Page 10 of Kitten

I couldn’t bring myself to move. My eye glared back at me, ugly next to the iridescent tiles of the mirror. This sensation of being frozen in place was another familiar childhood feeling. My mother, for reasons she never articulated to me, hated being at home. She often took herself on long drives, or else worked late at the lab. In her absence, I passed many hours the way I did now, studying my reflection, waiting for something—hunger, thirst, the click of the front door—to break my stillness. In the summer, my mother left me ice pops she made from soda and food coloring, which I used to stain my lips red. I knew red lips were beautiful because my mother had them. On the bathroom mirror, I’d trace the mouth of my reflection with the tip of a melting pop, watch the red crawl down my reflection’s face. I dreaded the moment the liquid finished its journey and pooled in the border between mirror and wall. There, the girl in the mirror ceased to exist, and I felt she was more real than me.

Those were lonely but not unhappy hours. There was a certain pleasure in challenging the girl in the mirror to stay still. But something had changed between then and now—a capacity for imagination had been lost. In my reflection, I saw only myself.

Again, my phone buzzed. Again, it was only James.

—

Downstairs, it smelled like butterand garlic. James hummed as he set the table. I felt nervous but somewhatexcited about him seeing my eye. I knew he would be startled and then very worried.

James stopped humming as soon as he saw me. “What happened?” His breath was warm, slightly garlicky. He took my face and turned it toward the ceiling light.

“I don’t know. It just looked like this when I got out of the shower.”

“It looks like you’ve burst a blood vessel,” he said, confirming my hypothesis. “You’ll be okay, try not to touch it.”

Scanning the room for Silver, I took stock of my surroundings. Everything looked hand-drawn or homemade: the ceramic plates, the painted pitcher, even the dining table, which was simple and wooden with visible black nails. There was a time in my life where this room would’ve looked plain to me, the décor unconsidered, but I sensed now that the plainness was intentional. This discernment, I felt, had been given to me against my will.

Outside, the spines of closed beach umbrellas shuddered against the windows, casting shadows on the walls. Silver studied the shadows with focus. When she finally turned to look at me, she seemed startled at my appearance. Then she licked her paw and brought it to the left side of her face, swiping at her eye. My heart jumped.

“James.” I pointed. “Look!”

“Cute, right? She’s bathing herself.”

Silver and I met each other’s gaze. She licked and swiped again at her eye. “It’s like she can see something’s wrong with my eye,” I said. “She’s showing me how to heal.”

“That’s a sweet thought.”

He didn’t believe me. I licked my finger and massagedmy eye, the way my mother used to smear her saliva on my scraped knees. Spit, she said, was your body’s own antibiotic; you didn’t need anything else. It was only when Lou caught me licking a bad stovetop burn in our sophomore year that I realized this was gross. “Whoever taught you that needs to be jailed,” she’d said, handing me a tube of Vaseline. I hadn’t licked my wounds since, until now.

James had prepared potatoes and scallops for dinner. I loved scallops because of the surf-and-turf buffets my university threw each spring, when they covered the campus in bounce houses and served steak and seafood while blasting R&B music into the evening. The fanfare was probably designed to distract from the winter’s suicides, reliable as clockwork, but Lou and I loved it in earnest. Surf and turf was one of the only things we did together sober.

I told James my theory about surf and turf.

“God,” he said. “That’s dark.”

“It wasn’t so bad. People seemed used to it.”

“Five suicides a semester?”

“That was only freshman year. Every other year was two or three.” I didn’t know why I was talking about the student suicides. I was probably disrespecting their memory by invoking surf and turf.

“God,” James said again. “That didn’t happen at my school. Maybe I forgot. Or blocked it out.”

I wondered if I should be blocking out the ones from my school, too, but that also felt disrespectful.

“It’s really a shame,” James said. A small pink blotch formed just above his right eyebrow. I could see that he felt deeply about this. “Life gets so much better after college.All that talk about it being the best four years of your life isn’t just false, it’s dangerous.”

“Life gets so much better?” I posed the question as a challenge, but James took it as agreement. He nodded as he speared a scallop.

“We forget what it’s like to be a kid, to have no control.”

The only time I remembered being remotely happy was when I was a kid. I debated voicing this, but James continued. “What kids, teenagers really want is the ability to do something for themselves. Have whatever breakfast they want, ora room of their own.” He made quotations with his fingers.

“You think the people who killed themselves wouldn’t have done it if they had their own rooms?”

“I’m clearly not saying that—”

“I find it hard to believe that the answer to unhappiness is taking control of your life. That’s the exact sort of thing people, like, kill themselves to not do.”