White Cat

I put a big chunk of sauce-soaked bread in my mouth and stand.



“Congratulations. You’re going to be sleeping in your room tonight, Mr. Sharpe.”



I nod, chewing. Maybe if I make it through tonight, they’ll consider letting me stay.



“But I want you to know that I have Dean Wharton’s dog and she’s going to be sleeping in the hallway. That dog is going to bark like hell if you go on one of your midnight strolls. I better not see you out of your room, not even to go to the bathroom. Do you understand?”



I swallow. “Yes, sir.”



“Better get back and start on your homework.”



“Right,” I say. “Absolutely. Thank you, sir.”



I seldom walk back from the dining hall alone. Above the trees, their leaves the pale green of new buds, bats weave through the still-bright sky. The air is heavy with the smell of crushed grass, threaded through with smoke. Somewhere someone’s burning the wet, half-decomposed foliage of winter.



Sam sits at his desk, earbuds in, huge back to the door and head down as he doodles in the pages of his physics textbook. He barely looks up when I flop down on the bed. We have about three hours of homework a night, and our evening study period is only two hours, so if you want to spend the break at half-past-nine not freaking out, you have to cram. I’m not sure that the picture of the wide-eyed zombie girl biting out the brains of senior douchebag James Page is part of Sam’s homework, but if it is, his physics teacher is awesome.



I pull out books from my backpack and start on trig problems, but as my pencil scrapes across the page of my notebook, I realize I don’t really remember class well enough to solve anything. Pushing those books toward my pillow, I decide to read the chapter we were assigned in mythology. It’s some more messed-up Olympian family stuff, starring Zeus. His pregnant girlfriend, Semele, gets tricked by his wife, Hera, into demanding to see Zeus in all his godly glory. Despite knowing this is going to kill Semele, he shows her the goods. A few minutes later he’s cutting baby Dionysus out of burned-up Semele’s womb and sewing him into his own leg. No wonder Dionysus drank all the time. I just get to the part where Dionysus is being raised as a girl (to keep him hidden from Hera, of course), when Kyle bangs against the door frame.



“What?” Sam says, pulling off one of his buds and turning in his chair.



“Phone for you,” Kyle says, looking in my direction.



I guess before everyone had a cell phone, the only way students could call home was to save up their quarters and feed them into the ancient pay phone at the end of every dorm hall. Despite the occasional midnight crank call, Wallingford has left those old phones where they were. People occasionally still use them; mostly parents calling someone whose cell battery died or who wasn’t returning messages. Or my mother, calling from jail.



I pick up the familiar heavy black receiver. “Hello?”



“I am very disappointed in you,” Mom says. “That school is making you soft in the head. What were you doing up on a roof?” Theoretically Mom shouldn’t be able to call another pay phone from the pay phone in prison, but she found a way around that. First she gets my sister-in-law to accept the charges, then Maura can three-way call me, or anyone else Mom needs. Lawyers. Philip. Barron.



Of course, Mom could three-way call my cell phone, but she’s sure that all cell phone conversations are being listened to by some shady peeping-Tom branch of the government, so she tries to avoid using them.



“I’m okay,” I say. “Thanks for checking in on me.” Her voice reminds me that Philip’s coming to pick me up in the morning. I have a brief fantasy of him never bothering to show up and the whole thing blowing over.



“Checking up on you? I’m your mother! I should be there! It is so unfair that I have to be cooped up like this while you’re gallivanting around on rooftops, getting into the kind of trouble you never would have if you had a stable family—a mother at home. That’s what I told the judge. I told him that if he put me away, this would happen. Well, not this specifically, but no one can say I didn’t warn him.”



Mom likes to talk. She likes to talk so much that you can mmm-hmm along with her and have a whole conversation in which you don’t say a word. Especially now, when she’s far enough away that even if she’s pissed off she can’t put her hand to your bare skin and make you sob with remorse.



Emotion work is powerful stuff.



“Listen,” she says. “You are going home with Philip. You’ll be among our kind of people, at least. Safe.”



Our kind of people. Workers. Only I’m not one. The only nonworker in my whole family. I cup my hand over the receiver. “Am I in some kind of danger?”



“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. You know I got the nicest letter from that count. He wants to take me on a cruise with him when I get out of here. What do you think of that? You should come along. I’ll tell him you’re my assistant.”



I smile. Sure she can be scary and manipulative, but she loves me. “Okay, Mom.”



“Really? Oh, that’ll be great, honey. You know this whole thing is so unfair. I can’t believe they would take me away from my babies when you need me the most. I’ve spoken to my lawyers, and they are going to get this whole thing straightened out. I told them you need me. But if you could write a letter, that would help.”



I know I won’t. “I have to go, Mom. It’s study period. I’m not supposed to be on the phone.”



“Oh, let me talk to that hall master of yours. What’s his name. Valerie?”



“Valerio.”



“You just get him for me. I’ll explain everything. I’m sure he’s a nice man.”



“I’ve really got to go. I’ve got homework.”



I hear her laugh, and then a sound that I know is her lighting a cigarette. I hear the deep inhalation, the slight crackle of burning paper. “Why? You’re done with that place.”



“If I don’t do my homework, I will be.”



“Sweetheart, you know what your problem is? You take everything too seriously. It’s because you’re the baby of the family—” I can imagine her getting into that line of theorizing, stabbing the air for emphasis, standing against the painted cinder block wall of the jail.



“Bye, Mom.”



“You stay with your brothers,” she says softly. “Stay safe.”



“Bye, Mom,” I say again, and hang up. My chest feels tight.



I stand in the hallway a few moments longer, until the break starts and everyone files down to the common lounge on the first floor.



Rahul Pathak and Jeremy Fletcher-Fiske, the other two junior-year soccer players in the house, wave me over to the striped couch they’ve settled on. I wave back, take a hot chocolate packet, and mix it into a large cup of coffee. I think technically the coffee is supposed to be for staff, but we all drink it and no one says anything.



When I sit down, Jeremy makes a face. “You got the heebeegeebies?”



“Yeah, from your mother,” I say, without any real heat. HBG is the abbreviation for some long medical term that means “worker,” hence “the heebeegeebies.”



“Oh, come on,” he says. “Seriously, I have a proposition for you. I need you to hook me up with somebody who can work my girlfriend and make her really hot for me. At prom. We can pay.”



“I don’t know anyone like that.”



“Sure you do,” Jeremy says, looking at me steadily, like I’m so far beneath him he can’t figure out why he has to even try to persuade me. I should be delighted to help. That’s what I’m for. “She’s going to take off her charms and everything. She wants to do it.”



I wonder how much he’d pay for it. Not enough to keep me out of trouble. “Sorry. I can’t help you.”



Rahul takes an envelope out of the inside pocket of his jacket and pushes it in my direction.



“Look, I said I can’t do it,” I say again. “I can’t, okay?”



“No, no,” he says. “I saw the mouse. I am completely sure it was heading toward one of those glue traps. Dead before tomorrow.” He mimes his hand slashing across his throat with a grin. “Fifty dollars on glue.”



Jeremy frowns, like he’s not sure he’s ready to give up trying me, but he’s not sure how to get the conversation back to where he wants it either.



I shove the envelope into my pocket, forcing myself to relax. “Hope not,” I say quickly, reminding myself that after I get back to the room, I’m going to make Sam note down the amount and for what. It’ll be good practice. “That mouse is good for business.”



“Yeah, because you just want to keep taking our money,” says Rahul, but he smiles when he says it.



I shrug my shoulders. There’s no good answer.



“I bet it chews off one of its feet and gets away,” Jeremy says. “That thing is a survivor.”



“So bet, Jeremy,” Rahul says. “Put up.”



“I don’t have it on me,” says Jeremy, turning the front pockets of his pants inside out with an exaggerated gesture.



Rahul laughs. “I’ll cover you.”



The mocha burns my throat. I’m hating everything about this conversation. “If you need to collect, Sam’s going to be taking care of things for me.”



They stop their negotiation and look across the room at Sam. He’s sitting at the table in front of a pile of graph paper, painting a lead figurine. Next to him Jill Pearson-White rolls strange-sided dice and pumps her fist into the air.



“You trust him with our money?” Rahul asks.



“I trust him,” I say. “And you trust me.”



“You sure we can still trust you? That was some serious One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest–type behavior last night.” Jeremy’s new girlfriend is in drama club, and it shows in his movie references. “And now you’re going away for a while?”



Even with the coffee running in my veins and the long nap this afternoon, I’m tired. And I’m sick of explaining about the sleepwalking. No one believes me anyway. “That’s personal,” I say, and then tap the part of the envelope sticking out of my pocket. “This is professional.”



That night, lying in the dark and looking up at the ceiling, I’m not sure the sugar and caffeine I’ve gulped will be enough. There is no way they’ll ever let me back into Wallingford if I sleepwalk again, so I don’t want to risk dozing off. I can hear the dog outside the door, its toenails clicking across the wood planks of the hallway before it settles into a new spot with a soft thud.



I keep thinking about Philip. I keep thinking about how, unlike Barron, he hasn’t looked me in the eyes since I was fourteen. He never even lets me play with his son. Now I am going to have to stay in a house with him until I can figure my way back to school.



“Hey,” Sam says from the other bed. “You’re creeping me out, staring at the ceiling like that. You look dead. Unblinking.”



“I’m blinking.” I keep my voice low. “I don’t want to fall asleep.”



He rustles his covers, turning onto his side. “How come? You afraid you’re going to—”



“Yeah,” I say.



“Oh.” I’m glad I can’t see his expression in the darkness.



“What if you did something so terrible that you didn’t want to face anyone who knew about it?” My voice is so soft that I’m not even sure he can hear me. I don’t know what made me say it. I never talk about stuff like that, and certainly not with Sam.



“You did try to kill yourself?”



I guess I should have seen that coming, but I didn’t. “No,” I say. “Honest.”



I imagine him weighing possible responses, and I wish I could take back the question. “Okay. This terrible thing. Why did I do it?” he asks finally.



“You don’t know,” I say.



“That doesn’t make sense. How can I not know?” The way we’re talking reminds me of one of Sam’s games. You reach a crossroads and there’s a small twisty path going toward the mountains. The wide path seems to run in the direction of town. Which way do you go? Like I’m a character he’s trying to play and he doesn’t like the rules.



“You just don’t. That’s the worst part. It’s not something you want to believe you’d ever do. But you did.” I don’t like the rules either.



Sam leans back against the pillows. “I guess I’d start with that. There must be a reason. If you don’t figure out why, you’ll probably do it again.”



I stare up into the darkness and wish that I wasn’t so tired. “It’s hard to be a good person,” I say. “Because I already know I’m not.”



“Sometimes,” Sam says, “I can’t tell when you’re lying.”



“I never lie,” I lie.



* * *



After not sleeping all night, I’m pretty dazed in the morning. When Valerio bangs on the door, I answer, fresh from a cold shower that jolted me awake enough to put on some clothes. He looks relieved to find me alive and in my room. Next to Valerio stands my brother Philip. His expensive mirrored sunglasses are pushed up onto his slicked-back hair, and a gold watch flashes on his wrist. Philip’s tanned skin makes his teeth look whiter when he smiles.



“Mr. Sharpe, the board of trustees talked to the school’s legal team, and they want me to communicate to you that if you want to come back to school, you need to be evaluated by a physician, and that physician must be able to assure the school that nothing like the incident that took place the night before last will happen again. Do you understand me?”