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

sleeping bags, and her laptop from the RV, and we settled in for the night, a flashlight between us.

“Eight hundred and ninety-two miles left,” she said to the tent ceiling, her words sifting through the dark. “And we have to drive that in a day. It’ll take us fourteen hours, at least. That’s if we don’t make any stops at all. We should’ve left earlier, Leonard. I should’ve figured everything out sooner. I’m so sorry.”

She was apologizing to me? After all the good she’d done?

It occurred to me then: Olive could’ve had a regular cat. Maybe in an alternate universe, in another summer, that is what Olive found: an earthly cat, who’d curl up at the edge of her bed, day after day, year after year, until its fur grew thin and gray.

Instead, she got me. And I felt a bit ashamed, for not fulfilling that role. For bringing her on such a difficult journey.

“I really wanted to you to be my cat,” she said, as if reading my mind, “and maybe a tiny part of me waited until the end of the month because I didn’t want you to leave. Sometimes I wish that I could stay—that we could stay—in Turtle Beach forever.”

I cocked my head at her. Turtle Beach, I understood; but I couldn’t fathom why she wanted me so badly. On the surface, dogs seemed like much more reliable pets. They were obedient and loyal. They brought in newspapers. They attacked intruders in a more convincing manner than cats.

I pawed at her, asking, Laptop, please?

She rolled over to open it.

These were some of my last chances to ask her anything—ask her everything and anything on my mind. My raincoat swished as I typed.

Best day on Earth. That is a question for you.

“My best day?” she asked. “That’s . . . Well . . . Can I tell you something first?”

I nodded.

“I’ve been thinking about what Norma said all day, about my dad. I can’t stop thinking about it.” Absentmindedly, she unclipped and reclipped her daisy barrettes. “I really did want to like my mom’s boyfriend, Frank—to have someone else in my life. Not a dad, but someone like a dad. Someone in my corner. I mean, my mom’s been there. Before this summer, the longest we’d been apart was for two weeks, when I was at Science Explorers camp. You’d like her a lot, Leonard. But lately she’s always around Frank . . . and now he’s going to live with us? Permanently? In California?”

Her nostrils flared as she blew out a breath. “I don’t even know if he’ll let us put up the photos. Of my dad. We keep a few on the mantel, a few in the kitchen. My dad loved to cook.” She paused, hesitant. “Would you maybe want to see a picture?”

I did. I would. Before I could properly answer, though, she was reaching deep into the pocket of her overalls. I cannot tell you what that did to me, the realization that she was keeping him with her, all this time. It was a small photo, easily cupped in her palm, and there he was: rounded ears, light-brown skin, a gap-toothed smile. So much like Olive.

“I know people always say this in movies,” Olive whispered, “but the worst part is, I don’t even remember if I said goodbye. I don’t remember much about him at all.” She drew the sleeping bag tighter around her, and I readjusted myself, kneading the puffy fabric. “Leonard?”

I looked at her with a purr.

“When you leave, can you say goodbye?”

She said it so earnestly, so quietly, that it nearly stopped my heart.

“A real goodbye,” she continued, producing something else from her backpack. It was a tiny circular object: flat, possibly cardboard, and yellow. “I know you’re not dying or anything. It’s the opposite. But . . . still.” The corners of her mouth curled into wistful smile. “Sometimes I thought that if I had just one good friend—one really good friend—it would make all the difference. And then I met you. And it did.”

In that instant, I understood what was in her hands. A ranger badge. A handmade ranger badge, with my name printed in black ink.

“We were supposed to get something like this in Girl Scouts, to go across our sashes, but I never got that far. So . . . I wanted to make sure you had one.” Olive cleared her throat. “For bravery and resilience, and for excellent penguin communication, I award you the Yellowstone Badge.”

She pinned it on my raincoat.

My throat quivered.

“You don’t have to say anything,” she told me. “I know.”

We left the campground just before the crack of dawn. It was a long drive through the rest of Nebraska—nothing but rolling plains, dotted with the occasional tree. Everything was the color of tumbleweeds, and gigantic sprinklers spread across the fields like wings. As I stuck my head out the window, I found myself missing the beach, missing the sea grass and the shore.

There wasn’t much time for stopping—the hive would collect me in less than twenty hours—but we ran low on gas in the middle of Nebraska, pulling into a station for a refuel. Norma tried to dawdle, perusing the gas station’s aisles in an incredibly slow manner, while Q filled up the tank. Olive, Stanley, and I were waiting on the curb when we glimpsed something in the distance. Something moving.

“See it?” Olive asked.

Stanley a-wooed in response, and I shuddered my tail.

It was standing a hundred feet away, just beyond the motor home. A deer with a white tail, her head dipping to chomp at a sprig of grass, her ears twitching in the mid-July heat. For a second, her gaze fell on the three of us, and it felt like a sign: that I was so close to the wildlife of Yellowstone, so close to leaving all of this behind. Because I wanted to leave tomorrow morning. And I didn’t. The two were mixing