Meowintime is a small town that mostly minds its own business. On the third street from the end of it, in a house with a crooked porch light, lived an orange tabby who had been born with a white heart printed onto her forehead — as if somebody had pressed a stamp there and meant it.

Her name was Lucy, and she belonged to Marisha, who was eight and had opinions. Marisha had decided a long time ago that a cat should never have to make do with a corner of a room. So she gave Lucy the whole room.

Tunnels along the baseboards. A tower by the window at bird height. A basket of toys sorted by how loud they were. Above the bed, in glitter marker, a sign: THE CAT CLUB — MEMBERS WELCOME. For a long while the club had exactly one member, and she slept through most of the meetings.

But Lucy had begun to notice a small ache that naps did not fix. The room was perfect. The room was also very quiet. A club, she thought, ought to have somebody to be a club with.

So one gold-colored evening she climbed the back fence — the tallest thing she was allowed to climb — and did something no cat in that neighborhood had ever dared. She called out, on purpose, to everyone.

Four strangers came to find out what the fuss was about. A long grey tuxedo cat who asked practical questions. A cream Persian shaped like a bread loaf. A kitten so small he was mostly ears. And a calico with one folded ear who said nothing and missed nothing.

Lucy led them home in a line, through the door with the paw-print sign, straight into the Cat Club. The tunnels were tested. The tower was climbed. Nobody wanted to leave, which is how you know a club is working.

Then a can rolled. A box thumped. A treat jar rattled in a way that fit exactly between the thumps — and five cats stopped moving at the same time. Whatever was happening, it was not a club sound. It was better than that.

Marisha came in, took one long look at the wreckage of her toy bin, and understood instantly. By morning there was a stage made of a crate, a drum kit made of pots, and a setlist written in her best handwriting.

They practised badly, then less badly, then rather well. Miles drummed on the pots. Biscuit found the keyboard and refused to give it back. Pip strapped on a little red guitar nearly his own size. Olive kept the beat, and named the band.

THE HEARTMARKS, said the poster, because of the white heart on their singer's forehead. Marisha taped that poster to every flat surface she could reach, and a few she could not.

Their first audience was one girl, four bedroom windows and a suspicious squirrel. They played anyway, all the way to the last note, and Lucy sang like the room was a stadium.

Word travels fast in a town the size of Meowintime. First the neighbours. Then the shop with the good awning. Then a real stage in the town square, with real lights, and a crowd that stretched back further than any of them could see.

Backstage, Lucy's paws shook. Marisha crouched down, fixed the pink bandana, and told her the only true thing there was to tell: they are already on your side.

The first chord went up over the square like a firework. Nobody sat down again after that. Cats on fences, kids on shoulders, grown-ups pretending they weren't singing along.

By the end, Meowintime was singing the words back at them. A famous band, it turns out, is just a band that a lot of people decided to love at the same time.

Fame is heavy to carry home. They got back after midnight, dragging pots and cables and one enormous jar of ticket money, and made it precisely as far as the rug before their legs quit. Snoring. Purring. Exhausted paws in every direction. The great sleep-in had begun and the Heartmarks intended it to last for days.

Marisha slept with Lucy curled against her pillow, and the whole cat-printed room breathed slow and warm. Outside, the snow came down over Meowintime, quiet as a held breath. And far out past the fence, something small and cold and entirely lost was still running. Just then —

— the window exploded open.

It came through in a spray of snow and curtain: a tiny peach-colored dog with no fur at all and ears like satellite dishes, skidding across the floor at a speed no living thing should manage indoors. The cat tower went. The yarn went. The lamp went. Most of the band went.

Everyone hid. Lucy did not. She walked straight up to the wrecking ball with the enormous eyes — close enough to touch — and that is when she saw the thing nobody else had: he wasn't angry. He was shaking so hard he could barely stand.

Marisha arrived, took one look, and came back with the softest blanket in the house. No collar. No tags. Just a small trembling voice saying his name was Burrito, and that he had been lost for a long, long time.

He told it in pieces, the way you tell a thing you have been carrying alone. A truck he chased out of his own town. A road he didn't recognise. Marien, one hundred and seventy-five miles behind him. Snow that had very nearly finished the job.

He ate three bowls without breathing once. The cats sat in a half-circle and let him, and when he finally said out loud that he only wanted his family back but had no money to get there, nobody in the Cat Club could think of a single thing to say.

Nobody except Lucy. She jumped onto the crate stage with her ears straight up, and the idea came out of her all at once: the biggest show this town has ever seen — and every single coin buys Burrito's ticket home.

Meowintime never stood a chance. Marisha drew flyers until her marker died and they left one in every shop in town: the bakery, the hardware store, the flower stall, the place that only sells buttons. Then — because Marisha does not do things halfway — she rented a blimp.

The square filled at dusk and kept filling. Every cat, every kid, every grown-up with a glow stick and a pocket of change. Lucy counted them in, and the Heartmarks played for a dog they had known for eleven days like he was family, because by then he was.

Coins. Crumpled dollars. One enormous jar. Enough for a bus seat with two dollars left over for snacks. Seat 12, four o'clock, and a small peach-colored passenger holding his own ticket in his mouth so nobody could take it back.

One hundred and seventy-five miles later a bus door opened in Marien, and a boy with swooped-over black hair came off a porch so fast he forgot his shoes. Burrito crossed that lawn in about four seconds. The rest of the family arrived crying and did not stop for some time.

A week after that, a postcard reached the Cat Club: TO THE HEARTMARKS AND ALL OF MEOWINTIME — THANK YOU. LOVE, BURRITO. Marisha pinned it above the stage, where the band could see it from every seat.

The postcard was only the first of the letters. They came from cities nobody in that bedroom could pronounce, all asking the same thing: would the cat band that sent a dog home please come and play? Marisha wrote WORLD TOUR across the top of her clipboard and underlined it twice.

Tokyo first, because Tokyo asked loudest. Fifty thousand glow sticks came up at the first chord and swung together like a tide, and Lucy sang into a wall of light so bright she could not see where the crowd ended.

Paris gave them a stage that floated. The band played while the river carried them past the tower, the sun going orange behind it, and Olive — who never says anything — said something.

In between there was the bus: dark windows, city lights sliding by, five cats in a heap and a map filling up with pins. Marisha counted the stops out loud every night. Two to go, she said. And the last one is special.

Being famous turned out to be mostly waiting around, so they became tourists instead. They held up a leaning tower with their own paws, all five of them straining, and Marisha took eleven photographs of the effort.

They ate their way across the world. Macarons taller than Pip. A plate of spaghetti built for a family. One sundae roughly the size of Biscuit, who ate it looking directly at the camera and then refused to leave the table.

There were the flashy evenings too — carpets, cameras, tiny sparkly outfits Marisha sewed on the bus — and Lucy taught the whole band to walk down a red carpet as if the song were still playing.

And afterwards, always, the line of fans. It went out the door and around the corner, and the Heartmarks signed every single thing handed to them, even though four of them can only sign a smudge.

The special last stop was a small stage in a town called Marien. The band had been there once before, in a way — they had sent someone home to it. Lucy stepped up to the microphone and said only: this one's for Burrito.

He was in the front row with Leo, and Leo's mom and dad and sister, howling along to every word. Afterwards there was a group hug so large and so long that nobody could say later who had started it.

Then twelve cities' worth of road, running backwards. A bus, a train, a taxi, a familiar fence — and finally the crooked porch light they all knew by heart, waiting on exactly as it had been.

Tour postcards went up on the bedroom wall, one for every pin on the map. Then five tired cats and one tired manager fell asleep by eight o'clock in a room with a glittery sign above the bed, and the whole world outside kept humming their song.