Celestia and Luna all about his first day. Then he tells the Stars.

At this time in his life Cheese sees no difference between the stars in the sky and the stars in his mother’s plastic baggie. He believes that stars fall from the sky sometimes, and that his mother goes around collecting them like acorns. He believes she has to use heavy hoof gloves and dark sunglasses because the fallen stars are so hot and shiny. She puts them in the freezer for forty five minutes, and when they come out they are flat and silver and sticky on the back and ready for his hoof.

This makes him feel close to the unfallen stars left in the sky. He thinks of them as his nightlights. As he grows drowsy in bed, he wonders which is greater: the number of stars in the sky or the number of school days left in his life? It’s a wonderful question.