1.


Once there was a monster who loved a boy. And a boy who loved a monster.

They hadn’t always known each other. The monster lived under the boy’s bed for a long time before they met, and the boy didn’t know the monster was there until one night when the monster decided to introduce himself. And now they were friends.

Here is a list of things the boy and the monster liked to do together:

Use the boy’s mother’s fancy gels and sprays to make funny hairstyles on the boy and furstyles on the monster.Draw pictures of themselves having adventures, saving the world, and wearing matching hero suits.Ask questions.That third one was really more the monster’s thing.

The monster had a lot of questions.

“Why don’t eyebrows grow long like the rest of your hair? Why are eggs so smooth? Why do elbows only bend one way? How fast can a duck run?”

The boy did his best to answer the monster’s questions.

Luckily, the monster didn’t mind at all if the boy’s answer was “I don’t know.”

(Some people will try and tell you that “I don’t know” is not a proper answer to a question. If that ever happens to you, you may inform them that curiosity is a valuable thing.)

If the boy didn’t know an answer, he did his best to find it. The first place he always looked was his bookshelf. The boy had a huge bookshelf with lots and lots of books on it.

When the monster had a question about stars, the boy showed him a book about space.

When the monster had a question about teeth, the boy showed him a book about bodies.

When the monster had a question about raccoons, the boy showed the monster a book about animals.

The book said that some animals were awake at night. That was called nocturnal. Some animals were awake during the day. That was called diurnal. And some animals were awake at the beginning of the day and at the end.

“That sounds like me,” said the monster.

“Then you are crepuscular,” the boy told him.

“Ooh,” said the monster. “That sounds fancy.”

“And it rhymes with muscular,” the boy pointed out.

“Am I that, too?”

The boy studied the monster for a minute. “I can’t really tell,” he said.

Then the monster and the boy went back to what they had been doing before, which was spying on animals through their binoculars.

(Binoculars was another word that the monster thought sounded fancy. And he didn’t know this yet, but those binoculars were about to become very, very important.)


Text copyright © 2021 by Hannah Barnaby

Illustrations copyright © 2021 by Anoosha Syed