The Five Lives of Our Cat Zook Read Online Free PDF Page A

much, even though I got it with the help of a yellow whopper. It just feels so good to have extra money in your pocket—ever notice?
    â€œThat’s a lot of money,” says Freddy.
    â€œLet’s keep it a secret awhile, OK?” I say. “Promise?” I hunch over the money and turn my back so Salvatore and Manic Moe can’t see it.
    â€œSure, I promise,” Freddy says. “I love secrets!”
    Then Fred asks a question I had a feeling he’d ask sooner or later. Except I guess I thought it would be later.
    â€œOona, how many lives do human beans have?”
    â€œOnly one. But don’t worry. It’s a long, long one.”
    My heart hurts, because that’s a whopper, too. A white one, but a big one for sure. Our dad did not have a long life. He died of cancer when he was thirty-one. Freddy blinks like he knows I’ve told a lie, but the dots aren’t all connected for him yet.
    And now I don’t feel like hearing more questions from Freddy. I just feel like telling him other whoppers, so he’ll feel better. Before he connects the dots and thinks about our dad.
    Because that’s my fourth job: telling stories to Freddy. My father’s stories.
    A wise, wise person (OK, our dad, the Great Rebus-Maker and Whopper-Teller) once told me that stories are whoppers, but in a good way. My father said there aren’t too many stories in the world, and he’d told me practically all of them. But you can tell the same stories over and over by making them different all the time. All you have to do is take pieces of the real world, then string them up in new ways to make a whole other world. My dad told me to do that. He told me to make the stories my own. That’s why stories are green whoppers, because they’re alive and growing and changing all the time.
    The whopper-teller feels good telling the stories. Whenmy mom makes me wash my Raiders sweatshirt, I lose a little bit more of the smell of my dad. But I still have his stories.
    The whopper-getter feels good, too. And eats food of many colors and shapes. And doesn’t get real skinny and cry all the time, like he did when the Great Whopper-Teller disappeared forever.
    I hand Freddy the plate of fried zucchini. Then I start telling him about our cat Zook’s other lives.

pull on my left ear, my story ear, like my father used to do. The ear he pulled when he used to say, “Hey, that reminds me of a story.”
    Fred leans close to me.
    â€œOnce, long, long ago, maybe one hundred years ago or more, there was a fine, fat mother cat,” I say. “She lived on a faraway little island called Rebusina. Rebusina was famous for its artists, its olives, and its green vegetables and herbs, especially parsley and zucchini.”
    My dad’s stories took place in Rebusina, so mine do, too. I close my eyes so I can concentrate on the best story-making words, such as
faraway, woe, befall, whence
, and
by and by
.But I open them a crack to see if Fred is chewing. He is, so I continue.
    â€œOne night, when you could see every single star in the sky and the olive groves shimmered in the moonlight, the mother cat gave birth to six kittens under a tree. The smallest one, blue-eyed and black as night, was born last, just as two shooting stars zoomed across the sky. And so it happened that the smallest kitten arrived with two extra toes on each paw, for a grand total of twenty-six. The mother cat didn’t care about those extra toes. What’s an extra toe or two? Twenty-six toes don’t help you dash up an olive tree any better than eighteen, as far as she could tell.
    â€œâ€˜I have the same amount of love for all my kittens,’ she said. ‘OK, maybe I love some a little less than others, but only on the days of the week when they get into scrapes. By the end of the week, it ALWAYS evens out.’”
    â€œHey, that’s what Mom tells us,” says Fred.
    I open my eyes.