Page 5 of Kitten

Until last week, I worked part-time for our university’s law school, a work-study job I started in my freshman year and held up to graduation. It was remote, paid well for workstudy, and the labor was mindless. Mostly I organized documents and skimmed them for identifying material. After I graduated in May, the university agreed to extend my contract through the summer. It was unusual, but they were slammed, and I was cheap. I needed the money, but felt incapable of applying for more serious, real-world jobs. But summer was over, they’d found a replacement, and they still hadn’t processed my paycheck.

Lou typed for a while before her message came through. She simply responded:ugh.

I put down my phone. It lit up immediately with a new message from Lou.

not trying to be mean. but i know your school gig ended. do u have anything lined up?

I lowered my phone again. Whenever I was confronted with the prospect of finding new employment, my brain itched like it was being poked by a lot of tiny needles. My fingers rose to braid my hair, something I was good at doing. I braided my hair so tight and often that sometimes chunks of hair would fall out—only a few strands, though. My hair grew back quickly.

Lou wrote:

do u need help? intros?

I wrote back:No.

I didn’t know why I declined so quickly. I could probablydo with some help. My braid loosened, fell apart. She replied:

why? everybody does it katie it’s nbd. do you think you’re above all that?

Did I? If anything, I felt the opposite, that the kind of work Lou and most of my classmates did—art and finance and management consulting—were above me. Besides, I’d met Lou’s connections. Twenty-two-year-olds who wanted to be senators, children of curators with brownstones in the city. These people tended to ignore me. I was certain that if Lou and I hadn’t been assigned to live together in our freshman year, we wouldn’t be friends. Though, four years later, the wordfriendstill felt presumptuous, and I usually defaulted to roommate. It wasn’t clear which was more appropriate. She fished my hair out of the shower drain, I knew the shape of her toenail clippings, but we didn’t share much of our lives beyond getting enormously drunk.

“Ugh, Katie.” Lou sent a voice note this time. “Hang on, I’m about to get home.” I listened to her breathe for thirty seconds before the sound of a door slamming shut introduced a new silence. “Okay, sorry. I just got home from work.” Lou was an assistant at her uncle’s art gallery. She often worked weekends and brought this fact up so frequently I couldn’t tell if it actually bothered her. “I think you sound depressed. And being depressed isn’t a bad thing. But since graduation, all you do is spend time with James, which is unhealthy, on top of being boring. Also, who caresabout beingworthyfor a job? It’s not like my job chose me because I’m worthy of something. I just networked my ass off.”

My fingers moved to reply, but I didn’t know what to say. Lou was talented at expressing herself, and I often found myself deferring to her beliefs. According to her, I had a “shallow emotional manner.” She went to therapy every week and was well-versed in that kind of language.

Another voice note: “Anyway, you can have until tomorrow. But Anna’s getting annoyed. Also, where have you been?”

Anna was Lou’s cousin. She owned an apartment in the Upper West Side and rented it to us for cheap. I replied that I would be with James for the next two weeks, which Lou saw but did not respond to.

Even though I could be shy, I wasn’t particularly insecure until I met Lou. She moved in the day before I did, so our room was already marked by her perfume (amber, oud) and her belongings, four suitcases of them. She claimed the bed by the window and covered the wall with a gigantic print of different shades of orange. When I asked if it was her art, she looked stunned. It was a Rothko. It was obvious I didn’t know Rothko, but she didn’t explain. The lack of explanation made it clear to me that I wassupposedto know, which was the crucial conclusion, more important even than who Rothko was. This was college’s best lesson, and Lou taught it to me early. We didn’t speak until, three weeks later, she shared with me a handle of peach vodka and we discovered we were the same kind of drinker: serious, non-teary.

Silver headbutted my phone to the side, then loweredonto her belly, folding her arms beneath her. A thrill ran through me. This was the first time she’d taken a position of relaxation in my company, though there was an alertness to her gleaming eyes, the irises quivering like poked jelly, that signaled she might leap away at any moment. Carefully I ran my hand over her back. Up close her gray fur looked nearly lavender, like the breast of a dove. I lowered my nose to the plume of her neck. She was the softest thing I’d ever touched. She smelled like cloth that had dried in the sun.

I was struck by the intensity of my affection for her. “You don’t know what you look like, do you? You have no idea.”

Silver began to dig her paws into the bed, as if massaging a lump of Play-Doh. Then she rubbed her face into my thumb. Her nose was wet and left a trace on my skin.

“You’re very cute.” I looked into her eyes. In the muted light of James’s bedroom, her black pupils grew voracious, swallowing the surrounding ring of green. “I forgive you, by the way. For eating my birthday cupcakes.”

Then, as if she understood me, Silver rolled happily over, exposing her belly. Here the fur was frizzy and clumped in neat flat swirls. If they were any longer, they might have been ringlets. I felt the way little girls felt when they received a new doll, itching to rub and stroke and work the untouched hair, which was of course the best part of a new doll and always the first thing to get ruined. When I reached to touch Silver, she flinched.

“What are you so scared of? You like me, remember? I introduced you to milk.”

The click of the front door turned her head.

“Who are you talking to?” James’s face appeared in thedoorway, his brown hair made darker by the rain. “You’re talking to Silver?”

“Sort of,” I said. “We were bonding, until you came in.”

“She likes you. Cats are just like that, they’re fickle.”

“Why would you want a pet that’s fickle? Isn’t the whole point of them to love you?”

“I’m not sure about that.” James bent and tousled his hair with a T-shirt. Beads of water flew onto the duvet. Silver hopped around on the bed, as if dancing through a sprinkler. “It’s nice to look after something. I guess it’s kind of like having a kid.”

He could see I was confused. “Or a relationship?”

“You see me like a pet?” The notion excited me.