As soon as he walked into the classroom, Oggie noticed that the rainbow-covered box was no longer sitting on Mr. Snolinovsky’s desk. He also noticed that the bulletin board at the front of the room was completely covered with colored squares of paper that hadn’t been there the day before. When he went to have a closer look, Oggie discovered that each piece of paper had three lines typed on it. Haiku!

Oggie searched for his poem, finally locating it on a square of green paper, pinned to the upper right-hand corner of the board.

“There’s mine!” he cried happily.

“Don’t say another word, Oggie!” Mr. Snolinovsky called from his desk. “Come have a seat so I can explain what we’re going to be doing with the haiku.”

Once the class was seated and attendance had been taken, Mr. Snolinovsky told everybody that the reason the haiku had been typed up and put on the bulletin board was because they were going to play a game called Whose Haiku Are You?

“As you know, there are no names on the poems, and they have all been typed up so that nobody will be able to guess an author based on his or her penmanship.”

“How do you play the game?” asked America.

“You’ll have all day today to read the poems and think about who wrote them,” Mr. Snolinovsky explained. “This afternoon you’ll make your guesses.”

“What do we get if we win?” asked David Korben.

“Your reward will be the joy of knowing that you are a thoughtful reader, and that you know your classmates well,” Mr. Snolinovsky told him.

“Some prize,” grumbled David, who was used to being handed a shiny trophy for his efforts on the basketball court.

Throughout the day, Oggie went and stood in front of the bulletin board, studying the haiku. Some of them were easy to figure out:

Basketball is cool

Cooler than baseball or foot-

Ball or golf. The end.

Although Oggie didn’t think it sounded very haiku-ish the way the lines were all choppy and split up, he had to admit it did capture the essence of David Korben, who was clearly the author. Donnica’s, as promised, was all about how perfect she was:

How lucky to be

So beautiful and perfect

Don’t you envy me?

Bethie Hudson’s was about winning a spelling bee — something she never missed an opportunity to remind people she’d done back in the second grade. And there was one other haiku that Oggie felt certain he knew who had written:

Ghorks and Shadow Zwills

How you fill my heart with joy

My secret Ghoulers

It had to be Dylan’s. Who else would have written about Ghoulers and Ghorks? Each time Oggie visited the bulletin board, his eyes would drift up to the upper right-hand corner where he would reread his own haiku, wondering whether people would recognize the essence of him in the words.

Many of the haiku were hard to match up with a particular person. There was one about riding a bicycle and another about playing with a cat. Pretty much anybody with a bicycle or a cat could have written those. At noon, before the class was dismissed to go to the cafeteria, Mr. Snolinovsky made everybody promise not to discuss the haiku game during lunch.

“I want your guesses to be based only on the poems,” he told them. “Not on hints your friends drop about which ones they wrote.”

As promised, Amy and Oggie did not discuss the haiku. Instead, Amy quizzed Oggie on the B.P.R.’s while they ate their sandwiches.

“ ‘Our moon is not cheese, so what’s that funny smell?’ ” said Oggie.

“No,” Amy corrected. “It’s not, ‘so what’s that funny smell,’ it’s ‘but what’s that funny smell?’ Remember? The b stands for brain cells.”

“Oh, right,” said Oggie. “Rule Number Thirty-Five: NO TALKING ABOUT THE THINGS THAT YOUR PARENTS TELL YOU WILL KILL YOUR BRAIN CELLS.”

“I wonder why you always forget that one,” said Amy.

“Probably those fifty-three marshmallows I ate.”

“Or maybe the cotton ball.” Amy giggled.

As they walked back to class together after lunch, Oggie asked Amy, “Do you think I’ll know all the rules by heart by tomorrow afternoon?”

“Absolutely,” Amy told him.

“Well, in that case, do you think Donnica likes purses?”

“That’s a weird question,” said Amy.

“Not really. If I go to the party, I have to bring a gift. My mom thinks I should give Donnica a purse, but I don’t even know if she likes purses.”

Amy’s personal feeling was that the only thing Donnica Perfecto deserved from Oggie was a big fat punch in the nose.

“If she doesn’t like purses, I was thinking maybe I could crochet her some pink shoelaces,” said Oggie.

“What about Rule Number Two?” Amy re-minded him.

“Do you think it would still be breaking the rule if the shoelaces were in a box?” asked Oggie.

Their conversation was interrupted by a loud voice behind them. Donnica was yelling at her friends.

“How many times do I have to tell you? It’s not my fault. I told Daddy that the only thing I wanted for my birthday was Cheddar Jam!”

Oggie’s eyes got very wide.

Prrrrr-ip! Prrrrr-ip!

“Did Donnica just say she wanted cheddar jam for her birthday?” whispered Oggie excitedly.

“That’s what it sounded like to me,” Amy confirmed.

“What’s cheddar jam?” Oggie asked.

Amy shrugged. Neither she nor Oggie had attended the Valentine Dance, so they hadn’t heard of the band. Living in Wawatosa, Wisconsin, though, they were used to people trying to come up with new and creative ways to use cheese. But jam? Oggie squinched up his face as he tried to imagine eating a peanut butter and cheddar jam sandwich. It didn’t sound very appetizing.

I wonder why Donnica wants cheese for her birthday, Oggie thought. But it didn’t really matter. What was important was that Oggie finally knew what Donnica wanted for her birthday, and he made a promise to himself then and there that he was going to get it for her.

Cheddar jam.