Squirrel in the Museum

by Vivian Vande Velde

  Is she still by the dinosaur, screaming? I wonder. I listen but she must have stopped, for squirrels have excellent ears, and I’d be able to hear her, even from this other room.

  This room is as dark as outside right after sunset. Those children and adults who are in here with me are moving slowly and looking upward. These two things are good because they mean nobody will be noticing me on the floor so no one will be trying to claim me as a pet. I just need to avoid their feet.

  I dart left.

  I dart right.

  I dart around.

  I dart between.

  Once in a while, my tail brushes someone’s ankle, and they squeal, “What was that?”

  But by the time they look, I have darted somewhere else.

  But all that looking up they’re doing makes me curious, so I look up, too, to see what’s so interesting, just in case it’s something good, like fruits or nuts about to drop from above, or something bad, like an owl circling hungrily.

  What I see are balls of various sizes and colors hanging from the ceiling.

  The reason it’s so dark in here, especially near the floor, is because the only light comes from the biggest ball, which is glowing as it hangs there in the center. It is also the only one sitting still while the others move around it. The children reach up, stretching, but the balls are too high above for them to be able to touch.

  The people at the museum may have planned this.

  Even though there clearly is nothing about wolves here, I decide the dark makes it safe for me to stay for a little while to listen and learn—which is what the geckos told me to do. But I keep on darting: left, and right, and around, and between.

  “So these are the planets,” a girl says, “which means that one must be the sun. So, is that the earth?” Her face is tipped upward to see the planets rather than forward to see where she’s going as she walks to keep up with a blue-and-green ball overhead. It’s about the size of an apple.

  Teachers like to answer questions with questions, so I guess it is a teacher who answers, “Is it the third one from the sun?”

  Another probably-teacher asks, “Is two-thirds of it covered by blue for water?”

  From behind me, just coming in, is a voice I recognize as the voice of the boy with the movable chair. Maybe he hopes to be a teacher someday, for he too answers with a question: “Does it have a sign on the wall saying it’s the earth?”

  The girl who asked leans against the handrail that goes along the entire circle of the wall. There are signs here and there on the wall, with little lights over them, and the girl peers at one of them. “Oh, they included the moon, too,” she says, but then she looks up to check.

  I look up, too. There is what looks like a giant gray blueberry near the blue-and-green apple planet.

  The boy in the chair says, “This isn’t right.”

  I know what he means. We live on the earth. Obviously the earth isn’t round, or we’d fall off. The moon is round—except when it isn’t—but it’s not a blueberry.

  The boy says, “This isn’t accurate. It isn’t to scale.”

  The only scales I know are on snakes, so I don’t know what he’s talking about.

  Neither does the teacher who is pushing the boy’s chair. “What do you mean?” the teacher asks.

  The boy says, “The solar system is too immense to be shown to scale in any room. It would take more than three million earths to fill the sun. This sun, here, is about the size of a beach ball. That means the ball representing the earth should be just a little bit bigger than a pea, and Mercury would be the size of the head of a pin.”

  “That would be hard to see,” one of the other children acknowledges. The planets stop moving, and he pushes a button on the wall, which gets them going around the room once more. “But if that’s the right way, that’s the way they should show it.”

  I think so, too. The geckos said science is about facts.

  The boy in the chair shakes his head, which—for people—means no even though for squirrels it means something’s gotten into my ear. The boy says, “But then the room would have to be about a mile and a half long.”

  “Know-it-all,” someone says, in a tone that indicates that knowing all there is to know is a bad thing—even though it sounds like a good thing to me.

  Someone else asks one of the teachers, “Is that true?”

  The teacher says, “Ahmmm. Well. Ahhh. Don’t forget, I teach math, not science.”

  “It is,” says the girl who is still by the sign on the wall that tells which planet is which. “It says so here, on this sign, under Facts. It says this display is to show the order the planets are in, and which are big ones and which are smaller ones. Ooo, and it says if you include Pluto, Pluto would be the size of a dot made by an extra-fine pen, and that it would be two miles away.”

  “I don’t think they should have gotten rid of Pluto,” another child says.

  Squirrels don’t have planets, but when most of the children call out their support for Pluto still being a planet, I agree with them because it isn’t nice to not include everyone.

  They teach that—along with shapes—in first grade.

  More children start to crowd around the girl to look at the Facts sign by her, even though there are plenty of other Facts signs around the room, and I get nervous that they are so intent on reading facts that one of them will step on me. Other people have come into the room, and nobody is leaving. There are just too many feet blocking my way to the door I came in, and there are even more feet between me and the second door, which leads farther into the museum—to where I will learn about wolves.

  I dart left, right, around, between—and I’m no closer to a door than I was before.

  So I climb up onto one of the big wheels of the boy’s movable chair.

  Neither the boy nor the teacher notices me. But then the teacher says, “Well, why don’t we move on to the next exhibit and make room for others to see this? I hear they have pieces of meteorites and lunar rocks and a Mars rover model.” And with that he starts pushing the chair.

  I’m holding on to the side of the wheel, not the rim, so I don’t get run over, but I go around once…twice…three times…and I’m getting dizzy.

  When the spot where I’m holding on once more reaches its highest, I jump off the wheel and onto the boy’s lap, hoping he won’t notice.

  But he does. He gives a squeal just as loud—but not as long—as the backpack girl did when I first climbed onto her head.

  I jump from his lap to the handrail that keeps the children from actually touching the Facts signs. From there I jump onto one of the planets that’s overhead. Luckily, the one that happens to be closest to me is the biggest, so it’s easy to catch hold of even though it takes an expert jumper like me to make it.

  The ball begins to swing back and forth even while it continues to move in a slow, steady trek around the room and the glowing ball in the center.

  All of a sudden, nobody is interested in whether Pluto should still be a planet.

  There’s a lot of gasping and squealing, and then people start shouting:

  “It’s a squirrel!”

  “It’s that squirrel that was on Lydia’s head!”

  “It’s gotten onto Jupiter!”

  The planets are moving at different rates of speed, but only Jupiter is swinging.

  I jump onto another planet, and this one has a ledge around it, which makes my hold even steadier even though now it’s swinging, too.

  Except that there’s a loud crack! and suddenly the ledge is tipping downward.

  “There go the rings of Saturn!” someone shouts.

  Some of the children duck and cover their heads and scramble to the edge of the room as though afraid I’ll lose my grip and fall on them. At the same time, others crowd in for a closer look.

  “
Let me through! I’ve got a net!” calls a voice I recognize as belonging to Security Guard.

  A net doesn’t sound good.

  But the boy in the movable chair cheers me on: “Squirrels in Space! You go, squirrel!”

  My Saturn-ball is about as far away from the center of the room as its journey around the sun takes it, so I jump again before the ledge can break off entirely. Good thing I jump when I do: Saturn’s ledge breaks free of Saturn, Saturn breaks free of the string holding it, and both pieces hit Security Guard on his shiny head, one after the other.

  “Ow! Ow!” he says.

  The new ball I’m on is much smaller, but it’s the one that’s farthest away from the light in the center that’s meant to be the sun.

  “Neptune!” the children sing out the way they do on oral quiz day.

  Because Neptune is so small compared to the last two planets I was on—it’s a bright blue grapefruit—I need to curl myself around it, and its swinging is enough to make even a surefooted squirrel eager to move on. I see I’m approaching the door that leads farther into the museum.

  And—since I’ve learned all there is to know about planets—I jump.

  I jump off Neptune in one room and onto a table made out of glass in the next. It’s like a window, except it’s going the same direction as the ground instead of reaching up and down like the windows at school. But it’s definitely a window on this table because I can see through it. Still, there isn’t a schoolroom on the other side. It’s more like a big box. But the box isn’t holding anything interesting. Just a bunch of stones.

  I jump to the next table. When I look through that window, I see somebody’s clothes. The clothes are all puffy, like what the children wear when they go outside to play in the snow, since they don’t have fur to keep them warm the way squirrels do. But this set of clothes is big, like for a grown-up, not a child.

  There are also very thick gloves, and boots, and something round that comes with its own small, curved window attached. In the table box, there is a list of facts, like there was on the wall in the room with the planets.

  The facts include a picture of a man wearing these clothes, and he has the round thing on his head. Even though it goes all around his head, this reminds me of the helmets worn by the children who ride their bicycles to school. I have heard the teachers who wait outside say, “Put on your helmet to protect your head in case you fall.” The grown-up who wears this helmet must not be very good at all at riding his bicycle if he needs so much more protection than the children do.

  I hear the sound of footsteps running into the room, and I decide there is no time to look at any more of the tables.

  In this room there is another, smaller room made entirely of windows—the regular up-and-down, side-to-side kind, not the lying-flat kind. The windows of this room within a room go all the way down to the floor, but they don’t go all the way up to the ceiling. It’s just like the fish tank in the third grade. But people-sized.

  And without the fish.

  Or the plants that sway in the water.

  Or the water.

  Or the little treasure chest that opens and closes, opens and closes.

  I jump from the window table to on top of one of the fish-tank-room windows. From here I see that Security Guard has run in. He has a second Security Guard with him. This one has curly hair on his head, and his big belly jiggles as he runs. He is carrying a blue plastic box like the ones at school, where the teachers say Bottles and cans in the blue bin, papers in the yellow bin. If there were bottles and cans in this blue bin, Bin Guy has lost them from holding the bin upside down.

  I also notice that there were children in here all along. They aren’t looking at the window tables. (No wonder! They’re boring!) Instead, the children are looking into the window room. I have noticed what’s not in here (fish, plants, water, treasure chest), but now I look to see what is here.

  I see something very like a sandbox. I know sandboxes from the school playground and a few of the yards nearby.

  Inside this sandbox, someone has built up hills and dips and scattered stones like the ones in the first table box. There is also something else. It is about the size of the backpack I rode in, but I don’t know what it is.

  The teacher said this room holds a Mars rover model. I don’t know what that is, either, so I wonder if the two things I don’t know are the same thing.

  I balance on the top edge of the window. The museum worker called the dinosaur in the first room a model, so I wait to hear if the Mars rover model will roar, too.

  “There he is!” the teacher who pushes the boy’s movable chair shouts at the two security guards. “By the Mars rover exhibit! Get him before he jumps in!”

  Why would I jump in?

  There must be something interesting that I can’t see from on top.

  I decide that jumping in sounds like a fine idea.

  The sand in the sandbox is more dirt than sand. Also, there are no toys. A good sandbox has pails and shovels. Here there are only the stones and Mars Rover. Sometimes in the school sandbox there are treats which the smaller children have brought with them during recess but which have fallen into the sand, and then the children don’t want them anymore.

  I don’t know why.

  I look for treats, but there aren’t any of those, either. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten.

  I sniff at Mars Rover, wondering if that’s something to eat, but it’s not. Just metal.

  Suddenly Mars Rover moves, jerking forward on its wheels as though startled by my sniffing it. I jump, too, startled by Mars Rover being startled. I put my paw out to touch, to make certain Mars Rover isn’t a live thing.

  No, it feels like metal, just the same as it smells like metal.

  Mars Rover moves forward a bit more.

  I notice that there are children crowded around the fish-tank-room windows, watching.

  One girl is sitting at a chair that is up against one of the windows. She is wearing great big glasses and great big gloves. Some of the children are crowded around her. “Move it again!” they tell her.

  She does something with her hand, and Mars Rover moves again.

  “I don’t want to scare him,” she says. “But it’s my turn to use the virtual reality controls. I’ve been waiting for, like, forever.”

  “Turn it so the camera’s facing him,” someone tells her.

  Again she twists her hand. This time Mars Rover doesn’t move forward, but a metal tube swings around until it’s pointing at me.

  The children around the girl cheer, but I don’t know why. I sniff at the tube that moved and is now facing me. The children are laughing and excited when I press my nose against the glass at the end of the tube, but I still don’t know why. I climb up onto Mars Rover for a better look.

  Security Guard tries to get the girl to move away from the big gloves and glasses so he can sit in the chair, but she says she waited her turn, and it would be unfair of anybody to make her move so soon after she got there, and she doesn’t want to start yelling unless she has to.

  She moves her hands again, and Mars Rover very slowly begins to roll forward on its wheels. This reminds me of riding on the field trip bus, except bouncier so that I have to hold on to Mars Rover the whole time, and not just when we start and stop and turn corners. And this time I’m not hiding under a seat, so I can look around. Mars Rover rolls up and down over some of the hills in this sandbox. Once in a while it moves another metal piece that scoops up some of the dirt or one of the stones, sort of like a shovel.

  “Just keep him moving,” I hear Bin Guy tell the girl. I see that Mars Rover and I are headed toward the back window of this fish-tank room. Security Guard has come to this side. He has opened a glass door and is standing there—which would be good, since that will be an easy way out. But it’s not good, because Security Guard is holding a net.
/>   Does he think I can’t see him?

  I will have to move quickly.

  Moving quickly is a squirrel specialty.

  Mars Rover is bringing me closer and closer to the door. I’m almost there. Security Guard has the net raised. In one more moment I will jump off Mars Rover and zig and zag past man and net.

  With the teacher watching Security Guard, the boy with the movable chair makes his chair bump right into where the girl with the gloves is sitting.

  She jerks her hands, and Mars Rover runs over Security Guard’s foot, just as though the foot was another hill.

  Security Guard yelps in surprise.

  Bin Guy comes running and slams the upside-down blue plastic bin over Mars Rover—and onto Security Guard’s foot.

  But not over me. I have already jumped off. I run past both of them and into another room.

  The next room still doesn’t have anything about wolves. What it has is a big circle in the middle of the floor. (These museum people really seem to be fond of circles.) Like the room with the planets, there’s a ball hanging from the ceiling. But the cord that holds it must be broken, because this planet is swinging back and forth very close to the floor.

  There is a museum worker here, and he is talking to the children who are gathered around the circle. But he does not say, The planet in this room is broken. He says, “This is a Foucault pendulum. If you look up, high above your heads, you can see where the pendulum is attached to the dome three stories up. Down here, the pendulum swings back and forth. But—because the earth rotates on its axis—each swing of the pendulum brings it closer to one of the bowling pins placed on the floor at precise intervals as on a clock face. Every ten minutes—accurate to the second by careful scientific calculation—the pendulum will knock over one pin. If you don’t mind waiting, or if you want to come back, the next pin will be knocked over in seven minutes and thirty-six seconds on the dot.”