Chapters You grow up with a colt but you never really notice him. He's just there, on the dirt road, the playground, all around Ponyville. He's part of the scenery, like the trees and the green plastic cans on trash day.
You pass through school, first grade, second grade and there he is, going along with you. You're not friends, you're not enemies. You just cross paths now and then. Maybe at the park playground, one day you look up and there he is on the other side of the seesaw. Or it's winter and you sled to the bottom of Ponyville Hill, and you're trudging back up and there he goes zipping down, his legs out like a swan diver, screaming his head off. Or maybe it annoys you that he seems to be having even more fun than you, but it's a one second thought and it's over.
You don't even know his name.
And then one day you do. You hear somepony say a name, and somehow you just know that's who the name belongs to, it's that kid.
'Cheese Sandwich'
Sooner or later the let-loose sidewalk colts will cross the streets. Running, they will run into each other. And sooner or later, as surely as noses drip downward, it will no longer be enough to merely run. They must run against something. Against each other. It is their instinct.
“Let’s race!” one will shout, and they race. From trash can to corner. From Sugar Cube Corner to the mail office.
Their mothers holler at them for running in town, where other ponies walk, so they go to the alleys. They take over the alleys, make the alleys their own town.
They race. They race in July and they race in January. They race in the rain and they race in the snow. Although they race side by side, they are actually racing away from each other, sifting themselves apart. I am fast. You are slow. I win. You lose. They forget, never to remember again, that they are pups from the same litter.
And they discover something: They like winning more than losing. They love winning. They love winning so much that they find new ways to do it:
Who can hit the pole with a stone?
Who can eat the most cupcakes?
Who can go to bed the latest?
Who can weigh the most?
Who can burp the loudest?
Who can grow the tallest?
Who is first . . . first . . . first . . . ?
Who?
Who?
Who?
Burping, growing, throwing, running— everything is a race. There are winners everywhere.
"I win! I win! I win!"
The townsquare. The backyards. The alleyways. The playgrounds. Winners. Winners.
Except for Cheese Sandwich.
Cheese never wins.
But he doesn’t notice. Neither do the other colts.
Not yet.
Cheese Sandwich gets in trouble his first day of school.
In fact, before he even gets to school he’s in trouble. With his mother.
Like the other neighborhood mothers of first day, first grade foals, Mrs. Sandwich intends to walk her son to school. First day is a big day, and mothers know how scary it can be to a six year old.
Cheese stands at the front window, looking at all the the other colts and fillies walking to school. It reminds him of a parade.
His mother is upstairs getting ready. She calls down, “Cheese, you wait!” Her voice is firm, for she knows how much her son hates to wait.
By the time she comes downstairs, he’s gone.
She yanks open the door. People are streaming by. Mothers walking side by side with their younger ones while fourth and fifth graders yell and run and rule the roads.
Mrs. Sandwich looks up the road. In the distance she sees the long neck of a giraffe poking above the crowd, hurrying along with the others. It’s him. Must be him. He loves his giraffe hat. His dad bought it for him at the zoo. If she has told him once, she has told him fifty times: Do not wear it to school.
The school is only three blocks away. He will be there before she can catch him. With a sigh of surrender she goes back into the house.
The first grade teacher stands at the doorway as her new pupils arrive. “Good morning . . . Good morning . . . Welcome to school.” When she sees the face of a giraffe go by, she nearly swallows her greeting. She watches the giraffe and the colt under it march straight to a front row desk and take a seat.
When the bell rings, the teacher, Miss Meadow, shuts the door and stands before the desk of the unusually hatted student. The other students are openly giggling. She wonders if this colt is going to be a problem. This is Miss Meadow's year to retire, and the last thing she needs is a troublesome first grader.
“That’s quite a hat you have there,” she says. "It is in fact remarkably lifelike."
The colt pops to his feet. He beams. “It’s a giraffe.”
“So I see. But I’m afraid you’ll have to take it off now. We don’t wear hats in the classroom.”
“Okay,” he says cheerfully. He takes off the hat.
“You may be seated.”
“Okay"
He seems agreeable enough. Perhaps he will not be troublesome after all.
Now she has to tell him that he can't keep the hat with him the hat with him. She hopes he won’t break out bawling. First graders can be so unpredictable. You never know what might set them off.
She tells him. She keeps an eye on his lower lip, to see if it will quiver. It does not. Instead he pops to his feet again and brightly chirps, “Yes, ma’am,” and hands the hat to her.
Yes, ma’am? Where did that come from? She smiles and whispers, “Thank you"
"No problem, ma'am"
Twenty-six heads turn to follow her as she carries the three-foot hat to the cubbyholes at the back of the room. She labeled the cubbies the day before, and now she suddenly realizes she doesn’t know which one belongs to the boy. She turns. “What’s your name, young stallion?”
He jumps to attention and belts at full voice "Cheese Sandwich!"
She has to turn her face to keep from laughing out loud. In all her thirty years of teaching, she has never known a student to announce himself or herself in such a manner.
"Thank you, Cheese Sandwich. And you may sit down, and there is no need to rise your voice when you speak.”
"Yes ma'am"
The cubbies, as the classroom seating soon will be, are in alphabetical order. She goes straight to the third cubbyhole and inserts the giraffe. The space is not deep enough to hold it all. It looks as if a baby giraffe is napping in there. The thought comes to her that Cheese Sandwich, in more ways than cubbyholes, will always be easy to find.
Miss Meadow stands at the head of the class and for the thirty-first and last time gives her famous opening day speech: “Good morning, young citizens...”
It pleases her to think that many years down the road a student or two might recall that Miss Meadow called them “young citizens” in the first grade. She feels that Equestria’s foals are babied a bit too much and way too long.
“Welcome to your first day at Ponyville Elementary School. This is a big, big day for you. Not only is it the first day of the school year, it is the first day of twelve school years. Hopefully, twelve years from now, every one of you will graduate from high school. That sounds like forever from now, doesn’t it?”
A sea of nodding heads, as always.
“But it will come. Twelve years from now will surely come, and you will have learned how to write a topic sentence. And how to solve an equation. And even how to spell the word...” she pauses dramatically, she opens her eyes wide as if seeing the wonderful future... “tintinnabulation.”
Audible gasps come from the sea of wide eyed, oh mouthed faces. A few shake their heads in vigorous denial. She sneaks a peek at Cheese Sandwich. He alone is grinning, giggling actually, as if he has been tickled.
“By the time you graduate from high school, many of you will already be doing your own things and holding jobs. You will be ready to take your places in the world. You will be ready to travel all the way across Equestria by yourself, if you wish. You will be ready to begin your own families.
“What a wonderful adventure it will be! And it all begins here. Right now. Today. It will be a journey and an adventure of many days.” She pauses. “‘How many days?’ you ask.”
Several hooves shoot up. She knows if she answers them, someone will knock her whole point out of whack with a guess in the millions. She ignores them. She goes to the board. With a new, crisply cut length of chalk, she writes in large numbers on the green slate: '180'
“That,” she says, “is the number of days we are required to be in school each year.”
She turns back to the greenboard. Beside the 180 she writes: 'x12'
“That is the number of years you will attend school. Now let’s multiply.”
She does the math on the greenboard, writing the numbers slowly, grandly:
'180x12=2160'
She points to the top number. “There it is.” She taps the greenboard twice with the chalk. “Two thousand one hundred and sixty. The days of your journey. That is how long your adventure will last. Every one of those days will be an opportunity to learn something new. Just imagine how much you can learn in two thousand one hundred and sixty days!”
She pauses to let them imagine.
“Two thousand one hundred and sixty adventures. Two thousand one hundred and sixty opportunities to become whatever you want to become. This is what you’ve been waiting six years for. This is the day it begins.”
She wishes she had a camera.
She looks at the clock above the door. She acts surprised. “Oh my goodness! Look at that! Time is passing! Before you know it, there will only be two thousand one hundred and fifty-nine days left. Our first day is passing by and we haven’t even learned a thing yet! What do you say we get this learning train started?”
She reaches into her desk drawer and pulls out the old, navy blue train conductor’s cap. For the thirty-first and last time she puts it on. She pumps her hoof twice. “Toot! Toot! All aboard the Learning Train! First stop, Writing My Own Name! Who’s coming aboard?”
Twenty six hooves shoot into the air. And Cheese, jumping to his feet so fast that he knocks his desk over with a nerve slapping racket, thrusts up his hooves and bellows to the ceiling: “YAHOO!”
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.
Here is the surprise: Every day is like the first day for Cheese Sandwich. Things keep happening that rekindle the excitement of the first day. Learning to read his first two syllable word. Making a box scene about Princess Luna and the moon. Counting to five in Spanish. Learning about water and ants and tooth decay. His first fire drill. Making new friends.
At the dinner table, Cheese tells his parents about his days. But he always waits for his father’s question. “So, what’s new, Chickamoo?” Or “What’s new, Boogaloo?” Or “Kinkachoo.” Or “Pookypoo.” Many things tickle Cheese, but nothing more than the sound of a funny word. Words tickle him like hooves to the ribs. Every time his father comes up with a new one, Cheese has to put down his fork and laugh. Usually he leans to one side, as if the funny word has the force of a great wind. Sometimes he even falls over.
It’s his teacher, Miss Meadow, who comes up with the best one. She stands at the greenboard one day, trying to explain what a billion basketballs would look like. “If you put the first one here,” she says, pointing to the floor, “and line them up out the door and down the hallway and across the playground and down the road, they would stretch from here to Jabip!”
The classroom is a sea of boggling eyes.
Someone calls out, “Where’s Jabip?”
Miss Meadow explains that there is no actual place called Jabip. It’s just her way of saying someplace really far away.
At that point Cheese, in the last seat in the last row, tilts alarmingly to the left and falls from his desk. The teacher rushes to him. His face is red. Tears stream down his cheeks. He’s gasping for air.
“Cheese Sandwich! Cheese Sandwich” she calls, though he is inches away.
He looks up at her through watery eyes. He gasps, “Jabip!” He pounds the floor.
That’s when Miss Meadow realizes her pupil isn’t dying, he’s merely laughing.
It’s a good five minutes before Cheese calms down enough for the class to continue. Miss Meeks forbids the class and herself to utter the word “Jabip” for the rest of the day. Nevertheless, from time to time there are sudden giggly eruptions from the back row as the word pops back into Cheese's head.
When he hears Clunker Four coming that day, he runs alongside the carriage as it coasts to the curb. “Daddy! Daddy! Did you ever hear of Jabip?”
“Sure,” says his father out the open carriage. “I also heard of Jaboop.”
Cheese rolls on the ground. Jabip. Jaboop. He keeps erupting through dinner. Eating becomes hazardous. His parents smile patiently for the first minute or so, then begin telling him enough is enough. But Cheese can’t stop. When a bolt of mashed potatoes shoots from his nose, he is sent to his room. That night he giggles through his prayer and into sleep.
In school for the rest of the week Cheese continues to produce outbursts of laughter in the back row. Every outburst triggers laughter from the other pupils. Sometimes, to get him started, a pupil waits until the teacher’s head is turned, then whispers the forbidden word. Sometimes Miss Meadow bites her tongue to keep from joining in, sometimes she gets mad.
It’s during one of the mad times that she says, “Cheese Sandwich, come up here, please.” When he stands before her she takes something from her desk drawer. It’s a round yellow necklace with a fake medallion. It’s the largest medal the students have ever seen, as large as a giant pinwheel taffy. It has black letters on it. “Can you tell me what it says?”
Cheese studies the necklace . Finally he shakes his head.
“It says, ‘I know I can behave.’” She hangs the necklace onto his neck. “And I know you can.”
Cheese has to wear the necklace for an hour. During that time he does not laugh once. Miss Meadow judges her maneuver a success and returns the button to the drawer. Soon Cheese is laughing again. He gets the necklace back.
So it goes for several days. Second graders who wore the button the previous year and who have heard of Cheese's endless giggling ask him in the playground, “Did you get the necklace today?”
One day Miss Meadow has to leave the classroom for a while. When she returns she finds Cheese's hoof waving in the air.
"Yes, Cheese?"
“Miss Meadow,” he says, “I laughed when you were gone.”
And she realizes at last that for Cheese, the button is not a punishment at all, but a badge of honor. From then on she punishes him by keeping the necklace in the drawer.
Necklace or no necklace, Cheese loves school. One day he awakes before anyone else in the house. He gets himself ready. He makes his own breakfast. He brushes his teeth and walks off to school. 'I must be early', he thinks, for he sees no parents or other children along the way.
He is sitting on the front of the school waiting for the door to open when he hears Clunker Four. It stops in front of the school and out pop both his mother and father. Both come running. “Cheese, we’ve been looking all over! You weren't in your bed!"
“I came to school all by myself,” he declares proudly
His parents look at each other, his mother bites her lip. His father picks him up and says, “You’re very big to do that all by yourself. The only problem is, there’s no school today. It’s Saturday.”
When Miss Meadow passes Cheese onto second grade, she writes on the back of his final report card: “Cheese Sandwich sometimes has a problem with self-control, and I wish he were neater, but he is so good natured. That son of yours is one happy colt! And he certainly does love school!”
In the summer between first and second grades Cheese Sandwich acquires two new friends. One is a baby filly, the other is a neighbor. The baby sister is Patty Melt. The neighbor is a colt named Cobalt.
When Cheese first meets the filly, his mother says, “Look,” and pulls down the blanket. Cheese's eyes boggle.There are two silver stars on the baby’s diaper. This filly is less than one day old. What can she have done already to deserve two stars? He’s never been awarded more than one at a time. “Mom,” he says, “two stars? What did she do?”
“She did the best thing of all,” says his mother, pulling up the blanket. “She was born.”
Has Cheese been misinformed? “I was born too, wasn’t I?”
She pats his hoof. “Absolutely. You were every bit as born as Patty was.”
“So,” he says, “how come I didn’t get two stars?”
“Who says you didn’t?”
He brightens. “I did?”
She shakes her head. “Sorry. I was kidding you. That was before I started giving out stars.” She pats his hoof again. “Tell you what, how would you like your being born stars now? Better late than never.”
He brightens again. “Yeah!”
But she’s not finished thinking. “Or how about this? We could make a deal. We could wait until you’re having a really bad day, some day when you could really, really use two stars to pick you up. That’s when you get them.”
He thinks it over. He hates to wait, but he loves to make deals. “Okay,” he says and shakes his mother’s hoof. Then he reaches into the blanket and shakes the baby’s hoof.
A month later the new neighbors move in next door. That same day Mrs. Sandwich bakes a strawberry angel food cake and carries it out the front door. Her firstborn tags along. “This is how we say welcome,” she says.
He stands at his mother’s side as she rings the doorbell and says, “Welcome to the neighborhood” and hands the cake to the new mare neighbor, whose proper name is Mrs. Aurora, but whose first name is better: Nightlight. Then he is introduced. “This is my son, Cheese Sandwich.”
Nightlight smiles down at him and shakes his hoof and says, “Hello, Cheese. I have a son too. His name is Cobalt. How old are you?”
“Six,” he replies.
“So is Cobalt.”
Cheese stares at the two mares in wonder. “Wow! Same as me!” He looks past Nightlight. “Is he in there?”
“He is,” says Nightlight, “but he’s hiding. He says he’s never coming out. He’s mad because we moved away from our other house.”
Cheese thinks about this for a moment. He lifts a hoof to Nightlight. “I have an idea. Tell Cobalt my father is a taxi pony. That will make him come out.” In Cheese's view, taking ponies to their destinations in a carriage is the most interesting job there is.
Nightlight nods solemnly. “I’ll give it a try.”
Before Cheese and his mother get back to their own house, he has another idea. “I’m going to make a special welcome just for Cobalt.”
“Good for you,” says his mother. “A cake?”
“No, a cookie.”
His mother does not say no. His parents try not to say no to him unless it’s really necessary. So when he announces that he intends to bake a cookie, his mother simply says, “What kind?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “A snickerdoodle!” The snickerdoodle is his favorite cookie. Every cookie tastes good to him, but snickerdoodles taste twice as good because of their name. Sometimes his dad says “snookerdiddle” and makes him laugh for an hour.
Cheese's idea is to bake a snickerdoodle so big that Cobalt the new neighbor will have to come out and see it.
Since he is working on the kitchen table, it seems to him that the largest cookie he can make would be one as large as the table itself. But his mother points out that a cookie that big could not fit in the oven. So he settles for a rectangular cookie that covers the entire cookie pan.
Every time his mother tries to help, the young chef snaps at her, “I can do that.” So his mother simply gives directions and says “Celestia help me” a lot while her intrepid son makes a mess of the kitchen. Flour and eggs fly everywhere. For weeks to come the family will feel the crunch of sugar grains under their hooves.
Finally, miraculously, the cookie gets baked. He snatches the quilted mitten and potholder from his mother “I can do it myself ” pulls the hot pan from the oven and sets it on the kitchen table. Impatient as always, he cannot wait for it to cool. He blows over the steaming cookie until he’s out of breath. He flaps his hooves over it. At last the pan is cool enough to carry it on his back without a towel.
He trots to next door with it. He rings the bell. Nightlight opens the door.
“Hi, Cheese.”
“Hi, Nightlight. I made a welcome cookie for Cobalt. It’s a snickerdoodle. I think if you put it on the floor and wait a little while, he’ll smell it and come out.”
Cheese is utterly serious, but for some reason Nightlight laughs. “Come on in,” she says. “Wait here.”
Nightlight leaves him standing in the living room. He hears whispery voices upstairs. Once he hears a sharp “No!” Then there are hoofsteps on the stairs, and here at last is Cobalt walking toward him in his grumpy face, messy mane and pajamas in the middle of the day.
“Hi,” Cheese says. “My name is Cheese Sandwich. I’m your neighbor. I made you a welcome cookie. It’s a snickerdoodle.”
Cobalt's face perks up. He leans in to smell the cookie. He is hooked.
Cheese reaches for the spatula his mother told him to bring along. A cookie is not really a cookie until it’s out of the pan and into the hoof. He lays the pan on the floor. He pries the giant snickerdoodle from the sides and bottom of the pan. He lifts out the warm, soft, heavenly smelling welcome. He lifts it with his hoof and holds it out to Cobalt. As Cobalt reaches for it, the panless, unsupported cookie collapses of its own weight and falls to the floor. Cheese is left with a bite-size scrap in his hoof. Cobalt stares in horror at the floor. He screams, “My cookie!” He screams at Cheese. “You dropped it!” He runs screaming up the stairs. “I hate this place!”
Cheese stuffs one scrap into his mouth, then the other. He gathers up the collapsed pieces from the floor and carries them home in the pan. He sits on the on the road. Everypony who passes by that afternoon is offered a piece of cookie. In between, Cheese helps himself.
By the time Clunker Four rattles up to the house, the cookie is gone. As his father gets out of the carriage, Cheese runs to him, plunges his head into his father’s workbag and throws up.
Cheese was born with an upside down valve in his stomach. This causes him to throw up a couple times a week. To Cheese, throwing up is almost as normal as breathing.
But not to his father, who has brought his work bag home with him in order to repair the strap. When Cheese was an infant, Mr. Sandwich was very good about changing diapers, but he has no stomach for vomit. He turns away, holds out the bag and growls, “Take it to your mother.” Early on, Cheese's mother is impressed about upon her son the etiquette of throwing up: That is, do not throw up at random, but throw up into something, preferably a toilet or bucket. Since toilets or buckets are not always handy, Cheese has learned to reach for the nearest container. Thus, at one time or other he has thrown up into soup bowls, flowerpots, wastebaskets, trash bins, shopping bags, winter boots, kitchen sinks and, once, a clown’s hat. But never his father’s mailbag.
He thinks his mother will say “Celestia help me” but she does not. She’s cool. She puts down filly Patty Melt and unloads the bag into the toilet. She scours it with a stiff bristle brush and hand soap. She rubs it with leather cream. She sweetens it with a splash of aftershave and sets it into the playpen for Patty to crawl into.
Hungry again, Cheese Sandwich eats a full dinner that night. And throws up into his glass of water. “Celestia help me.”
Soccer is Cheese's kind of game. Baseball has too much waiting and too many straight lines. Shooting a basketball demands precision. Hoofball is fun only for the ball carrier.
But soccer is free for all, as haphazard and slapdash as Cheese himself. He plays in the Peewee League in the autumn of his seventh year. His team is the Titans. Every Saturday morning he’s the first one there, kicking pinecones around the field until the coaches show up.
Once the game begins, Cheese never stops running. He zigs and zags after the checkered ball like a fox after a field mouse, except he hardly ever catches up to it. Someone else always seems to reach it first. Cheese is forever swinging his hoof at the ball a half second after it goes past him. He winds up kicking the legs and flanks of the other players. Twice he’s kicked the referee. Once, somehow, he kicked himself. His teammates rub their bruises and call him “Wild Hoof.”
To Cheese, a net is a net. He doesn’t much care which team the net belongs to. Several times during the season he kicks the ball at the wrong goal. Fortunately, he always misses.
The first game is against the Ramblers. When it’s over, Cheese jumps up and down and pumps his hooves as he has seen athletes do and yells “Yahoo!” He does not notice that he is the only Titan cheering. “What are you so happy for?” says Thunderlane, one of his teammates. “We lost.”
This is news to Cheese. Throughout the game, and even at the end, he has not thought about the score. Apparently, losing has made Thunderlane very unhappy. It shows on his face. It shows in the way he’s kicking at the turf. Cheese looks around. Other Titans are kicking turf or stomping their hooves or kicking their own flanks. Every Titan wears a sour puss.
And then the coach calls the Titans into a huddle and says, “Okay, on three, yea Titans. One, two, three..." Cheese bellows, “Yea Titans!” And adds, “You da man!”
“Yea Titans” barely crawls from the lips of the other teammates.
And then the coach is lining them up, and the Ramblers are in a line too, and the Titans and Ramblers are patting hooves down the line like dominos, pat pat pat pat, no sour pusses on the Ramblers, who keep saying “Good game, good game, good game . . .” and Cheese is the only Titan saying “Good game” back.
And then the Titans are heading for their parents on the sidelines, and in order to show their parents what serious soccer players they are, they kick the turf some more and tear off their leg pads and jersey and throw them to the ground and stomp on them. One Titan even falls on the ground and bawls while pounding his hoof into the grass.
Cheese wants to be a good Titan. He kicks at some turf too. His mother and father look on with mouths agape as he tears off his jersey and soccer horseshoes and finally his socks and stomps them all into the ground. He gets down on his hind legs and rips up grass and flings it into the air. He snatches the pacifier from Patty Melt's mouth and hurls it onto the field. He pounds his hooves into the ground and cries out, “No! No! No!”
By now other parents and players are watching.
Cheese's mother says, “Just what do you think you’re doing?”
Cheese looks up. “I’m being mad because we lost.”
Patty Melt is bawling.
“Well, you can start being madder, because this little demonstration will cost you your allowance for a week. And you have five seconds to bring that pacifier back.”
Cheese is determined to become a better loser. In the following weeks he practices his losing in the backyard. But he never again gets a chance to show his stuff on Saturday, for the Titans win all the rest of their games.
No great thanks to Wild Hoof.
One time, amazingly, he finds himself alone with the ball and a clear field ahead of him.
Propelled by an excitement of whistles and screams behind him, Wild Foot boots the ball on and on, never realizing he has long since gone out of bounds. He crosses a baseball diamond, past the library and is finally stopped inside SugarCube Corner which made Mrs. Cake ask him "Aren't you a long away from your game, young man?"
On another occasion he throws up on the ball, which in turn causes two other players to throw up.
It is after this incident that several Titans ask the coach if Cheese can be traded to another team. They are soon glad it didn’t happen.
The last game of the season comes down to a playoff between the Titans and the Hornets. The Hornets also have lost only one game. The winner will be champion.
The game goes as usual for Wild Hoof. He runs around a lot. He swings his hoof a lot but seldom connects with the ball. Sometimes he makes himself dizzy running in circles as he tries to keep up with the action swirling around him.
Late in the second half the score is still 0–0. Cheese is standing in front of the Hornets’ net, wondering where the ball is, when suddenly it hits him in the head. It bounces into the net for a goal, and Cheese is instantly mobbed by cheering teammates. The final score is Titans 1, Hornets 0.
The Titans are Peewee champions!
The Titans go wild. They jump like kangaroos. They fall onto their backs and churn their legs in the air. They ride their parents’ backs and thrust up their hooves and crow, “We’re number one!”
Cheese goes wild too. He tries to stand on his head. He shouts into Patty's face “We’re number one!” and makes her blink. He climbs onto his father’s back and proclaims to all the wide world: “We’re number one!”
And then he looks down and sees the face of Cobalt, his neighbor. Cobalt is a Hornet. Cheese has never seen a sadder face in his life. It reminds him of a monkey’s face. He begins to notice the other Hornets, in their black and yellow jerseys. They are slumped on the grass. They are slumped under their parents’ legs. Not one of them rides a back. Every one is monkey faced and crying and slumpy.
Then they give out the trophies. Every Titan gets one. Cheese has never won a trophy before. It’s a golden soccer pony on a black pedestal with a golden soccer ball at his hoof. It glows as if it has been painted in sunlight. It is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.
Cheese sees the other Titans kissing their trophies, so he kisses his too. As he does so, he sees the Hornets slumping away to their houses.
And suddenly he’s running, he’s yelling, “Cobalt! Cobalt!" Nightlight and Cobalt turn around. Cheese runs huffing up to them. “Cobalt, here.” He holds out the trophy. The look in Cobalt's eyes tells him he has done the right thing. “You take it.”
Cobalt reaches for it, but his mother catches his hoof. “Cheese, that is really nice of you, but you’re the one who won it. Cobalt will win a trophy of his own someday.”
Cobalt's hoof curls up. He can feel the golden trophy inches away. As his mother leads him off to go home, he cries out, “I want it!”
That afternoon Cheese sits on his back step. The trophy is beside him, brighter than ever.
Cheese is playing a game he invented called Bugs on a Stick. In the next backyard, Cobalt lies down by a bed of purple pansies. He cradles his chin in his hooves. His face is still sad.
Cheese calls, “Wanna play my game?”
Cobalt shakes his head.
“Wanna go in the alley?”
Cobalt shakes his head.
Cheese asks Cobalt many questions, but all Cobalt does is shake his head and look monkey faced.
After a while Cheese gets tired of his game. He looks at Cobalt. He can think of nothing else to say. By now Cheese is sad too. Not just because Cobalt is sad, but for another reason: The soccer season is over. That has been the best part of it. Playing the games. He wishes he could make himself feel less sad.
He picks up his trophy and goes inside. A minute later he opens the back door and places the trophy on the step and goes back in.
When he comes out later that day, the trophy is gone.
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.
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
He is one of the new litter colts tossed up by this brick-and-hoagie town ten miles by train from a city of one million. For the first several years they have been home foals, Cheese Sandwich and others, fenced in by the walls and backyard chain link and, mostly, by the sound of Mother's voice.
Then comes the day when they stand alone on their front steps, blinking and warming in the sun like pups of a new creation.
At first Cheese shades his eyes. Then he lowers his hoof. He squints into the sun, tries to outstare the sun, turns away thrilled and laughing. He reaches back to touch the door. It is something he will never do again. In his ears echo the thousand warnings of his mother: "Don't leave the yard."
There are no other constraints. Not a fence in sight. No grownup hoof to hold. Nothing but the bright wide world in front of him.
He lands on the road with all four hooves and takes off. Heedless of all but the wind in his ears, he runs. He cannot believe how fast he is running. He cannot believe how free he is. Giddy with freedom and speed, he runs to the end of the block, turns right and runs on.
His legs-- his legs are going so fast! He thinks that if they go any faster he might begin to fly. A Pegasus in the air is coming from behind. He tries to race the Pegasus. He is surprised that the Pegasus passes him. Surprised but not unhappy. He is too free to be unhappy. He yells "Hi!" at the Pegasus. He stops and looks for somepony to laugh with and celebrate with. He sees no one, so he laughs and celebrates with himself. He stomps up and down on the sidewalk as if it's a puddle.
He looks for his house. It is out of sight. He screams into the never-blinking sun: "Yahoo!" He runs some more, turns right again, stops again. It occurs to him turning right he can run forever.
"Yahoo!"