Free Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary Page A

get to wear a costume and march around and around the playground. This year she had a doughnut and apple juice coming to her.
    â€œMama, did you buy my mask?” Ramona asked every day, when she came home from school.
    â€œNot today, dear,” Mrs. Quimby answered. “Don’t pester. I’ll get it the next time I go down to the shopping center.”
    Ramona, who did not mean to pester her mother, could not see why grown-ups had to be so slow. “Make it a bad mask, Mama,” she said. “I want to be the baddest witch in the whole world.”
    â€œYou mean the worst witch,” Beezus said, whenever she happened to overhear this conversation.
    â€œI do not,” contradicted Ramona. “I mean the baddest witch.” “Baddest witch” sounded much scarier than “worst witch,” and Ramona did enjoy stories about bad witches, the badder the better. She had no patience with books about good witches, because witches were supposed to be bad. Ramona had chosen to be a witch for that very reason.
    Then one day when Ramona came homefrom school she found two paper bags on the foot of her bed. One contained black material and a pattern for a witch costume. The picture on the pattern showed the witch’s hat pointed like the letter A . Ramona reached into the second bag and pulled out a rubber witch mask so scary that she quickly dropped it on the bed because she was not sure she even wanted to touch it. The flabby thing was the grayish-green color of mold and had stringy hair, a hooked nose, snaggle teeth, and a wart on its nose. Its empty eyes seemed to stare at Ramona with a look of evil. The face was so ghastly that Ramona had to remind herself that it was only a rubber mask from the dime store before she could summon enough courage to pick it up and slip it over her head.
    Ramona peeked cautiously in the mirror, backed away, and then gathered her courage for a longer look. That’s really me in there,she told herself and felt better. She ran off to show her mother and discovered that she felt very brave when she was inside the mask and did not have to look at it. “I’m the baddest witch in the world!” she shouted, her voice muffled by the mask, and was delighted when her mother was so frightened she dropped her sewing.

    Ramona waited for Beezus and her father to come home, so she could put on her mask and jump out and scare them. But that night, before she went to bed, she rolled up the mask and hid it behind a cushion of the couch in the living room.
    â€œWhat are you doing that for?” asked Beezus, who had nothing to be afraid of. She was planning to be a princess and wear a narrow pink mask.
    â€œBecause I want to,” answered Ramona, who did not care to sleep in the same room with that ghastly, leering face.
    Afterward when Ramona wanted to frighten herself she would lift the cushion for a quick glimpse of her scary mask before she clapped the pillow over it again. Scaring herself was such fun.
    When Ramona’s costume was finished and the day of the Halloween parade arrived, the morning kindergarten had trouble sittingstill for seat work. They wiggled so much while resting on their mats that Miss Binney had to wait a long time before she found someone quiet enough to be the wake-up fairy. When kindergarten was finally dismissed, the whole class forgot the rules and went stampeding out the door. At home Ramona ate only the soft part of her tuna-fish sandwich, because her mother insisted she could not go to the Halloween parade on an empty stomach. She wadded the crusts into her paper napkin and hid them beneath the edge of her plate before she ran to her room to put on her long black dress, her cape, her mask, and her pointed witch hat held on by an elastic under her chin. Ramona had doubts about that elastic—none of the witches whom she met in books seemed to have elastic under their chin—but today she was too happy and excited to