My Friend Juan

28 My Friend Juan I first met Juan one day when I was walking home from school. Suddenly, I heard the sound of a dog growling. I turned the corner, and there was Juan. He was hanging from a tree branch, and the dog was jumping up and trying to bite him. I yelled at the dog and scared it away. Then, I helped Juan out of the tree. He was very thankful. He was shaking and had been bitten. My mother and I took him to a doctor who lived next door. He gave Juan a few stitches on his back. We could see that he was sick. He was very thin and he lived on the street in a poor part of our city. My mother really didn't like Juan very much. Even though she felt sorry for him, she thought that he was very lazy and all he did was sleep. He ate a lot and he kept late hours. The one nice thing she would say about him was that he had big, beautiful eyes. But she felt he was noisy and was always asking for more food.

Juan stared out the window all day. He was always nervous and jumped at the smallest things. But he became a great friend to me. I told him things that I would tell no one else in the world. If I had a bad day, Juan would listen to me and he would always play with me. One day, my mother got sick and Juan stayed with her all day. That was when she really got to like him. You see, she hated mice and Juan took it on as his job to catch all the mice in the house. Of course, he also ate them. That may seem a little strange, but perhaps I forgot to mention that although Juan was a boy, he was also something else-a cat!