Alex sniffed the air warily as we entered the place, glancing around and flicking her ears this way and that as she took in her surroundings. She didn't seem uncomfortable, just…uncertain. I found it odd since she'd just been here a week ago – but that'd been with her dad, and I remembered how alien and intimidating strangers' houses could be when I was a kid.
As we cleared the entryway, she glanced over her shoulder – and froze. For a moment, I felt my own nerves flare, wondering what was wrong – had something gotten into the apartment? If she was in danger… Then I recognized the reaction: she was staring at her own tail, out of the corner of her eye. I saw her limbs tense, and she whirled around—
—and came face to face with me, and leapt back with such a start that I thought I'd have to peel her off the ceiling. When she landed, I could already see the realization in her expression; she turned away and began scanning the apartment for anything else to talk about. I fought back a smirk, humoring her out of solidarity.
"D'you read a lot?" she asked, studying the bookshelf as if she'd meant to do so from the start.
"Sometimes." I scratched at the back of my head, feeling awkward; really, a lot of the books were random thrift-store finds I'd picked up on a whim but hadn't gotten around to yet. It felt weird having someone come into my home and start examining the selection, but I could hardly cast any stones on that count.
"What's this about?" she asked, zeroing in with unerring precision on Snow Crash.
"…A cult spreading a computer virus that affects the human brain," I said, leaving out the bits about katana-wielding hackers and nuclear-powered Gatling guns in hopes of not making it sound like the kind of book an eleven-year-old (tom)boy'd want to pick up.
She frowned. "How's that work?"
"It doesn't, really," I said, thinking uneasily about certain viruses that did affect the brain. "There's some explanation, but when nyew get down to it, it just makes for an interesting story."
"…Huh." She continued browsing, tail twitching. "'Harriet the Spy' doesn't look like much of a spy."
"Most spies don't," I chuckled dryly.
She thought about it for a moment. "Guess nyat," she conceded. "…Is she, really?"
"She finds places to hide and watch the people in her neighborhood and writes about them in her notebook," I replied, "if that counts."
She frowned, stepping away from the bookshelf and prowling the living room in an exploratory manner. "Why's she do that?"
"She wants to be a writer," I said, shrugging, "but…I think it's also that she doesn't really get people."
"…Oh." Alex got a faraway look for a minute. "Sometimes I don't get people," she muttered, looking a little guilty at the admission.
I made to reply, then hesitated. That's normal, I wanted to say, but…was it? I never had figured that one out. Did "normal" people find each other as frustrating and opaque as I did, or was that just projection…? "Myew're nyat alone," I said at last. "They can be prrretty confusing."
"Does it get better when nyew grow up?"
"Sometimes," I sighed. It was better than it had been, but as a kid you're given the impression that when you get to be An Adult things'll just magically make sense. I was still waiting on that part.
She didn't say anything for a bit, eyeing the TV curiously instead. "This is one nya those really old ones, huh?" she mused.
"It's from before you were born, if that's what you mean," I said, ignoring the recitation of Asimov's "The Prime Of My Life" that'd suddenly started running in the back of my head.
"Why's it so huge, if the screen's so small?"
"It's got a big glass tube instead of an LCD panel." I had to marvel at her insatiable curiosity; I wondered if I wouldn't find it exhausting, by the end of this, but it seemed like a sign that she was getting more comfortable, at least.
There was a tink as she tapped the CRT with her claw. "Were they nyat invented yet?"
I cast my thoughts back to the Mesozoic world of 2002 A.D., when the ancient cabinet TV we'd inherited from my grandma succumbed to a fatal case of Inquisitive Youngster With A Magnet° and we'd picked up this set. "Nya, just expensive and sh…crummy."
° (I would've gotten in more trouble, but my mother'd long since realized that she hated it as furniture.)
"Mya could get a nyew one," she opined, in that little-kid way that indicated she was the first to suggest the obvious solution.
"I don't really need it for anything."
She frowned. "D'you nyat like TV?"
"Nyat really." I shrugged. "Do you?"
"Nyat really," she said, after thinking about it for a moment. "Why d'ya have one, then?"
"DVDs, mostly. What do you like…?" I asked, wondering if standing around talking about my media collection wouldn't get boring pretty quick. I wasn't cut out for the cruise-director role, but maybe there was something we could do that'd keep her engaged and not wear me out too much…
Alex gave it another moment's thought, finger to her lip and tail flicking. "I like goin' nyoutside."
I stifled a groan; me and my big mouth… "You, mya, you do, huh?"
She nodded. "I useta go explore 'n stuff, when…" She hesitated. "…when I felt like it. But after alla this started we were s'poseta stay inside, 'n nyafter we turned into…into cats, Dad got all worried about me goin' nyalone."
"…Ah." Frankly, I was with Frank; even without the occasional report of stray mountain lions wandering into town, there were rattlesnakes around here, not to mention scattered encampments of homeless folks who might not all be just down on their luck in a rotten economy. Really, I wondered why she ever would've been okay with it, but I was starting to get the feeling that there were important things being not-said here.
"It doesn't make sense," she huffed. "Like, I even got claws 'n fangs niaow."
"Well, you're still her kid," I said; really, I meant "a kid," but that'd likely rub her the wrong way. "But…we could, mya, go for a walk or something, if you want, I guess."
She eyed me curiously. "I don't think you're an nyoutside kinda purrson."
"I'll live," I said, trying not to sound miffed; she didn't have to be that blunt about it. "Or we could hang out here, if you'd prrrefer; whatever works."
I caught a momentary flash of interest before she masked it behind a distinctly feline air of detachment. "I guess we could go for a walk," she said. "There's like a pond we could go see."
"Oh, the reservoir?" I called, ducking into the bedroom for my purse. I knew it was somewhere behind the hill our row was built into – during wildfire season they'd occasionally send the bucket-copter 'round – but I'd never bothered to look for it.
"Nya-huh!" she said, the mask slipping a little. "There's a street back behind the meat place that goes almost there."
"'Butcher shop,'" I said reflexively, realizing that I'd never been in there, either; part of my brain wondered if they stocked more poultry than just chicken and turkey, then got to thinking about the wild turkeys that frequented the local back roads.
And out the door we went. The day was pleasantly warm and the sun was already making for the horizon; it'd be summer soon enough, but for now the weather was mild. We strolled down to the end of the street, turned, and went up the road towards the meat place. Alex picked her feet delicately over the coarse asphalt, but didn't seem uncomfortable; her paw-pads were probably thick enough to cushion.
By now just being outside was no longer a sensory overload, but it was still amazing how much I could perceive about the space around me – the smell of dry grass and pine pollen and trails of exhaust from passing vehicles, the rustling of small critters in the roadside brush and the calls of far-off birds, the distant, muffled thumping of a car stereo. I wasn't sold on the whole "outdoors" thing, but the novelty of this altered perspective on the world was almost enough to rekindle my interest.
Alex was similarly engrossed, but not enough to keep her from talking; with the ice semi-broken, she seemed less guarded. (I wondered how often she'd gotten to talk to anyone besides her dad, the last couple months.) "I don't think it's fair that they're makin' mya do homework 'cause of this," she said, scooping up a rock as we turned at the butcher shop and chucking it into the bushes. "That should be illegal, prrrobably."
"Well, I don't think they're trying to make it hard on nyew," I said, though I could sympathize. "It's more making sure you don't fall behind the rest of the class." I wasn't sure how much credit to extend the System on that, but if the other teachers at her school were anything like Nicole, I could probably give them the benefit of the doubt.
"'S nyat like it makes sense anyaway," she sighed. "Like, how'm I s'poseta guess what some writer was thinkin' just 'cause of how they talk about other stuff!? I'm nyat them!"
"Mya, I don't know why they make you do that as a kid," I sighed, definitely empathizing there. "It kinda starts to make sense when nyew get older, but only 'cause you've heard a lot of people talk about a lot of things by then."
"Does it…?" she asked, understandably skeptical.
"Kinda, sometimes," I shrugged. "Like what they call 'negative space' in art."
She shot me a look that said I wasn't clarifying anything for her. "Mya, think of drawing," I said. "If you've got a blank page, you could draw a shape and fill it in – but if you filled in everything but that, you'd still see what the shape was. When nyew know how most people talk about something, you can make a guess at how someone else feels by what they aren't saying about it."
"…Huh." Her brow furrowed as she thought it over, and we walked on a ways. "What about how there's 'I' and 'me' and 'which' and 'that' and stuff? Why's there so many words that mean the same thing?"
"That's 'cause English…well, because English," I laughed, as we reached the end of the street. "It's what happens when nyew get three different groups all invading the same island over a thousand years; they left bits 'n pieces of their languages lying around all over the place."
"Is that why it is?" she asked, ears perked, as she scrambled up the hillside; the dry, sandy soil scattered under her paws. "We're still doin' Nyam'rrrican history mostly."
"Yep," I said, following more cautiously; my new shoes weren't intended for hiking, and I wasn't sure of my footing. "The Rrromans took over part of it, then the Saxons, then the Nyormans, but every time someone nyew was in charge, they and whoever they took over had to learn to talk to each other. So by the end of it, they were talking in this big jumble of Latin, German, nyand French, and that's what English is."
"Huh." We crested the ridge, slogging through a stand of dry grass, and the hillside dipped into a basin where things were at least marginally greener. Alex stood there, surveying the reservoir; her expression had a bit of both the explorer gazing upon a new land and the cat perched on a fence to observe the yard below in it. "Is that why there's so many rules to try'n rrremember?"
"And so many exceptions, nya," I said. "Happens with other languages, too, but the ones that turned into, say, Spanish or French were closer to begin with."
"My abuela talks in Spanish when she's excited or mad," she said, springing down to the water's edge with arms and tail outstretched for balance; as outclassed as I felt by a naturally active kid less than half my age, it was easy to forget that she was new to this herself. "I only kniaow a bit, though." She frowned. "Ugh, she's prrrobably gonnya call me linda or prrrincesita or somethin'."
"You think so?" I picked my way down the slope carefully. The reservoir was still pretty full, this early in the year, and at the edge of the pond I could feel the ground squelch beneath my feet.
"Mrrr, she does it with my cousins," she said irritably. "They're all girrrls 'n they're all older'n me." She lined up her paw to kick a rock into the water, realized she wasn't wearing shoes, and thought better of it; she picked it up and tossed it instead. The splash glittered brilliantly in the first rays of the sunset, and we watched the ripples dance, scatter, and fade.
I couldn't exactly relate – I was smack in the middle of a fair assortment, myself – but it wasn't hard to picture; three of my own cousins were girls just a couple years apart and thick as thieves. I didn't know if her reactions were entirely fair, but I could see her feeling like the odd man out regardless.
"Well, you never kniaow," I ventured, trying to thread the needle between offering encouragement and not making empty promises. "That might just be how she is with them; it doesn't necessarily mean she'll treat you that way."
Alex gave a noncommittal grunt and dabbed one paw into the water, then padded farther on down the shore.° She turned and was about to say something—
° (Is it still "shore" if it's on a pond? If not, what is it?)
—when a jay flitted over the rim of the basin and down towards the water, noticed the two of us standing on either side of his flight path, and gave a sudden flutter of acceleration, zipping right past: don't mind me, just passing through…!
We were instantly riveted. It's hard to explain this if you haven't experienced it yourself; humans are opportunistic, omnivorous scavengers who learned hunting in a social context æons later, but as a catgirl part of you is wired like a critter that's been an obligate carnivore and ambush predator since time immemorial. The best analogy I've got is when you walk past a restaurant and catch a whiff of grilling meat or frying onions, and even if you've just eaten your mouth starts watering – but that doesn't convey how primal the instinct is. When you're a cat and you see a bird, you just know.
That's not to say you're helpless in its grip – but when you've only been one for a week or two, the influence is a lot harder to shake. We were both staring as it flew right out the other side of the basin and perched in a high treetop, but Alex's expression was so intent that I wondered if she even realized what she was doing. With loose limbs and ears triangulating on her target, she slunk slowly 'round the pond toward the treeline, sinking to all fours as she went; her altered leg structure made it surprisingly natural.
As she approached the base of the tree, she began making short chittering sounds of a type I couldn't remember hearing before, but instinctively recognized: a nobody here but us chickens! kind of quasi-birdcall.° But a human voice could probably do a better imitation,°° and I wondered why she wasn't doing that; she must really be deep in instinct…
° (I'd long since given up pretending to be normal in hopes of going unnoticed, as a human, but I still grasped the principle.)
°° (Well, okay, maybe not with a jay's screech.)
It was hard to tell what the jay made of it, but he stayed put, and presently Alex was crouched by the base of the tree, eyeing it thoughtfully. Part of my brain didn't see an issue with this, but another part realized it'd probably end in my having to explain to my neighbor why I'd had to call the fire department to get her kid down. "Mya, Alex?" I called, just as her limbs tensed and she prepared to spring.
She jumped like a firecracker'd gone off next to her, launching on the course already set; I cringed, anticipating scrapes, bruises, and/or a bloody nose, but some combination of kid reflexes and feline instinct took over and she stuck the "landing," gripping the trunk with her claws about four feet off the ground. She didn't say anything, but her ears and tail suggested that realization had just sunk in. The jay flitted off without comment.
For a moment, we just stood there; then, still facing the tree, she said: "What?"
I had the urge to chide her about getting stuck a couple stories off the ground, or parasites in wild game, but suppressed it. I was just the babysitter, and she probably knew the first part already; no need to pile on. Looking for something to pivot to, I offered: "…If you're getting hungry, we could head back."
She declined to respond, at first; then her stomach did it for her. "…Okay," she said, turning away in what was Definitely Not Embarrassment.
Another moment passed, and she stayed where she was. Finally, I felt obligated to ask: "Um…myew need help getting down…?"
Her ears pinned back. "No," she huffed indignantly, and looked down at the ground below; from her visible relief, she must've thought she was higher up.
I watched her figure out the dismount; the trick seemed to be that, when you have claws, you actually have to loosen your grip to retract them. She disengaged her hindpaws, planted them against the trunk, and then let go with her hands, kicking off to land in a crouch like the whole thing was playing in film-reverse. I did my best to stifle a snort; her ego was probably bruised enough already.
"C'mon," I said, nodding back toward the road. "Let's go get dinner started."