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His cat may have a jones, but she's still a Jones

My son is 9 and I expect that he will make at least half the dumb mistakes I did. That's normal.

MY SON is 9 and I expect that he will make at least half the dumb mistakes I did. That's normal. I can deal with it, and I know where and when to warn him because I've lived it all before.

My girls? They're different. I haven't walked in their shoes, and thank goodness for that, because I don't think I could make it half a block in heels. Besides, girls are much more diabolical than boys, which makes them that much harder to deal with.

Boys will do things knowing they'll get caught. Then after they're punished, they'll do it again.

Girls? They'll actually have a plan; one that involves timing, execution and practice. They scheme to account for every contingency. They plan for the unexpected. And if it weren't for the fact that their plots always involve boys, they'd probably get away more often.

How do I know? I have two daughters of my own. Adrianne is 21, and as a teenager she trained me for everything I could possibly experience with 12-year-old Eve.

From text messaging to social networking, from the scourge of rebelliousness to the peers who know far more than I do, from boy craziness to heartbreak - I've seen it all before, and I expect to relive it any minute now.

There's just one problem. I never expected to relive it with our cat.

You see, I couldn't have imagined that we'd ever have a cat, especially one who's a girl. After so many years of being anti-pet, I never thought that the wife and kids would use guilt, tears and outright begging to help a street cat worm her way into our home. But somehow they did it, and now we're paying the price.

It's not that Styx is a terrible cat. She's not, but she is a girl, and a manipulative one at that. She points to her bag of Cat Chow, rubs against your leg and rolls over when she wants food. She walks in front of you to keep you from getting past her when she wants to play. She looks at you with those big green eyes when she wants sympathy. And when she's planning something, she takes it to a whole new level.

Make no mistake. Styx is a girl who's planning something. I've seen girls do this before. They get quiet and pensive. They lock themselves in their rooms. They send secret messages to their little girlfriends. They cut their families off. But the worst part of all is the look. It's the one that says, "I'm almost-but-not-quite sorry for what I'm about to do."

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking cats don't have that look. You obviously haven't observed them that carefully. But don't feel bad. I probably would've missed it, too, were it not for something that Eve said today, while brushing Styx's hair.

"She's trying to do it herself," Eve said, when the cat positioned herself so that her hair would be brushed in the opposite direction. "I think she's at that age when she wants to do her own hair."

And that's when it all made sense: The incessant meowing, the running out the door, the peering through the window, the pining away. This whole thing has been about what it's always about for girls. It's about a boy.

And it's not like she's in heat, either. When she was in heat, there was a kind of forlorn misery to her meowing. Every male cat that heard her sat in front of our door, waiting for Styx to come out so they could hit pay dirt.

This is different.

I've seen only one cat walking around near our home, and I think she's a girl - one who's a lot less refined than our Styx. I keep seeing her traipsing through the neighbor's yard, looking in our window and trying to lure Styx back to street life.

I'll bet her name is Trixie or something. No doubt she's like the neighborhood doorknob. Everybody gets a turn. But she's not going to ruin Styx. She's not going to lure her out to the mean streets and lead her into the waiting paws of some dirty Tomcat. No, our Styx is going to remain virtuous.

That's the way it's got to be if she's going to be one of the Jones girls. After all, we've got a reputation to uphold.