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  Grandma put her coffee cup down with a clink.

  “You will do no such thing,” she said. “Allie Finkle! What can you be thinking! A lady never raises her fist to another!”

  “Really?” I looked guiltily at her. “But then what am I supposed to do about her? I don’t want her to stuff my head in a chair.”

  “You will tell your mother about her,” Grandma said. “And if you don’t, I will.”

  “You just promised you wouldn’t!” I cried. “And if you tell Mom, and Mom tells my teacher, and my teacher says something to Rosemary, or to Rosemary’s parents, Rosemary’ll just get more mad, and she’ll make my life even more miserable than it is already. Believe me, it’s happened to me before.”

  Grandma made her lips all small, which was funny, because Mom does that, too, when she’s mad.

  “Very well,” Grandma said. “I won’t say anything. But I don’t approve. What can your father be thinking?”

  Probably that he wished someone had taught him how to punch so he wouldn’t have gotten the crud beaten out of him when he was my age, I thought.

  But I didn’t say that out loud.

  Instead, I said, “Want to go pick out my present now?”

  Grandma sighed and said, “All right.”

  But when she saw what it was I wanted, she asked, “Are you sure this is what you want?”

  “Yes,” I said, wondering what she meant. What else would I want? Couldn’t she see how fabulous the collar was? It was pink. And it had sparkles.

  “Wouldn’t you rather have a pretty dress?” Grandma asked. “I saw some lovely ones when I was in the mall the other day.”

  A dress? What did I want with a dress? I could get a boring old dress anytime. I couldn’t get a hot pink cat bed with a velveteen cushion and a feathered canopy anytime.

  “Or a new doll?” Grandma looked hopeful. “What about a lovely new Madame Alexander doll? I could get you Jo from Little Women. You haven’t read Little Women yet, but I can assure you that you’ll love Jo, she’s just like you. She wants to get into fights, too.”

  I could see that Grandma didn’t understand me at all. I don’t want to get into fights. I want to avoid fights. Only no one seems to be able to help me figure out how to do that.

  “No,” I said, showing her the cat bed. “This is what I want. This is what I really, really want.”

  Grandma sighed and said, “All right. If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure,” I said, my heart leaping. The cat bed! Mewsette’s cat bed! And pink rhinestone collar! My kitten was going to be the most stylish, most comfortable cat in the world!

  On our way to the counter, I also saw a pretty silver water dish and food bowl, and since they were only four dollars each, Grandma agreed to buy me those, too. So now I had everything my kitten needed (except food, a litter box, litter, and her shots)! I was so happy with my present, I hugged it to my chest the whole way home (well, as much as you could hug an enormous canopy cat bed).

  It was when we walked in the door that Mom delivered the bad news. Or the good news, depending on the way you looked at it.

  “Mrs. Hauser called,” she said. “Lady Serena Archibald has developed an infection.”

  “Yeah,” Dad said. “Mrs. Hauser finally decided she wants her Manolo Blahnik boots back.”

  Mom turned around and gave Dad a dirty look before she went on.

  “Lady Serena’s going to be all right, but she can’t nurse anymore. All her kittens are being fostered out to people the vet’s office has found, but Mrs. Hauser thought since you already picked the striped one, you might like to take her early—”

  I gasped. Bring Mewsette home now? Tonight?

  “But before you say anything,” Mom went on, “I told her it’s too much responsibility for a nine-year-old. A kitten that was already premature and isn’t even weaned is too young—”

  “No, it’s not!” I yelled. “I can do it!”

  “Allie,” Mom said, looking desperate. “That kitten has to be given a special formula, and it will have to be fed with a sterilized bottle every few hours. What about when you’re in school?”

  “Well,” Grandma said, putting down her purse, “I can do it, while I’m here.”

  Dad looked at Grandma in surprise. “Mother. Are you sure?”

  “Really, Ruth,” Mom said. “That’s very nice, but—”

  “It’s just a kitten, Elizabeth,” Grandma said. “Honestly. How much responsibility can it be?”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling a huge burst of love for Grandma. I took back every mean thought I’d just had about her. “And I’m going to be a vet someday, Mom. I’ve read every book in the library on the care and feeding of cats. I know exactly what to do. I know I’ll have to take care of her the way Lady Serena Archibald would have. I won’t go to any sleepovers or to the mall or anything. That’s okay. I’ll feed her before school and when I come home for lunch and as soon as I get home from school and before dinner and before bed, and in the middle of the night, and I’ll get Erica to come here and help me take care of her, and Sophie and Caroline will want to help, too—”

  “I want to help,” Mark said, coming into the kitchen from the TV room. He didn’t look like he was joking, either.

  “Me, too,” Kevin said, following him. “I want to help with Mewsie.”

  Mom looked at all of us. Then she looked at Dad.

  “Well,” he said with a shrug, “it is just a kitten, after all, Liz.”

  Then Mom looked at the ceiling. Then she took a deep breath.

  Then she let go of it.

  “All right,” she said. “We can try it.”

  We all started screaming. Well, me, Mark, and Kevin, which caused Marvin, who was lying on the kitchen floor, to start barking.

  Mom had to shout the next part to be heard above the yelling: “But if it gets to be too much, we’re giving her to one of the foster people the vet found.”

  Which was how, five hours later, I was lying in my sleeping bag inside the barrier I had made in my room, which wasn’t so much to keep Mewsette in as to keep Marvin out, in case he wandered into my room—not that I thought he’d do anything to Mewsette, but he might have germs on him that wouldn’t be good for such a little kitten until she got a bit older—looking at the tiny kitten Mom and I had picked up, along with the kitten nursing kit Mrs. Hauser had given us. I couldn’t believe I had her at last—and that she was mine! It was like a dream come true.

  I had put Mom’s heating pad under the tap-shoe box so the heat wouldn’t be too much—just enough, and hopefully just like what she was used to. I’d wanted to tuck Mewsette into her pink feathered canopy cat bed, but Mrs. Hauser said the people at the vet’s office had recommended a small box for now, saying it would make a tiny kitten feel more secure.

  And I wanted Mewsette to feel very secure. I was hoping she wasn’t missing her brothers and sisters and mom too much. I felt so bad for her! Her first night away from home! I remembered what it was like the first time I came to this house, how creepy and new it had felt. I hoped she didn’t feel that way. She certainly seemed to have liked the food I’d made her. It hadn’t looked too good to me—a powdered mix that came from the vet’s office and you added water to—but Mewsette had gobbled it down like it was ice cream, maybe because she hadn’t gotten too much food back home at the Hausers’ because of having to fight all those other kittens for it, and then Lady Serena getting sick and all.

  The amazing thing was, as much as she’d eaten already, she’d be hungry again in a few hours. I knew I’d be tired—it would be the middle of the night when she woke up again for her next feeding—but that was okay. When it’s your kitten, you don’t mind being tired. Besides, she’d be ready to eat regular kitten food in a few weeks, and by that time we’d be the best friends in the whole world.

  Grandma had promised to look after her when I was at school, and Mom and Dad had said they would, too. Even Uncle Jay had said he would stop by between classes after
Grandma went back home and help out with what he was calling Operation Mewsette.

  “Animal Activist Allie, at Work Again,” he said when he came over for dinner (Indian food delivery) that night. “Did you know veterinarians have to go to college for eight years?”

  “So?” I’d asked, gnawing on some naan, which is Indian bread and is very good.

  “You really want to go to college for eight years just so you can stick your hand up some horse’s behind?”

  “I imagine veterinarians get paid a good deal more than poets these days,” Grandma observed.

  “Touché,” Uncle Jay said, and helped himself to more tandoori chicken.

  As I drifted off to sleep, I told myself how lucky I was. I had a kitten—a brand-new kitten—of my very own! This made all of it—being the New Girl, being embarrassed in front of everyone, even being terrorized by Rosemary—completely worth it. Mewsette was the best thing that ever happened to me. I would make sure that she was safe, and warm, and well fed. I would never let anything bad happen to her.

  And that, I knew, meant not letting anything bad happen to me. Tomorrow, I told myself, everything was going to be different. Tomorrow, things were going to change. Because I didn’t have just me to worry about anymore.

  I had a kitten to think of, too.

  RULE #12

  We All Make Mistakes, and We All Deserve a Second Chance

  Things didn’t go quite as smoothly as I’d hoped. I was so tired the next day from waking up to feed Mewsette when she cried in the middle of the night, and then feeding her again in the morning, that I wasn’t ready when Erica showed up to walk to Pine Heights with me.

  But Mark, who’d meant it when he said he wanted to help, told his friends on the dirt bikes that he couldn’t ride with them and walked Kevin to school with Erica.

  That’s when I realized that maybe my little brothers weren’t total jerks after all.

  Mom wrote a note asking that my tardiness be excused, and then Dad drove me to school on his way to work, even though Pine Heights is only two blocks away.

  I hurried into school, anxious to get to class as soon as possible so as not to miss math and fall behind. Plus, I wanted to tell Sophie and Caroline about Mewsette.

  Maybe it was because I was rushing that I didn’t notice the other person who’d apparently also woken up late, and been dropped off by her parents, and was rushing to get to class, too. We were both rushing so fast, we nearly bumped into each other at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Watch where you’re going,” Rosemary started to say.

  “No,” I said, the words coming out of my mouth before I had a chance to think about them. “You watch where you’re going.”

  That’s when she saw it was me.

  “You!” she cried, giving me a poke in the shoulder that sent me staggering backward a few steps.

  My heart, as it always did when I found myself caught up in a one-on-one situation with Rosemary, did a funny loop de loop inside my chest and then started pounding hard. Exactly the way Rosemary was going to start pounding on my face in a second or two.

  But then I remembered. I didn’t have time for this stuff anymore. I had a kitten to take care of.

  “What did you just say?” Rosemary asked in her meanest voice, letting her backpack slip off her shoulders and fall to the floor.

  “You heard me,” I said. My heart was still pounding. But I let my own backpack slip off as well. It was time. Time for this to end. “Why don’t you watch where YOU’RE going?”

  Rosemary blinked at me, looking confused for a few seconds. “No,” she said. “YOU.”

  “Both of you had better watch where you’re going,” said a man’s deep voice from down the hallway. “Because both of you had better get going to class, where you belong.”

  Rosemary and I both whirled around to see Mr. Elkhart standing there with his push broom, looking at us. Rosemary let out a guilty-sounding squeak, scooped up her backpack, and ran up the stairs as fast as her legs could carry her. I took a little bit longer to pick up my stuff, because my backpack had spilled when I’d dropped it, and I had to squat down to stuff all my things back into it.

  I didn’t care so much about Mr. Elkhart catching me practically fighting in the hallway. After all, Rosemary started it. Still, I noticed that he hadn’t gone away. He was just standing there leaning on his push broom and staring at me. I looked up at him to see what he wanted.

  “That girl,” he said, looking up the stairs to show that he was talking about Rosemary. “She’s always wanting to start something with you, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” I said. I didn’t say Yeah because Dad said it’s rude to say Yeah to adults. You should say Yes or Yes, sir or Yes, ma’am. That’s a rule.

  “Why do you think that is?” Mr. Elkhart wanted to know.

  “I don’t know,” I said, shrugging, even though Grandma says it’s rude to shrug.

  “You know why I think it is?” Mr. Elkhart said. He didn’t wait for me to say yes. “I think it’s because none of you girls ever invite her to play with you.”

  I stared at him. Mr. Elkhart was nice and all. He always rescued people’s balls when they landed on the roof or in the teachers’ parking lot or whatever.

  But this statement proved he had to be a little nuts. Because only a crazy person would think that the reason Rosemary Dawkins wanted to kill me was because my friends and I had never invited her to play with us.

  “Well?” Mr. Elkhart stared down at me from beneath his hairy gray eyebrows. “Think about it. She’s always playing with the boys. Kick ball. Stuffing their heads into folding chairs. When do you girls ever ask her to play with you? Don’t try to deny it. You don’t. You don’t ask her to eat lunch with you. You don’t ask her to play with you at recess.”

  “That’s because she says she’s going to beat me up,” I explained, thinking that even a crazy person could understand this.

  “She wants to beat you up because she feels left out,” Mr. Elkhart said. “Some people don’t know how to act, you know. So they act out. That’s what that girl is doing. Maybe if you and the other girls tried to include her once in a while, instead of treating her like she was one of the boys, she might not be so mean.”

  Then Mr. Elkhart shrugged and went back to cleaning. “But then what do I know,” he said, pushing his broom. “I just watch every single thing that goes on around here.”

  I stared at Mr. Elkhart as he swept his way down the hall. I thought about what he’d said. I didn’t think it was very fair. We didn’t treat Rosemary like she was one of the boys, even though she was interested in the things the boys in our class were interested in—sitting in the back row and being bad; stuffing people’s heads through folding chairs; kick ball; making fun of other people. I mean, I am not a particularly prissy person—I can burp just as loudly as anybody else.

  But Rosemary really had taken all that to a whole new level. If she wanted to be treated like a girl, well, then, stomping around and threatening to beat people up really wasn’t the way to go about it.

  On the other hand, she had come over and asked what Caroline, Sophie, Erica, and I were doing in the bushes the other day. Maybe that had been her way of asking if she could play with us. Maybe, in spite of how it looked, Rosemary did want to be a little more girlie. I mean, she had made fun of my essay where I’d said I wanted a pink feathered canopy cat bed and a pink rhinestone cat collar for Mewsette.

  Was it possible that when people make fun of other people for wanting things, it’s because deep down inside they want those things, too?

  I went upstairs to Mrs. Hunter’s classroom feeling as if a blindfold had been lifted from my eyes. What Mr. Elkhart had said might not be true.

  But it also might be.

  And if it was, it was better than all the other advice I had gotten so far rolled into one—better than my dad’s punching lessons, or Grandma’s insistence that a lady never raises her fist to another, or Uncle Jay’s tip about psyching o
ut your enemy.

  For the rest of the morning, I watched Rosemary carefully (which was kind of hard to do because she sat behind me. But I tried to watch her as often as I could without being completely obvious).

  And I started to think maybe Mr. Elkhart might be right. Rosemary did seem to kind of want attention from the girls in the room, all of whom completely ignored her. I mean, Erica and I were constantly getting caught chitchatting with each other.

  But no girl ever got caught chitchatting with Rosemary.

  And Caroline and Sophie got caught passing notes to each other during math.

  But no girl ever got caught passing notes with Rosemary.

  Instead, Rosemary got caught impaling the back of McKayla Finegold’s head with a paper airplane and hissing, “Scaredy-cat, scaredy-cat” at me during reading. Rosemary’s only interactions with girls were totally negative ones.

  Of course, this could be because Mrs. Hunter had stuck her in the back of the classroom with Stuart Maxwell, Joey Fields, and Patrick Day, the rowdiest boys in our class. So it wasn’t like Rosemary got a lot of opportunity to hang around with us girls.

  But still. That didn’t mean that when she did get a chance to hang with us, she had to spend it saying she was going to kill us.

  Maybe Mr. Elkhart was right. Maybe Rosemary didn’t know any better. Maybe she just didn’t know how to act.

  Maybe she didn’t know the rules. Maybe nobody had ever bothered teaching them to her.

  Or maybe she had never thought of keeping a book of them, like I had.

  You couldn’t blame her, really, for acting the way she did. Fourth grade is hard. Not just the school part, but the friend stuff, too. I don’t know where I’d be if I hadn’t had the rules.

  All morning I thought about Rosemary and what Mr. Elkhart had said about her. By the time the lunch bell finally rang and we all got up to get our coats and get in line, I had thought of something. And what I’d thought of was that Mr. Elkhart was maybe right. I didn’t know totally for sure, because I was, after all, just the New Girl.