The PupKit

• Sophie Kiara Black, Grade 3, Bulimba State School
• Short Story
• 2017

Excellence Award in the 'Spread The Word 2017' competition

She is half dog and half cat and that is why they call her Pupkit. The little Pupkit was getting ready for school. It was her first day and she was a bit scared because she looked different from the other puppies. Her dad was a dog and her mum was a cat so her face and upper body were of a golden retriever dog but her lower body and tail were of a stripy cat.
At school everyone in her class were getting on with their business, but as Pupkit walked in and shyly started looking around, everyone looked up and stared at her. It’s like they already knew she was different before they even looked up. She realised she was being stared at and started backing up out of the classroom door. She thought ‘Do I really look that bad?’ Just then she had a thought, ‘Maybe they were looking at something behind her?’ She turned around but there was nothing there, except for some more staring puppies. She burst into tears and ran to the bathroom to cry without anyone seeing her. After a while she looked at her watch and realised that the class had started. Instead of going back to the classroom she went to the sick bay because she had a bad headache which she thought was caused by a lot of puppies staring at her. The nurse at sick bay insisted she goes back to class but she refused. She wanted to go home. She yelled out so loudly that everyone in the building could hear it. She was sure of it. Then big angry tears ran down her face. The nurse ran off to call her parents. When they came to pick her up, she could tell they were not expecting her to be weeping.
When she got home, she told them everything. They told her, ‘It didn’t matter how she looked. What mattered was what was in her heart and that she was a special and caring Pupkit’.
The next day she went back to school and at first break, she ran and hid in the bathroom. A few puppies came in and they were saying some mean things about her. She looked under the door and saw them. She would remember them for the rest of her life. When they left, she wasn’t feeling well and started walking towards the sick bay when she heard her teacher panicking. A puppy was stuck on the top of the fence and surprise, surprise… It was one of the puppies that was talking bad about Pupkit. She had climbed on the top of a fence and was about to fall down. Pupkit with her springy cat legs easily climbed onto the fence, grabbed the puppy and put her down gently onto the ground and pounced away. Everyone cheered up for Pupkit and wanted to be her friend. Pupkit now understood what her parents meant!