In a dogs world, p.13
In a Dog's World, page 13
Katasha was relieved when the waiters came around to take the empty platters away. All the Pathways cats started standing up to leave.
"How was your summer?" Blue asked, stepping up beside her and Daria. "Has your sister gone off to college yet?"
"Corina and my brother Dmitri should still be at home," Katasha said. "Mama's driving them to college tomorrow, and my brother Dominic will be driving here."
"Oh," he said, "You don't have any of your stuff yet?
"Her side of the room is still completely bare," Daria said, taking Katasha possessively by the arm. Katasha had mixed feelings about Daria adopting her so thoroughly as a surrogate sister. She supposed that Daria must have a littermate or two out there who were suddenly having to cope with their sister being gone. Katasha wondered if they were at other colleges, being adopted by other cats who missed their sisters...
Would Corina adopt a surrogate sister at Orrington State to replace Katasha? Suddenly Katasha felt terribly lonely, surrounded by strangers, walking back to a room that was supposed to be hers but was completely empty except for a bed with a bare mattress. She'd sleep tonight wrapped in a quilt borrowed from Daria, who was acting like her sister but was not her sister.
"Well, if there's anything you need," Blue said, "my suitemates and I are all set up."
At that moment, Aaron came pirouetting past, twirling his cape dramatically. He pranced around them in a complete circle and then stopped, with the cape drawn up to his amber eyes. "You must come to our suite," he said. "Consider it a compulsion of the spirit. You will be well fed on fine conversation and fun competition. Can you play chess?"
Katasha flattened an ear. "You do sound like a vampire," she said.
Aaron flung his cape wide and laughed maniacally. Then he turned about and ran ahead, meowing into the night, "Learn to play chess! It feeds the sooooul!"
"Can you play chess?" Blue asked. His simple earnestness was a bizarre contrast to Aaron's theatricality.
Katasha shook her head no. "My brother Dmitri plays chess," she said. She wondered if he'd join a chess club in college too.
"It's a wonderful game," Blue said. "The rules are so complex and simple at the same time that it's survived since the early days of the First Race."
"Yes, but you all haven't been playing chess," Daria said. "I mean, I know that you're using a chess board, but I've watched you guys, and that was not chess."
Blue's ears flicked, and a smile crept into his green eyes. "True, we've played with the rules a little."
For the rest of the walk back, Katasha was bombarded from one side with the specifics of the different chess variants that Blue's suitemates had been playing and from the other side with gossip about what all the other Pathways cats thought of it all. Apparently, Cheshire Suite, as Blue's suite was called, was somewhat infamous among the Pathways cats, both loved and hated at the same time. But then, wasn't everything? At least, when you're hanging out with cats...
Blue invited Katasha and Daria to come back to Cheshire Suite with him and learn some chess. Aaron swooped by, flapping his cape like wings, and urged them not to defile their eternal souls by turning down Blue's offer. Daria said that she didn't mind defiling her eternal soul if it meant she didn't have to learn chess. Katasha simply told Blue she was too tired.
Aaron screeched, "Fools!" and ran straight toward the farther arm of Greene Dorm. He got to the wall of windows, hopped toward one of them, and disappeared right through it.
Katasha's eyes widened.
"We leave the window open," Blue said, "That way we can get into and out of our room from the courtyard."
"Right," Katasha said, realizing that she could see the curtain billowing lightly in the breeze. "Good to know."
"Yeah, I wish we had a first floor courtyard-facing room so that we could do that too," Daria said.
Their room was not only on the second floor, but it was on the wrong side of the hall to have a courtyard-facing window. Instead, their window faced the scramball fields and the enclosure around the swimming pool. It was a nice view, actually. And Katasha was not at all sure that she'd trade it for a "door" onto the courtyard.
That night, Katasha fell asleep to the soft sound of Daria snoring. The quilt wrapped around her felt strange and bulky from its ruffled edge. She liked the sensation of sleeping way up in the air on the bunk bed, but she was a little bothered by how close the ceiling felt. Mostly, though, she was sad that she hadn't had a chance to catch up with Claire and the others. She wondered if all the Intro to Isleywood dogs had gotten together for a big dinner like the Pathways one. The thought made her sad, because that's where she'd really belonged, with the dogs who'd spent all week hiking with her.
Except... Clearly not. Because they'd thought she belonged with the cats.
Katasha wasn't sure she belonged anywhere.
Chapter 20
Breakfast was bleak in the morning. Daria woke Katasha, unintentionally, by singing along with a songbird in a tree outside their window. It was cloyingly sweet. At least, it would have been if Daria could sing.
Katasha dragged herself out of bed slowly enough that by the time she made it to the dining hall, there was only a plate of stale mutton muffins out with a handwritten sign saying, "Dining Hall Hours will Return to Normal Tomorrow." Apparently, they were keeping abbreviated hours until more students arrived.
After that, Katasha skulked around campus, trying to avoid the Pathways cats, while keeping her eyes peeled for any fellow hikers. There were a number of unfamiliar students, trailed by parents and littermates carrying cardboard boxes, beginning to move in to other rooms in the dorms.
The curtains on Cheshire Suite had been thrown wide, and Katasha could see several cats playing chess inside. Aaron was lounging in a plushy armchair that was incongruously sitting in the courtyard in front of the Cheshire Suite window.
Admittedly, Katasha was intrigued, but she really wanted to catch up with her hiking friends. So, she stayed to the far side of the dorm and ducked inside as surreptitiously as possible. That way the crazy Cheshire Suite cats couldn't snag her. Walking down the hall, she passed several open rooms, but, when she got to Claire's door, it wasn't one of them. Katasha knocked, and the door was answered by a dog she hadn't met before.
"I'm sorry," Katasha said, "I thought this was Claire's room."
The dog looked Katasha up and down. She was a short, funny looking-dog with broad, pointed ears. Of course, short for a dog meant that she was about Katasha's height. She was very handsomely dressed. Katasha thought this dog might be a corgi. She was clearly a herding breed like Claire. Katasha could tell from the shape of her muzzle.
"I'm Claire's roommate," the dog said.
Katasha tried to remember the name that Claire had mentioned on the hike. It was a kind of plant... A vine... "Ivy?" she asked.
"That's right," Ivy said. Her eyes had turned distant, like she'd already written Katasha off as unimportant, exactly the kind of behavior that Katasha was used to from dogs.
"Do you know where Claire is?" Katasha asked. "Or Turtle?"
Ivy frowned. "I don't know anything about turtles," she said, "But Claire left with some other dogs from her hiking group a few minutes ago. They were all going to go on some day hike at the Brenton Field Station to cap off their hiking experience."
"Brenton Field Station?" Katasha asked, her heart in her throat. Maybe she could still catch up with them.
"It's some kind of wildlife preserve that the biology students use for research. They have it locked off from the general public, but if you know a biology major then you can get in."
The only biology major that Katasha knew was Turtle... But he wouldn't have the code, because he was a new student. Besides, he'd have left with Claire.
"Do you know which way they went?" Katasha asked.
"Outside," Ivy said sardonically. "Now, if you don't mind, I need to get back to unpacking." She closed the door rudely in Katasha's face.
For Claire's sake, Katasha hoped that Ivy was prejudiced against cats or simply under a lot of stress from moving. Either way, Katasha didn't think she'd be spending a lot of time hanging out in Claire's room.
Katasha made a half-hearted attempt to locate Claire and the others outside. She wandered about the close-trimmed grass of the quad. However, she didn't know which way they'd gone or how far ahead they were. Eventually, she gave up hope and simply went to wait for Dominic in the student parking lot. She sat on the curb and tried not to think about the cheerful hike she was missing out on.
She didn't have time for a hike right now anyway. Dominic would be here soon. Besides, Katasha thought, she'd spent the last week hiking. Why would she want to go on another hike? She could catch up with the others later. Unless they made secret plans together again. Then, every time she looked for them, they'd already be busy with the plans she'd missed out on finding out about last time...
Except that was crazy, paranoid cat-thinking. It was exactly the kind of over-analytical tripe she'd heard going on among the Pathways cats last night, and she wanted no part of it. Probably, when the Intro to Isleywood hikers got back, they'd simply be happy to see her and wonder how she'd been. She would try to be like them -- simple and straightforward and not wondering if they'd left her out on purpose because they didn't really want to be her friends.
Katasha sighed. She knew it would be brief, but seeing Dominic would bring some respite from the immense uncertainty and unfamiliarity of everything around her.
When the Cherry Racer finally pulled into the parking lot, it looked completely wrong. All the cardboard boxes of her stuff were strapped to a rack on the top, and the trunk had been jerry-rigged shut with green bungee cords. The effect was that of a beautiful butterfly having been ensnared in an evil spider's web, wrapped up, and left to be devoured. Dominic must be dying to get her unaesthetic boxes of stuff unloaded from his precious car.
Katasha's tail started to twitch impatiently at the thought -- not the idea of unloading the Cherry Racer, but the idea of seeing Dominic. She paced along the edge of the parking lot, following the Cherry Racer, as it drove along seeking a parking space. There was a bounce in her step again, and her tail swished widely when the engine finally turned off. Her brother opened the door, and Katasha pounced into his arms before he'd fully stepped out of the car.
"Woah, Tash," he said, "You're going to knock me over." He complained, but his throat was rumbling with a purr to match her own.
"Tell me everything that's happened at home," she said, stepping away enough for Dominic to catch his balance.
"It's been one week," Dominic said, "You're acting like I dropped you off for that hike a whole year ago."
"Well, maybe I invented a time machine, and it really has been a year," Katasha quipped. The idea reminded her of Howell's story about the human professor dressed up as a French Mastiff, sleeping away the years in a cryogenics chamber. "It has been a long week," she said.
Dominic eyed her. The broad lines of his black-furred face, edged with white, were immensely familiar and comforting. This is what Katasha needed.
"Tell me about home," she said.
"It sounds like your week has been more interesting." He shoved his black paws into the pockets of his matching black leather jacket.
Katasha's ears flicked. She didn't know how to even begin talking about her week. She'd met so many new people, and every detail of her interactions with them connected into some other detail of the complex web of knowledge she'd built up in the last week. It all created a network of information and ideas too complex to share with a brother who hadn't met any of the people who would make up the community she lived in for the next few years of her life.
Except Howell. He'd met Howell. "The leader of my hiking group was Howell," she said, and, then, without expecting it, she broke down and cried.
Dominic looked confused. His ears turned one way and the other as he waited for Katasha to continue. Finally, she managed to say, "He never even acknowledged me. It's like prom never happened... We'd never met before... It didn't mean anything to him."
Dominic frowned. It was a look that would have withered even the biggest, scariest dog -- if that dog could be forced to pay attention to a small, fine-boned cat for long enough to see it. "I told you to be careful," he said. "Do you want me to go let him beat me up? That'd show him."
Katasha laughed. The tears in her blue eyes already drying. She was crying more from the exhaustion of leaving home and trying to find her place in this unfamiliar world than from whatever pain Howell had caused her. Though, his indifference to her had hurt.
"Can we go for a drive?" she asked, realizing how comforting it would be to simply sit in the Cherry Racer, beside her brother, as the landscape rolled by outside.
"Sure," Dominic said.
The two of them got in the car, and Dominic maneuvered his sadly burdened hot wheels out of the parking lot. He drove around Isleywood campus twice, and then he expanded the radius of their cruising to include the rest of Montville. When they drove through Old Town Montville, Katasha pointed out the Persian restaurant she'd eaten at last night. Mostly though, she was quiet.
Dominic filled the silence with minor anecdotes about the week. Renee and Dmitri were, remarkably, still getting along. Dmitri had relented and promised Renee that he wouldn't date any other cats at college, at least not for the first semester, until they figured out if they could make a long distance relationship work.
Mama and Papa, however, had continued to fight. Dominic thought the stress of having most of their kittens moving out was getting to them. He hoped their quarrels would settle down once the transition was over.
All of this was pretty much what Katasha expected. In fact, she wasn't even surprised when Dominic informed her that Florabella had practically moved into the empty half of her old room. It made her sad and jealous, though. The idea of her own room at home, empty and waiting for her, was shattered by the image of Florabella and Corina sharing it like they were sisters. Nonetheless, that would be over soon.
"Corina and Dmitri must be on their way to Orrington State today," she said. "Right?"
Dominic glanced over. He was driving them back to campus now, turning the steering wheel as they rounded the block that would bring them back to the student parking lot. "That's right," he said. "You know, she doesn't say it, but Corina misses you horribly."
That made Katasha feel better. She missed Corina too. More than she had expected.
"You're a funny one, Tash," Dominic said, as he parked the car and turned off the engine. "You couldn't wait to get here all summer long. Now you're acting like you want to turn around and go home."
Katasha twitched the tip of her tail, considering Dominic's allegation. "No..." she said. "I don't want to go home."
"That's good," he replied, getting out of the car. Then, leaning back in so Katasha could hear him, he said, "Florabella and I have plans to turn the entire upstairs into our love nest, so I wasn't offering to take you."
Katasha rolled her eyes. Once she was out of the car, she stared levelly at Dominic across the hood and said, "I'm making you carry all the heavy boxes."
True to her word, Katasha selected a box for herself that she recognized as holding the comforter, pillow, and sheets for her bed. That would be nice and light. Also, she was eager to return Daria's ruffled monstrosity to Daria's side of the room as soon as possible.
The box slipped against the skin on her paw pads as she pulled it off the roof of the Cherry Racer. Katasha dug her claws in to get a solid hold. Then, once she saw that Dominic was properly weighed down with a nice heavy box full of books and computer equipment, she called out to him, "The dorm's this way!"
The student parking lot was behind the recreation building. They walked past the recreation building, and across the well kept lawn to Greene Dorm. The doors at the end of the hallway were propped open. Clearly, Katasha and Dominic weren't the only ones lugging boxes across campus today.
Once they made it to her room, Katasha scratched at the base of the door with the claws of her left hind paw. Daria opened the door, and said, "Ooh! Boxes!"
Katasha set her box down in the middle of the floor and directed Dominic to do the same.
"This must be your brother," Daria said.
"Yes," Katasha answered. "He's busy right now. I'll introduce him after he brings in the rest of the boxes."
Katasha and Dominic stared at each other, blue eyes to blue eyes. Dominic folded, swishing his tail. "Fine," he said, "but only because..." He looked at Daria and halted. Katasha thought he was going to say something about how distraught she'd seemed on their drive. Apparently, he thought better of it. "Only because I want to impress your roommate."
As soon as Dominic left, Katasha said to Daria, "He's kidding. He has a girlfriend." Then she extended a claw and settled down to opening her boxes. She sliced through the packing tape, and turned back the cardboard flaps to reveal hidden treasure, heavenly pieces of home.
Her bed looked much better once she'd replaced the bulky, bumpy ruffles of the borrowed quilt with the smooth, geometric lines of her own patchwork quilt. Mama had sewn one for each of the kittens when they were quite small. It had just the right weight and warmth and a beautiful collection of autumnal colors. Each kitten had been allowed to pick their own patches out from Mama's vast collection of fabrics. So, Corina's quilt was a riotous rainbow of colors. Dmitri's was shades of gray, and Dominic's was tan and blue.
Katasha looked over at the far side of the room and frowned. Daria's shades of magenta simply weren't right. She might need to get a rainbow colored poster or something to properly balance out her own half of the room. She'd never felt the need for more color when Corina was around... Without her, Katasha just might miss the rainbows.
Daria helped Katasha set up her computer and arrange her books. When Dominic finished hauling in boxes, he flopped down on the newly made bed. "I've done my part," he said.
"You should look up your class schedule," Daria said.
