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Overview
Now Claire faces being the “new girl” in school. A year later, she is confronting betrayal . . . and sin. Finally, she is fifteen and in love. But it is not a love that can be spoken of, least of all by Claire.
In five interrelated stories, Claire grows into a young woman, learning about racism, sex, and love along the way. Most of all, she learns about truth.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547076140 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 11/10/2008 |
| Pages: | 167 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
| Age Range: | 12 - 17 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter Three Miss Kitty
There was nothing appealing about the dark gray kitten. She was scraggly and flea-bitten and skinny. You could count her ribs through her fur. She had come into a world where no one wanted her, and been abandoned before she was old enough to care for herself.
My brother and I were walking near the baseball field when we found her.
The field was a rough one Hugh and his friends had carved out in the long grass between the woods and Lexington Avenue, with its double row of cement-mill company houses. The kitten was teetering on top of the field’s homemade backstop, surrounded by cheering boys.
The boys were taking bets on how high they could count before the mite lost her frantic hold on the boards and tumbled to the ground again. Tommy, Fred, Jack—they were all there. Even Bobby, though he was three years younger than the rest and wasn’t usually tolerated by them. They were all laughing and slapping each other on the back . . . and counting.
Putting the scraggly kitten up there on top of the backstop had been Bobby’s idea. Maybe that was why the other boys were allowing him to hang around, because he’d come up with such a good idea. Jack was the one who had the bets going.
Hugh and I stood for a few seconds, taking everything in. The excited boys, elbowing one another, egging one another on. The terrified kitten, scrabbling on her perch, needle-like claws extended, tail puffed like a bottle brush, pink mouth open in silent pleading.
It was the last that affected me most, the way she kept opening her mouth without making a sound. The mews seemed to have been frightened right out of her.
I wanted to protest, but I was afraid of the boys. There was a roughness about them that had always intimidated me. So though I longed to rush in and snatch the kitten away, I looked to my older brother instead, hoping he would come to the rescue.
I had never seen the kitten before.
She didn’t belong to anyone we knew, and from the looks of her no one cared what happened to her. Except for me and, I hoped, Hugh. The kitten didn’t look as though she was going to survive much longer if someone didn’t interfere with the game she was caught in.
“Hey!” Hugh said to the boys.
The kitten fell again, her legs splayed, her tiny puff of a tail poked straight out behind as if she were trying to turn herself into a parachute.
But if that was what she intended, she wasn’t very successful. Not only did she fall fast, she didn’t even land on her feet. She hit the ground on her side with a soft but perceptible thud. It was hard to believe anything so small could make that much of a sound on impact.
Harder still to believe she had enough life left in her to claw and bite when Bobby picked her up to return her to the top of the backstop.
“Ow!” Bobby yelled, followed by several stronger words. And he flung his hand, sending the kitten sailing once more. This time she managed to get her feet under her before she landed, though she had less time to prepare.
“Hey!” I said it this time. “You leave that kitten alone!” The boys turned to gawk at me before they laughed.
But Hugh stepped forward. “I’ll take her,” he said. “Give the kitten to me.” They weren’t keen on stopping their fun, but my brother had a quiet authority over them, and they gave her to Hugh without too much complaint. I wanted to be the one to carry her home, but Hugh just shook his head and kept her cupped against his chest.
“She’ll scratch you,” he said. “She doesn’t even know how to retract her claws.” Maybe, I thought, she knows, but she’s never felt safe enough to put her weapons away.
I loved cats. We had one at home named Sooty. We had Sooty despite the fact that our mother had grown up on a farm and didn’t really believe in having animals in the house. They belonged, she said, outside or in a barn. But she allowed a cat, partly because I begged for one and partly because it kept down the population of mice that scurried through the walls of our old frame house. When one cat met with some accident, as it inevitably did, we always got another. Sooner or later, someone we knew would be giving away kittens.
Sooty was a tortoise-shell, black with ginger and cream splotches. I was the one who’d named her. I always named the cats, though Hugh sometimes complained about the names I picked. Our favorite cat of all I had called Wee One, a name he’d positively hated. When she went out into the woods one night and didn’t return, she’d been replaced by Sooty. Hugh didn’t seem to mind the name Sooty. He liked cats well enough, but he had no use for dogs. He never said, straight out, that he was afraid of dogs, but I’d gone with him on his afternoon paper route a time or two.
There were a couple of mutts on the route that came running out, gggggrowling and yapping at him, and you needed only to see his face to know that he was scared spitless. I had to admire him, though—he wouldn’t give up that route.
Still, my brother was reasonably fond of cats. Sometimes at night he even let Sooty come into his bedroom to sleep on his bed, right behind his knees. That annoyed me. “She’s my cat,” I would tell him, though no one had ever said the cat was mine. “You’d better explain that to Sooty,” he always replied.
This kitten, though, would be mine for sure. Entirely.
We found our mother in the kitchen, making strawberry preserves. The steam from the bubbling pot of strawberries filled the kitchen with fragrant heat.
She said no of course. We both knew that was what she would say. I took over at that point, arguing, wheedling, describing the horrible death awaiting the poor little thing if we didn’t make a home for her.
Hugh went back outside and left the kitten’s fate to me. I guess he knew I’d wear Mom down. And, finally, she did give in. Rather, she didn’t so much give in as quit arguing. Our dad would argue endlessly on just about any topic at all, so long as you kept up your end of the discussion and didn’t use any dirty tricks like tears. I usually lost arguments with Dad for descending into tears. It didn’t take much, though, for our mother to run out of arguments . . .
and words. Once she did, the kitten settled in.
Hugh named this one. He said since he’d rescued her, she was his to name, and the name he came up with was about what I would have expected from him. He called her Kitty.
I objected. Who wouldn’t? Hugh refused to budge, though, so I put my stamp on his choice. I called the indignant puff of gray fur Miss Kitty.
Hugh just shrugged and ignored the “Miss” part of her name. And after a while, as usually happened, Miss Kitty ended up belonging to me anyway . . . as much as she could be said to belong to anybody.
Under either name, the tabby kitten did not grow up well. Either because of her rough beginnings at the backstop or earlier deprivations we knew nothing about, she grew into a cranky, disagreeable cat. She would as soon claw you as look at you. And the fierce light in her yellow eyes made her feelings very clear: She hated everyone on sight.
Sooty simply stayed away from her.
The rest of the family did, too. But I kept trying to tame her. Day after day, I held Miss Kitty on my lap, gently stroking her, and she usually accepted the attention for a time. When she decided she’d had enough, though, she gave no warning. She just flipped over onto her back, clamped her teeth down on the offending hand, and raked the attached arm with her back claws. I often went around with hands and arms that resembled pin cushions.
Miss Kitty was grown before she had another experience to justify her dark view of humans. She had brought an early-summer litter of kittens into the world in a corner of what my family called “the entry.” It was a small enclosed porch leading to the kitchen door, the most accessible entrance to the house and the only one anybody used.
The corner was a well-protected place to harbor mother and babies. The outer door to the entry always stayed open, which meant that Miss Kitty could come and go as she pleased, and a rug under a small table that stood behind the open door provided a cozy corner cave.
Miss Kitty loved those kittens fiercely and took excellent care of them. But it happened that our family was going on vacation while the kittens were still very young, so Hugh asked Brad, a friend and neighbor, to take over his paper route and, while he was doing that, to come by and feed the cats every day. Brad agreed, and we went off on our trip.
We returned two weeks later to find the entry littered with smashed flower pots tipped from a high shelf, the kittens gone, moved to the woods, we later found out, and a Fuller Brush catalog stuck between the inner screen door and the door that led into the kitchen. We pieced together the first part of the story from the evidence on hand.
The Fuller Brush man had obviously come by and, finding no one home, put his catalog between the two inner doors and left, shutting the solid outer door to the small porch behind him.
Obviously, he’d forgotten that the outer door always stood open, and he probably never saw the cat and her babies in their dark corner. He must have had no idea that he was shutting the mother in, away from the food and milk Brad set out each day beneath a nearby tree, away from the small creatures she hunted, away from places distant enough from her brood to safely relieve herself.
Miss Kitty had clearly gone crazy.
The rest we learned from Brad. He had arrived one evening, pausing on the paper route to feed the cats, only to find the door to the entry firmly closed and Miss Kitty, frantic at her confinement, leaping and yowling and scrabbling inside. Of course, he opened the door. Wouldn’t you? Simply releasing a trapped cat seemed the way to proceed.
But this wasn’t just any cat. It was Miss Kitty. And she had never been much impressed by kindness. So instead of responding with gratitude toward her benefactor, she flew at him in a rage.
She attacked Brad so fiercely that he gave up on the idea of feeding her and ran down the hill behind the house with the canvas bag of papers banging against his butt. “She was like a mad dog,” he said, pulling down his sock to show remnants of the neat puncture marks on each side of his Achilles tendon. “She caught up with me and tore a big piece out of my sock!” A neighbor, working in his garden at the top of the hill, heard Brad yell and ran over to help. For good measure, Miss Kitty chased him down the hill, too.
Brad was a loyal friend. He continued to bring food for the two cats until we returned, but each time he did, he tiptoed through the yard quietly, always relieved that he hadn’t encountered the gray cat again. And when it came time to find homes for the new litter of kittens, he made a great point of saying they didn’t need a cat at his house.
From that day on, Miss Kitty had a reputation in the neighborhood. She still tolerated the members of her immediate family, barely, but she looked at other human beings—especially males—with a distinctly jaundiced eye.
She once allowed a visiting toddler who had escaped supervision for a few moments to haul her about without a sound of complaint or extended claw. But no one outside the family with an even slightly deepened voice or long trousers was permitted to come onto the property.
A wandering dog that had the poor judgment to trot across our yard one afternoon was ridden into the woods with Miss Kitty attached firmly to his back.
Dad had never taken much interest in the gray cat—or any of our cats, for that matter—but he did now. “We’ll be sued, you know,” he said to Mom, again and again. “If that cat attacks one more person, we’ll be sued!” Mother listened to his dire forecasts without comment. I listened, too, without paying much attention. Dad was a worrier. He always seemed to be fretting about something.
The truth was, though, as hard as I would have fought to keep her, I was half-afraid of my beloved Miss Kitty.
Even a task as simple as giving her a bowl of stinky cat food turned into a hazard. She didn’t stay on the floor, mewing and rubbing and twining between my ankles, as any proper cat would do.
Instead, every time I fed her, Miss Kitty threw herself into the air, snatching at the bowl—and at the vulnerable hand that carried it—with stiletto claws. And because her deadly exuberance put terror into my heart, I tended to put off the next feeding until she was so hungry that her leaping and grabbing and clawing was even more dramatic—and more painful—than the time before. Still, she was mine, and if her existence in our family had been threatened, I would have fought to keep her.
Or rather I would have until I saw the puppy.
Copyright © 2007 by Marion Dane Bauer.
Reprinted by permission of Clarion Books / Houghton Mifflin Company.