Shai & Emmie Star in to the Rescue! Read online

  Shai opened her peacock notebook and added an item to her own to-do list:

  *Give Furball ear medicine twice a day! Use distraxion treats!

  She erased “distraxion” and wrote in “distraction.”

  “Jamal, can you get yourself to your eye doctor’s appointment on Monday at four o’clock?” Momma went on. “Grandma Rosa will meet you there a few minutes late because she has her dentist appointment at three on the other side of town. They can fix your glasses or order you new frames if they need to. Sam, don’t let Jacobe play with your new Legos; he’ll try to put them into his mouth. Also, no gymnastics on the bed, please!”

  Samantha stopped in the middle of a somersault and pouted.

  “Oh, and everyone? Aunt Mac-N-Cheese will come by when she can to help out, but she’s very busy with rehearsals for her new play at the Little Theater,” Momma continued. Aunt Mac-N-Cheese, whose real name was Aunt MacKenzie, was an actor—just like Shai, who intended to be a famous Hollywood actor someday, and just like Grandma Rosa, who used to be a famous stage actor when she lived in New York City. “She’s also working extra shifts at the coffee shop next week, and . . . Wait, where is my passport?” Momma exclaimed, glancing around wildly.

  Jacobe crawled out from under Momma’s makeup table and handed the passport to her. He had put a shiny blue butterfly sticker on it. “Bubberfly,” he explained.

  Momma gave a sigh of relief. “Oh, whew. Jacobe, honey, that butterfly should probably live in your sticker book, okay?”

  Daddy peered at his watch. “Annemarie, we need to leave for the airport in fifteen minutes if we’re going to make your flight. Kids, Grandma Rosa should be here any second. She’s bringing sandwiches for your lunch, and she said something about the zoo later.”

  Samantha began jumping up and down on the bed. “The zoo! The zoo! Can I get Dippin’ Dots at the zoo?”

  “May I get Dippin’ Dots at the zoo,” Momma corrected her. “And no jumping! It’s up to your grandmother. Also, that means no dessert after dinner.”

  “Maaay-be,” Samantha said with a sly smile.

  Actually Shai agreed with her little sister on that one. She had never understood their family’s “only one dessert per day” rule. Desserts were the best!

  Just then Purrball, Furball, and Sweetiepie burst into the room, their paws thundering against the wood floors. It was hard to tell who was chasing whom. They trampled across Momma’s open suitcase, scattering clothes this way and that. One of Momma’s silk scarves landed on Purrball. The scarf fluttered from his neck like a superhero cape as he and the other two cats raced back into the hallway.

  “Cats!” Momma yelled. “Purrball, come back with my scarf!”

  “I’ll get it, Momma,” Shai said.

  She rose to her feet and ran after the cats. They were practically flying down the stairs. When Shai finally reached them, they were in the kitchen fighting over a toy catnip mouse. Catnip was like dessert for cats.

  The silk scarf lay crumpled on the floor. Shai bent over to pick it up; it smelled faintly of Momma’s jasmine-and-honeysuckle perfume.

  Something caught her eye through the window.

  Outside, a creature was moving through the vegetable garden.

  Shai pressed her face against the window, staring and staring. The creature was practically invisible in the dense veggie jungle. Was it a squirrel? Or a hunormous chipmunk? Or a runaway pet? She was curious to find out.

  She folded Momma’s scarf neatly and set it down on the counter. Then she opened the back door as quietly as possible and stepped outside.

  Shai made laser eyes at the vegetable garden. Carrot tops rustled. Spinach leaves stirred. Dill and basil sprigs twitched. There was a flash of brown fur . . . then white. She could barely see it, but for some reason Shai had the feeling that it might be a cat. On the other hand, she didn’t know of any brown-and-white cats in the neighborhood, and besides, all the cats on their block were indoor cats.

  Shai squinched her face into a deep thinking expression. What if it was a stray cat? What if it was homeless and hungry and didn’t have a warm, cozy bed to sleep in? The idea made her extremely sad.

  On the other hand, if it was a stray, then maybe her family could adopt it? Sure, they already had a houseful of pets. In the cat department they had Purrball, Furball, and Sweetiepie. In the dog department they had Sugar, Patches, Noodle, Sandy, and Marti. And in the other-pets department they had the hamsters, Ham and Ster, and the goldfish, Goldilocks. Plus, Jamal had been asking for a pet snake because his bestie-best friend, Travis, had just gotten one.

  Pets were a hunormous amount of work. Shai knew that. Still, what was one more? Besides, wasn’t it her family’s responsibility—their tradition, even—to help animals in need?

  Shai saw another flash of brown and white behind the big, round cabbages. Determined, she got down on her hands and knees and crept through the damp grass. “Here, kitty, kitty . . . or whoever you are,” she called out in a friendly voice.

  The brown-and-white creature startled and disappeared into the bushes. Shai jumped to her feet and ran after it. She peered into the bushes . . . and through them and behind them too.

  But the creature was gone.

  Now Shai had a new item to add to her to-do list:

  *Rescue stray!

  SCENE 6

  Tuna Delight

  Shai sat cross-legged on her shiny turquoise bedspread with her Spanish workbook splayed across her lap. She had already changed into her favorite pj’s, the ones with smiling clouds with mustaches, and was sipping a mug of hot cocoa with marshmallows, which was good for sleepifying. Across the room her favorite books were organized neatly, or sort of neatly, on the shelves: novels, detective mysteries, folktales, and true-fact nonfiction. On her desk her lava lamp swirled and glowed and cast a spooky orangey-red light onto her dinosaur-tooth collection.

  “ ‘Red’ is ‘rojo’ or ‘roja,’ ” she said out loud. “ ‘Orange’ is ‘naranja.’ ”

  Next to her, Sugar barked.

  “ ‘Dog’ is ‘perro’ or ‘perra,’ ” Shai told Sugar. “So I guess ‘super-cute dog’ must be ‘perra súper linda’?”

  Sugar panted happily and curled into a contented ball.

  Down the hall Samantha and Jacobe were asleep in their rooms, exhausted by a long afternoon at the zoo. Jamal and Daddy were watching TV. Grandma Rosa had gone back to her house, which was just around the corner from theirs. It was the house where she and Grandpa Lloyd had raised Momma, Aunt Mac-N-Cheese, and their brother, Milo. Shai still really, really infinity-missed Grandpa Lloyd, who had passed away when she was seven.

  Shai thought about the brown-and-white stray in the vegetable garden. Was it a cat?

  She wondered how to say “stray cat” in Spanish. She decided to look it up in her Spanish-English dictionary. “Gato callojero,” she read out loud.

  Just then she had a brilliant idea. She would take a plate of cat food out to the vegetable garden. The gato callojero needed to eat, didn’t it? Besides, if it ate the yucky, smelly, fishy cat food, that would mean it was definitely a cat—versus a dog or a guinea pig or a blue-tongued skink or some other animal.

  Excited, Shai put on her fuzzy slippers and headed downstairs. Sugar followed at her heels. TV sounds and Daddy-and-Jamal-laughing sounds drifted from the living room.

  Once in the kitchen, Shai got a can of Tuna Delight from the cabinet, opened it with a can opener, and dumped it onto a plate. Sweetiepie, Purrball, and Furball appeared mysteriously out of nowhere. They circled Shai’s ankles and rubbed up against her, meowing and purring.

  “Sorry, guys. It’s not for you,” said Shai.

  The cats tried to follow her as she squeezed out the back door. She pattered across the yard in her slippers and set the plate down next to the vegetable garden.

  The night air was cool. Shai peered around in the darkness. Mrs. Tayler next door still had her lights on. On the other side at the Wallises’ house, t
heir new baby was crying in a high-pitched, new-baby way that reminded Shai of when Jacobe was born.

  “I brought you dinner, kitty!” Shai called out into the darkness.

  The cat didn’t appear.

  “It’s really, um, delicious!”

  Shai crossed her fingers and toes, which was what she and Emmie did whenever they told a lie . . . and whenever they needed luck. In this case, it might be both.

  The cat still didn’t appear.

  Shai waited and waited. She gazed up at the velvety black sky. She thought she could make out a constellation. It wasn’t the Big Dipper or Orion the Hunter or Cygnus the Swan or any other constellation she recognized, though. Instead it looked almost like . . . a cat. Or could it be a dog? Or a rabbit, even? Shai made pinchy fingers and stared through them with one eye closed. But still she couldn’t identify the shape formed by the stars.

  Five minutes went by, then ten, then twenty. Still no cat.

  After a while Shai let out an exhausted yawn. The hot cocoa had sleepified her brain. It was time to go to bed.

  “Enjoy your dinner, kitty!” she said to the bushes. And then she headed back inside.

  SCENE 7

  Is This Your Cat?

  The Tuna Delight was gone the next morning. As Shai stood in the backyard gazing down at the lickety-clean plate, she was positively, definitely, 100 percent sure that the brown-and-white creature was a cat!

  What next? Shai thought and thought. She probably should make positively, definitely, 100 percent sure that the brown-and-white creature wasn’t someone’s missing cat—maybe by passing out some flyers? And if it wasn’t someone’s missing cat, then she could try to convince Momma and Daddy to let their family adopt it?

  Yes, that was it!

  Now all she had to do was make some flyers.

  Inside, Jamal sat at the kitchen table poring over one of his schoolbooks and punching numbers into a calculator. Samantha was standing in front of the microwave oven with her hands on her hips. She wore the same T-shirt she’d worn the day before; it was streaked with pink, yellow, and red Dippin’ Dots stains.

  “I am the breakfast cooker today. I’m cooking breakfast for everybody!” Samantha informed Shai.

  “What are you making?” Shai asked curiously.

  “Pancakes. They’re gonna have strawberries and whipped cream and never-ending rainbow sprinkles on them. And root beer, too!”

  Root beer?

  “Yum?” Shai said uncertainly. She bent down and peered into the microwave. A box of frozen pancakes sat unmoving on the round glass tray.

  “Sam? You have to take the pancakes out and put them on a plate. And then you have to hit the power button to turn the microwave on.”

  Samantha rolled her eyes. “I know that, silly-billy Shai-Shai!”

  On the other side of the kitchen, Jacobe pushed a toy broom across the floor. “Kobee keening!” he said eagerly.

  “Good for you, Jacobe,” Shai said, although it seemed like he was just moving some crumbs around. Still, it was nice that he was trying to help out—and Samantha, too.

  Shai grabbed a banana and a leftover corn muffin and headed back upstairs. She knew she had to get dressed for church soon. But first she wanted to make those flyers.

  Up in her room she found some white drawing paper and markers. As she sorted through the colors, she realized she didn’t actually know what the stray cat looked like. All she’d seen was a bit of brown-and-white fur.

  But a cat was a cat, right?

  She turned a piece of paper vertical, then horizontal, then vertical again. She sketched out a cat in pencil and traced over it with brown marker. She filled in with more brown but left a few white spots.

  Underneath she wrote down their family’s phone number and the words:

  IS THIS YOUR CAT?

  She made a dozen more of these. After church she would pass them out at the neighbors’ houses up and down the street.

  Either the cat’s owner would claim the cat . . . or, if the cat didn’t have an owner, the Williams family could adopt it.

  It was a win-win!

  SCENE 8

  A Dramatic Discovery

  On Monday during orchestra, Mr. Yee had the students run through their concert pieces. There were three of them in all: “Opportunity,” plus a couple of pieces by two olden-day composers, Mr. Beethoven and Mr. Mozart.

  Shai had a hard time with her parts, though. She kept messing up her notes. She’d been so busy with her stray cat project that she’d forgotten to practice her clarinet over the weekend. She’d been studying the clarinet for only a year, so it wasn’t like she could coast; she still had a lot to learn just to get up to everyone else’s level.

  “Why don’t we take it from the top? Good concentration, woodwinds! Now let’s try for even better concentration,” Mr. Yee said, not looking at Shai.

  A couple of the other woodwinds—Glenn on clarinet and Julia on flute—did grumpy faces at Shai. Shai felt her cheeks grow hot. Emmie turned around in her seat and made silent words. It looked like her mouth was saying: Hi are you okay?

  Shai made silent words back: Hi not really. I’ll tell you later!

  She took a deep reset breath and assumed her clarinet-playing position. Fingers, lips, chin, laser eyes. She ordered herself to concentrate.

  But it was super-hard. Her brain was wondering if the stray cat was okay. Shai hadn’t actually seen it since Saturday. Her brain was also wondering if anyone would recognize the cat from her flyers. She’d left them on her neighbors’ front porches yesterday afternoon, but so far no one had called to claim the kitty as their own.

  Her brain was filled with other things too, like the fact that the fund-raising concert was in less than two weeks, and she hadn’t even started on the posters or decorations or concessions snacks. Maybe Emmie could come over after school so they could at least make a few posters? Shai needed to catch up on her clarinet practice too—obviously.

  Also, when was Momma coming home? Was it in five days or six? Even with Grandma Rosa’s help, and with the whole family pitching in with chores, things were not going super-smoothly. At church yesterday Samantha had spilled a juice box all over her dress, and no one had remembered to pack a change of clothes. And just this morning Daddy couldn’t find his cell phone; it turned out Jacobe had dropped it into the cats’ water bowl and was stirring it around with a chopstick to make “soup.”

  * * *

  After school Emmie got permission from her mom to go over to Shai’s house. Daddy was home; he had taken the day off from his pizza restaurant to be with Jacobe and also to try to fix his soggy cell phone. Grandma Rosa often watched Jacobe while Daddy and Momma were at their jobs, but today she was in bed with a cold. Aunt Mac-N-Cheese had driven Samantha to her gymnastics class at Head Over Heels and was also meeting Jamal at his eye doctor’s appointment instead of Grandma Rosa.

  As Shai and Emmie searched for snacks in the kitchen, Shai explained about the stray cat project.

  “Aww, poor kitty!” Emmie said sadly. “No wonder you’re worried. What are you going to do?”

  Shai told Emmie about the flyers she had passed around. “So far nobody’s called. I think? Daddy, did anyone call about a cat?” she yelled in the direction of the living room.

  “Cat!” Jacobe yelled back.

  Daddy appeared in the kitchen doorway. There was a butterfly sticker on his forehead. “What are you talking about, Shai? What cat?”

  “Nothing! So nobody called?”

  Daddy frowned. “Nobody called. What are you up to? Is there something I should know about, or—” He stopped and turned around at the sound of frantic barking. “Jacobe, Patches is not a pony! You get off her right this second, mister!” He hurried back to the living room.

  Emmie gazed longingly at a box of microwave popcorn that was sitting on the counter. She reached up and touched her braces, which were purple today. “I’m not supposed to have crunchy foods or chewy foods or sticky foods or hard foods
. It’s so boring.”

  “Let’s have grapes! Grapes are awesome. Plus, they’re a vitamin food, and vitamins are good for energy. Does your family want to adopt a cat?” Shai asked.

  “I wish! But Mommy’s allergic to cats. And my dad’s apartment doesn’t allow pets. I know because I tried to adopt a dog once. Are you sure your kitty’s still hanging around in your yard? You said you haven’t seen it since Saturday, right? Maybe it went back to wherever it came from.”

  “Maybe?”

  Shai rinsed grapes in the metal thingamabobber with the small holes in it like she had seen Momma do a billion zillion times. She dumped the grapes into a blue bowl and offered some to Emmie.

  Munching on a grape, Emmie walked up to the window and peered outside. “Um, Shai? I was wrong.”

  “What?”

  “I think I see your cat!”

  “What?”

  Shai made a beeline for the window. She followed Emmie’s gaze.

  The brown-and-white kitty was back! It was in the vegetable garden, half-hidden behind the sugar pea plants.

  Shai’s eyes zeroed in on the plate of Tuna Delight that she had left out last night. It didn’t look as though it had been touched.

  Why wasn’t the kitty eating the cat food? Was it having tummy troubles?

  Ignoring the tuna, the cat moved out from behind the sugar peas and made its way toward the feathery carrot tops.

  This was the clearest view Shai had ever had of the cat. She could see that it had long ears . . . and a white cotton-ball tail . . . and longish back legs.

  “It’s not a stray kitty. It’s a stray bunny!” Shai exclaimed.

  SCENE 9

  Shopping with Aunt Mac-N-Cheese