The meeting room wasn’t far from my class. Nothing is far in our school. It’s a single story divided in two wings—classrooms at one end, common rooms at the other, the principal’s office and meeting room in the middle. There are sixty-eight kids at Salmon Creek School—and that’s every grade from kindergarten to twelve.

Having fewer than seventy kids means you know everyone by name. It also means every teacher—all five of them—knows you by name and your parents by name and your pets, too.

There are more kids in the upper grades than the lower ones. When the St. Clouds built their facility, they hired staff with young families, and those kids are all teenagers now. I’m in the biggest class—the grade eleven/twelve split.

The St. Clouds give us the best of everything. That’s how they lured employees into a community in the middle of nowhere—promise the best education possible for their children. Our classroom desks are all built to accommodate our laptops, which are replaced every two years. Our auditorium has theater-style seating. Our cafeteria has a chef and cloth napkins. We have a gym, but no pool or skating rink, only because the St. Clouds put those in the community center a ten-minute walk away.

It all sounds very posh. It’s not really. When I say Salmon Creek is in the middle of nowhere, I mean it. We’re an hour’s drive from the nearest city, and half of that is on empty back roads through uninhabited forest. Since we’re living so isolated, we don’t feel special the way private school kids might. We aren’t here because we get amazing grades or our parents are rich; the extras were just normal. By the time we reach the upper grades, we don’t even take advantage of the cafeteria chef anymore—we bring our lunches and grab a picnic table outside.

I had to pass through the principal’s office to get to the conference room. I waved at the secretary—Ms. Morales. Dad was waiting by the door and ushered me inside. Mayor Tillson was at the espresso machine. He’s my friend Nicole’s dad. If you didn’t know which was the police chief and which was the mayor, you’d probably guess wrong. Chief Carling was a tiny blonde, a few inches shorter than me, dressed in slacks and a silk blouse. The mayor was a foot taller and twice as heavy, with a bulldog face. He wore jeans and a plaid shirt that strained around his waist.

When I finished telling them everything that happened that morning, Chief Carling said, “Your dad says this isn’t the first encounter you’ve had with this particular cat.”