Jessica Martinez - The Vow

Reed’s staring at me. I need to say something, but I can’t think of the words to reassure him. His eyes are that faultless chocolate brown, and it’s easier just to get lost in them. But he’s waiting.

“I’m so sorry,” I say softly.

He shrugs, looking uncomfortable. “I don’t want you to be sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong, and I’m okay. It’s okay now.”

I nod and look away because it doesn’t seem like he wants me watching him. His embarrassment is sitting between us on the couch now.

“Mo and I really are just friends.”

He doesn’t hear the way the words catch in my throat, the muscles constricting over them in a sudden panicky spasm. He takes their meaning at face value, my smile as proof that I won’t hurt him. I’m trustworthy.

And I feel a little better because he feels better. Maybe I should tell him the truth or break it off or just leave, but I don’t. None of those things is the right thing either. I’m pretty sure there no longer is a right thing, if there ever was.

There’s only what feels right. I don’t stop him as he lifts me from my corner of the couch and pulls me onto his lap.

Mo

I pull Satan’s Cat from her corner of the couch onto my lap. Mistake. Painful mistake. Her Highness makes the same feral scream she did the last time I dared to touch her and digs a new set of gashes down my left forearm with both claws.

I scream swear words in English, Spanish, and Arabic (covering all my bases), and she scampers away.

I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m not sure why I keep trying. She is, after all, Satan’s Cat, and has been since the day I took over as her guardian, the day she proved herself totally unworthy of being called Duchess by crapping on my pillow.

My arm kills. I inspect the fresh red lines branding me as her property. Droplets of blood bubble up along the deepest one, but I don’t wipe them away. I stare at the blood, focusing on the pain, trying to harness it to fuel my revenge. Because I think it’s finally time for revenge.

I’ve been trying all weekend to make friends with Satan’s Cat—yes, actually trying to forge an emotional bond with the most sinister feline the animal kingdom has ever produced—but she’s still giving me the hiss-and-fang show. As if lying on the couch crying off and on for the last forty-eight hours hasn’t been emasculating enough, I’m now being rejected by a puffball formerly known as Duchess.

I spent the first few hours in this apartment wandering around baby-talking to Duchess, looking for Duchess’ bunny toy, scooping Duchess’ piss puddles out of the litter box. When I found the diarrhea on my pillow, it was almost a relief, as if she was giving me permission to let the charade go. We were to be mortal enemies. We are mortal enemies. For ever and ever. I should probably eat something—I feel light-headed.

Hopefully Sarina doesn’t mind that her cherished pet is my new nemesis. Not that she’ll know. I promised to keep the animal alive, not sing her songs and braid her hair. The only redeeming aspect of the cat situation is that she’s distracted me from the torn and ragged feeling in my chest every time I think about my family.

I look over at Satan’s Cat in the corner, and of course she starts it again. She widens her eyes. I sigh loudly, but not enough to deter her. Another staring contest. This is probably somewhere around our fifteenth in two days. It goes like this. Satan’s Cat stares into my eyes. I stare into Satan’s Cat’s eyes. After a few minutes I get freaked out and jump off the couch, usually screaming the same string of trilingual curse words as before because she has the most terrifying eyes in the world. They’re amber with long black flecks in them that look like slivers, and I swear after about thirty seconds they start spinning like pinwheels and she’s actually grinning at me the whole time—EVEN THOUGH CATS CAN’T GRIN!—probably because she knows she’s stretching her evil out and into my brain. Demonic ocular poisoning. I’d Google it if I weren’t so afraid of what I’d see. Whatever. Maybe this time I’ll win.

The nasal apartment buzzer—the auditory equivalent of a rusty nail probing the softest part of my brain—sends Satan’s Cat scrambling off the couch. She’s jumpy. Probably related to a guilty conscience.

I drag myself up and off the couch and stumble through the cloud of dizziness swirling my field of vision around like a psychedelic glow stick. Is this the first time I’ve stood up today? Yeah. Maybe. I can’t really remember when yesterday ended and today started, and I must’ve gotten up to pee at some point. I shuffle my way over to the intercom and hold the wall-mounted box for a moment to steady myself. When things look relatively solid, I depress the red button. “Yeah?” My voice is gravel, tar, and a cheese grater.

“Let me up.”

“Who is this?”

“Very funny, Mo. Let me up.”

“This sounds like a girl I used to know. Annabelle, I believe her name was.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry. The weekend’s been a little crazy.”

“For you, too? I’ve been wrestling with a possessed feline and contemplating whether a toaster in the bathtub would actually do the job.”

“You’d better be talking about killing the cat.”

“Actually, I was referring to both of us. We’ve made a murder-suicide pact.”

“You can’t make a murder-suicide pact. It’s just a suicide pact, and you don’t make one with a cat.”

“I’m not even sure she’s a cat,” I explain. “She could be, like, I don’t know, the devil incarnate.”

“Let me up.”

“If it’s not a murder-suicide pact, what do you call it when she promised to kill me if I don’t kill myself ?”

“Mo!”

“Fine.”

I press the gray button, look around, and realize too late that I’ve made a mistake. She’s going to go nuts. I’ve got three days’ worth of dirty dishes on the coffee table and half a box of used tissue from when I may have shed a few manly tears about being abandoned, all scattered around the permanent body imprint I’ve left on the couch. Four empty bottles of Mountain Dew on the end table, and oh yeah, and a family-size box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch on its side beside the couch with about two hundred tiny cinnamon toasts sprinkled across the carpet, which I may have accidentally kicked over and trudged through on my way to the intercom. And the boxes I was supposed to unpack—my clothes, my books, some dishes and kitchen crap that I don’t even know how to use, some decorating stuff my mom insisted I keep—are all still stacked in a tower in the corner, unopened. Satan’s Cat is perched stone-like, glaring down at me from the top one. Hell’s gargoyle.

Annie doesn’t knock. The door opens and she takes a few cautious steps into the cave, looking around without a word. She’s wearing another one of those sundress things that she doesn’t seem to realize make her look like she’s a five-year-old time traveler from the 1950s. There’s something else different about her too, but it takes me a moment to figure it out. Her hair is curled. She hasn’t curled her hair since Chris Dorsey. Great.

She places her purse oh-so-gingerly on an open patch of carpet, then turns a slow circle. She saw the place last week after we’d just moved the boxes in, before my family left, so she knows what it’s supposed to look like. I brace for impact. I’m predicting the words “disgusting,” “pig,” and “health inspector” in any order.

What I’m not predicting is for her to turn, put her hand on my arm, and say, “Oh.”

Just oh.

I underestimated her. The way she looks at me, eyes bigger than gumballs, it’s clear I’m not the revolting, unshowered mess of a human being I’ve morphed into over the last forty-eight hours. We’re not even at Wisper Pines. We’re at the Louisville Children’s Science Center, I’ve got piss running down both of my legs, and she’s the only one in the world who sees me.

I swallow and turn away. She doesn’t try to hug me, and for that alone, I will love her forever.

She starts with the food, scooping handfuls of cereal into an empty grocery bag she finds in the kitchen. I watch for a few numb seconds, then go off to find the vacuum cleaner.

When I get back she’s holding an empty Mountain Dew bottle in each hand. “Recycling bin?”

“Can’t do it. Global warming conspiracy theory is way too mainstream.”

She doesn’t even roll her eyes, just tosses them into the trash.

I gather the tissues and chuck them too. “I had a cold,” I mutter, in case she’s wondering, but she doesn’t even raise an eyebrow.

Satan’s Cat watches it all from her perch until Annie opens up a can of cat food and scoops it into a bowl. For this, the beast hops down from her roost, slinks and weaves her way through Annie’s legs, then begins taking dainty little bites.

I glare at the beast. When I feed her, she pounces on it, stopping to hiss every few seconds to let me know her feelings for me haven’t changed just because I’m keeping her alive.

“No offense,” Annie says after a few minutes of cleaning, “but how long has it been since you showered?”

“Uh . . .” I can’t even remember what day I took them to the airport. Friday? And today’s Sunday? No, Monday. Maybe.

“Go shower.”

I obey, relieved to be bossed around, relieved to not be having another staring contest with Satan’s Cat, relieved someone is offended by my stench. And my obedience leads to the discovery of Wisper Pines’s finest amenity: the showerhead. They really should have included it in the brochure. I mean, the tennis and basketball courts plus community gardens are lovely features, but this showerhead is way better because it feels like I’m being pelted by skin-melting lasers, and it’s something I’m going to use every day. Well, theoretically. If I’d known, I would’ve spent the last two or three or four days in here instead of lying on the couch.