by Helen Ellis
Mr. Charles says, “Young man, give her here.”
Ben does. Mrs. Wrinkles slips back inside her chaperone’s lapel, and the pair easily make their escape because Ben is not a young man anymore. Poking his head out of his shirt sleeve, which now lies in a lump on the floor, Ben is a solid-blue powder puff. His gaping mouth is the size of a dime with tiny teeth like dime ridges.
He squeaks: “Mraw!”
Nick says, “See there, Ben lost his chance just like that!” Snap! “You could turn just like that!” Snap! “We have to go after Mrs. Wrinkles.”
Ling Ling glances over her shoulder toward the door through which Mr. Charles and Mrs. Wrinkles just vanished. She says, “Good luck.”
Octavia says, “Mary, look at your arms!”
Orange fur pushes off Yiayia’s bandaging. Bloody gauze dangles from slick strips of Scotch tape. I peel the clotted covering off both arms, slow and tortuously, the real way you peel off band-aids. Because, hello, here is this eerie calmness again. I’m not panicked. I am fascinated. I caress the fur, which feels like short strands of silk. I offer my arms to everyone. How can something so luxurious be bad?
Octavia won’t come too near, but she and Ling Ling round the Old English bookcase and enter the well. I can see by Ling Ling’s face that she wishes she were me. It is a new sensation to be envied. Exhilarating! Ling Ling pats my fur with two fingers, like I’m the baby book Pat the Bunny.
“Quit wasting time!” shouts Nick.
Yoon counters: “Let her do what she wants. You don’t have to help her. Let me. Maybe, for once, somebody else knows what’s best.”
“Dude, you don’t know jack!” Nick grabs hold of Yoon’s yellow dishwashing cuffs. He jerks the gloves off. The gloves hit the floor with two sickening smacks.
Yoon stands stunned, as if he’s been pantsed.
His hands (paws?) are as rubbery as the insides of his gloves and pasty black. There is no fur. No human hair. No cat claws. No nails. No fingernail beds. His digits (not fingers because there aren’t enough joints) are bulbous, like charred marshmallows on broken campfire sticks. They’re not threatening, unless you find deformity threatening.
Ling Ling makes a sound like she’s going to throw up.
Yoon crosses his arms and tucks his hands between his biceps and ribs. They stick out behind him like runt wings.
Nick clutches my hands. He asks me, “This is who you trust to tell you what’s best? Do you want what happened to Yoon to happen to you? Mary, the turning is not what you think it is. Please, believe me. We have to find you a pure-cat.”
Octavia backs into a bookshelf and says, “A pure has found us.”
“Mraw!” Ben squeaks. His blue kitten ears flatten as he and the rest of us bear witness to Country Club’s gigantic, shadowy head crossing over the skylight.
Nick shouts, “Run!”
None of us do.
Nick and Yoon have to defend their turf. This is the domestic royal lair. They haven’t been marred, so they’re not officially strays. Despite Yoon’s intention to take over the doms, I guess he’ll have worse hell to pay if he flees. Ben too. Even if he runs, where can he go? He’s teeny-tiny. If a book falls on him, he’s a goner. Ling Ling scoops him up with one hand and slips him into the side pocket of her purse. She hikes it over her shoulder and stays put, just in case the Greek book, upon further inspection, lists a way for a girl like her to catch the turning.
The book well is darkened and chilled by Octavia’s greatest fear, but she loves me. She won’t leave me behind.
I won’t leave my sister behind either. As Yoon predicted, I’m not going anywhere. I have family and friends and turf to protect.
Octavia was right: I am a hunter. The instinct is in me. X-ray me, the x-ray will be orange. This is MY choice: I want to kill Country Club.
He is a menace. He should be put down for what he did to the previous king. It wasn’t a fair fight. And now he is here to fight me just as unfairly. As soon as I turn, I’ll be no match for him. I’ll be too small, nothing more than a mouthful. He’ll kill me easily. Then I’ll have no life, normal or not.
I have to kill him before I fully transform.
Country Club rears up and comes down full throttle. His front legs break the skylight. He plummets through shards of glass to land on my neck. His hind claws sink in to my shoulder blades, and his front claws dig into my scalp. I don’t feel pain. I feel pressure. In an instant, I am flattened. My face is on the floor. Think of a five-pound bag of flour. Now, think of ten bags glued together; now, glue rusty nails to them and drop them on yourself from three stories up. This is what Country Club feels like: huge and solid and sharp and unforgiving.
Blood pours down my cheeks and pools beneath my nose. The blood bubbles as I breathe into it. It is a combination of mine and Country Club’s from where the skylight tore his legs, belly, and face. What’s not absorbed by his pristine white coat clots my hair.
My orange slingshot widens to fur my entire neck. Orange sprouts beneath my cardigan as Country Club shreds my back. He knows how to turn me, and he wants me to turn before I can defend myself.
The others hurl books at him. Country Club teeters on my spine. He hisses and chomps at the air to ward off helping hands. Fur burns through lines on my forehead where his claws connect with my skull.
I reach back and snare his mite-eaten ear. I twist it. A bit of that ear comes away in my hand.
Country Club scrambles off.
I spring to my feet.
But he’s up, up, up, soaring from shelf to shelf. He spirals the book well, staining coverless books with blood. He leaves the rest of us in his wake, necks craned, spinning in place as we stare up after him.
Country Club settles on a shelf beneath the jagged skylight and studies me. He narrows his eyes, which are so blood-soaked that they look more olive than yellow. He licks blood from his nose, but his nose keeps on bleeding. Thick red drops fall and splatter our faces, shoulders, and arms. The tomcat is nonplussed. His chopped face is part of being the king. It is a punching bag daring me to hit it. He rocks, anxious for another aerial assault.
Fine, I think. I am ready to fight.
My cardigan is heavy with blood. I unbutton it, slip off one soaked sleeve and then the other.
Country Club bellows.
I bellow right back. My chest fills with fury, and I let that rage out. I don’t sound like a girl. I don’t sound like any cat I’ve ever heard. I like the way I sound. I am pure attitude.
Country Club plunges down the well like a white bowling ball.
I bag him with my sweater.
I don’t know how I manage it. I wanted him; the King of the Strays is in my sweater.
I swing him against a hard oak shelf with all my might. Thwack! The sound is wet and bone-crunching. I’ve stunned him. Bagged, he barely fights. All his senses are cut off. His claws are pinned against his body. His weight is his only defense. My arms burn as I swing him over and over, rotating my hits against all four surrounding bookcases. The others duck. Blood sprays out of the sack over their heads and splatters my face.
“Enough!” Nick shouts.
When I drop Country Club, he doesn’t fight to get out of his swaddling. Standing over him, the lump that is his body looks surprisingly smaller than he looked on the library roof; smaller than he felt on my neck. Nick peels away the cardigan to expose his front legs and belly. Country Club’s back is broken in several places. Don’t ask me how I know. I can tell just by looking at him.
Nick says, “He’ll be dead in a minute, Mary. Drink.”
Octavia says, “He’s already dead.”
Nick falls on the cat’s unmoving chest and listens. He flicks a limp paw. He shakes him. “No!” Country Club’s head lolls. “No! She has to drink before he dies!”
“Nick, stop!” Octavia says, “Let that dead cat
alone. Look at her—she swallowed plenty!”
It’s true. My school shirt is pasted to my body. I’m painted in Country Club’s blood. My chin and lips are slick. I taste that coppery liquid on my tongue. It is in between my teeth, soaking into my gums. I can’t believe my carelessness. I was so caught up in killing him, I forgot not to swallow what—as a result of killing him—wound up in my mouth. Any second now, the orange on my arms, back, throat, and forehead will petrify like pins and sink into my flesh. It’s going to hurt so much. My eyes well up in anticipation. I tell myself I’ll be fine. But I won’t be fine.
I wail, “I didn’t want to stop the turning!”
Blessedly, Nick can’t stand it when half-girls/half-cats cry. He’s not happy with my admission that I didn’t want to get fixed, but he’s happy that I fixed myself, whether I meant to or not. He wraps his arms around me. I’m shivering, awaiting the pain. He moves behind me and cradles me like he did on the twins’ terrace lounge chair and the library handicap ramp. His arms align with mine. This time, he holds my hands.
Yoon looks disappointed, but he pecks my cheek. He wipes his mouth on his shirt collar. He presses his lips to my bloody cheek again. He is cleaning me. When my fur pierces my skin, he’ll help me through it like he did the first time.
Ling Ling looks on, jealous but respectful. She holds her bag close and strokes Ben’s kitten head.
Octavia frowns. The youngest captain ever of the Purser-Lilley debate team is struggling with what to say. And say something she must because she still won’t come near me while I’m in this state.
Finally, Octavia breathes, “As soon as this is over, I’ll make it up to you.”
But my orange doesn’t go anywhere.
I ask, “Why isn’t the antidote working?”
Ling Ling says, “Country Club’s blood was diluted with yours, so maybe it’s slower to take effect like it was with what was under my nails.”
“Mraw!”
Ben jumps from Ling Ling’s purse. He tiptoes through a puddle of blood and props his paws on the tomcat’s ribs that lie underneath the death shroud of my sweater. On his hind legs, he’s tall enough to bite a cardigan button. He tugs the button, his back feet slipping and sliding in the goopy redness, which turns his blue feet purple. But he persists until the cardigan falls away to reveal Country Club’s pelvis and hindquarters.
What’s round and white and fuzzy all over? This dead tomcat has got them.
“Nuts,” marvels Octavia.
Yoon looks shocked and then stricken. “Mary, this isn’t Country Club.”
Nick cries, “But drinking his blood still counts. A cat’s a cat!”
No, not this one.
We know we’ve made a mistake when the dead cat’s freshly marred ear turns human. The rest of him transforms finger by finger, limb by limb, until before us lies the naked, crooked corpse of a teenage boy.
Yoon says, “It’s a Saddam!”
The fire ants attack. They spool my body and fill in the fur. Their bites sting like venom, but I give myself over to the turning. I’m shrinking. Down, down, down I go! Above me, I see so many faces, so many moons.
Nick says, “Mary, (fill in the blank with how they’re going to get rid of the dead turn-cat’s body). Mary, (fill in the blank with bullshit about how nobody will miss him because he’s a runaway stray).” Mary, (I’ll learn to live with remorse because war is part of being Queen).”
But it is Octavia who gathers me up off the floor. She raises me to eye level. Her look says: What’s happened has happened.
Whatever our future, good or bad, she is with me. She caresses my tiny body against her cheek. I curl up in the safety of her hands. Her voice gives me tingles. I am named.
She says, “Call her Kitty.”
acknowledgments
Thank you to my editor, Dan Ehrenhaft, who lit a Sourcebooks Fire under my butt and gave me back my writing life.
Thank you to Susanna Einstein, who has always been an excellent advisor, but with this book also became my agent, proving that friendship and business can mix.
Thank you to Martin Wilson, who opened the door to YA and welcomed me in.
Thank you to Nina Delianides and Devi Rasaili, who reminded me that reading is supposed to be an escape.
Thank you to Vicki, Laura, Ellen, and Heather, who over a summer weekend at Myrtle Beach reminded me who I was at seventeen.
Thank you to Patti, Elizabeth, Laurie, Koula, and Joanie for never letting me go.
Thank you to the D.A. poker game for calling me Kitty.
Thank you to my parents, who, despite my failures, still tell me I can do anything. And to my sister, Elizabeth, who told me specifically that I could do this.
Thank you to my writing workshop of well over a decade: Ann Napolitano and Hannah Tinti, amazing authors and friends who always understand exactly what I am going through.
about the author
Helen Ellis is the acclaimed author of the novel Eating the Cheshire Cat. The Turning: What Curiosity Kills is her first young adult book and the first of a series. She lives in Manhattan with her muses Lex, Shoney, and Big Boy. She clings to her Southern accent like mayonnaise to white bread.
