For Johanna, Lillian, and Julia
—A. M. R.
Chapter One
Just My Luck
“Which one’s worse, walking under a ladder or a black cat crossing your path?” I asked, hopping over a line in the sidewalk. Chuck and I were walking to school and playing the game where you’re not supposed to step on any cracks.
“They’re both bad luck,” my brother said. “About the same amount. But you can cancel out bad luck with good luck by finding a penny or a four-leaf clover, or knocking on something made of wood—like your head,” he teased. He tried to tap his knuckles against my skull but I dodged out of the way.
“Missed me! Ha-ha.” I straightened my backpack on my shoulders.
Chuck had been reading The Big Book of Small Superstitions for a report he’d be giving at school today, so now he was kind of an expert. I wasn’t sure I believed in that stuff—I love animals, so seeing a cat of any color seemed like good luck to me—but I thought it was fun to hear about.
“Breaking a mirror is the worst one,” Chuck said. “Then you have bad luck for seven whole years. You’d have to find a lot of pennies to make up for that.”
“Whoa.” I wondered if I could train Banana, my dog, to sniff out lucky pennies. With her help, I bet I could find enough extra luck to share with everyone in my family and my best friends, Sadie and Isabel, too. Though Banana was more interested in chasing squirrels and eating treats than she was in luck or money.
I followed Chuck around the corner, toward the Surely Shirley house. I call it the Surely Shirley house because it says SHIRLEY on the mailbox in big purple letters, and when I asked Dad why, he said, “Surely Shirley lives there,” which made me giggle. I didn’t know if Shirley was the person’s first name or last. Maybe it was both. But I was pretty sure an old couple lived there. I had seen them out in the yard a few times. Most likely they were Mr. and Mrs. Shirley.
Banana and I loved walking by the Surely Shirley house. In spring, summer, and fall, colorful flowers bloomed in the garden. Fancy lights twinkled in the tree branches all winter long. The bird feeders attracted lots of sparrows and robins, and the shiny, purple gazing ball and dancing frog sculpture were like something out of a fairy tale. It was always the most cheerful-looking yard on the block.
But it wasn’t like that today. Not at all.
Today the garden looked brown and wilted, like everything in it was feeling sad. Sharp-seeming bristles and extra-huge thorns reached out like they wanted to bite us. It reminded me of the witch in the book I’d been reading, and how everything near her lost all its color whenever she got angry. There weren’t any witches around here, of course—I knew that spooky story was only make-believe—but I walked a bit faster anyway.
“Do you think the Shirleys moved away?” I asked.
Chuck shrugged. “I dunno. Why?”
“Because the house looks kind of creepy and abandoned, doesn’t it?”
Before he could answer, I heard a howling shriek and a crash in the bushes, like an enormous creature was racing straight toward us. I screamed and jumped as something white—was it a ghost?—streaked past me, just inches in front of my feet. My heartbeat pounded in my ears like a drum. I grabbed on to Chuck for safety.
It took me a few seconds to realize Chuck was laughing. I dropped his arm and looked where he was pointing, in the direction the white thing had gone.
There it was, across the street: not a ghost or a monster or a terrible, ferocious beast. It was a tiny white kitten. His ears were pink and his fur was as puffy as a dandelion ready for its seeds to be blown. His whiskers twitched as he looked straight at me, then he slipped into a hedge and disappeared from sight. He was adorable, not scary.
My cheeks felt hot with embarrassment and relief. Chuck clutched his stomach and tried to catch his breath from laughing so hard. “You should have seen your face!” he said. He stretched his mouth and flailed his arms in what I guessed was supposed to be an impression of me.
“You jumped too,” I said.
“Did not!”
“Did too.” But we were both grinning. Now that I knew we were completely safe, I had to admit it had been pretty funny.
“C’mon, scaredy cat,” Chuck said. He leaped over a crack. “We’d better get moving before more kittens attack.”
Chapter Two
A Funny String of Events
By the time we got to school, my heart rate had slowed from a gallop to a trot, and Chuck had finally stopped snickering. I wished him good luck with his report, and ran to find Isabel and Sadie. They were right where I thought they’d be: near the fence behind the swings, practicing tricks for String Club.
String Club was a new thing our classmate Keisha had started when everyone got excited about the tricks she was doing with a loop of yarn in the cafeteria last month. She’d learned the string tricks from her cousin Mo, who’d learned them from a kid at his school, who’d learned them from a book. Everyone at the lunch table wanted to know how to do them too, so Keisha had showed us. Then more people wanted to learn, and soon it turned into a club that met every Tuesday and Thursday at recess. Anyone who was interested could learn and practice tricks. All you needed to join was a piece of yarn or string, and our teacher, Ms. Burland, had brought in a whole ball of it.
By now almost all the third-grade girls were in String Club, and half the boys, too. Sadie was club secretary, so she used a clipboard to keep track of who’d learned which tricks and what level everyone was at. Most of us in String Club were still level one, but Isabel had mastered so many tricks, she was already level two. So far only Keisha had reached level three.
Before String Club started I only knew how to do Cat’s Cradle, but now I could do Jacob’s Ladder, the Butterfly, Cup and Saucer, and Witch’s Broom. I was also getting pretty good at Cutting Off the Fingers, a trick where the yarn loops around each finger and it looks like if you yank the loose end hard enough, your fingers could come right off—but of course they don’t.
If you do it right, the string slips away, sliding through your fingers like magic. But if you do it wrong, the string won’t budge, and your fingers get all tangled. I’d been practicing it at home over and over again with Banana. Cutting Off the Fingers was Banana’s favorite string trick. Every time it worked, she thumped her tail on the floor like applause. She did that sometimes when it didn’t work too.
“Look!” Sadie said, holding up her hands as I approached. The yarn in her fingers was stretched into a trick called Cat’s Whiskers. She held the “whiskers” in front of her face and meowed.
“She did it all by herself this time,” Isabel said. “I didn’t help once.”
“Cool! Way to go,” I said. Sadie beamed. She had been struggling with that trick all week.
I pulled a loop of yellow string out of my backpack and twisted it through my fingers. “Speaking of whiskers, guess what happened to me this morning?” I launched into the story about my scare with the ghost kitten. My friends’ eyes went wide as I acted out the way I’d shrieked and jumped, and they laughed as I played up how tiny and cute the kitten had been. We were all still giggling about it when the bell rang to call us inside for class.
We settled into our desks and quieted down when Ms. Burland clapped twice to start the day. As she handed back our spelling tests, Isabel slipped me a note. I unfolded the paper and grinned at what I saw. She’d drawn a tiny ghost kitten underneath the word “BOO.”
Later, in the lunch line, Sadie made us giggle again by saying, “Meeeeeeeeeeooowwwwwwww,” in an eerie voice. Her hands floated through the air like little ghost paws.
Even the word of the day seemed to be i
n on the joke. The word was “heebie-jeebies”: a feeling of nervous fear. I liked the silly-but-shivery sound of it.
The kitten probably wouldn’t have scared me so much if I hadn’t already had the heebie-jeebies from thinking about the witch in my book. I hoped we’d see the kitten again on the walk home, so I could get a better look at him and maybe even pat him. He looked so sweet and soft. I wondered what the Shirleys had named him.
When Chuck and I got to the Surely Shirley house after school, I stared at the witchy garden, but the kitten was nowhere to be seen. A cold breeze blew against my neck and rustled through the dead leaves, making me shiver. I wished my friends were there with me to help me feel braver.
I stepped closer to Chuck and reminded myself there was no reason to be scared. I clicked my tongue against the top of my mouth and called, “Here, kitty kitty!” but the kitty didn’t come.
“Maybe it hasn’t learned to speak English yet,” Chuck said.
I rolled my eyes, but that reminded me of a funny joke. “What’s smarter than a talking cat?” I asked.
Chuck looked at me. “What?”
“A spelling bee!” I answered.
“That’s dopey,” Chuck said, but he was laughing.
“Nope!” I said. “It’s purrrrrfect.” He reached out to swat my arm, so I ducked and broke into a run. I raced him all the way home, and won.
Chapter Three
A Tale of Two Tails
I burst in the front door of our house, almost out of breath. Banana was right there waiting for me. She barked and twirled in a circle at my feet, to say she was happy to see me. Her toenails clicked against the floor as she spun. It sounded like she was tap-dancing.
I dropped to my knees and kissed her on the snout. “I missed you too,” I said. “And I’ve got a lot to tell you.” Banana’s ears perked up. She’s always been a great listener.
I shrugged off my backpack and clipped on her leash, and we set off around the block. While we walked, I told her about the fluffy little kitten who had turned me into a scaredy cat, and how Sadie and Isabel hadn’t laughed at me when I’d told them—they’d laughed with me, which made it all seem better, because that’s what best friends do.
“It sounds silly now, but I really was terrified,” I admitted to Banana. “It was almost as bad as the time Chuck convinced me there was a werewolf in Nana and Grumps’s basement.”
Banana froze. I smiled to reassure her and tugged at the leash. “Don’t worry,” I said. “There’s no such thing as werewolves. Chuck made that up to fool me when I was little. The noise was just a furnace that growled because it was broken.” But Banana wouldn’t budge. Her whole body held stiff as she stared at something on the other side of the road. I turned my head to look, and let out a gasp. Banana had spotted the kitten!
“That’s him!” I said. Banana pressed back her ears and pushed her nose forward. She crouched low to the ground and crept toward the kitten, pulling me behind her. I looked both ways and we crossed the road. Banana was as focused and determined as when she sees a squirrel or thinks I might drop a piece of cheese I’m eating. She really wanted to play with him.
The kitten stared at Banana and flicked his tail. Banana wagged hers eagerly. But as we got closer, the kitten arched his spine and puffed out his fur like he wanted us to think he was made of sharp needles instead of soft tufts. Banana wasn’t fooled.
“Banana!” I yelped as she lunged toward the kitten. I pulled on the leash to stop her from reaching him. The kitten hissed, jumped out of the way, and ran off through the bushes. I saw one last glimpse of his skinny white tail, and then he was gone.
Banana sniffed the ground where the kitten had been, wagging her tail fast. I hadn’t seen her so excited since the cookout last summer when Chuck dropped his whole hamburger and she got to it first. But even though Banana was thrilled, I was worried about how the kitten felt.
“Banana, you scared him!” I said. Her ears and tail drooped. “I know you didn’t mean to. You just wanted to say hello. But the kitten doesn’t know us yet. We have to approach him gently. It’s not nice to charge at new friends.” Banana nudged my leg with her nose to say she was sorry.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You’ll do better next time. I’m still glad we saw him.” But then I realized: We were nowhere near the Surely Shirley house, and the kitten had run off in the opposite direction. What was he doing so far from home?
Chapter Four
What If
“Maybe the kitten doesn’t belong to the Shirleys after all,” I said to Banana as we returned home. “But then, whose kitten is he?”
I couldn’t help worrying about it. Even while I was doing my Roman numerals worksheet for math and practicing Cutting Off the Fingers for String Club and setting the table for dinner, the kitten was still on my mind. What if he was lost? Even wondering that made me want to hug Banana extra tight. Losing a pet would be terrible.
But when I told my parents, they didn’t seem concerned. “I’m sure he knows his way home,” Mom said. “Some cats like to wander pretty far.”
“Even little tiny ones?” I asked.
“Sure,” Dad said. “Cats are very independent.”
Before I could say anything else, Chuck made a disgusting sound and I turned to see him slurping up a strand of spaghetti while balancing a meatball on his nose. “Charles!” Mom shouted as the meatball rolled off, falling straight into Banana’s mouth. “The dinner table is not a playground!” Chuck grinned and my parents frowned, and everyone seemed to forget about the kitten.
But Banana and I didn’t forget. I took her outside again before bed and we squinted into the dark, wondering if the kitten was out there, scared and lost and alone. I didn’t see any sign of him.
Maybe my parents were right. Maybe the kitten was curled up at home, dreaming about the day’s big adventures. I hoped so.
I thought about walking to the Surely Shirley house to ask, and maybe I would have if Sadie and Isabel were with us, but Banana and I knew better than to knock on a stranger’s door by ourselves—especially on a moonlit, windy night. We ran back inside and got ready for bed instead.
I crawled under the covers and took out my book, while Banana settled into her basket beside my bed. The girl in the book walked deep into the forest, following the path she thought her missing brother had taken. She didn’t know it was a trap that would lead her straight to the witch’s lair. It was the scariest chapter yet.
When Mom came to tuck me in and said, “Lights out,” I closed the book like I was supposed to, reached down to pat Banana good night, and shut my eyes. But falling asleep was impossible. The girl and the witch kept floating through my brain, mixing with thoughts of the kitten.
I grabbed my flashlight from its hiding spot under the bed, turned it on beneath the blankets, and reopened the book. I had to find out what happened next.
I wished I could turn the page to see what would happen with the kitten, too.
Chapter Five
Losing Sleep
I dragged myself out of bed, moving as slowly as the sloths in Isabel’s new favorite video. Usually Banana and I were the first ones down to the kitchen on Saturdays, but today my parents had to call us three times for breakfast.
Last night, as I’d read my book under the covers and Banana snored in her basket, the story had gotten scarier and scarier. Reading it after bedtime while the house was all quiet and dark had started to seem like a bad idea, but I hadn’t been able to stop.
I’d read and read, until my eyelids felt as heavy as the iron key the witch had used to lock the girl in the enchanted cage. I fell into a dream where I was running through the forest, trying to get to the girl and her brother. Suddenly the forest gave way to a garden, which looked as overgrown and neglected as the garden at the Surely Shirley house, but a thousand times larger and creepier. Thorns and bristles grabbed at my shirt as I ran through the mist. I thought I spotted the kitten, but he kept disappearing from where I’d seen him and rea
ppearing someplace else, like a ghost. The witch was after me and time was running out, but I couldn’t leave the garden without saving the kitten from danger. I knew I was the only one who could help him.
I must have called out in my sleep because the next thing I knew, Banana’s warm, wet tongue was licking my face, urging me awake. When I opened my eyes, Banana had her two front paws up on my mattress and was nuzzling against me to push away the bad dream.
I’d patted Banana’s soft ears and warm fur, and instantly felt so much better. If there were ever a real witch or ghost in our house, I knew Banana would protect me. Even though she was just a little wiener dog, she always had my back.
Now, in the daylight, I scooped some kibble into Banana’s dish and poured myself a bowl of Gorilla Grams with milk. I wondered if the little white kitten was eating breakfast somewhere too. Or maybe he was still in bed, fast asleep, like I wished I could be.
I yawned, careful to cover my mouth with my hand since that’s good manners. Banana yawned too, and stretched out her legs under the table at my feet. She didn’t even try to cover her mouth, but nobody minded. Good manners are different for dogs.
“Earth to Anna.” Chuck waved his arm in front of my face. “I said, will you please pass the orange juice? Yeesh.”
I blinked and reached for the juice carton.
“You sure look sleepy this morning, kiddo,” Dad said. “You didn’t stay up all night reading, did you?”
“No! Of course not,” I said. Which, technically, was true. I hadn’t stayed up all night, just for a few extra chapters.
“Well, finish your breakfast so we can get hopping. There’s a lot to do before Sadie and Isabel come over,” Dad said.
Anna, Banana, and the Little Lost Kitten Page 1
