Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [83]
“I love you,” she whispered into Nick’s hair.
“Me too,” Nick whispered back. “Actually.”
Patrick thought he heard a mewing sound. He peeked through the dusty wooden boards of a nearby box stall. On the floor of the stall was a cardboard box housing a gray cat and her kittens. The cats stared up at him with accusing yellow eyes. Have you been drinking? they seemed to say. The kittens were shivering. Patrick opened the door to the stall and picked up the box. He carried it out of the barn and through the snow to the house, cradling the top of the box against his chest to keep out the snow. The mother cat was big. She must have weighed nearly twenty pounds.
He put the box under the kitchen table, filled up a bowl full of sheep’s milk from the fridge, and placed the bowl next to the box. His parents had never allowed him a pet. It felt nice, providing for these little creatures.
“There,” he told the wary mother cat. “See? I’m not so bad.”
The gray cat continued to stare at him while he finished off the grapes. A minute or two went by. Then the cat stood up and stretched and hopped out of the box to lap up the milk. Patrick lunged for the box and scooped up a soft black kitten, carefully stashing it in his parka pocket. He headed outside to the car, ignoring the mother cat’s accusing glare.
Tragedy buried her chin beneath the collar of the thick raccoon coat. The fur was warm as hell. Falling almost down to her ankles, it completely insulated every part of her body except her head, which was frozen raw. Pretty soon she’d be able to peel her head off her shoulders, like a wart that had been frozen off.
She liked to walk. No matter the weather, she’d always liked to walk. The woods around Dexter were connected by a trail that looped around itself like a giant pretzel, with the town of Home in the middle of one loop, and the college, up on its hill, in the middle of the other. She thought she knew the trail blindfolded—rain, shine, in sunlight, or in total darkness. One of her usual routes led from the top of the hill behind her house all the way to the field house at Dexter, on the other side of the Pond. This was the path she was on now. At least, she thought she was. Walking in a blizzard in the dark was like solving a Rubik’s cube with only white squares.
The melody of the Bee Gees song she’d been named after moseyed through her mind like Muzak in a grocery store. It’s hard to see. With all this snow and no pants on, you’re going nowhere…
Her parents hoped that naming their beautiful baby girl Tragedy might provide some relief from all the ugly tragedies in the world. The personal is political. Make love not war. Think globally act locally. Those were their mottos. And she liked the way people repeated it when she said her name, rolling it around in their mouths and testing it out. “Pretty,” they’d say, looking her up and down.
Where was the fucking field house? She’d been walking for hours, and there was not a building or a light in sight. The path she was on ended in a clump of uprooted trees. It looked like a car wreck. She must have gotten turned around somewhere. Maybe she’d walked over the state line into Canada, which might actually be all right. Her mom and dad would miss her, but she could write to them tomorrow and let them know she was okay.
“Fuck!” she exclaimed, remembering the sheep. She was supposed to put them in the back stalls and throw them some hay.
“Double fuck!” she shouted, remembering the kittens. It was cold now and Storm, the mother cat, would be hungry.