Theme anthologies are gold mines for some writers. Give them a topic, and they can write a story around it. Cat story, horse story, a story about a magician with a sword, a haunted house story, a story about a mermaid . . . And oh, how I envy those writers.
I just can’t do it.
Lord knows I’ve tried. But it’s sort of like the fable about the emperor who would give his fortune to the man who could look at a white horse and not think about its tail, but in reverse. The more someone gives me a theme, the more those stories elude me.
But once in a great while, I still manage to wriggle and wrangle a story into a theme anthology. “Strays” is a tale like that. I was approached by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, a longtime friend and fellow writer. She was editing an anthology to be called Warrior Princesses. Surely, as a fantasy writer, I could come up with a story that had such a character.
Well. No. Or rather, yes and no. I was working on a story. And with a touch or two, perhaps I could convey a bit of royalty to my protagonist.
And once I did, I perceived that she’d actually been a princess all the time. For every female cat is a queen.
Lonnie Spencer looked like a boy. She sat on a rusty bike, one foot on the curb, the toe of her other ratty sneaker in the gutter. She had scabby knees, a smoking skull on her baggy sweatshirt, and a baseball hat backward over her chopped black hair. What’s wrong with that kid’s face? was my second thought when I saw her. My first had been to avoid him because he looked like he’d kick gutter water at you just to get it on your school clothes.
As I edged past, she spoke in a clear girl’s voice, “Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”
I had been staring. I’d never seen anyone my own age with a big scar down her face. It ridged her Native American skin, pulling her cheek and her eye to one side. It was hard not to stare. So I looked down and saw the Barbie doll lashed to the front of her bike. It had a fur skirt and one boob. Her clumpy hair was tied back with gold thread. A tiny wooden bow was slung over her shoulder.
“Amazon,” I said without thinking.
“Yeah!” Lonnie grinned and suddenly didn’t look so scary. “She’s an Amazon warrior. That’s why I cut off her tit. So she can shoot a bow better. I read that they really did that.”
“I know. I read about it too.”
Our eyes met. Connection. We both read, and we read weird stuff, stuff about women who were warriors. It’s so simple, when you’re a kid.
In her next breath, Lonnie announced, “I’m a warrior too. I been teaching myself martial arts. Ninja stuff, swords and pikes, too. I want to learn to shoot a bow. Scars are okay, on a warrior. Hey. My name’s Lonnie Spencer.” She stuck out a grubby hand. She had a boy’s way of doing things. “What’s yours?”
Her hand was scratchy, scabs and dirt and dry skin. “Mandy Curtis.”
“Mandy, huh. Bet you get teased a lot about that in school. Handy Mandy. I hate school. All the teachers hate me and the kids tease me all the time. ’Cause of my scars, you know, and because I don’t dress like they do. They think if you don’t have the right kind of clothes, you’re nothing. Lower than shit.”
Her words spilled forth. I sensed she needed to talk but didn’t find many listeners. I’m a listener, like my mom. She says it’s our curse, to have total strangers tell us their darkest secrets. I glanced at Lonnie again. Not many of the girls I’d met at school would want to be seen talking to her. My clothes were a lot better than hers were and I was still having trouble making friends.
I kept walking. I was supposed to come straight home from school every day. We were new to this neighborhood and Mom was jumpy. Our building was okay, but two blocks away was a commercial strip, and the apartments that bordered it attracted what Mom called “a rougher element.” Mom had never defined that but I looked at Lonnie and knew. She coasted her bike alongside in the gutter as I walked. “I didn’t get my scars in a fight, though,” she volunteered abruptly. “My mom threw me through a picture window when I was two. She was pretty drunk and I was fussy. That’s what she says, anyway. Cut up my face and cut my leg muscles, too.” She watched for my reaction. Her words challenged me. “That’s why I limp when I walk. They had to put over a hundred and seven stitches in me. After that, they put me in a foster home, until my grandma came and got me. Now Mom has me.”
Kids ask the questions that adults swallow. “Why do you want to live with someone who threw you through a window?”
Lonnie lifted one shoulder. “Well, you know, she’s my mom. She went to counseling. And the court says it’s okay, and Grandma is getting pretty old. So.” Again the one-shoulder shrug.
So. That could sum up a lot of Lonnie Spencer. So.
The conversation lagged awkwardly. Mom wouldn’t want me hanging around with Lonnie. I knew it. I think Lonnie knew it too. But I was as desperately lonely as she was. “You go to Mason School?” I asked her, just as she exclaimed, “Oh, no! Not Scruffy, oh, man . . .”
She hopped off her bike, letting it clatter into the gutter. Without a look at me she hurried to a sodden calico body at the edge of the street. I followed her, reluctant but curious. Lonnie crouched close over it; I stayed back. The cat’s mouth was open, white teeth and a sprawling tongue. I wouldn’t have touched that sunken body with a stick, but Lonnie stroked it, smoothing its soggy fur.
“I hope his next eight lives are better than this one was,” she said quietly.
“You really believe a cat has nine lives?”
“Sure. Why not? One old lady, a foster mom, she told me if a cat really likes you, it can give you one of its lives. Wouldn’t that be something? Get to live a cat’s life?”
I looked at the dead cat. “Doesn’t look like he enjoyed it much,” I pointed out.
“I can think of worse lives than being a stray cat,” she said darkly as she unslung her backpack. She pulled out a can of neon orange spray paint. The balls inside it rattled like dice as she shook it. Then she outlined the cat’s body, meticulously tracing each leg and the tail, even the jab of an ear against the pavement. She surveyed her work, then capped the paint and put it away. Without squeamishness, she picked up the little body and moved it to the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street. The orange outline of the body remained on the pavement, a grim reminder. I was speechless.
Lonnie wiped her hands self-consciously down her shirt. “I don’t think people should just hit a cat and forget it,” she said quietly. “This way, whoever hit that cat has to look at that outline every time they drive past. I put the bodies up off the street and some city guy comes and picks them up instead of the next fifty cars making him mush.”
“Do you think we should try to find his owner?” I asked in a hushed voice. In a macabre way, I relished the idea of being the bearer of such sad tidings.
“Naw,” Lonnie said dismissively. She looked down at the dead cat with bitterness. “Scruffy didn’t belong to anyone except himself. A stray disappears, no one wonders about it.” She shrugged into her backpack. As she picked her bike out of the gutter, she added, “I figure it’s something I owe them, in a way. My loyal subjects should not be left dead in the street. I done all I can for him, now . . .”
“Your loyal subjects?” I asked skeptically. Being weird is okay unless it’s fake-weird. A lot of kids pretend to be weird just to impress other people. I wondered about Lonnie. Maybe even her scar story was fake, maybe she’d just been in a bad car wreck.
She gave her shrug again. “I’m Queen of the Strays. Even my mom says so. Which reminds me, I’m supposed to be picking up some junk for my mom. See you around.”
She was already pedaling down the street. When she hit puddles, muddy water rooster-tailed up her back, but she didn’t avoid them. Fluorescent cats and a one-boobed Barbie. Genuinely weird, I decided. I liked her. “Yeah, see you,” I called after her.
I got home just as the rain resumed. I called Mom’s office and left a message on her voice mail that I was safely home. I dumped my books in my room and went to the kitchen. Not much in the fridge. There used to be little microwave pizzas or pudding cups when Mom and Dad were together. Not that we’re starving now, just on a budget. I grabbed an apple and some cheese. Then I watched television and did homework until Mom got home. I forgot about Lonnie until late that night. I thought about rain soaking the cat’s body and hoped someone had picked it up. Then I thought about all the live strays, shivering in the rain. Lonnie was Queen of the Strays. I wondered what she had meant and then I fell asleep.
Three weeks passed. I didn’t see Lonnie. I watched for her, in the lunchroom at school or when I saw kids on bikes in the street, but I never saw her. Then one day, walking home from school, I found two outlines of dead cats in the street. The paint was bright and fresh.
I had reached the front of our apartment building and was fishing my key out of my shirt when Lonnie yelled to me from down the block. I waved back and she came in a lopsided run. She favored her right leg. As she came, I realized that her whole body twisted that direction. It hadn’t been so obvious when she was on her bike.
“Hey, Mandy,” she greeted me.
I was surprised at how glad I was to see her. “Hey, Lonnie! Long time, no see. Where’s your bike?”
She shrugged. “Got stole. My mom left it out and someone took it while I was gone. She didn’t even notice until I asked her where it went. So.” She paused, then changed the subject. “Hey. Look what I made.” She pulled a little drawstring bag out of her shirt. It was hanging around her neck on a string. “This is my new, uh, whatacallit, omelette.”
“Amulet,” I said reflexively.
She tugged the bag open. Inside was a little princess doll from a McDonald’s Happy Meal. Like the Barbie, it was missing a boob. As it was dressed in a ball gown, it looked very peculiar. Lonnie shrugged at my frown. “It doesn’t look as good as the other one.”
I changed the subject. “So. Where were you, then?”
She shrugged again as she replaced her amulet. “CPS came and got me, ’cause I missed so much school. They stuck me in a foster home, but they couldn’t make me go to school either. So now I got a deal with my social worker. She lets me live with my mom, I stay out of trouble and go to school.”
“I didn’t see you at school today,” I pointed out. “If you live around here, you should go to Mason.”
“Yeah, I should,” she conceded sarcastically. “But even when I’m there, you wouldn’t see me. I’m in the special-ed classes at the end of the hall.”
“But you’re not retarded!” I protested.
“Special ed isn’t all retarded. There’s deaf kids. And ADD. Hyperactive. Emotionally disturbed. They got lots of names for us troublemakers. They just shove us together and forget about us.”
“Oh,” I said lamely.
“I don’t care.” She smiled and wagged her head to show how little it bothered her. “Mostly I just read all day. They don’t bother me, I don’t give them any grief.”
“Well.” I glanced up at the sky. “I’ve got to go in. I have to call my mom as soon as I get home from school.”
“Oh, latchkey kid, huh?” She watched me stick my key in the security door. “Well, after that, do you want to hang out?”
I stopped. “I’m not supposed to have friends in when Mom isn’t home,” I said awkwardly. I hated saying it. I was sure she’d take it as an excuse to ditch her.
“So who’s going to tell?” she demanded with a superior look. I quailed before it. Knowing I was going to regret this, knowing I’d have to tell my mom later, I unlocked the door and let her in ahead of me.
Our apartment was on the third floor. I was painfully conscious of Lonnie limping up the stairs. There was an elevator at the other end of the building but I’d never used it. I felt almost ashamed that my body was sound and whole and that the climb didn’t bother me. As I unlocked my door, I automatically said, “Wipe your feet.”
“Du-uh!” Lonnie retorted sarcastically. She walked in just like a stray cat, with that sort of wiggle that says they’re doing you a favor to come in. She stopped in the middle of our living room. For an instant, the envy on her face was so intense it was almost hatred. Then she gave her shrug. “Nice place,” she said neutrally. “Got anything to eat?”
“In the kitchen. I’ve got to phone Mom.”
While I left my message, Lonnie went through the refrigerator. By the time I got off the phone, she had eaten an apple, drunk a big glass of milk and poured herself a second one, and taken out the bread and margarine. “Want a sandwich?” she asked as I turned around.
“I hate peanut butter and that’s all there is,” I said stiffly. I’d never seen anyone go through a refrigerator so fast. Especially someone else’s refrigerator.
“There’s sugar,” she said, spreading margarine thickly on two slices of bread. “Ever had a sugar sandwich? Mom used to give them to me all the time.”
“That’s gross,” I said as she picked up the sugar bowl and dumped sugar on the bread. She pushed it out in a thick layer, capped it with the other piece of buttered bread. When she lifted it, sugar dribbled out around the edges. Her teeth crunched in the thick layer of sugar. I winced. I imagined her teeth melting away inside her mouth.
“You ought to try it,” she told me through a mouthful. She washed it down with half the glass of milk, sighed, and took another sandy bite.
As she drained off the milk, I suddenly knew that Lonnie had been really hungry. Not after-school snack hungry, but really hungry. I had seen the billboards about Americans going to bed hungry, but I never grasped it until I watched Lonnie eat. It scared me. I suddenly wanted her out of our house. It wasn’t all the food she had eaten or the sugar mess on the floor. It suddenly seemed that by living near people like Lonnie and having her inside our house, Mom and I had gotten closer to some invisible edge. First there had been the real family and home, Mom and Dad and I in a house with a yard and Pop-Tarts and potato chips in the kitchen. Then there was Mom and I in an apartment, no yard, toast and jam instead of Pop-Tarts . . . We were safe right now, as long as Dad sent the support money, as long as Mom kept her job, but right down the street there were people who lived in cruddy apartments and their kids were in special ed and were hungry. That was scary. Mom and I weren’t people like that. We’d never be people like that. Unless . . .
“Let’s go hang out,” I said to her. I didn’t even put her glass in the dishwasher or sweep up the sugar. Instead, I took a pack of graham crackers out of the cupboard. I opened it as we walked to the door. She followed me, just like a hungry stray.
I felt safer as soon as I shut the door behind us. But now I was stuck outside with her on a cold and windy day. “Want to go to the library?” I offered. It was one of the few places Mom had approved for me to hang out on my own. Even then, I was supposed to say I was going there and phone again when I got back.
“Naw,” Lonnie said. She took the package of graham crackers, shook out three, and handed the stack back to me. “I have to pick up some junk for my mom. But we can do my route before that. Come on.”
I thought maybe she had a paper route. Instead it was her roadkill route. Lonnie patrolled for animal bodies. The only thing she found that day was a dead crow in the gutter. It had been there awhile, but she still painted around it and then moved the body reverently up onto the grassy strip. After that, we stopped at two Dumpsters, one behind Burger King and the other behind Kentucky Fried Chicken. They had concrete block enclosures and bushes around their Dumpsters. There was even a locked gate on Kentucky Fried Chicken’s, but it didn’t stop Lonnie. She made a big deal of waiting until no one was around before we crept up on them. “Warrior practice,” she whispered. “We could get arrested for this. You keep watch.”
So I stood guard while she went Dumpster diving. She emerged smelling like grease with bags full of chicken bones and half-eaten biscuits and a couple cartons of gravy. It amazed me how fast she filled up bags with stuff other people had thrown away. At Burger King, she got parts of hamburgers and fries. “What are you going to do with that stuff?” I asked Lonnie as we walked away. I was half afraid she’d say that she and her mom were going to eat it for dinner.
“Just wait. I’ll show you,” she promised. She grinned when she said it, like she was proud of what she carried.
“I’ve got to get home soon,” I told her. “Mom sometimes calls me back and I didn’t say I was going out. I’m supposed to be doing homework.”
“Don’t sweat it, sister. This won’t take long, and I really want you to see it. Come on.” She lurched along faster.
She lived on the other side of the main road and back two blocks off the strip. The sun goes down early in October. Lights were on inside the apartments. The building sign said Oakview Manor, but there were no oaks, no trees at all. Some boys were hanging out in the littered parking lot behind the building, smoking cigarettes and perching cool on top of a junk car. One called out as we walked by, “Hey, baby, wanna suck my weenie?” I was grossed out, but Lonnie acted like he didn’t exist. The boys laughed behind us, and one said something about “Scarface.” She kept walking, so I did too.
At the other end of the parking lot, three battered Dumpsters stank in a row. Beyond them was a vacant lot full of blackberry brambles and junk. Old tires and part of a chair stuck out of the brambles. The frame of a junk pickup truck was just visible through the sagging, wet vines. Lonnie sat down on the damp curb and tore open the bags. She spread the food out like it was a picnic, tearing the chicken and burgers to pieces with her fingers and then breaking up the biscuits on top of a bag and dumping the congealed gravy out on them. “For the little ones,” she told me quietly. She looked around at the bushes expectantly, then frowned. “Stand back. They’re shy of everyone but me.”
I backed up. I had guessed it would be cats and I was right. What was shocking was how many. “Kitty, kitty,” Lonnie called. Not loudly. But here came cats of every color and size and age, tattered veterans with ragged ears and sticky-eyed kittens trailing after their mothers. Blacks and calicoes, long-haired cats so matted they looked like dirty bath mats, and an elegant Siamese with only one ear emerged from that briar patch. An orange momma cat and her three black-and-white babies came singing. They converged on Lonnie and the food, crowding until they looked like a patchwork quilt of cat fur.
They were not delicate eaters. They made smacky noises and kitty ummm noises. They crunched bones and lapped gravy noisily. There were warning rumbles as felines jockeyed for position, but surprisingly little outright snarling or smacking. Instead, the overwhelming sound was purring.
Lonnie enthroned on the curb in the midst of her loyal subjects smiled down upon them. She judiciously moved round-bellied kittens to one side to let newcomers have a chance at the gravy and biscuits. As she reached down among the cats, the older felines offered her homage and fealty, pausing in their dining to rub their heads along her arms. Some even stood upright on their hind legs to embrace her. As the food diminished, I thought the cats would leave. Instead they simply turned more attention upon Lonnie. Her lap filled up with squirming kittens, while others clawed pleadingly at her legs. A huge orange tom suddenly leaped up to land as softly as a falling leaf on her shoulders. He draped himself there like a royal mantle, and his huge rusty purr vibrated the air. Lonnie preened. Pleasure and pride transformed her face. “See,” she called to me. “Queen of the Strays. I told you.” She opened her arms wide to indicate her swarm, and cats instantly reared up to bump their heads against her outstretched hands.
“Oh, yeah? Well, you’re gonna be Queen of the Ass-Kicked if you don’t get up here with my stuff!” The voice came from a third-floor window. To someone in the room behind him, the man said, “Stupid little cunt is down there fucking around with those cats again.”
The light went out of Lonnie’s face. She stared up at him. He glared back. He was a young man with dark, curly hair, his T-shirt tight on his muscular chest. A woman walked by behind him. I looked back at Lonnie. She had a sickly smile. With a pretense of brightness in her voice she called up, “Hey, Carl! Tell Mom to look out here, she should see all my cats!”
Carl’s face darkened. “Your mom don’t got time for that shit, and neither do you! Stupid fucking cats. No, don’t you encourage . . .” He turned from the window, drawing back a fist at someone and speaking angrily. Lonnie’s mom, I thought. He was threatening Lonnie’s mom. We couldn’t hear what he said. Lonnie stared up at the window, not with fear, but something darker. Carl leaned out again. “Get up here with my stuff!”
Lonnie stood up, the cats melting away around her, trickling away into the shadows. A lone cat stayed, a big striper, winding and bumping against her legs. She didn’t seem to feel him. Shame burned in her eyes when her eyes grazed me. This was not how she wanted me to see her. She reached up to grip the little doll strung around her neck. Her eyes suddenly blazed. She squared herself. “I didn’t go get your stuff.” She put her fists on her hips defiantly. “I forgot,” she said in a snotty voice.
Carl’s scowl deepened. “You forgot? Yeah, right. Well, you forget dinner or coming in until you get it, Lonnie. And it better not be short, or I’ll throw you outta this window. Get going, now!” He slammed the window shut. Across the parking lot, the boys laughed.
She stood a moment, then stuffed her hands in her pockets and walked away. The striper cat sat down with an unhappy meow. I hurried to catch up with her. It was getting really dark. Mom was going to kill me. “Lonnie?”
She didn’t look back. “I got to go,” she said in a thick voice.
I ran after her. “Lonnie! Lonnie, your cats are really something. You really are the Queen of the Strays.”
“Yeah,” she said flatly. She wouldn’t look at me. “I got to go. See you around.” She lengthened her stride, limping hastily away.
“Okay, I’ll look for you at school tomorrow.”
She didn’t answer. Darkness swallowed her. Rain began to fall.
Before I got home, the headlights of the cars were reflecting off the puddles in the streets. I hurried upstairs, praying that Mom wouldn’t be home yet. She wasn’t. I hung up my dripping coat, kicked off my wet sneakers, and raced into the kitchen. The phone machine was flashing. Six messages. I was toast.
I was cleaning up sugar and listening to Mom’s frantic, “Mandy? Are you there? Mandy, pick up!” when I heard her key in the front door. I was still standing in the kitchen looking guilty when she found me.
She looked me up and down. The lower half of my jeans and my socks were sopping. “Where have you been?”
I could have lied and said I was at the library, but Mom and I don’t do that to each other. And I needed to tell someone about Lonnie. So I told her everything, from the one-boobed Barbie to the cat-carpet and Carl. Her face got tight, and I knew she didn’t like what she was hearing. But she listened, while we fixed dinner. We didn’t have to talk about dinner. Wednesday was spaghetti. I chopped mushrooms and peppers, she chopped the onions and smashed the garlic. She put the water to boil for the pasta, I sawed the frozen French bread open and spread it with margarine.
By the time everything was ready, she had heard all about Lonnie. Her first words were pretty hard on me. “I trust you to have good judgment, Mandy.”
“I don’t think I did anything wrong.”
“I didn’t say you did wrong. I said you used poor judgment. You let a stranger in while I was gone. You left without telling me where you were going or when you’d be back. If something bad had happened to you, I wouldn’t even have known where to start looking.”
“Why do you always assume something bad is going to happen? When am I supposed to have friends over? I can’t have them in while you’re gone, and I can’t go out with them. What am I supposed to do, just come home and be alone all day?”
“You can have friends over,” my mom objected. “But I need to know something about people before we let them into our home. Mandy, just because a person is your own age and a girl doesn’t mean she can’t hurt you. Or that she won’t steal from us.”
“MOM!” I exploded, but she kept on talking.
“Lonnie is probably a nice kid who’s just had a hard time. But the people she knows may not be nice. If someone knew that I’m at work all day and you’re at school, they could rip us off. I certainly couldn’t afford to replace the stereo and the television and the microwave all at once. We’d just have to do without.”
“You haven’t even met Lonnie and you’re judging her!”
“I’m not judging her. I’m trying to protect you.” Mom paused. “Mandy. There’s a lot of Lonnies in the world. As much as I’d like to, I can’t save them all. Sometimes, I feel like I can’t even protect you anymore. But I do my best. Even when it means . . .” She halted. Then she spoke gravely. “Mandy, if you hang out with Lonnie, people will treat you like Lonnie. Not that Lonnie deserves to be treated like she is; in fact, I’m sure she doesn’t. But I can’t protect Lonnie. All I can do is try to protect you.”
She was so serious that my anger evaporated. We sat at the little table in the kitchen with our dinner getting cold between us. I tried to remember the big table in our old dining room with the hardwood floor and the wallpaper. I couldn’t. “Mom?” I asked suddenly. “What is the difference between Lonnie and me?”
Mom was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Maybe the difference is me. Someone who cares fiercely about you.”
“Lonnie loves her mom, even if she did throw her out a window.”
“Lonnie may love her mom, but it doesn’t sound like her mom cares about her. It doesn’t sound like anyone does.”
“Only her cats,” I conceded. “And half of them are deaders.” And me, I thought. I care about her.
In the end, we made compromises. I could have Lonnie over if I told Mom she was there. Mom had to get Lonnie’s phone number, address, and her mom’s name. If we went out, it had to be somewhere like the library, not just to walk around. I had to call Mom before I went and when I got back. I had to stay out of Dumpsters. And I wasn’t allowed to go to Lonnie’s house.
“But why?” I ventured.
“Because,” Mom said darkly, and that was the end of that.
I looked for Lonnie at school the next day. I even went to the special-ed rooms. No Lonnie. Three days later, I found one cat-body outline, but I couldn’t tell if it was new or old because of all the rain. I was afraid to go to her building. Mom was right, it was a tough neighborhood. But on the fourth day, I screwed up my courage and took the long way home from school to walk through her neighborhood.
I saw her from half a block away. She was standing at the corner of a convenience store parking lot, her arms crossed on her chest. There were three boys facing her. Two were our age, one looked older. They had her bike.
It was so beat up I wouldn’t have recognized it, except for the Amazon Barbie. One of the boys sat on the bike possessively while the other two stood between Lonnie and the bike.
“I don’t care what he said,” Lonnie told them. “It’s my bike and I want it back.” She tried to circle, to get close enough to get her hands on the bike, but the two boys blocked her lazily.
“Your dad said we could have it.” The boy on the bike was cocky about it.
“Carl’s not my dad!” Lonnie declared furiously. “Get off my bike!”
“So what? He said we could have it for picking up his junk for him. Gave us ten bucks, too.” There was a sneer of laughter in the older boy’s voice.
I froze, watching them. They moved by a set of unspoken rules. Lonnie could not physically touch the boys, and they knew it. All they had to do to keep her from the bike was to stand between her and it. She moved back and forth, trying to get past them. She looked stupid and helpless and she knew it. A man walked up to them and stopped. My hopes rose.
“It’s a piece of shit bike anyway,” one of the boys declared laughingly as they blocked her yet again.
“Yeah. We’re gonna take it down to the lake and run it off the dock into the water.”
The light changed. The man crossed the street. It was as if he had not even seen Lonnie and the boys and the bike. He didn’t even look back.
“You better not!” Lonnie threatened helplessly. She darted once more at the bike. And collided with a boy.
“Hey!” he pushed her violently back. “Keep your hands off me, bitch!”
“Yeah, whore!”
Suddenly, in the physical contact, the rules of the game had changed. The boys pushed at her. Lonnie cowered back, and the one on the bike rode it up on her, pushing the wheel against her. Now instead of trying to grab her bike back, she was trying to back away from it. The other boys touched her. Her face. “God, you’re ugly!” Her chest. “She ain’t got no tits, just like her dolly! Your momma cut them off, too?” Her crotch. “Whoo, whoo, you like that, ho?”
Across the street, a bus stopped and two people got off. They walked away into the darkness. Cars drove by in the gathering dusk of the overcast October evening. No one paid any attention to Lonnie’s plight. Deep in my heart, I knew why. She was already broken, already damaged past repairing. If you can’t fix something, then don’t worry about hurting it even more. The boys knew that. She wasn’t worth saving from them. It was like jumping on the couch that already had broken springs. She was just a thing to practice on.
“Stop it, stop it!” She flailed at them wildly, trying to slap away the hands that darted in to touch her insultingly, pushing, poking, slapping her face. She had forgotten she was a warrior. She was just a girl, and that was a boy’s game. She couldn’t win it. Leaves in the gutter rustled by. I was so cold I was shaking. So cold. I should get home; I was cold and it was getting dark and my mom would be mad at me. One of the boys pushed her hard as the other one rammed her with the bike. She fell down on the sidewalk and suddenly they ringed her, the bike discarded on the pavement as they sneered down at her.
Some tribal memory of what came next reared its savage face from my subconscious.
“No!” I suddenly screamed. My voice came out shrill and childish. I flew toward them, gripping my book bag by its strap. A stupid weapon, my only weapon. “Get away from her, get away from her!” I uttered the word I knew Lonnie could never say. “Help! Help me, someone, they’re hurting her! Help! Get away from her!”
I waded into them, swinging my book bag, and they suddenly fell back. Abruptly their ugly faces turned confused and surprised. Like magic, they were only boys again, just teasing boys who always push you as far as they can, especially if the playground teacher isn’t around.
“Look out, it’s Wonder Woman!” one yelled, and a man who had come to the door of the 7-Eleven across the parking lot laughed out loud. They grabbed the bike and ran away, shouting insults at one another—You pussy! You wimp! You sissy!—as they ran. No one came to help as I took Lonnie’s hands and dragged her to her feet. The knee of her sweatpants was torn, and her backpack was muddy. There was mud on the side of her face, too.
“Are you hurt?” I asked her as she stood. I tried to hug her. She slapped my hands angrily away.
“They got my damn bike! Shit! Shit, shit, shit, why didn’t you grab the bike while it was laying there!” Her eyes blazed as she turned on me. I fell back in surprise before her anger.
“I was worried about you! The bike wasn’t that important!”
“That’s easy for you to say. A bike isn’t the only damn thing you’ve got!” She lifted her sleeve to wipe mud off her face. She might have wiped away tears as well. I stared at her, speechless. I thought I had been brave, almost heroic. She seemed to think I had been stupid. She glanced up from examining a bleeding scrape on her knee and knew she’d hurt me. She tried to explain. “Look, it’s like this. If we had gotten the bike, we would have won. Now I got all bruised up and I lost, too. So they’ll tease me with the bike again. I got to fight them all over again tomorrow.”
“I think it’s dumb to fight for that bike at all,” I said quietly. “You could really get hurt. The bike isn’t worth it.”
“Yeah,” she said sarcastically. “That’s what they teach us girls. Don’t get into fights over stuff. It’s not worth getting hurt over. So guys keep taking stuff from us, knowing we won’t fight. Those guys, if I don’t fight them to get my bike back, then they’ll take something else from me. And something more. They’ll keep on taking stuff from me until I have to fight back. Only by then it’ll be too late, because I’ll never have learned to fight, so whatever it is that I finally fight for, they’ll just take it from me anyway.”
Her logic was torturous, and I shied away from her conclusion.
“Like Carl,” she added bitterly. “I didn’t fight him at first. He moved in. He eats our food and uses our phone and leaves the house a mess. He took my home. He took my mom. Shit. He even took my bike and gave it to those guys. Now he thinks he can take anything he wants and I won’t fight. He’s probably right, too.”
“I know I probably can’t beat those boys,” she admitted a few minutes later as we walked slowly down the darkening street. “But I can make it cost them something to pick on me. They can hit me and knock me down, but they know I’m going to fight back, hit back. So maybe they’ll go find an easier target. I know, everyone says that if you avoid a bully or ignore him, he’ll go away. But that’s bullshit. They don’t. They just grow up and become your mom’s boyfriend. Dead cat.”
I don’t know how she saw it in the dark. Black fur in a black gutter, but she saw it. She opened her pack and took out her spray can and inscribed his neon orange memorial on the pavement. She scooped up his body carefully and set it at the base of a No Parking sign. “Still warm,” she said regretfully as she wiped her hands down her shirt. “Poor kitty.” Crouched over the body, it was like she spoke to the cat. “Carl gave them my bike. That’s like he gave them permission to pick on me, take stuff from me. Like I don’t matter any more than a dead cat in the gutter. Run over me and just keep going.” She smoothed the cat’s rumpled fur a last time. “God, I hate Carl,” she said quietly.
More conversationally, she added, “You know what really pisses me off? That Carl gave them my bike and some money for picking up his dope. He never gives me nothing for picking up his junk. I just have to do it. So that if someone gets caught with it, it’s me. He told my mom, if I get caught, they won’t do much, because I’m a kid.”
“But doesn’t your mom . . .” I began.
“Long as my mom gets her junk, she’ll believe whatever he says,” Lonnie said sadly. “Since Carl moved in, it’s like I’m mostly invisible. She doesn’t even yell at me anymore. The only time she talks to me is when I bring the junk home. She always thanks me. That’s the only reason I do it.” Her eyes swung to mine. “And I still talk to her. Carl’s always telling me to shut up, but I don’t. I tell her about my cats, I told her about you.” In a quieter voice she added, “I tell her she shouldn’t be tricking just to get money for junk. That’s how I fight him. Maybe I won’t win, but no one can say I didn’t fight.” She gave her one-shouldered shrug. “I won’t stop, either. Long as I keep fighting, he can’t say he won.”
When I got in, Mom was waiting for me. Her face was white. “I damn near called the cops,” she hissed at me. “You didn’t call me; I came straight home, there’s no sign of you . . .” Then she burst into tears.
I was stupid. I told her where I’d been and what had happened. When I was done, she just sat there on the couch with her face in her hands. She spoke through her fingers. “God, Mandy. You have no concept . . . look. Sweetie. You can’t get involved in this. You just can’t. Drugs and prostitution and abuse and . . . No. Mandy, you have to stay away from her. You must.”
“I can’t.” I was telling the truth. “I can’t just abandon her. Then she’d have no one! I have you, but she doesn’t have anyone but a bunch of stray cats.”
Mom got up and walked into her room without a word. That really shook me up. For a minute I thought that was it, that she was so mad she wasn’t even going to talk to me anymore. Then she came back with a little red tube in her hand.
“This is not a toy,” she told me severely, as if I had asked to play with it. “This is a serious weapon. Pepper spray. You point it like this, push this catch down, and then spray it. It will make anyone back off long enough for you to run away. Don’t stick around and try to fight, just get away. And use it only if you are really in danger. Never for a joke, never as a threat. If you have to, use it. Other than that, don’t even tell anyone you have it.”
“There’s two,” I said out loud as I took them.
“Give the other one to Lonnie,” she said. She walked to the window and peered out through the curtains. She talked to the night. “Show her how to use it. But after that, you are not allowed to see her anymore. Do you understand? This is as much as we can do for her. No more.”
I couldn’t argue with that voice, but I wondered if I would obey her. “Mom,” I asked quietly, “if you had been there tonight, if you had been me . . . would you have used it on those boys?”
“No. Boys your age are just . . . Well, maybe, yes. Yes.” She hesitated. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Mandy, I don’t know; I wasn’t there, and you weren’t the one being threatened . . . If Lonnie had just walked away, if she hadn’t challenged them . . .” Her voice trailed away. She didn’t know either. How could I know when to fight back if my own mom didn’t know? In a quieter voice she added, “I have to get us into a better place. I have to.”
I didn’t see Lonnie for a while. I took a different route home from school, used a different door into my building. I pretended that if I didn’t see her, I wasn’t avoiding her. I liked her, but her problems were just too scary. I tried not to think about her, but my hand kept finding the extra vial of pepper spray in my coat pocket. Then one afternoon at four o’clock, I turned off the TV and put on my coat. I wrote Mom a note. I left the apartment.
It was dark but at least it wasn’t raining. I walked fast, glad there were no boys hanging out around her building tonight. I wondered how I’d know which door was hers. I wondered if I’d have the guts to knock. But I didn’t have to. Lonnie knelt on the ground by the Dumpster. The single parking lot light illuminated at least a dozen orange outlines of cats on the pavement. As I watched, another one slowly formed on the ground in front of Lonnie. I went to her.
The area around the Dumpster was littered with sprawled cat bodies. A terrible noise was coming from Lonnie as she painted around them. Uh, huh, huh. The noise people make when they can’t cry. I was afraid to get too close to her. She crawled to the next cat and began outlining it.
“What happened?” I whispered into the darkness.
She looked up, startled. Even in the dimness, I could see she was broken. “I don’t know,” she choked out when she recognized me. “I don’t know. They weren’t hit by cars, they weren’t killed by dogs. They’re just dead. I just don’t know.” She sank down in defeat on the dirty pavement. “My strays. My loyal subjects.” Her hand rested on one dead cat like a benediction. Behind her, a small kitten mewed questioningly in the bushes. “I got nothing left,” she told me sadly. She shook her head. “I fought and I fought. But I still lost. In the end, it all got taken away.” She seemed to get smaller.
“Lonnie!” Carl called from the window. He leaned out, craning to see her. “Lonnie, you down there? You got my stuff?”
It was the wrong time to ask her that. She came to her feet like a puppet hauled up on its strings. “No!” she screeched back. “No, I don’t!” Then, in a plea for understanding, “Carl, my cats are dead! Something killed them.” Her voice broke on the words.
“Oh, no, really?” His voice shook. “That’s awful, Lonnie. That’s just terrible.” Then he laughed out loud, and I knew he’d been holding it back all along. “Well, maybe someone poisoned the fuckers so you’d quit wasting time on them. Quit sniveling and go get my stuff. Now!”
Her hands flew up to her face in horror. Speechless, she stared into the darkness beyond the Dumpsters. When she dropped her hands a moment later, her painty fingers had left fluorescent tabby-cat stripes on both her cheeks.
I couldn’t believe what happened next. She didn’t even look at me. She limped straight to the door of her building. She obediently went inside. Lonnie had stopped fighting.
The kitten found me. I felt her tiny claws in my sock. I picked her up. She was skinny and her little mouth opened hugely when she cried. “You’ve got the wrong person,” I told her. I set her down and walked away.
Then I heard the sound. Not a shout. A roar, like the roar of a lioness, wordless in her fury. It came from the window above. Carl yelled back but it was a startled shout, full of dismay. I couldn’t see much, but I saw her shadow crash into his, her fists pummeling at his face and chest. For an instant I thought that she could win. But it was still a boy’s game. I heard his answering roar of anger. He seized her by the upper arms, lifted her off her feet, and threw her.
She hit the window. The glass shattered, flying out like a cloud of diamonds. Lonnie fell with it, twisting and yowling.
I did a stupid thing. Somehow I had the pepper spray in my hand and I pointed it up at the window. Lonnie seemed to be falling forever. I saw Carl look out as she fell; I even saw the shock on his face, heard someone else in the room behind him scream.
Then I squeezed the button and enveloped myself in a cloud of pepper gas. Carl was too far away. Even finally knowing when to fight, I thought to myself, was not enough. People like Carl still won. Blinded and choking, I fell to my knees as Lonnie struck the ground. Broken glass rang in a brittle rain with her.
Everything in the world stopped. I didn’t kneel by her, I crumpled. I tried to touch her but I couldn’t. I wasn’t Lonnie, to touch death without fear. Then she lifted her head. She looked at me and her mouth opened. As if she moved a mountain, she turned her head. Her lips pulled back. With her last breath, she lifted her upper lip and snarled up at the window that framed Carl.
Summoned, the cats came. The queen’s loyal subjects poured forth to her call. Without a rustle of leaves, without a patter of paws, they came. Orange shapes flickered in the night. They came in a wave that became a tide. From the bushes in back of the Dumpster, from under cars, from the distant streets, from everywhere, they came. They flooded the parking lot. A score, a hundred, five hundred fluorescent orange silhouettes lit the night as they answered her call. I saw Carl stagger back from the window. Like living flames, the cats licked up the side of the building, over the sill, and through the broken glass. The rumble of their snarls were like a big truck idling. The parking lot was darker when the last one disappeared inside. The hissing and spitting and caterwauling from up there almost drowned his screams.
Mom’s headlights hit me just about the same time the cats poured out of the window again. Like molten gold or streaming honey, they flowed down the side of the building. They engulfed Lonnie and me. I felt the warmth of a hundred small bodies, the soft swipe of velvet paws as they rushed past and over me to get to her. I swear I saw them, and I swear I felt them.
They purred all over Lonnie, they marked her with their brows, they bumped her with their fluorescent noses. They nudged and they pleaded and they nagged, pushing at her body. They kneaded it with their paws demandingly, scores of little fluorescent paws pushing at her yielding flesh, making her smaller and more compact, re-creating her in a new and perfect image.
The Queen of the Strays sat up groggily. She blinked her great amber eyes. She lifted a velvet paw to swipe at her tabby face. She stood and she stretched, showing me four sets of razor claws and four powerful legs attached to a lithe and perfect body.
“Lonnie?” I asked incredulously.
The cat shrugged one shoulder.
In the next instant, Lonnie was gone. The tidal wave of fluorescent cats retreated, and she padded off in the midst of them. The great orange glow surged into the blackberry tangle. Their light dwindled as they faded into the thorny jungle of vines. Then it winked out. Lonnie was gone and my mom was there going, “Oh, my God, my God. Get in the car, Mandy. Right now. Get in the car.”
I did. We were halfway home before I noticed the tiny black-and-white kitten that was stuck to my sock like a burr. When I put it in my lap, it curled up and began to purr.
I don’t know what Mom saw that night. She says I had pepper gas in my eyes and that I couldn’t have seen anything. The papers said that a junkie whore got mad at her pimp and cut him to ribbons with a razor. The papers never even mentioned Lonnie.
No one ever wonders what happens to strays when they disappear.
I hope her next eight lives are better than this one was.