Late Night Study ~

[Sharp Glimpse]

Here's a silly story about a silly cat who learns a lesson. It's kind of lame, but funny.




Judy



Judy stepped silently through the shadowy hall, entering the small library lit only by the dim candles on the dusty shelves. She was lucky to have such a private room in her house. All her friends envied her for it. Finding a cozy spot in one of the aisles, Judy sat down on the crimson carpet and dropped the papers she held in her mouth.
She had forgotten to do her homework that day, so she forced herself to do it in secret that night.
“Math,” she growled, gripping the rug with her claws. She’d much rather do English. If there was anything Judy enjoyed doing, it was writing. She pushed herself to read the first problem.
“16 x 3,” she said out loud.
Why can’t they put 3 x 16?
She held one of her quills in her mouth and wrote it as a word problem. She always found it easier that way. “I have three friends: Adelaide, Roxy, and Crystal. Also Skylar, but the equation says three so I can’t count him. If I give each of them sixteen quill pens, how many quills is that in all?” she wrote all of this along the edges of her paper. “Let’s see…three times ten equals thirty and three times six equals 18, so the answer is 28!”
Judy’s amber gaze flashed at the papers, but moved to her inkwell beside them. Two quills sat erect in the ink – the stiff crow feather pen she had been using, and a fluffy black quill.
“But if I own two quills,” Judy explained to herself, “then that means I only need to get 26!” Just as she wrote ‘6’, the point of her pen snapped. “Scratch that. I’ll need 27.”
She wrote it down with the fluffy quill. Oh, what a beautiful golden-brown pen it was! Why did she have to give it away? Oh, what a terrible thing math was!
“I need a pen too! I’ll buy 28 quills so I can keep mine!” She paused. How much would that cost?
Let’s see, Judy thought, I have 21 dollars in my kitty bank and quills cost one dollar each. That means I’m seven dollars short! I could borrow some from mom and dad, but of course that means I’ll be cleaning the litter box for months to pay for it. But quill pens are actually 99 cents which makes it even more complicated.
Judy stared down at the parchment. “I HATE MA –”
She cut short the work ‘math’ as she remembered she was trying to keep as silent as possible. However, when she glanced back at the pages, she realized that she had knocked over the inkwell, spilling the black liquid all over them.
“NOOO!!!” she yowled louder than before, not for the math sheets and her reputation of being a diligent student, but for all she had written on them. Just then, her dark fur stood on end as she heard a voice calling from somewhere else in the house.
“Judy? Are you in bed?”
Judy almost called out ‘no’, but she stopped herself just in time. She transferred the inky papers to the trash, mourning for the lost piece of writing, when she confronted with another problem – the carpet. Instead of the luxurious, scarlet fur that her mother insisted was vintage, Judy gazed upon the ugly, black-stained and sticky mass of hair bristling from the floor. At least it was only like that in one spot.
Judy’s mind raced on what to do about it. Should she place a book on top of it and pretend she had nothing to do with it? Should she pull out the carpet under the shelves and stuff it in the inked part? Or should she move the entire shelf over it? Then it hit her.
She snatched the nearest candle, blew it out, and creamed it on the ink stain. Now it looked just like the candle had fallen and burned the rug!
I’m so clever!
But Judy still had a problem – for how many months would she have to clean the litter box? “Dad pays me fifty cents for every time I clean it. It gets pretty nasty in six days, so I’ll be getting fifty cents a week.”
Judy had to write this down somewhere. Judy had no paper to write it down on. Judy was doomed.
Wait!
She wielded her fluffy quill and scribbled ‘Judy’ on her fur. She could hardly make out the dripping letters against her black fur, but that was good enough for Judy. She worked out the problem.
During all this time, Judy hadn’t realized that the night had almost reached its end. It wasn’t until she had figured out that it would take her almost 98 days to pay off her debt that she also discovered what time it was.
It’s…time to go to school!
She didn’t have her homework, but she didn’t care. The answers were written all over her (she didn’t realize that they were the answers to the wrong things)! Judy zipped out of the house with everything she needed, happily trailing ink all the way to school.

Later, she got sent to the principal’s office several times for destroying her homework and covering everything with ink; her friends got more quill pens than they needed; and Judy spend almost half of the year paying off her debt.

But she learned a lesson, so it wasn’t all a waste.