Kitty Kitty

by Michele Jaffe

  As soon as I put out my name card, Arabella slid a note over to me.

  Professore seems to be in le totally good mood.

  One of the reasons I liked Arabella so much was because she believed that if she took any English word and either added “le” before it or an “o” on the end it became Italian. This made her amusingo with a side salad of Le bOnKeRs. I still couldn’t decide whether Arabella’s warning label should be CAUTION: UNSTABLE or SPECIAL HANDLING REQUIRED.

  Like her outfits. She always wore black motorcycle boots with shiny silver buckles, and today she’d paired them with a green cashmere sweater five sizes too big for her, a leopard-patterned turban, and extra-long false eyelashes. The other regular fixture of her wardrobe was a huge fake (I assumed) diamond brooch that she’d attach somewhere on her person; today she was using it to pin a feather to the turban at a jaunty angle, making her look kind of like the love child of Robin Hood and a maharaja. Which was actually a fairly conservative look for her.

  I opened my notebook and wrote back:

  Where have you been?

  I was sicko. What did I miss?

  Professore has a new boyfriend. He spent the night at his house last night.

  How do you know? DID YOU FOLLOW HIM?!?

  Ha ha. No, he was wearing the same shirt yesterday but not the leather jacket, and it’s not his. See how it’s more worn out on the right-hand side? But Professore Rossi is left-handed. Plus, he smells faintly like Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men today, which isn’t his regular—

  Before I could finish, a shadow fell across my notebook.

  “Do Signorina Callihan and Signorina Randolph have something to share with the class?” Professore Rossi said, towering over us.

  “I was just asking Jasmine how to say ‘birth certificate’ in Italian,” Arabella said, hitting him with Wide Eyes of Innocence.

  “Certificato di nascita,” he told her. “Will there be anything else?”

  “Le not,” Arabella said pleasantly.

  “Bene. Then we may continue without bothering you?”

  Ho ho ho! Teachers are so LE FUNNY.

  The rest of the lesson zipped by because we were supposed to discuss our life goals, and I earned praise from Professore Rossi by saying I wished to sniff out crime. (Thank you, Il Commissario Rex!) I was already thinking of what flavors of gelato I would reward myself with for lunch, when Arabella passed me a final note that said,

  Can I talk to you after class? It’s le important.

  As we filed out I asked, “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

  She hesitated for a moment, like she was trying to make up her mind about something. Finally she said, “I have to talk to someone at Prada. Come with me.”

  Polly would never have forgiven me if I’d gone to Prada—aka LogoLand—so I convinced Arabella to stop for gelato instead. I was kind of distracted while we were ordering because the radio was playing a song where the singer was describing all these guys his girlfriend could be hanging out with, guys with titles and fancy yachts, and how he wished he could just reach out and take her hand and tell her that he might not have a Lamborghini but that those other guys were weenies. I was thinking that not only did I know just how he felt but I could give him a few tips on heartache, when I realized Arabella was talking to me.

  She was saying, “You know how today in class you said your goal in life was to fight crime? Is that true?”

  “Sì, signorina. Why?”

  “I lied about my goal. I don’t really want to be a lawyer, I just wanted to learn the word. Have you ever seen those kiosks at the mall where they write your name on a grain of rice?”

  “Sure.”

  She looked up at me and her eyes were shining with excitement. “I want to own one. To help people make special memories.”

  Definitely SPECIAL HANDLING REQUIRED. I wasn’t quite sure what to say, but fortunately she wasn’t waiting for a response because she plowed ahead, almost desperately. In fact, as she went on about having already started researching it and her search for a feng shui person who could properly orient her kiosk, I had the impression that while she was passionate about rice art, it wasn’t what she really wanted to talk about. So when she broke off in the middle of a sentence about micro-pens, I wasn’t completely surprised.

  But I was surprised by what she said next, which was: “Jas, I think someone is trying to kill me.”

  Since that’s the kind of statement that sets you speeding down the road past the NOW LEAVING MIND-YOUR-OWN-BUSINESS ISLAND! COME AGAIN SOON! sign, it was clear that in my role as a Model Daughter I should pretend to have developed rapid-onset deafness and scurry away. Which is, of course, exactly what I did.

  In an alternate universe.

  What I did in this universe was say, “What makes you think that?”

  “I think there’s been someone following me all week. That’s why I skipped class. I didn’t want to leave my house.”

  Be a Model Daughter, I commanded myself. Ask no questions. Batten down your hatches. Where hatches mean Eyes. And also Ears. “Can you describe the person?” my mouth said. Traitor mouth!

  “No, I’ve never seen anyone.”

  “Then how do you know you’re being followed?” Shut up, traitor mouth!

  “A fortune-teller told me I’m in grave danger.”

  “I think fortune-tellers tell everyone that to get them to pay them money. Has anything else happened to make you think that?”

  “No, but I can feel it. A lurking menace. In the shadows.”

  Oh, good. Not only was her stalker invisible, he qualified as a member of the Lurking Menace Club. It is so nice to have sane friends. I imagine.

  But it was a relief and helped to put an end to the tug-of-war going on between Model Me and Traitor Mouth of a Thousand Unnecessary Questions. Because while having friends who were being targeted by killers was contraindicated by Model Daughters, having friends who were just delusional and possibly paranoid wasn’t entirely disallowed. In fact, you could make a case that Model Daughters had a responsibility to the community to be kind to the insane.

  “You don’t believe me,” Arabella said with a wounded puppy expression. “No one believes me. I tried to tell—”

  She’d been looking up at me but now she glanced over my shoulder and suddenly her face turned deadly white. Like she’d just seen an ax-wielding murderer. Or a ghost. Or a ghost with an ax.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” I asked as I turned to follow her gaze. I was increasingly convinced that whatever was going on with Arabella was in her head, and what I saw—or rather didn’t see—just proved it. Behind us were some gondoliers, a guy wearing a dress and wig passing out flyers to a Mozart concert, a nun, a man in a tweed cap, and a woman with massive blond hair talking on a cell phone. No one who would make the Ghouls-n-Villains annual calendar, even in the honorable mention category.

  Apparently, she was seeing something different than I was, because as I turned back she said, “It—it’s not possible.” And then her eyes got huge and she grabbed my arm and shouted, “RUN!”

  Chapter Three

  Allow me to pause here for a moment to say that while it might be unusual for most people to have others shouting “RUN!” at them, it happens to me pretty often. And I’ve developed a simple set of guidelines for these situations:

  Little Life Lesson 2: Don’t do it.

  Little Life Lesson 3: Ever.

  Little Life Lesson 4: Especially if you are trying to be a Model Daughter and the person who yelled it at you is a nineteen-year-old girl dressed like a homeless pixie whose life goal is to Write on Rice and who adds, with a quiver in her voice, “They’re going to kill me, too.”

  They. Are. Going. To. Kill. Me.

  TOO.

  But sometimes doing What Is Right is not an option, such as when the nineteen-year-old homeless pixie whips out her Incredible Hulk strength and starts dragging you down the tourist-filled street at a rapid pace.

  “Wh
ere are we going?” I shouted at Arabella as she bounced me off of two tourists.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said desperately. “We just have to get away from him.”

  “From who?”

  “The man in the straw hat. He’s following us!”

  I glanced around and saw a straw hat bobbing through the crowd behind us, but no evidence at all that he was on our tail.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Watch.”

  Arabella moved like someone who’d aced Advanced Placement Dodging Through Crowds, which should have made me suspicious, but I didn’t have time for that. Without warning, she yanked me around a corner and started running faster. As she wove expertly between the tourists on the crowded street, cleverly using me as a buffer, I stole a look over my shoulder and had to admit she might be right: The straw hat was still behind us. And gaining.

  Whizzing past luxury boutiques and tourist landmarks, I realized that this could be an enticing metaphor for my college essays. Like a lesson—bam—about not rushing through life—bash—because you miss things and—thud—can wind up in a lot of pain. Out of nowhere two men carrying a pane of glass appeared, blocking the entire street (for real. A PANE OF GLASS), but instead of, oh, stopping, Arabella ducked down and dragged me under it.

  Little Life Lesson 5: When towing a six-foot-tall girl, try to bear in mind that her head clearance is different from yours.

  After putting How Low We Could Go to the test, we were confronted by a gaggle of Russian tourists with large rolling bags clogging the entire side of the Bridge of Sighs in front of us, and I knew we’d reached the end. This was it. I had to admit I was kind of relieved. I’d had all the—

  Arabella sped up. Before I realized what she had in mind, she was leaping over suitcases like hurdles. From there it was just a simple matter of winding between souvenir kiosks, cafés, and people stopped in the middle of the path to snap memorable vacation photos—smash!—into Saint Mark’s Square, the biggest piazza in Venice.

  Saint Mark’s is filled with three things: 1) Tourists 2) Cafés 3) Carts that sell birdseed to tourists so they can feed pigeons out of their hands while they sit at the cafés. I tried to suggest that since there was such a big crowd to le mingle ourselves with we could stop and catch our breath, but Arabella had a different plan. The Tear-Through-the-Middle-of-the-Square-Swinging-Jas-Wildly-into-Objects Plan.

  What was pleasant about this was it allowed me to experience several of the rules of physics firsthand. For example, the faster you are going when you bash into a man with a hard-sided briefcase, the more it will hurt (Force = Mass x Acceleration). And that being pulled between two women chatting and carrying large shopping bags will result in them screaming not-very-nice things at you. (For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.) And my favorite: A Jas in motion—such as one who sidesteps to avoid running into a stroller and instead finds herself tripping over a small dog and launching into the air as though she’s a trouble-seeking missile—will stay in motion unless acted on by an equal but opposite force.

  Like the little girl I crashed into.

  A little girl whose mother had just bought her a bag of birdseed. Which flew into the air, traced a parabola, and cascaded back down (gravity = 9.81 m/s2), landing on me. Or rather, in my hair.

  Where a hundred pigeons suddenly decided to have lunch.

  Oh hello, icing the cake of my day badly needed!

  The nice thing about having your head dive-bombed by pigeons—besides how lovely comma un it feels—is that you can’t see anything. Which, okay, doesn’t matter that much when you are busy being the pull toy of Le Crazy Person. But seeing does come in handy when Le Crazy stops without warning and you keep going, crashing into something hard.

  Something that says, “Che diavolo fai? Sei pazza?”

  This does not mean “Ah, just what I wanted today, a very tall girl to fly into my arms!” but is more along the lines of “What the hell are you doing? Are you insane?” Not the kind of thing Model Daughters want to hear, ever.

  Especially not what they want to hear when the pigeons take off, and they can see again, and what they see is that they’ve run right into a police officer. A police officer who looks as angry as he is large. Which is very.

  So I said the first thing that I could think of to explain. It turns out, “The smaller monkey is better for that experiment” is not actually a multipurpose phrase.

  In fact, some people might even think you were insulting them. Especially if they happened to look a bit like a large ape and had probably been mocked for it during their formative years.

  “Who do you call a monkey?” asked Officer Ape—whose name tag read ALLEGRINI—not exactly in a Filled-with-Fun tone.

  Little Life Lesson 6: There is no JAS in TROUBLE.

  Little Life Lesson 7: But there is a JAS in JAIL SENTENCE FOR INSULTING A POLICE OFFICER.

  I did a rapid search of all my extracurricular vocabulary and managed to come up with: “There are no monkeys here. That crazed assassin is after my friend to kill her,” while pointing at Straw Hat, who had just entered the square.

  I was pretty sure I got all the words right, but Officer Allegrini didn’t move.

  “He is a bad guy!” I said, waving my arms for emphasis. “A dangerous assassin! He plans to murder my friend.”

  “Pardon, signorina, but please explain,” Officer Allegrini said in Italian. “To what friend do you refer?”

  That’s when I realized there wasn’t anything wrong with my Italian. It was my story.

  Because Arabella had given me le slip.

  Chapter Four

  Little Life Lesson 8: If the police already think you are making up a friend, having the person you described as a crazed assassin march right up to you and say “Bellissima! Eccomi qui!” (Beautiful lady! Here I am!) will not help your credibility any.

  “Arrest him!” I cried. “He is an assassin!”

  The straw-hatted assassin laughed as though he was a visitor from the Planet of Hilarity. “But no, I am merely a gondolier,” he said.

  “He is merely a gondolier,” Officer Allegrini repeated like he’d been mind melded.

  “Which is an excellent cover for being an assassin,” I pointed out.

  Straw Hat shook his head and said, “No, I do not think so. First, the gondola is too slow for making a good escape. Second, this cover would work only in Venice. I do not think you could make the living being an only-in-Venice assassin.” Then he smacked himself on the forehead and said, “Pardon me, I am very rude. My name is Massimo, but you may call me Max.” After which he bowed, took my hand, and kissed it.

  Allowing me to notice:

  1) he was speaking English, with only a very faint accent

  2) he’d had to bend down to talk to me

  3) (down, as in, he was taller than I was)

  4) he had longish light brown hair

  5) and mysterious smoky blue eyes

  6) that made him seem kind of fascinating

  7) and could have gotten him a DANGER: HOT SURFACE label

  8) BUT HE WAS NOT AS FASCINATING OR HOT AS JACK—

  9) (who was possibly at that moment meeting a willowy marine biology major with a double-jointed tongue who once outswam a pack of sharks and an angry dolphin while carrying adorable orphans on her back)

  10)—AT ALL.

  Possibly not in that order.

  As Max stood up he whispered, “Leave the carabin-iere to me,” and winked.

  WINKED.

  I was so stunned that by the time I reacted he was already talking to Officer Allegrini, saying in Italian, “Thank you very much, my friend. We shall not detain you any longer. This lady has apologized and I have graciously decided not to press charges. Also I will tell my uncle, the capo of police, what a good job you have done. Now leave us, we would be alone.”

  And Officer Allegrini did! After hitting me with a look that said seeing me again wasn’t going to top his to-do list, he melted
into the crowd like a lozenge. Leaving me completely on my own with someone who, while probably not an assassin, had just chased me halfway around the city.

  Who was now smiling at me and saying, “At last, it is just the two of us! I thought he would never leave!”

  There were probably three hundred things I should have said but what came out instead was “Your uncle is not the head of the police.”

  “Do not spoil it for Officer Allegrini! The carabinieri may have very sharp outfits, but their brains are not so sharp and they have few pleasures. He thinks he has earned a commendation. You do not wish him to be unhappy, do you?”

  I stared at him.

  “No, I did not think so. I could tell you have a kind heart from the first time I saw you. Now tell me why you make all this trouble for me.”

  I blinked at him. “You’re the one who chased after us.”

  “Of course. Because you were running.”

  “We were running because you were chasing us.”

  “I chase you because you are running.”

  “You chased us first.”

  He shook his head. “I did not chase you. Max does not chase girls. Girls chase Max.”

  “If you weren’t following us, what are you doing here?”

  “Aha! I did not say I was not following you.”

  “But—”

  “I did follow you. To give you back this.” He reached into his pocket and in the back of my mind it occurred to me that if I were an assassin, this would be exactly the moment when I’d pull out my gun and start shooting.

  Instead, what he pulled out were seven euros. “Your friend leaves her change when she buys her gelato,” he explained. “Signora Lee cannot leave the stand to bring it to her, so I go after to return it.”