For Luke—JM
For everyone at Abernethy Elementary, especially the student journalists of the Abernethy Talon—EC
For my parents, Barb and Brad. Thanks for all the stories, drawings, and unending support—RM
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Text copyright © 2019 by John Bemelmans Marciano and Emily Chenoweth. Illustrations copyright © 2019 by Robb Mommaerts. All rights reserved. Published by Penguin Workshop, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. PENGUIN and PENGUIN WORKSHOP are trademarks of Penguin Books Ltd, and the W colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Ebook ISBN 9781524787233
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Copyright
Raj
Klawde
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
About the Authors
RAJ
My name is Raj. I’m a regular kid from Brooklyn who just moved across the country to Elba, Oregon. I hated it when I was forced to come here, but now I kind of like it. I have a mom, a dad, and a very special cat—Klawde!
KLAWDE
My name is not Klawde. It is Lord High Emperor
Wyss-Kuzz, the Magnificent. I was exiled across the universe to this backward planet of furless ogres known as Earth. I hated it when I was forced to come here, and now I hate it even more.
CHAPTER 1
I was getting dressed verrrrry slowly. The reason: Today was the first day of middle school. This was scary enough for any kid, but I was living in a brand-new town, and that made it ten times worse.
I wished I could just crawl back under the covers, but Klawde was lying on my bed. He wasn’t very nice about sharing, and I had the scratch marks to prove it.
“Do you think I’ll know anyone?” I asked him. “I mean, besides Cedar and Steve and the kids from Camp Eclipse?” Unfortunately, those kids included Newt, who was always trying to mess with me, and Scorpion, who always picked on me. “I just hope there’ll be other new kids in sixth grade.”
If Klawde had an opinion about the matter, he didn’t express it. He stretched and yawned in the little square of sunlight falling on the bed.
“The first time I see Newt, she’ll probably try to trip me in the hallway,” I said. “And Scorpion will step on my face.”
Klawde swished his tail and rolled over.
What was the point of having a talking cat if he didn’t actually talk? I loved him, but sometimes he could be pretty frustrating.
“Look at my schedule,” I said, holding up the paper I’d printed out last night. It was so complicated, I needed to go to school just to be able to understand it.
“I’ve never had homeroom before,” I said. “Or had to walk around a huge school all by myself. How will I find my classes? And Room 3.5—what does that even mean?”
“Raj! You’re going to be late!” my mom called from downstairs.
I shoved some color-coded folders into my backpack, along with the rest of my new school supplies.
“Lunch isn’t until next-to-last period. I’m gonna starve,” I said. “And what kind of a class is ‘RBX’? That’s not even a word!”
Klawde opened his mouth, like he was finally about to say something. But he just yawned again. He rolled onto his back and let the sunlight fall on his furry belly.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” I asked him.
Klawde stretched all the way out and wriggled his toes.
“Oh, have you been speaking?” he said. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
CHAPTER 2
I was in a mood most foul.
My plans to re-reconquer my home planet were at a standstill, and it was all thanks to that cross-eyed fool, Flooffee-Fyr. Not only had my former lackey overthrown and exiled me, he had also closed all wormholes between Earth and Lyttyrboks, making a return presently impossible.
Luckily I knew that double-crossing nincompoop better than he knew himself. Flooffee could manage a coup, but not an entire planet of cats. I had been following the chaos on the Intra-Universal Feline News Feed. Any day now he would call me and beg for me to come back. And once I ruled Lyttyrboks for the third time, I would never again allow that power to slip through my claws!
In the meantime, however, I could do little but sit on my backside and watch the intergalactic cat phone, waiting for it to ring. I was so disturbed by this state of inaction that I had napped only eleven times yesterday. And now, when I was trying to catch up on my rest, the Human would not cease his inane blathering.
Though I pointedly ignored him, the boy-Human droned on about this new school of his. He was—as usual—helpless in the face of a challenge, and he begged me to share some of my wisdom with him.
Yawning, I took pity, and asked what they taught there.
“Poison Chemistry? Battle Tactics? The Art of Slash-and-Claw?”
He would be more useful once he had learned such basics.
But the Human informed me that he would be learning none of these essential skills.
I already told him I had NOT.
I inspected his diagram of classes. “A course in English?” I said, swishing my tail scornfully. “But that is a language you already speak! And lunch? You know how to eat!”
Although it was disgusting to watch.
“Where is Revenge 101?” I demanded. “Where is the Art of Ambush?”
Ah, the Art of Ambush! I remembered fondly how I had taught it to my most brilliant student—Ffangg.
That traitorous wretch.
The boy was still blathering, but thankfully the master of the house—the mother-Human—called up the stairs again.
“Raj, your friends Cedar and Steve are here!” she said. “You have to GO!”
“Wish me luck,” he said.
I scoffed. “True warriors make their own luck!”
But I pitied him as he rushed away to this “middle school.” Leave it to the hairless ogres, in their stupidity and shortsightedness, to create schools that taught nothing of importance.
That’s when it hit me—my latest BRILLIANT idea!
The Humans may not teach the Art of Ambush, but I could. What if I set up a school? A school of my own.
A school for . . . warriors!
Purrrrr.
CHAPTER 3
On the walk to school, Cedar, Steve, and I took out our schedules, and as we compared them, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.
We had almost no classes together.
“But we’re in the same math class,” Cedar said to me as we hung around the flag in front of the school, waiting for the doors to open. “And sometimes we have lunch together. And look—we all have Lab RBX!”
“Whatever that is,” Steve said.
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
At the sound of the bell, we hurried inside. A big monitor hung from the ceiling of the main hall and flashed a message in bright red letters:
WELCOME BACK, FIGHTIN’ BOOKWORMS!
Was the school mascot really an earthworm wearing boxing gloves? Worms didn’t even have arms.
The first good news of the day was that I found my homeroom, no problem. (It was right inside the front door.) I sat down just before the tardy bell rang. When I looked around, I saw a bunch of kids I didn’t know—but no teacher.
Suddenly, there was a booming voice, and I half jumped out of my seat.
“Hi, y’all! And welcome to your FIRST day at Elba Middle School!”
The voice was coming from a pair of speakers.
“Y’all can call me Miss Emmy Jo, and I’m your homeroom teacher.”
Miss Emmy Jo had big glasses, orange hair, and a sweater with a glittering, sequined pony on it. She was also just a face on a smartboard screen.
“Now, y’all may think it’s weird to have a teacher on a screen, but it’s part of a new wave in education,” Miss Emmy Jo said. “Remote instruction!”
“Cool!” the kid behind me whispered. “We can do whatever we want!”
Miss Emmy Jo’s bright blue eyes grew suddenly dark.
“No, you can not do whatever you want, Mr. Student Number Seventeen,” she said. “I may be sitting down here in Alabama, but I can spy you like a vulture spies a wounded field mouse!”
All the students suddenly got very quiet.
“I have a split-screen monitor right here with every student’s face on it,” Miss Emmy Jo said. “My hushed-voice recognition technology not only detects whispers at twenty decibels, but also who is making them!”
Miss Emmy Jo’s expression again suddenly switched, this time from a frown back into a big smile.
“I know we’re gonna have the best homeroom year ever! Go Fightin’ Mealworms!”
“Fightin’ Bookworms!” someone in the back yelled.
Miss Emmy Jo looked down at her notes. “Right,” she said. “Sorry about that, y’all! Skedaddle now, and have yourselves a great first day of school.”
CHAPTER 4
I was still purring at the thought of how I would start my own battle academy.
How could I not have thought of this evil scheme sooner?
Rather than wasting my exile on this miserable barren rock of a planet, I could be training an elite fighting force! Then, when Flooffee-Fyr brought me home to Lyttyrboks, I would have my own loyal soldiers to do my merciless bidding—soldiers who would never betray me.
Naturally I would punish Flooffee-Fyr for his faithless stupidity. But I would save the worst of my rage for General Ffangg, who had been the first cat to overthrow me and exile me across the universe.
Flooffee was a mere annoyance—Ffangg was my true enemy.
His deceit was especially irritating, as I myself had raised him, turning him from a mewling orphaned kitten into the greatest general in all the one hundred billion galaxies.
While cats are not known for their loyalty, his betrayal, I felt, was too much.
I purred as I imagined the humiliating punishments he had surely been undergoing.
The shaving of his tail fur.
The clipping of his whiskers.
Baths.
I got up from the patch of sunlight and put my enormous brain toward the task at hand: recruitment.
Of course I would not bother myself with this planet’s lower life-forms, such as Humans. The soldiers I sought were the cats of Earth.
CHAPTER 5
I got lost on the way to math and was so late that I had to sit in the back row, miles away from Cedar and so far from the board that I couldn’t decide if I needed glasses or binoculars.
After going the wrong way twice, I made it to science, and after going the wrong way three times, I got to English. I was late, of course, so I didn’t get to sit next to Steve. In fact, I had to stand. What kind of school didn’t have enough chairs?
My stomach rumbled all the way through social studies, and I was totally dehydrated because none of the drinking fountains worked. By the time I got to gym, I was so light-headed from hunger and thirst that I almost passed out playing volleyball.
When the bell rang, I sprinted to lunch. This was the one period I could not be late for. Nothing is worse than getting to a packed cafeteria and having no place to sit, no matter what day of school it is.
So it was a relief to get to the cafeteria and see that most of the tables were still empty. But then I saw . . . THE LINE.
It was at least seventy-five kids long, and I was the last one in it. I watched as kid after kid came out with a tray of food and promptly filled up another seat in the cafeteria. A seat that could have been mine.
By the time I got into the room with the hot plates, I was too nervous to be hungry. Maybe that was a good thing, since the only vegetarian option was a pile of floppy carrot sticks.
When I made it back to the lunchroom, the only table left with any space was the worst one of all.
The cool kids’ table.
Gulp.
CHAPTER 6
Though I previously held the cats of Earth in low regard, I had come to realize that they were not simply the idiotic, language-less fools they appeared to be.
Somewhere in the haze of their Earth-cat brains lurked a stunted but functional feline intelligence. The evidence for this lay in how they had tricked their ogres into serving them. Their ploys ranged from staging hunger strikes to gain the most delicious food to meowing relentlessly until Humans used their club-like opposable thumbs to open a closed door.
Most remarkably, they had gotten Humans to scratch, pet, and massage them, all for the reward of a purr—a sound that every feline knows conveys triumph and gloating. They mocked their ogres even while being served by them!
Purr!
Using these Earth-cat techniques, I had trained my own Humans. These days I only occasionally scratched them, as a
cts of random violence kept them on their toes.
(But never the mother-Human. One must beware around mother-Humans.)
As for which Earth cat would have the luck of being my first recruit, I needed to look no farther than out the front window of my fortress.
The Flabby Tabby.
I strolled across the street to greet him, slipping in through a narrow opening underneath the garage door. The obese one was perched upon his windowsill, snoozing. He sensed my presence—at least he was alert—and his eyes went round. He fled.
Resistance, my fleshy friend, is futile.
I caught Flabby easily. Using the trap-and-lead device the ogres call a “leash,” I dragged him across the street and into my underground bunker. He immediately took shelter under a couch and refused to come out.
My next (and more promising) prospect was the orange she-cat who lived to the rear of my fortress. Orange females are rare on Lyttyrboks—and, one must assume, on this wretched planet as well—but they are known to be admirably vicious.
This one followed me willingly back to the bunker. In fact, she appeared ready to do whatever I commanded.
I was already halfway to victory!
Their soft minds would easily absorb my training techniques, and the reeducation process would go forth with ease. By week’s end, I would have the beginnings of a feline fighting force such as this sorry world had never seen.
CHAPTER 7
I took a deep breath and sat down in the last remaining place at the table. But I only put one butt cheek on the bench so I didn’t crowd the kid next to me. Maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t even notice I was there.
He didn’t say anything, but he did shoot me a disgusted look. Then he took an enormous bite of his hamburger.
The kid across the table from me, though, leaned in and looked at my tray. He had blond hair, pink cheeks, and big hipster glasses.
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