Guess who was in the lunchroom when we got there?
If you said Evie, then you are exactly right!
She was sitting at our table, which already had plates and forks and knives and napkins set up. She was wearing the exact same outfit I was—without a juice stain on her shirt. And there was something on her chin, but I couldn’t tell what it was from far away.
I started to run to her, but Mrs. Finkel said, “Stella, no running! And please put your belongings over by the far window before you take your seat.”
So I walked, as quickly as I could, to drop my sleeping bag and backpack by the window, and then I walked even faster back to the table, and sat down next to Evie. “Oh my goodness!” I said. “There’s a bandage on your chin! What happened?”
“Just some bad luck,” she said. “I tripped when I was walking Bella and landed on my chin. I needed seven stitches.”
“Wow,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I think it might’ve been,” I admitted. “I broke a mirror yesterday, and all these bad-luck things started happening. First I found a book about a real-live ghost, and then Mr. Moyers yelled at dinner.”
Arielle glanced around. “I don’t see him now,” she said softly. She’d sat down across from us. Talisa sat next to her, and Lucy sat on my other side.
“Maybe he decided not to come back today,” Talisa said.
“I hope so,” Lucy and I said at the same time.
“Jinx!” Talisa said.
Then we had to say each other’s names backwards. “I didn’t even tell you about the cat yet,” I told Evie.
“A cat?”
“Yup,” I said. And I would have told her more, but then Lucy called out. “Joshua, you’re too mean to Stella. You can’t sit with us.”
It was nice that Lucy stood up for me, but I felt bad for Joshua. “I don’t mind if Joshua sits with us,” I said. “He is my friend.”
“Really?” Lucy asked.
I nodded. “Today he is.”
“Knock knock,” Talisa said.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s Opposite Day!”
“You mean it’s not Opposite Day,” Lucy said. “That’s what you say on Opposite Day, because it’s really the opposite.”
“It’s not Opposite Day,” I said. “And I mean it’s really not. Joshua can stay. Okay?”
The other girls nodded. Then Lucy got down to business. “We need to talk about our signs,” she said.
“Signs?” Evie asked.
“It has to do with the cat I mentioned before. You see—”
“Stella! STEL-LAAAAAAH!” a voice rang out.
I turned to see Penny racing toward us. “Don’t run,” I told her, before she could get in trouble with Mrs. Finkel. I didn’t know for sure if a third-grade teacher could get mad at a kindergartener, but it was better not to take the chance.
Penny stopped running and she speed-walked the rest of the way to our table. When she got to us she was huffing and puffing a little. Lucy scooted over so Penny could sit between us, next to me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I’m not supposed to tell you because Mom and Dad are helping to make a special breakfast,” she told me.
Talisa clapped her hands. “Ooh, your parents are making a special breakfast? Does that mean we’ll be eating candy?”
“Oops,” Penny said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We won’t tell them you told us anything.”
Everyone pinky-swore to make it official.
Penny started giggling. “What’s so funny?” Lucy asked.
“We’re having breakfast in the lunchroom!” she said. “It’s so funny!”
It was funny. The rest of us laughed, too.
“I always wanted to see Somers Elementary School on a weekend,” Penny went on. “And now I have!”
“Do you know what you want to see next?” Arielle asked.
“Hmm,” Penny said, thinking. “Oh, I know! I want to see the White House!”
The rest of us at the table agreed that the White House would be a pretty cool thing to see.
Then we started talking about the cat signs again. It was actually good that Penny was there, because she was the one who put the signs up in the exact place where Bella the dog had run away to, and we ended up finding Bella because of it.
Penny had lots of ideas about where we could put the “Found Cat” signs. Like she said we should definitely put signs up by Man’s Best Friend, which is the pet store in the same shopping center as Batts Confections. “Because if someone lost their cat they might go try to get a new one,” she said.
We were so busy making plans for who would put signs up on what streets, that we didn’t notice who had walked up behind us: MR. MOYERS!
“Children,” he said, in his deep crackly voice. If it was possible, Mr. Moyers looked even older and meaner than usual. The bags under his eyes were bigger, his eyes were smaller, and the few strands of hair on his mostly bald head were sticking up, like he hadn’t brushed them down after he’d woken up. “Did I hear you talking about a cat in school?”
Penny pressed herself closer to me and I put an arm around her.
“We didn’t break any rules,” Lucy said quickly. “We didn’t bring a cat to school. We found one.”
“Where?” he asked gruffly.
I could feel Penny’s body shaking against me. Sometimes protecting my little sister makes me feel braver. “It came into the library when we were supposed to be sleeping,” I said.
“What color was it?”
“Black.”
“That’s what I thought,” Mr. Moyers said. “Is it in the library now?”
“Asher’s dad took it home,” Talisa supplied.
“Why’d he do that?”
“They have other cats at home. It needed food, and a place to go to the bathroom.”
Mr. Moyers folded his arms across his chest and stared down at us with his beady eyes.
“You can ask my mom about the cat if you don’t believe us,” Lucy said.
Mr. Moyers blinked and grunted. Then he left to walk over to Lucy’s mom.
“Now back to the signs,” Lucy said.
But we didn’t get to talk about the signs anymore, because then breakfast was served. And you’ll never guess what it was, so I’ll just tell you:
Pancakes.
Okay, maybe you would’ve guessed pancakes. But you’d really never guess what was mixed up in them:
Eensy weensy pieces of my STELLA’S FUDGE!
Mom and Dad came out from the kitchen and helped the other grown-ups serve all us kids. “Is Marco here?” Lucy asked. “I want to hold him.”
“Marco is with his babysitter, Mrs. Miller,” Mom said. “And you have to eat your pancakes anyway.”
We ate our first pancakes so fast and asked for seconds. “Hey, Stella, knock knock,” Talisa said.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
“Pancake.”
“Pancake who?”
“The best pancakes in the whole world!”
I speared a fluffy piece of pancake with a chunk of chocolate swirl fudge and popped it in my mouth. And as I chewed I nodded in agreement. They were the best pancakes I’ve ever had in my whole entire life!
Mrs. Finkel stood in front of the tables and clapped her hands so we’d all quiet down. She said she had a few announcements to make. “First, when you finish eating I want you to clean up in an ORDERLY fashion. For those of you whose parents aren’t already here, your parents should be arriving in the next ten minutes. Second, I am sure you’ll all be interested to know the cat’s owner has been found.”
Kids started clapping before Mrs. Finkel had stopped talking, so it was hard to hear what she was saying.
“Shh, shh,” I said.
“Mr. Moyers has a story to tell you,” Mrs. Finkel said.
Mr. Moyers looked pinched and uncomfortable, but we stayed quiet and he started talking. “Right after my wife died, I adopted a cat.”
I’d never even thought about Mr. Moyers having a wife. Suddenly, for the first time ever, I felt sorry for Mr. Moyers.
“It was a black cat,” he said. “Because they were always my wife’s favorite. She knew some folks were afraid of them. But she always said they needed a good home as much as any other cat did.”
“It was YOUR cat we found!” Lucy said.
“I believe it was,” Mr. Moyers said. “When I left the house to come here last night, she snuck out after me. She’s very attached to me. I always have to be careful when I leave that she doesn’t follow me out. Apparently I wasn’t careful enough last night. When I got home, she was gone. I drove around looking for her all night.”
“I’ll tell my mom to bring her back to you!” Asher called out.
“Lucy’s mom already made that call,” Mrs. Finkel said.
Mr. Moyers smiled. “Thank you,” he said.
“Wow,” I said softly.
“What?” Mom asked me.
“That was the first time I’ve ever seen Mr. Moyers smile in my whole entire life.”
“Maybe he’s lonely,” Mom said. “Maybe that cat is his companion.”
“What’s the cat’s name?” Penny asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I told her.
“Hey, Mr. Moyers!” Lucy called out.
I thought he’d tell her not to shout. But he walked over to us and said, “Yes?”
“Does the cat have a name?”
“Catherine,” he said.
I felt a chill run up my spine—again!
“It was my wife’s name,” Mr. Moyers added. “When she died, I missed her very much. I even missed calling her name. So I named the cat after her. It was my good luck that she wandered in here and you found her.”
Good luck! That was a first!
“And it’s good luck that you work here,” Lucy added. “And that you heard us talking about her.”
“I work here because my wife did,” Mr. Moyers said. “It’s how we met—many, many years before any of you were born. Being here reminds me of her.”
“Cool,” Eleanor said from the table next to ours.
“Can we visit the cat named Catherine?” Beatrice asked.
Mr. Moyers shook his head. “You kids should concentrate on your studies,” he said. “That’s the problem with kids these days. They’re too distracted.” He cleared his throat and walked away from our table, stopping to bend and pick up a napkin that Miles had accidentally dropped on the floor. “You kids need to clean up after yourselves!”
So he was back to being the regular scary old Mr. Moyers again. Except he wasn’t as scary as he used to be.
“It’s so weird his wife was named Catherine,” I said. “Like Catherine in the library book. Maybe when she died she became a ghost!”
“What book is that?” Mom asked.
“Oh, this book called My Missing Friend.”
“By someone named Stella B?” Mom asked.
“Yeah, how’d you know?”
“Because that was one of my favorite books when I was young,” Mom said. “It’s where I first heard the name Stella, and I always wanted to get you a copy but it’s out of print. I’m so happy you’ll get to read it!”
“But I don’t want to read it,” I told her. “Because of the missing friend—it’s too scary to read about Catherine who died.”
“Stella,” Mom said. “You know I don’t believe in giving away the endings to books, but I’m going to make an exception here. Catherine didn’t die. She wasn’t alive in the first place.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She was Stella’s imaginary friend, and she went missing when Stella grew up. I think the other Stella B was a lot like you—she had an active imagination, and she loved writing.”
“But her name was Catherine, and Mr. Moyers’s wife was named Catherine,” I said.
“Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?” Mom said. “But that’s all it is, still, I promise.”
I stood up. “I’ll be right back,” I said.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to tell Mr. Ramos that I actually want to check out that book!”
Pretty soon after that it was time to go. Dad, Mom, Penny, and I got into the car together. “Good-bye, school!” Penny called out the window. “See you on Monday!”
“Yeah, see you,” I said.
I liked Somers Elementary School on the weekend. But I like being with my family on the weekend, too. In fact I think being home in my room with my parents nearby is the perfect place to read a book.
When I got home that’s just what I did.
