In memory of Siobhan Morgan Sheflin animal rescuer A H To my kittens Andrea Åsa and Colleen L C
Contents 1 The Birthday Chicken 10 2 The Creepy Churchyard 24 3 The Cat 40 4 The Begging and Pleading Begins 55 5 The Kittens 74 6 The Caboodle 91 7 Cat The Movie The Sequel 109 8 The Walking Stairs 127 9 Cat-astrophe Strikes 143 10 Cat Fight 154 11 The Three Disasters 173 12 The Unstoppable 3 182 13 Lost Cat 194 14 Adopt-a-Cat-a-Thon 208 9
1 The Birthday Chicken Me and Bradley We’d always been best friends We loved all the same things from orange Creamsicles to comic books especially the non-stop non-stop action-packed adventures of Cat And we did everything together from back-to-school shoe shopping to swashbuckling It’s a pirate thing Our Halloween costumes last year Notice our matching sneakers and peg legs 10
But ever since that spring when my best friend had appeared on Smarty Pants a televised quiz show for fourth graders he’d changed Mostly it was good With his newfound confidence Bradley had started raising his hand more in Ms Smith’s class He’d even volunteered to be the emcee at the end-of-year school barbecue announcing the winners of the egg-on-a-spoon race right into the microphone But things took a turn for the worse when we began building the Kitten Caboodle and if I’m being honest I should have seen it coming as far back as the day of Bradley’s tenth birthday party an afternoon that was supposed to be fun-filled but that ended up seriously sucking literally at least for me It was the second Sunday of July and we were in Bradley’s backyard where the party was in full swing Hiiiiii-yaaaah our friend Abby yelled She was wearing a blindfold and waving a baseball bat around wildly Even though she was only about four feet tall and had a teeny-tiny mouse-squeak of a voice Abby had surprising strength and 11
