Page 3 of Kitten

“Oh no.” James’s voice came from behind me. On the glass dining table, my box of cupcakes from Lou had been ravaged. Only a few swirls of pink and purple frosting remained. Seeing the box, Silver leapt out of James’s arms and slipped into the bedroom.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s okay.”

“I’m so sorry,” said James. “I haven’t looked after her in a long time. I forget she eats everything.”

“It’s okay. I didn’t really want them anyway.”

“You lie down,” said James. “I’ll clean.”

Later that night, while James was asleep, I went to the kitchen and opened the trash bin. All of James’s garbage was compressed so that my box of cupcakes sat squarely on the surface, the paper lid dark with grease. I fingered the remaining frosting into my mouth and allowed myself to think back to my last visit home, the last time my mother and I spoke. She asked me to stay. I left. When there was no frosting left, I folded the box into itself until it was compact and hard, then pushed it down with the rest of the trash. I accepted then that my birthday was over and resolved to put away thoughts of my mother.

2

I met James six months ago in March, at the retreat of a long and bad winter, the city damp with melted snow. Graduation was looming, and Lou had just received a job offer. Not long into our bar crawl, Lou went home with somebody less intelligent than she was while I became desperate for attention from strangers. Being drunk tended to make me that way. I knew it was pathetic, but I didn’t care. I wanted what I wanted, and what I wanted at that moment, more than anything, was to be kissed.

A glass dropped and shattered on the floor next to my feet. Nobody moved, so I bent to clean it up. But James had noticed, too. He strode across the room and knelt beside me, sweeping his hands quickly over the shards. By the time the staff arrived with cleaning supplies, the floor was spotless, James’s hands empty. I asked where he put all the glass. When he turned to face me, he smiled like he recognized me. Later, I would learn that this was simply how James saw the world: like there was no reason it couldn’t be his.

He shook a packet of chips. “Ta-da,” he said. Before he could go, I puked on his shirt. It was one of my best moves.

James paid for a taxi to my place and held my hair as I continued to vomit into the toilet bowl for the next hour. At some point in the night, Lou returned. The sound of her footsteps grew louder as she neared the bathroom but stopped at the door, then eventually receded. James put me in the shower with my clothes still on and began to wash my pukey hair. “That’s not mine,” I said, panicked. He was using Lou’s expensive shampoo. “That’s the wrong one.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s just shampoo.”

Shampoo mattered, especially when it cost as much as Lou’s. But it smelled good, and James’s fingers were firm and comforting against my scalp, as if determined to rub away the drunk. Afterward, we lay on my bed with our feet against the headboard. I’d never lain in the opposite direction from where you were supposed to and felt like I was in a movie.

James admired the paintings I hung above the headboard: my mother’s. He asked if I also painted. I said yes. That was a mistake, because then he insisted on seeing my “work.” It had been a few years since I’d seriously painted, and all my stuff was at home. I found a few photos on my phone: a solitary tree, two chairs facing each other. The colors were unblended, the brushstrokes irregular. They were not my best work.

“These are really nice.” James’s voice was soft and clear. “You have an eye for humanizing inanimate objects. Did you mean for the chairs to be talking?” I looked at the photo. I only ever saw them as chairs and told him so.

“My mother likes the kind of stuff you do,” he said.“Contemporary still lifes.” I wondered if he was maybe making fun of me. But as he continued to speak, his sentences rushed and meandering, I concluded he was simply the kind of person who disliked silence in conversations. His mother had been sick for long periods when he was a kid, he said. Even though she was better now, he always wondered how long it would last. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” He returned my phone. “I guess your paintings, the chairs, they remind me of something, they kind of remind me of the armchairs in her first hospital room. We’d spend the whole afternoon sharing a jar of peanut butter and reading their shitty magazines. Okay, yeah, Jesus. That’s enough from me. I’ll stop now.”

My mother had never been hospital sick, though she stopped eating when I was a teenager. I pictured us in facing chairs. Even in my imagination, I could not meet her eye. I refocused my gaze to the directly visible: James’s damp gray socks, my bare feet.

“There’s a hole in your sock,” I blurted.

James laughed, the sound thick and resounding like a book dropping. I worried it would wake Lou. Then he inched his foot over so our pinkie toes touched, and I forgot about her immediately. “A hole in my sock,” he said. “Good to know we’re both bad at small talk.”

We fell asleep at around five in the morning. The sky had just begun to pale. When I woke, James was snoring, and it was late afternoon. My hair, still damp, smelled better than ever. I felt like a baby bird still wet from the hatch, at once helpless and extraordinarily alive. One week later, Jamesand I slept together for the first time. A week after that, he asked me to be his girlfriend.

—

James needed to complete manywork-related tasks over the weekend before we left for Holme. These tasks weren’t assigned to him; he’d volunteered for them himself. Normally I took pleasure in James’s ability to impress people, enjoyed watching their faces brighten, guard abruptly lowered, at something he said or simply did without their requesting. But this time, it bothered me. James had said he was going “on vacation mode.” He even did the finger quotes.

James worked so hard that for a long time I didn’t think he could actually be rich. There was no reason, I believed, to commit yourself to making money if you were born with it. But James was devoted to his job, a copywriting role at a brand consultancy that, according to the website, turned consumer trends into love stories. He never talked about the hours he spent in the office, sometimes eleven a day. I’d had jobs since I was fifteen, but never that many hours at a time.

Before graduating, I hadn’t paid attention to the fact that James had a corporate job. But in the absence of classes and Lou, who started working, too, the enormity of James’s workday and the comparative vacancy of my own enveloped me slowly and assertively, like a summer flu. I occasionally did some work for the university, an administrative role I got through work study, but mostly I spent whole afternoons in bed, watching YouTube videos about strange addictions or else ignoring cryptic messages from Lou. Iinterpreted her mounting passive aggression as either the by-product of her growing work ennui—she couldn’t stand all the “vapid L.A. bitches”—or, and this seemed more likely, proof that she regretted asking me to be her roommate. Then, at last, always after I’d convinced myself he wouldn’t, James would pull the night back from the brink of expiry with a message to come over.

For most of Saturday morning, James sat in the same position in front of his laptop, rewriting an email. “Tom says my politeness makes me sound more junior than I am,” he said. His desk was next to the big window, and in the afternoon when the sun was at its brightest, his whole body seemed to glow slightly, like he was ascending to some higher plane of existence. Silver seemed to find him particularly attractive then. She pawed at his leg and chirruped for attention, which he occasionally gave. Mostly, though, he looked at his laptop with a serious expression.

“Come here,” I patted my leg. “Silver, come here.”

Silver’s ears twitched. She didn’t move.

“Meow,” I said.

She rounded her back, as if offended.

James stretched, the motion tossing a shadow on the wall. Silver’s body doubled in length as she leapt to catch it. When James’s hands returned to the keyboard, the shadow disappeared. Silver cocked her head. “Wow,” I said. “You’re really confused, aren’t you?” I raised my hand over my head, the shadows of my fingers stretching on the wall like tentacles. At the sight, Silver perked. I stilled my hand. To my delight, she pounced. I folded my left hand over my right to make the shape of a barking dog. “Arf! Arf!” Silver chasedthe shadow dog as I ran it across the wall, past the corner, and onto the next one. There she froze, waiting for the dog to return to the wall in front of her, not knowing to turn her head. Her eyes spun, vacant. I felt very sorry for her then, confronted with the basic limits of her consciousness.