1 George the Lobster Hat

 

  Plink, plunk! Plink, plink, plunk!

  Cordelia woke up that morning to the sound of acorns hitting her tree house. The tree house was perched high up in an elm tree in the middle of Central Park. She lived there with a squirrel named Shakespeare. He had found her under a shrub when she was a baby, and he had raised her as his own.

  Cordelia squinted her eyes open—first one, then the other. She sat up and peeked out of the little tree house window. On the grassy lawn below, she saw her friend Isaac. He smiled and waved up at her.

  “Want to play Gorilla Kickball?” Isaac called up.

  “Be right down!” Cordelia called back.

  She scrambled out of the tree house, leapt down to a lower limb, and skipped along the branch as nimbly as… well, as nimbly as a squirrel, until she reached a large hole in the trunk. That was where she kept all her stuff. Some of it were things that Viola Berry, the park’s groundskeeper, had bought for her, like boots and a puffer jacket and a knit hat and lots of books about animals. Some other things she had found in the playground. People were always leaving interesting things in playgrounds, like plastic-bead bracelets and half-used bottles of soap bubbles and a little man made of LEGO bricks. Cordelia chose her clothes for the day and her favorite bead bracelet, and after she got dressed, she went to peek at Shakespeare. He was curled up in his nest in the tree, his bushy tail covering his eyes.

 

   

 

“Are you sleeping?” she whispered.

  Shakespeare let out a big snore.

  “That’s a fake snore,” she said, lifting his tail off his eyes.

   

  “It was a real snore a second ago before you woke me up,” he replied.

  “I’m going to play Gorilla Kickball with Isaac.”

  “Are the gorillas the quiet kind of gorillas?” Shakespeare asked.

  Cordelia laughed. “There are no gorillas, Shakespeare.”

  She gently placed his tail over his eyes again.

  She climbed down to the last branch and made a springy leap to the ground, landing squarely on her feet.

  “I call Gorilla!” she said.

  Gorilla Kickball was a game she and Isaac had made up. It involved a lot of running and tumbling and hiding and a soccer ball.

  They were having a great time, racing around and rolling in the grass, when suddenly Cordelia felt an acorn plop on her head. She looked up to see Kate, a small red squirrel, glaring down at her from a tree branch.

  Uh-oh.

  “I’ll never understand how you can run around on those ridiculous legs of yours, Cordelia,” Kate said. “They look like Popsicle sticks.”

   

  Cordelia ignored her.

  “You might act like a squirrel, Cordelia,” Kate continued. “And you might live in a tree like a squirrel, but super guess what…? You’re not a squirrel!”

  “I’m squirlish,” Cordelia shot back.

  Shakespeare always told her that she was a little bit squirrel and a little bit girl. That made her squirlish.

  “People visit Central Park, they don’t live in Central Park. You don’t belong here, Popsicle Stick Legs.” Kate flicked her tail at Cordelia.

  Cordelia’s stomach started to feel blurggy, which is when you feel like you’ve eaten something that doesn’t agree with you, only you haven’t. Cordelia ran to her elm tree and climbed back up to the hole in the trunk. She reached into the hole and pulled out a hat shaped like a lobster. It was bright red with dangly lobster claws that hung down by her ears.

  “Good morning, George,” Cordelia said to the hat, and she put it on her head. Then she told the hat what Kate had just said to her.

  “What are you doing?” Isaac called up to Cordelia.

  “Talking to George.” She pointed up at her lobster hat.

  “Why are you talking to a hat?” Isaac asked.

  “Shakespeare said that whenever I feel worried, I should tell the worry to George and let him worry about it instead.”

  “Oh.” Isaac nodded. “Does it work?”

  Cordelia thought about it. Her stomach didn’t feel so blurggy anymore. Just a little blurggy.

  “It mostly works,” she said. “I think George always leaves a tiny bit of the worry for me.”

  She climbed back down to the ground just as Fenton the rat came running up to them.

  “How do I look?” Fenton asked. He spit on his paws and groomed his whiskers.

  “What did he say?” Isaac asked Cordelia.

  Fenton was speaking in Chittering, which is the language squirrels speak. Even though Fenton was a rat, he hung around squirrels so much that he spoke it fluently.

  “He wants to know how he looks,” Cordelia translated.

  “Oh! I’ll tell him!” Isaac knelt down in front of Fenton. Cordelia was teaching Isaac how to speak in Chittering, and he took every opportunity to practice.

   

  “You look very handsome,” Isaac said to Fenton in Chittering.

  Except Isaac’s Chittering was not very good. What Isaac actually said was “You look like a furry onion dumpster.”

  Fenton made an unhappy squeak. “I do?”

  “He didn’t mean that,” Cordelia said. “But why do you care what you look like all of a sudden?”

  “Because of them.” He pointed.

  Trotting on the footpath were four large white rats. Sitting on the back of each rat, riding them like ponies, were very noble-looking squirrels. They were the queen’s Royal Messengers, and it looked like they were heading straight toward Cordelia.