"Bye, kitty" called Charlotte.

"Meow!" said the kitten. And the next thing Charlotte knew, the kitten was standing in front of her again, blocking her path and meowing rather insistently.

"Now, kitty" said Charlotte, "I have to go home. Do you have any idea how much homework I have? You should go home too."

The kitten looked at her blankly. Charlotte began to walk on, but once again the kitten ran up and stood in front of her. Charlotte tilted her head and considered. The kitten was awfully skinny.

"Do you have a home?" asked Charlotte uncertainly. "Meow," said the kitten.

That seemed like a no. Charlotte regarded the kitten frankly. The kitten, in turn, regarded her. There seemed to be only one thing to do.

"Would you like to come home with me?" asked Charlotte.

"Meow," said the kitten.

So that was that. Charlotte picked up the blue-eyed gray and white kitten, tucked it under her thin, pale, freckly arm, and headed home, suddenly feeling that the world was perhaps not so tiresome, if you only looked hard enough.

Now, stray kittens are not, in themselves, an extraordinary phenomenon. And given events that were to follow, finding one would seem positively mundane. But if you were Charlotte, and you had been feeling that life was some cosmic joke that had no punch line, and in the space of a moment you had gone from being Charlotte-without-a-kitten to being Charlotte-with-a-kitten, you too would have found it nothing short of remarkable. (Even if you did not notice that as soon as you picked up the kitten, the man in the inappropriate tuxedo shook his head slowly and skulked off into the shadows.)

When Charlotte arrived home, she found her parents seated in the kitchen, talking. This was not unusual; Charlotte's father taught at the high school and was often home when she got there, and her mother worked from an office on the second floor of the Mielswetzski house for half of the week. Charlotte's mother was a child psychologist who wrote books on adolescence and was very concerned with Charlotte's well-being. This was not always as advantageous as it sounds.