Leonard (My Life as a Cat), Carlie Sorosiak [7 ebook reader .txt] 📗

ask you a question,” Q said after a moment, leaning back in his chair. “Do you think I’m weird?” Just then, he screwed up his face, puffing out his cheeks, widening his eyeballs like a fish.

Olive tried, very unsuccessfully, to suppress a grin.

“That’s what I thought. Now, I don’t want to feed you some junk like ‘everyone’s on their own path,’ but in a way it’s true. There are people who take the roads and people who take the marshlands. You, my friend, don’t seem like a road taker. Anytime you want to talk about animals, I’m all ears.” Q took a breath, reaching over to pat the crest of my head. “But hey, you’ve got the summer to figure everything out. Figure out exactly who you want to be.”

Something told me that maybe he was talking to me, too.

That night, after returning from the aquarium, Olive asked to keep me. Keep me, for real.

I was listening next to the refrigerator, Stanley panting by my side.

“I’ll walk him and everything,” Olive was saying on the phone. “Yes, Mom, walk him. He’s good on a leash. Mmm-hmm. I know. I know. But you haven’t even seen him! He’s really cute and well behaved, and he hasn’t scratched me or bitten me or anything. And he even uses the litter box—most of the time! It’s a big responsibility. I get it. But I’m also thinking . . . if we move to California with Frank . . .”

Olive paused. She sucked in a breath.

“Is it so bad,” she said, “to want a friend?”

I couldn’t let this go on any longer—not as Olive stood there in the kitchen, asking her mother: Can I keep him? Everything was stacking up: my will to live, my homesickness. And now I didn’t want to disappoint Olive, this human girl who kept rescuing me over and over again. She was becoming attached. Wouldn’t it be kinder to say something now?

“You hear that, Leonard?” Olive said, hanging up the phone. Excitement danced in her voice. “My mom said she’ll consider it, which is a good sign. She wouldn’t let me even think about a hamster. Or a rabbit.”

She knelt down, stroking the underside of my chin. As she blinked at me, I knew that I had to be brave—like the fiercest of house cats—and tell her exactly what I was. How would she react? How horribly might this go? Anxiety surged in my stomach, but still, I mapped out a plan: Tonight, find a crayon.

You see, my methods for telling Olive were limited. Pencils were too sharp—a danger to the eyes. Pens could burst, staining the white patches of my fur. Crayons were absolutely the answer: beautifully colored wax sticks that were also incredibly safe. Human children used them, so how difficult could they be?

We went to bed. After Olive flicked off the lamp, her turtle night-light glowing, I scoured the house: at the bottom of backpacks, in the ceramic kitchen bowls, under tables and chairs. Luckily, there was a big box of crayons in the downstairs closet—ninety-six colors, sorted into shades. As a cat, my eyes were most sensitive to blues, greens, and yellows. I’m not sure if this is true for all felines, or perhaps just me, but I could see some browns, some orange tones. Still, I had a hard time choosing between SEPIA and RAW SIENNA, but eventually I selected the second: it was more E.T.’s shade of brown.

I set to work the next morning as the humans ate breakfast; I figured it was better to work undisturbed. Rather quickly, it became apparent that gripping the crayon with my front paws was a disastrous plan. I couldn’t write straight enough. My mouth—my mouth was the key. Crunching the crayon with my back molars, I could just about steady it. True, my tongue was watering from the bitterness, and I had to breathe vigorously through my nose to keep from choking, but once I got the hang of it, I was surprised by how cleanly the crayon wrote. It was a warm day, and the wax drifted onto the walls.

Spitting out the crayon with an exaggerated hack, I stepped back to admire my work. The word ALIEN was haphazardly scrawled in brown letters, over a foot high, just above Olive’s baseboard. I’ll admit that panic did seize me. I was really doing this. Olive would see my work; she would know. Part of me asked, What if she is afraid of you? Another part said, What if she tells the world? I sat stiffly by the words, taller than me, and bid my time—preparing for the inevitable shock of Olive’s reaction.

The fur tingled between the pads of my toes.

I began mildly hyperventilating.

And Olive breezed in fifteen minutes later, asking if I’d seen her copy of Wild Animals and Beyond—a book she was reading and enjoying, too. “It was right here,” she said, lifting up her pillow. “I swore that’s where I left it.”

I cleared my throat, flicked my tail toward ALIEN, and braced myself. This was it.

“Oh!” she said, vision skating right past me. “In the kitchen. I think I left it in the kitchen. You coming, Leonard?”

Alien! I shouted after her. I am an alien!

But she was already halfway down the stairs, then she was sliding on a pair of yellow sandals, grabbing a beach towel and her book. I followed, caterwauling as she began heading in the direction of the ocean, as the screen door slapped behind us. My tail fuzzed, whiskers pulling back. Everything was happening so fast—so wrongly—that it floored me. Here I was, shouting after a human, desperately trying to tell her that I was not of this world, and the human was grabbing my harness.

“I haven’t gone to the beach at all this summer,” Olive said, holding my gaze at the bottom of the steps. Gently, she slipped the harness over my head, clicked the buckle, and attached a leash. “I’m not really