Minmin had heard from the neighborhood strays that when human kittens were shipped off to “school,” they vanished for six entire hours, returning far too exhausted to chew on anyone’s tail.
This was marvelous news. Minmin’s own kitten, Binbin, spent his days pouncing on her ears, biting her whiskers, and behaving like an unhinged furry tornado.
“You’re going to school,” Minmin announced, scruffing him firmly by the neck. “It’s time you learned fractions. Or at least stopped treating my tail like a pull-toy.”
Binbin let out a very high-pitched, very dramatic kitten screech.
“I don’t want to go!” he squeaked, his little claws digging uselessly into the rug. “There are gigantic small-humans there! They smell like peanut butter and loud noises!”
Nobody was impressed. Minmin certainly wasn’t. She marched straight out the cat flap, dragging a terrified, trembling Binbin across the lawn and through the open ground-floor window of St. Jude’s Primary School.
She dropped him squarely into Class 1-B and leaped back onto the windowsill to supervise.
At first, Binbin was entirely petrified. He squeezed himself into a tiny, shiver-ing ball under a plastic chair, hiding behind a discarded crayon.
“Oh look, a kitty!” shrieked a tiny human girl in a pink sweater.
Binbin closed his eyes, waiting for the end. But instead of squishing him, the small human gently rolled a red bouncy ball toward his nose.
Binbin blinked. He nudged the ball. It bounced. Something deep inside his mischievous soul clicked into place.
Within twenty minutes, the terrified little kitten was gone. In his place was a absolute menace.
Binbin bolted onto the teacher’s desk, swatted a box of chalk into the air, and executed a flawless wall-jump off the whiteboard. The children erupted into absolute chaos, cheering like wild hooligans as Binbin zoomied across the keyboard of the classroom computer, accidentally printing forty-seven pages of random letters.
Minmin watched from the window, her eyes widening in sheer horror.
“Wait,” she meowed softly. “No. That’s not how school works.”
Binbin knocked over a potted fern, slid across the linoleum on a sheet of construction paper, and joyfully stole a slice of string cheese right out of a boy’s lunchbox. He was unstoppable. He was a god among six-year-olds.
When the bell finally rang, the teacher—looking deeply defeated—opened the door to let the breathless, sticky-fingered children out for recess. Binbin strutted out the window, sliding down the drainpipe and landing neatly beside his mother.
“That was amazing,” Binbin declared, puffing out his tiny chest proudly. “I learned how to print paper and steal dairy. I’m going back tomorrow.”
Minmin stared at her newly empowered monster of a child, letting out a very long, very dramatic mother-cat sigh.
“No,” Minmin said grimly, nudging him back toward the house. “Tomorrow, you’re staying home. Where I can keep an eye on you.”
