The next night – the night before the big test – Stinky and I were going through Plan Number Two one last time.
It was simple. I was going to take him into school in my bag, in an old lunchbox that I’d punched holes in with a fork.
Before the test, when no one was looking, I’d take Stinky out and pop him into my shirt pocket. If I bent my head forward so it looked as if I was thinking really hard, I could whisper the questions to him and just about hear as he whispered the answers back to me.
Now, though, he was pacing up and down his cage.
‘You’re looking twitchy,’ I said.
‘I’m a hamster,’ he said. ‘We’re twitchy. We twitch. That’s what we do.’
‘Twitchier than usual, I mean. You must be nervous about tomorrow.’
‘Nervous?’ he said. ‘Me? Whatever for? Being jiggled up and down in a lunchbox all day? Or being surrounded by hundreds of giant kids?’
He was pretty sarcastic, for a hamster.
But when I thought about what Stinky was going to do for me, I was really grateful to the little ball of fluff. He’d helped me so much, and so I made a big decision. Giving Stinky his freedom seemed like the only way to repay him for all his help, even if it did mean my homework would go back to being rubbish.
‘It isn’t fair that you’re stuck in that cage, Stinky,’ I told him. ‘So, after tomorrow, I’m going to let you go free. Outside. Forever. I’ll miss you, Stinky, and my homework won’t be –’
‘Are you absolutely insane?’ he spluttered. ‘Have you lost your mind? Are you completely bananas?’ He jabbed one tiny paw towards the window. ‘Why would I want to go out there?’
‘I just thought …’
‘What?’
‘You said your cage was like a prison.’
‘Have you any idea what my chances are of surviving even one day outside? Do you know how many types of animal like to eat hamsters?’
I shook my head.
‘Practically every single one you can think of. Cats. Dogs. Birds. You name it, they’ll be after me. I leave here, I’m dead meat. A small and fluffy mouthful, I tell you. A furry snack.’
‘OK, I get it. Bad idea.’
He went for a run on his wheel. I could tell that he was feeling really tense about going to school tomorrow. As he was running, though, I thought of another way to repay him.
When he hopped off, I said, ‘OK, then. How about if I go to the pet shop and get you a mate?’
He was out of breath, but managed to wheeze, ‘A mate?’
‘A mate – you know, a special friend. A girl hamster.’
‘Here? In this cage? With me?’
I nodded. He stared at me.
‘What do you think?’ I asked him.
‘I think you want me to die. That’s what I think,’ he snapped.
‘What? Why?’ I asked, baffled.
‘We’re solitary animals. Solitary. We like being alone. Put two of us together, and what you’ve got on your hands is a fight to the death. Is that what you want? A hamster bloodbath in your bedroom?’
‘No,’ I said.
He shook his head and went for another run.
Stinky was on his wheel most of the night. Which meant that neither of us got much sleep.