John and Lorraine are two unlikely friends and normal sophomores in high school. One day, while making prank calls with their friends, Lorraine rings up Angelo Pignati and pretends to be a charity worker. She manages to keep him on the phone for a long time and ends up agreeing to meet him at his house to collect a ‘donation’. With the help of John, also posing as a charity worker, Lorraine goes to the man’s house and is invited inside. Mr. Pignati tells them a little about himself, like how his wife is on a trip in California. They stay with Mr. Pignati for a while longer, and agree to go to the zoo with him the following day. At the zoo, John and Lorraine meet Bobo, a baboon and Mr. Pignati’s best friend. The kids then return home and find themselves continuing to visit the …show more content…
Pignati falls from a heart attack amidst chasing after John. He is taken to the hospital and John and Lorraine pose as his children in order to visit him. While he is at the hospital, the high schoolers maintain his house, and decide to a throw a small party there the day before he is supposed to return. However, the small party becomes a large one when people that were not invited begin showing up, and the house is wrecked. Mr. Pignati’s pig collection, a memory of Conchetta, has been destroyed and her dresses ripped apart. Mr. Pignati returns home early to the sight of this, and he is devastated. The police take John and Lorraine home, who make plans with Mr. Pignati to take him to the zoo as a way to say sorry. He is somber and frail-looking the entire way through, and the kids try their best to make things right. At the monkey house, they discover that Bobo the baboon has died while Mr. Pignati was at the hospital, and after learning this he drops dead. John and Lorraine blame themselves for what happened, and they decide to write down their memories with Mr. Pignati in the book that is now The