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Every time he was almost asleep, a long cat tail would brush against his face, as if Cat were deciding whether she might like to plunk herself down to sleep right on his head.
    It hadn’t been what Mason would call a restful night.
    At art camp on Thursday, they were beginning work on clay pots or bowls made of clay “snakes” rolled out and then coiled together. Then the pots would be glazed and fired in a kiln.
    “I’m going to make a bowl for Cat,” Brody said. “As a welcome-to-your-new-home present.”
    “She already has a bowl,” Mason said. “Two bowls. One for food and one for water.”
    “Well, now she’ll have three!”
    Mason couldn’t think of anything better to make, so he decided to make a bowl for Cat, too. If she was going to have three bowls, she might as well have four. Maybe if they were all filled with food all the time, she wouldn’t wake him up at four a.m. to be fed.

    Dunk was making a bowl for Wolf—a very large bowl. Wolf must be a very large dog. A very large biting dog.
    “So you have a cat now,” Dunk said to Mason.
    What of it?
Mason wanted to say, but he just nodded and rolled out another clay snake.
    “My dog can eat up your cat,” Dunk said.
    To change the subject, Mason looked over at Nora’s bowl. “Who is your bowl for?” he asked. “Do you have a pet?”
    “I have lots of pets, but they don’t eat out of bowls. So my bowl is to put paper clips in.”
    “What do they eat out of?” Brody asked. “What kind of pets are they?”
    Nora smiled. “Ants.”
    “Ants?” Brody asked.
    “I have an ant farm,” Nora explained. “It’s in a glass terrarium. A whole colony of ants. I do experiments with them, seeing how they react to heat and cold, or light and darkness, things like that.”
    “Wow,” said Mason politely. He hoped that if Cat didn’t work out, his father wouldn’t come home with an ant farm for him next.
    “My dog can eat up your ants, too,” Dunk told Nora.
    “Have you ever heard of fire ants?” Nora asked Dunk pleasantly. “When they sting you, it feels like you’re on fire.”
    Mason noticed that Nora hadn’t said that her ants were fire ants. She had just asked Dunk a simple question. But he scowled and turned away.
    When Dunk left the table to go to the bathroom, Nora asked Mason and Brody, “Would you like to come over sometime and see my ant farm?”
    Brody shot Mason an excited grin. Mason knew Brody was thinking,
How could anybody not want to see an ant farm?
Mason was thinking,
How could anybody want to see an art farm?
    Besides, Mason didn’t like to go to other people’shouses. He didn’t even like to go to Brody’s house, which had so much noise and commotion and clutter and confusion, compared to the peaceful, quiet home of the Dixons. Mason’s mother’s afghans and pillows were bright and colorful, but they didn’t get up and
do
anything, unlike Brody’s sisters, who were always trying out new dance steps or talking loudly on their cell phones to their friends.
    He couldn’t imagine going to Nora’s house. He barely knew Nora. They would look at her ant farm, which would take about two minutes, and then what? Look at her books about hamsters?
    “Maybe some other time,” Mason said. “There’s some stuff I have to do today. Brody, I just got Cat. I can’t just go off and leave her, can I?”
    Brody looked ashamed for having forgotten how lonely Cat would be without them. Then his face brightened.
    “You could come see Cat,” he told Nora.
    Mason gave Brody a horrified stare. He couldn’t imagine Nora coming to his house any more than he could imagine himself going to Nora’s house. He couldn’t imagine his house with a girl in it.
    Nora gave Mason a quizzical look; she seemed to read his reaction better than Brody did.
    “I can’t come today,” she said.
    Mason felt his chest expand with relief.
    “But maybe sometime,” Nora said.
    Maybe some other time far, far away.
    The cat bowls wouldn’t be done for