Shadow

           Abby didn’t see the cat at first. She was still seeing red, furious with her mother. Besides, it was dark outside, and so was the cat. It had been sitting like a guard dog on the sidewalk in front of the Watson’s house, and when it saw Abby stalking towards it, it looked up and then darted off in front of her, as if it had been waiting to lead her somewhere. Since Abby had no idea where she was headed in her blind rage, she followed the cat.

When they turned the corner at Fifth Street, Abby took a breath and felt calmer— farther away from home, away from the possibility of being spotted from a window by her mom or a neighbor. She was surprised how pleasant it felt to be outside. Her hoodie was enough for this temperature. The Oklahoma winter had been pretty harsh, and spring had crept up on them slowly. “It’s practically balmy tonight,” her mother had said when they were eating dinner.

“You’re balmy,” Abby muttered now. Standing in the shadow of a large oak, Abby poked at her mother’s cell phone and waited for Lyssa to answer. She had unplugged the phone from the charger in the kitchen before she left and taken it with her. It was inconceivable that mother wouldn’t let her have one until she turned fifteen. Ten-year-olds own phones these days! For years she had argued and pleaded with her mother, to no avail. Anger surged within her.

“Abby?” Lyssa’s voice always sounded like a little girl’s on the phone. Abby hardly noticed it since they had been best friends for almost five years, ever since they bonded over their hatred of Caroline Morrison in fourth grade. Tonight, Lyssa’s fourth grade voice made Abby rethink her call.

“Lyssa, can you get out?” Abby asked. “I think I just ran away from home.” She started walking again, her eyes on the cat in front of her. As they passed under a streetlamp, she noticed that the cat’s fur was solid gray, its posture confident. It glanced at her and paused when she did.

“What? What happened? Where are you?”

“My mom!” Abby thought Lyssa would have realized this. “I hate her! She was bugging me like every two minutes. She told me to do my homework, then she wanted to read my final draft for Griffin’s class, which I haven’t finished yet, and then she yelled at me for not loading the dishwasher after dinner. Before she went to bed, she told me that when she got up at six-thirty tomorrow morning, the kitchen would be clean, and my paper done. She wants to correct it before I go to school! As soon as she shut her door, I grabbed her phone and went out the front. I don’t think she heard me.”

“Abby!”

“I know.” She had never done anything like this before.

“My mom and dad are still up,” said Lyssa, “So I can’t go out.”

“Please, Lyssa! I need you. Can’t you get out your window?”

“I haven’t tried that since we did it in sixth grade. I don’t think I’d fit.” Lyssa giggled, and Abby’s temper rose again. She pictured her friend lounging on her bed with her phone at her ear, her big breasts bulging out from under her chin. Abby’s own development had not kept pace; she was still a stick figure. She could have slid out of Lyssa’s window with ease.

“Fine! I’ll call someone else then!” Abby ended the call and immediately regretted it. She didn’t have anyone else to call. The warm phone in her hand was fading comfort as she shoved it into the back pocket of her jeans. Then it vibrated. Lyssa calling back, she thought, with a flash of hope. But when she looked at the number, she didn’t recognize it. She powered off the phone with a long, hard push. That will teach them, she thought, and she flipped her long hair over her shoulder. The cat was waiting for her. She would follow it and forget all her troubles.

But the aroma from her hair made her think of Ian Borowitz. A sense of hopelessness mingled with her anger and brought tears to her eyes. Ian hadn’t registered her at all today, not even a blink at the cocoanut-almond fragrance of her new shampoo. Ever since last week when she had moved up a chair in band to sit next to him, she had been dreaming about an encounter– a moment when Ian Borowitz, the most gorgeous boy in Hamilton Middle School suddenly realized he was attracted to Abby Robins, an ordinary girl who had suddenly turned beautiful. He would look at her and his pupils would dilate with love. Today in band she leaned close to him as she turned the page of their shared piece of music. She pushed her hair behind her ear, hoping a whiff of her shampoo would entice Ian, but when she glanced at him, he was raising his trumpet to his lips, his eyes on the notes of music. Ian! She wanted to scream or poke him, but of course, she didn’t.

The world was an awful place, she thought. As if hearing her, the gray cat paused in its determined stride and turned to look at her. With sympathy, Abby thought. Sympathy and kindness. She gazed into steady golden eyes. This cat understood her. He was a male cat, she decided as she watched him -- an independent creature with a touch of mystery. He was nothing like the other cats she knew, all wussy pussies like Miss Misty, her cousins’ skittish pet.

As they approached another streetlight, the cat’s shadow made pleasing rounded shapes on the sidewalk. Shadow. That was the perfect name for him -- even though Abby was more like his shadow tonight. With his tail straight up, Shadow led her towards Sooner Avenue, the edge of the university area. Abby could see the blinking yellow light at the intersection ahead. She wondered whether the cat belonged to someone near here, maybe someone in one of the crumbling Victorian homes that surrounded Sooner and housed the people her mom called “hippies.” Abby and Lyssa walked around here sometimes in the summer when the students were outside, barefoot and playing guitar on their porches or kicking around a soccer ball in the yard. Once, a shirtless bearded guy raised a beer can to Abby and Lyssa and called out, “Hola!” They burst into giggles.

The houses were lit up from inside tonight, and Abby heard music coming from one – “Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” By the Beatles, Abby knew – an old band that was popular again.  A Domino’s pizza car was double-parked nearby, all its lights glowing. Abby watched a long-haired girl come to the door of a house and grin at the delivery guy, taking pizza boxes and handing him a wad of bills. As he ran back to the car, the guy glanced at Abby and gave her a little salute. She wondered if he thought she was a college girl. She could maybe pass for a freshman in the dark. This pleased her and she smiled.

Shadow stopped and turned as if to admonish her, to urge her on this task of following him.  So she did. He was approaching the bank on the corner of Sooner, which flashed dots signaling 10:56 pm, a time when Abby was usually in bed. Maybe she should just go home now. Maybe Mr. Griffin would let her turn her essay in on Monday. He might give her a break. He was young and seemed to like teaching eighth graders. He let them read Stephen King for free reading, and he could make some of the poems and stories in their heavy old textbook seem magical.

In her paper, Abby was supposed to compare and contrast a poem from that anthology to the Amanda Gorman poem they had heard the author read online after the inauguration this year, “The Hill We Climb.” They’d talked about that poem in class and all the awful stuff that inspired it. Abby had chosen Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Dream within a Dream” to analyze next to Gorman’s poem. Both poems were about dreams – that was her main idea. Poe’s dream was more pessimistic than Gorman’s, though, and Abby had to side with him. Amanda Gordon had to be optimistic, didn’t she? She couldn’t very well stand up there in front of the whole United States and say this country is going to hell, which is what Abby’s mother said more than once in the past few years.

Poe’s poem wasn’t exactly a winner, however. His gushing tears over losing a grain of sand to the “pitiless wave” indicated he was one depressed guy. He basically was saying that life was “but a dream” though anyone who had been to preschool and sung “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” knew that already. Abby had said as much in the two and a half pages she’d written so far. What else was there to say? She supposed she could throw in some biographical notes about the writers, which teachers always seemed to like. A consultation with Wikipedia would help her finish in a jiffy. She sighed. She could go home, write her paper, and clean up the kitchen before midnight.

But when she looked down at Shadow, she wanted to follow him. The cat would lead her to something good, she knew it. He was her Toto on the way to Oz, her Samwise Gamgee and her Ron Weasley, even though they were in boring old Norman, Oklahoma crossing Sooner Avenue just now. So what about her mother? So what about the dishes and her homework and even Ian Borowitz?  Abbie plunged her hands into the pockets of her hoodie and picked up her pace. Shadow was moving faster, too. He continued onto the street just beyond Sooner, a lesser-known part of town for Abby, a part with sketchy little businesses, many abandoned, with planks nailed over the windows.

Shadow stopped suddenly in front of a closed shop which had a sign partially lit with purple neon letters: Lily’s Hair and Nails. A large wreath of painted lilies outlined in gold had once adorned the front window of the shop but was now mostly scratched off, framing everything inside with worn, jagged edges. The dark interior reflected itself in mirrors tinted lavender from the sign outside, which struck Abby as creepy. A printed poster near the entrance read “Psychic Reader: Enquire Within.” A huge staring eye under the words made Abby shiver. Was this what Shadow brought her to see? He seemed to nod at her as she acknowledged this possibility, and then he padded away from the beauty shop, turned down the adjacent alleyway, and disappeared.

Abby did not want to enter a dark alley. That was where strangers hung out— muggers, addicts, and kidnappers, right? She thought she smelled cigarette smoke and froze for a moment, wondering if some grotesque man was actually lurking down there. Maybe Shadow was like his assistant. He’d send Shadow to bring in unsuspecting teens and then lure them into some sort of demonic business or maybe even rob and kill them. Abby shook her head. Don’t be silly, she heard her mother say, Those kind of things don’t happen here.  

So Abby stepped forward bravely and peered down the alley. She could see the dark shapes of all kinds of trash and junk, including a broken chair from the beauty shop, its hair dryer hood drooping to one side like the head of a stroke victim. She didn’t see Shadow at first but heard rustling in the back of the alley. Then a movement caught her eye. Shadow leapt up from a cardboard box to the chair and then to the top of a full-length mirror crusted with grime and missing most of one corner. He faced Abby for a moment and then bent over to sniff and lick the surface of the mirror.

Abby stared and then sucked in her breath, overwhelmed by a horrible realization:  Shadow was an alley cat – an ordinary alley cat who lived on scraps and handouts like one of the pathetic homeless people she saw in the Walmart parking lot. He was not her Toto anymore, nor her Ron Weasley, and here she was alone in some dark alley far from home on a Thursday night. What had she been thinking? Tears welled up behind her eyes and throat. She wondered about trying to call Lyssa again, but she’d be asleep most likely. Lyssa always fell asleep before Abby when they had sleepovers.  

Abby blinked back her tears and decided to go home. She started towards Sooner Avenue, yanking her hoodie around her midsection, holding it closed rather than stopping to work the zipper. When she glanced back at the alleyway, she saw Shadow poised there, his tail in the air. They stared at each other.

“Shadow!” Her call was almost a whisper.

In no hurry, the cat crept up to her and rubbed his back along her shins. Then he turned to go back to his alley. Without thinking, Abby lunged forward and scooped him up. Shadow did not resist. He was soft and warm in her arms, When he turned his head to look at Abby, she saw his golden eyes, his thin pupils.

“Don’t worry,” said Abby to Shadow. “I’ll take care of you.” Abby felt certain she could convince her mother of this.