Acknowledgments 

My first cat was named Fluffy. So was my second cat.

I named Fluffy Two after Fluffy One because I missed the first Fluffy, because cats are soft, and because I was four. Since then, I haven’t been trusted to name any pets on my own.

I’ve always loved cats. There’s a photo of me as a baby lying on a blanket while a cat walks around me as if protecting me—that was Barny, a stray calico who used to live in our neighbor’s barn (hence the name) until we started to feed it. I have a huge smile on my face in that photo.

Growing up, we had other animals too. Labrador retrievers, just like Harrison’s Fibonacci. We also had a barely ridable horse, an anxious guinea pig, and a hive full of bees. I loved all of them (except for that one bee who stung me), but it was the cats who sat on my lap while I read book after book after book, who slept with me at night, curled up with my many stuffed animals, and who kept my secret when I whispered to them that someday I wanted to be a writer.

I wrote this book with the help of my current cat, Gwen. She sat on me while I typed, and she napped on the manuscript while I was trying to revise it. Writing can be lonely sometimes—just you and your laptop for many hours. A cat can fix that loneliness.

Gwen is a beautiful gray cat. She’s as soft as a chinchilla and as sweet as milk chocolate. She’s also a klutz. Once, while she was careening around the house at high speed, she tried to leap from the kitchen counter to the top of our refrigerator, missed, and collided with my face instead. Gave me a black eye. It was very embarrassing, for both of us.

Cats are worth it, though.

I’d like to thank Gwen, as well as all the other cats who have been a part of my life—Fluffy, Fluffy, Barny, Mittens, Sawyer, Jezebel, and Perni—for the years of cuddles and purrs.

I’d also like to thank all the wonderful non-felines who helped bring Zoe and Pipsqueak’s story to life: my phenomenal editor, Anne Hoppe, and my incredible agent, Andrea Somberg, as well as Amanda Acevedo, Lisa DiSarro, Candace Finn, Eleanor Hinkle, Catherine Onder, Frank Radell, Sharismar Rodriguez, Opal Roengchai, Jackie Sassa, John Sellers, Tara Shanahan, Dinah Stevenson, and all the other awesome people at Clarion Books and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And a special thank you to the fantastic Brandon Dorman for the fabulous art that graces the cover.

Much love and many thanks to my husband, my children, and all my family and friends—you are each magnificent, awesome, and extraordinary. Even better than a whole pack of talking cats! But please don’t tell Pipsqueak I said that.