The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson Page A

squash one another—that was their idea of a game. Where other people had grass in their front yard, the Herdmans had rocks. And where other people had hydrangea bushes, the Herdmans had poison ivy.
    There was also a sign in the yard that said BEWARE OF THE CAT .
    New kids always laughed about that till they got a look at the cat. It was the meanest- looking animal I ever saw. It had one short leg and a broken tail and one missing eye, and the mailman wouldn’t deliver anything to the Herdmans because of it.
    â€œI don’t think it’s a regular cat at all,” the mailman told my father. “I think those kids went up in the hills and caught themselves a bobcat.”
    â€œOh, I don’t think you can tame a wild bobcat,” my father said.
    â€œI’m sure you can’t,” said the mailman. “They’d never try to tame it; they’d just try to make it wilder than it was to begin with.”
    If that was their plan, it worked—the cat would attack anything it could see out of its one eye.
    One day Claude Herdman emptied the whole first grade in three minutes flat when he took the cat to Show-and-Tell. He didn’t feed it for two days so it was already mad, and then he carried it to school in a box, and when he opened the box the cat shot out—right straight up in the air, people said.
    It came down on the top blackboard ledge and clawed four big long scratches all the way down the blackboard. Then it just tore around all over the place, scratching little kids and shedding fur and scattering books and papers everywhere.
    The teacher, Miss Brandel, yelled for everybody to run out in the hall, and she pulled a coat over her head and grabbed a broom and tried to corner the cat. But of course she couldn’t see, with the coat over her head, so she just ran up and down the aisles, hollering “Here, kitty!” and smacking the broom down whenever the cat hissed back. She knocked over the Happy Family dollhouse and a globe of the world, and broke the aquarium full of twenty gallons of water and about sixty-five goldfish.
    All the time she kept yelling for Claude to come and catch his cat, but Claude had gone out in the hall with the rest of the class.
    Later, when Miss Brandel was slapping Band-Aids on everyone who could show her any blood, she asked Claude why in the world he didn’t come and get his cat under control.
    â€œYou told us to go out in the hall,” Claude said, just as if he were the ordinary kind of first grader who did whatever teachers said to do.
    The cat settled down a little bit once it got something to eat—most of the goldfish and Ramona Billian’s two pet mice that she brought to Show-and-Tell. Ramona cried and carried on so—“I can’t even bury them!” she said—that they sent her home.
    The room was a wreck—broken glass and papers and books and puddles of water and dead goldfish everywhere. Miss Brandel was sort of a wreck too, and most of the first graders were hysterical, so somebody took them outdoors and let them have recess for the rest of the day.
    Claude took the cat home and after that there was a rule that you couldn’t bring anything alive to Show-and-Tell.
    The Herdmans moved from grade to grade through the Woodrow Wilson School like those South American fish that strip your bones clean in three minutes flat . . . which was just about what they did to one teacher after another.
    But they never, never got kept back in a grade.
    When it came time for Claude Herdman to pass to the second grade he didn’t know his ABC’s or his numbers or his colors or his shapes or his “Three Bears” or how to get along with anybody. But Miss Brandel passed him anyway.
    For one thing, she knew she’d have Ollie Herdman the next year. That was the thing about the Herdmans—there was always another one coming along, and no teacher was crazy enough to let herself in for two of them at