Ava and Taco Cat by Carol Weston Page A

only two empty seats left. One was next to Chuck. Usually that would be fine, but he glanced at me then quickly looked away, which he never does. So I decided to sit by myself in the back.
    I felt like I was in Siberia (wherever that is).
    For a second, I wished we were all still in fourth grade, when we had assigned seats and rotating jobs like snack helper and line leader, and our teachers walked us everywhere, and we were the oldest in the school, and math wasn’t hard, and friendships weren’t fragile, and nobody ever tried to elbow her way into my life without an invitation.
    Ava, All Alone
    P.S. I looked up Siberia. It’s a freezing cold place on top of Russia. (Well, in northern Russia.)

1/7
after dinner
Dear Diary,
    Pip and I just finished “L is for lionfish.” Lionfish are beautiful but poisonous.
    Zara is pretty and poisonous.
    I was going to confront call Maybelle, but I thought, “What if she’s with Zara?” so I didn’t. (I changed “confront” to “call” because “confront” sounds unfriendly, and Maybelle is my friend.)
    Mom brought home cat treats, a cat brush, and yellow tulips. Problem: When no one was looking, Taco nibbled at the tops of the tulips, so now all the petals have tiny bite marks.
    (I thought it was cute, but Mom didn’t.)
    Taco let me brush him with the new brush and Mom kept me company and said that it’s not easy training cats.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I asked.
    â€œMost dogs can be bribed, but most cats can’t,” she said. “Can you picture a cat shaking or rolling over or playing dead?”
    â€œI guess not,” I admitted, but then told her the Aesop fable “The Thief and the Housedog,” which goes something like this:
    In the middle of the night, a thief came to break into a house. The housedog started barking and barking, so the thief tossed him two big, juicy steaks. But the dog was no fool. He said, “You can’t bribe me! You’re not my master and this is not my dinnertime. In fact, I’m going to bark louder than ever.”
    Mom smiled. “What’s the moral?”
    â€œIf someone tries to bribe you, beware,” I said.
    Mom said that I could think of cat treats and dog biscuits as “rewards” and “incentives” and ways to “show love” and “encourage behavior modification”—and not just “bribes,” since real bribes are bad and illegal. She also said that Dr. Gross’s technicians often give pets treats after they squirt goo in their eyes or shove pills in their mouths or do procedures that are no fun.
    It was nice talking to Mom, and inspiring too. In fact, I could feel myself coming up with a plan.
    At dinner, we talked more about cat treats. Pip said she’d heard about a cat that got trained to use a toilet bowl instead of a litter box. Mom said toilet-training cats is challenging. Dad said potty-training us wasn’t “a piece of cake” either. I said, “Can we change the subject?”
    Dad laughed and taught us all a new word: ailurophobia. It means “fear of cats.”
    Ava, Who is Not Ailurophobic

1/8
before school
Dear Diary,
    Last night right before bed, I put my new plan into action. Even though cats are not easy to train, I thought Taco might be easy to tempt . I decided to try to lure him into my room using treats as bait. I was tired of Taco playing hard-to-get!
    Remember how Dad used our paper mice to make a beeline—a mouse line!—from my bedroom to his office? Well, after everyone had gone to bed, I opened the new bag of treats, spilled some into my hand, and placed them one by one in a line from the top of our stairs to the foot of my bed.
    After I turned out my light, I tried to stay awake to see if Taco would come into my room. I even made believe I was on a safari in Africa. I pretended my bed was a jeep, and it was a moonlit night, and I was staying up