The Cat at the Wall Read Free

could watch TV in the study instead of in the rec room with my sister. Waiting for my mother to get off the phone and drive me to the Westgate Mall.
    I hated all of it. My heart would start to pound and I’d want to wring someone’s neck.
    “It’s not good for me to have to wait,” I told my parents. “Really, it isn’t healthy. I’m not kidding.”
    But they just went on making dinner or mowing the lawn or talking on the phone to Grandma, even though it would have taken them No Time to do what I wanted.
    I wonder if they’re sorry now.
    Sometimes I was able to get what I wanted by being really, really bratty about it. I’d unplug the lawnmower or I’d stand right in front of my mother while she yakked on the phone.
    “If I drive you this one time will you promise to settle down and not act like this again?”
    Of course I promised. And of course I did it again.
    Now I either wait or I go do something else. And nobody cares. It’s terrible. Nobody ever thinks about the wants and feelings of a stray cat.
    I rubbed my ears on the smelly carpet again, then closed my eyes. Cats can nap anywhere.
    My ears perked up at the sound of a package being opened. My nose twitched. I smelled cheese. One of the soldiers had unwrapped a hunk of cheese and was cutting it into pieces.
    In a flash I was out from under the sofa. I grabbed a big piece of cheese and bounded up to the top of a cupboard.
    “Hey!”
    I held the cheese in my teeth and raised my hind leg to my ear and gave those fleas a good hard scratch. It felt like heaven.
    I scratched, then I ate. The cheese stuck in my throat a bit, but I didn’t care.
    Simcha, laughing, reached out to grab the rest of the cheese. I hissed and swiped at him, scratching his hand.
    He stopped laughing and backed off.
    Now both of them were scratched. I wasn’t a bit sorry.
    When my breakfast was done, I enjoyed a long session of grooming. I’ve learned that grooming my fur is as soothing as brushing my hair used to be when I was a girl. I used to love brushing it and looking at the shine of it in the bathroom mirror, no matter how often it made my mom late for work. I don’t think that’s vanity, to admire something beautiful, even if the beautiful thing was me.
    I had another good scratch. Then I settled down on my perch for a nap. I was feeling so good I almost decided to purr.
    Then my nose told me something I hadn’t paid attention to before.
    There were three humans in the little house.
    Two of them were the soldiers.
    The third was a boy. And he was hiding.

Three
    —
    What did I care if a boy wanted to hide? It had nothing to do with me.
    The best thing about being a cat is that nothing is my fault.
    Oh, I suppose if I deliberately ran in front of someone carrying a huge tray of bread rolls on his head, making him trip so the rolls went flying into the gift shops along the narrow streets of old Bethlehem, that would be my fault. (And has been, more than once!) But no one would ever blame me in a serious way. No one would think to punish a cat. No one would bother giving a detention to a cat.
    I’ve become a living Get Out of Jail Free card.
    So what if a boy was hiding? So what if the soldiers had taken over his house?
    So what if he might be in trouble?
    Not my fault. Not my problem.
    I reminded myself of this when I sniffed out the boy.
    Not your business, I told myself. You have enough trouble of your own, stuck in this awful place with fleas and no TV. That boy hiding away will never help you. So why should you help him?”
    That got my thinking straightened around to where it should be, back to the place where most of my thoughts and feelings have been since I died.
    On hatred for my homeroom teacher.
    She was the one responsible for my death. That means that all the stuff that’s happened to me since is her fault, too.
    She had it in for me from the start.
    She was new to Lehigh Middle School. I came back from summer vacation expecting to have Mr. Hutchins for