The Turning Book 1: What Curiosity Kills

by Helen Ellis

  I am tingling.

  From neck to knees.

  With rage.

  I want to bait and switch Country Club within an inch of his life. How dare he threaten Mrs. Wrinkles? Who is he to bellow at me? This is MY library! MY neighborhood! MY sister! MY…boyfriend? Is that what Nick is? And what exactly is Ben to me? Never mind now. It doesn’t matter. Country Club is nothing but a bunny. I want all four of his feet on a key chain.

  I wriggle and buck.

  Nick secures me in place. His breath on my neck is as hot as a hair dryer.

  I hop, raise my knees, kick back, and jam my heels into his shins. Nick exhales sharply but doesn’t let go.

  Strangers filter off the library sidewalk, covering their mouths as they report our obnoxious behavior into their cells. New Yorkers will stick around for a gargantuan cat, but they’re not getting sucked into a couple of dumb kids horsing around. They think we’re asking for it. That tomcat’s going to jump and then we’re really going to be sorry. I laugh at their stupidity. I jerk and writhe and strain to break free from Nick’s tight hold. I’m going to tear that tomcat apart!

  “Are you crazy?” exclaims Octavia from her resting spot on Ben’s coat lapel.

  “I don’t know,” I admit.

  Country Club sits stoically and studies me. His eyes are yellow slits, his breathing controlled. If you didn’t know he was there, you might not even notice him. If you did, you’d mistake him for a fake owl that people put on their fire escapes and roofs to scare away rats. He antagonizes me with his composure.

  I kick Nick again.

  “Damn it, Mary! Quit!” Nick grips me with such force that he bends backward over the handicap railing and pulls me along with him. The toe bumpers of his red Chuck Taylors steady us on the cement ramp, but my feet are in the air. I bicycle my legs! I kick, kick, and kick! I scream to be released. Nick whispers, “It’s the orange.”

  I feel it, tingling, sprouting, bristling: a stripe from my shirt tag up the back of my neck.

  He whispers, “You can’t help it, but you have to. Orange means you could take him, but you’re too little now. If you touch him, you’ll turn. He’ll kill you if you turn.”

  “Just let me go!”

  Octavia takes her hands off Ben and grabs at my flailing ankles. Ben sticks his hands between me and her to try to protect Octavia from getting booted in the face. She gets hold of a calf, drops to the ground, and drags me with her. My butt hits cement. For crying out loud, how quick was I to forget that I’m still in my wrinkly, stinky, school skirt from yesterday? Through the children’s reading room windows, slack-jawed first graders are still gaping from getting a gander at my drawers.

  Sirens blare in the distance.

  Well, what do you know? Even in Manhattan, a wild cat gets a one-alarm fire department response. Animal control wheels up behind the laddered truck. Tranquilizer guns are drawn. A fireman cranks the big bolt on a hydrant. The long, flat hose is unwound and aimed. Two firemen storm into the library. Weighed down by fifty pounds of gear, their footfalls land heavily on the stairs as they pound their way up through adult fiction and nonfiction to get to the roof.

  Country Club doesn’t look nervous. Perturbed is more like it. I’ve seen that expression before on Yoon’s deli cat face. On Yoon, it was appropriate. He’d escaped falling into my toilet and then the plastic slats on the twins’ terrace lounge chair. Country Club has a hard rush of water, semi-poisonous darts, and ax-yielding firemen coming his way. But he glances back at me as if these are minor distractions at best.

  “Let her rip!” shouts a fireman. The hose fattens with water.

  The animal control people aim their tranquilizers and pull their triggers. They look even more frightened than the pedestrians. Feathered needles arch toward the roof. Every shot misses.

  Country Club pays the ammunition as much mind as he paid the dumbass’s rock. He turns and holds his tail high so we can all see his insubordinate butt.

  But I notice that something is missing. Two things are missing really. What’s round and white and fuzzy all over? Nothing on this cat. If there was ever a doubt in my head that Country Club is more than a cat—something like Nick, Yoon, and I are—that doubt is snip-snipped.

  Country Club flicks his tail as the stream from the firemen’s hose, raised toward the roof, splatters the building. When the stream hits the ledge, it explodes and makes a rainbow. Country Club is misted but saunters out of sight before he gets a full blast. The roof door bangs open. There’s shouting, but the arriving firemen are too slow to catch him as he springs to freedom on neighboring roofs.

  chapter seventeen

  Nick skims the tiny Greek book Octavia took from the library. He says, “I can’t read this. It’s in ancient Greek.”

  Ben asks, “What are you looking for exactly?”

  “It doesn’t matter. If Mary wants help and I can help her, I will. We’ll go to my house and have Papou translate.”

  I say, “Your grandmother’s not going to be happy to see me.”

  Nick says, “Why, because you got me in trouble at school? Once she finds out how much we’re alike, she’ll forget all about the principal’s office.”

  I self-consciously touch the orange fuzz on the nape of my neck.

  To help hide the skinny stripe behind my long hair, Nick offers me his scarf; the same black-and-gray-checked scarf he wouldn’t let Ling Ling borrow on the bus outside my house. No matter how hard she tugged at it, he wouldn’t give it to her. Now it’s tied around my neck. Instantly, it itches. But I’ll put up with the irritation. This scarf is Nick’s way of showing the world he belongs with me.

  “It’s cheap,” Nick confirms, “but Yiayia’s so proud of herself for getting a deal.” He impersonates her. “Ela! TWO for ten dollars, I talked the salesman into!”

  Octavia says, “Let’s go already.”

  I say, “I don’t want Ben to hear what the book says.”

  Ben says, “Sorry, Mary, you’re not getting rid of me. Nick told you he owes me.”

  Octavia hails a cab. “We’re wasting time. Everybody get in already! You’ll get yours, Ben, and we’ll get ours.”

  Nick gives his address to the taxi driver, dives into the back seat, and scoots to the far door. He pats the hump. What else can I do but pile in after him? Octavia crams in after me. She’s none too happy to be holed up with two cat people. I know she blames Nick for what’s happening to me and for what will happen to her if we don’t get me fixed. She yanks the door closed, leans forward, and glares around me at him.

  Ben, who’s left to sit in the front, sinks into the passenger seat and frowns into the rearview mirror. Racing uptown, the bulletproof partition, taxi radio, and driver’s never-ending, one-sided conversation into his earpiece will make it impossible for Ben to hear us.

  I ask Nick, “Who’s Country Club’s chaperone?”

  “He doesn’t have one. He’s stray.”

  “If he’s stray, what about his…who cut off his…”

  “Nuts,” Octavia says in a way that makes Nick cross his legs.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “He either spent time in a pound or someone neutered him as a kitten and then left him to fend for himself. He lives down on Ludlow. But since the economy tanked, he’s been up here sniffing around.”

  “For what?”

  “New territory. Haven’t you noticed? The Upper East Side is mostly vacant lots. There are empty stores on every block. The worst stretch is on Lex between 72nd and 77th. Every other window in your neighborhood is dark. Caviarteria, Starwich—”

  “That bathing suit store,” I think out loud. “The antique jewelry store…that store with retro furniture.”

  “Payard,” murmurs Octavia. “Every damn day, I miss those chocolate croissants.”

  Nick says, “No more mom-and-pops. Papou says we’re the new L
ower East Side minus the bad element. But the bad element’s already here. Country Club is King of the Strays.”

  “You mean them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, who are we?”

  “If you’re with me—”

  “I’m with you!” The words fly out of my mouth. “I mean, why wouldn’t I be with you?”

  “If you’re with me, you’re a dom. As in domestic,” Nick explains.

  “Domestic,” Octavia repeats, “because you guys live at home?”

  “Yeah. We’re fed, taken care of, given a roof over our heads. Spoiled, in strays’ opinions.” He studies the time, temperature, and fare on the front seat’s flat screen TV and decides what to reveal next. “See, doms and strays—the sides, us and them—are made up of pure-cats, like Country Club, and turn-cats, like you and me.”

  “Turn-cats, that’s what we’re called?”

  Octavia mutters, “Y’all need help.”

  Nick twists in his seat and snaps: “That’s right. We do need help, but we don’t have any! Apart from your little library book, there’s no written history about what we are. We’re not werewolves.”

  Octavia swallows hard. “Are there werewolves?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  I ask, “So, the twins’ cats are domestics?”

  Nick nods. “Peanut Butter and Jelly.”

  “You know them?” says Octavia.

  “Those Kim Jong-Il–lookin’ crybabies? Yeah.”

  “And Mrs. Wrinkles?” she breathes.

  “Queen of the Doms. Her family’s ruled for thirty years; Country Club has ruled the strays for a week. He’s only four years old, but talk about your dictators. His cats won’t lick themselves without his permission.”

  My heart starts to thump. “Who are the stray turn-cats?”

  Nick leans back. “Runaways. Kids who waste their lives on the benches outside American Apparel down on Orchard. You know the type: faces pierced, tattooed, dreaded-up, dirty. They left home for some kind of freedom, but I don’t know what kind of freedom you get by sleeping in abandoned buildings. This isn’t the eighties. They’re not starving artists. When their turn-time is up, where will they be?”

  Uh-oh. A chink in Nick’s shining armor. If it weren’t for my parents, where would I be? I am a lottery kid. My parents plucked me like a numbered ping-pong ball out of hundreds of thousands of foster kids, who are now living who knows where under who knows what kinds of conditions. No one chooses to run away. You run because you have no choice; continue living where you are living is worse than living on the streets. It is hell. But the streets are worse than hell. To avoid them, Octavia spent a year with the devil’s minions.

  She says, “Maybe those turn-kids were kicked out when their folks found out what they were.”

  Nick says, “Maybe. But that’s not our problem. Our problem is them turning up here. They need to stay below Houston where they belong. But Country Club wants his strays to squat in our empty lots.”

  I remember what Mr. Charles said about Country Club. “He wants to take over. He thinks Mrs. Wrinkles is getting old.”

  “She is. Best-case scenario, in a few years, she’ll die of natural causes. After her, there are no more Webster Wrinkles. A new dom has to take her place.”

  “Has a turn-cat ever ruled?”

  “Not the doms. With strays, power goes back and forth between pures and turns all the time. Strays love to fight. A turn-cat had power before Country Club killed him. He murdered that kid in cold blood when he was human. It was gruesome.”

  My body tenses. “You saw?”

  “Yoon dragged me downtown to the stray royal lair to see an initiation.”

  Stray royal lair? I can only imagine what Octavia is thinking. I keep my attention focused on Nick. We’re close to his house. Five more blocks.

  “Why’d you go with him to begin with?” I ask.

  “I don’t know many turns. Before you, I was the only one at Purser-Lilley. Yoon pisses me off, but he understands me. Sometimes, I need that companionship. I try to stay out of the whole doms-versus-strays situation, but Yoon is hard to say no to.”

  “But he’s one of them.”

  “Officially, he’s on the fence. He runs with strays but lives at home. He does enough to keep the strays happy, so they let him stick around. To officially become a stray if you’re a turn, you have to be marred. Yoon wanted me to see that initiation ceremony because he thought it would impress me.”

  “Did it?

  “It did. I’ll never go back to Kropps & Bobbers again.”

  “Where?” Octavia grumbles.

  “Hair salon down on Ludlow. There’s an overgrown garden in the back with high walls where stray turns and pures hang out. The owner is an animal lover; a people lover too. She doesn’t judge. She keeps the back door closed, looks the other way, and doesn’t ask questions.”

  “So, what happened?” Octavia now wants to know, twisting toward him.

  Nick’s eyes get so sad, it’s got to be impossible for Octavia not to pick up on how much he hates how we are and how hopeless he thinks our situation is. But if it weren’t for our condition, Nick would never have sought me out. We would never have kissed. I wouldn’t be tingling—in the good way—from being pressed up beside him. I wonder if the Greek book has a cure, and if he and I get fixed, will we stay together. Or will he ignore me? Because every time he sees me, he’ll remember what he wants to forget.

  Nick explains, “To get initiated into the strays, you have to mar yourself with a characteristic of the current king or queen. So, if the king’s a bobcat, you have your tail cut off. If the king’s a Persian, you have your nose broken. You know how Hussein had all those look-alikes? Strays call it getting Saddam-ed.”

  Octavia says, “That’s disgusting! Why would Yoon want to be one of them?”

  “Because strays are wild and unaccountable to anyone but each other. Apart from turning, once you’re a cat—I’ll admit it—it feels good. Everything feels better.”

  “Like love?” I dare to ask.

  Nick looks at me with his sad eyes. He says, “When you’re a cat, there is no love. Just lust. Heightened senses and no morals. You live life in the now. Strays want to live that way forever, but most of them don’t make it through their turn-time alive. The last king was a rotten little shit. Fifteen but built like he was nine. He fought everyone. His front two teeth were knocked out, so he spat when he spoke. Country Club was his biggest protector. The kid had nursed his mite-infested ear back to health to gain his loyalty, but this one time, he left Country Club out in the snow. To a cat, rain feels like razor blades, but snow feels even worse. Country Club nearly died. And cats aren’t dogs. They’re spiteful. They never forgive.

  “So, Yoon and I are downtown in that salon’s back garden, crowded around the initiation ceremony with a bunch of strays—turns in human form and pures in their only form—and we’re all watching the king stick a pair of pliers in some idiot’s mouth. That’s when Country Club jumped him. Landed square on the king’s head. His weight broke his neck, but before the king hit the ground, Country Club had scalped him, skinned his face, and nearly torn his head clean off.”

  Octavia warns, “Mary, you cannot be part of this.”

  Bile rises in my throat, the soured acid of my last meal—ham and cheese Hot Pockets. My desire to fight Country Club is nothing more than a bad taste in my mouth. If Nick hadn’t held me back from running after him at the library, what would that huge white monster have done to me? What made me think I could take him? What made me want to fight him at all?

  The orange, Nick had whispered.

  I slip off a mitten and reach back to touch the fuzz on the nape of my neck. The orange stripe has crept up behind my ears into the shape of a slingshot.

  Nick lifts my hair, peels down the scarf, and takes
a look. The gesture is incredibly intimate. Heat spills down my throat and under my blouse.

  He says, “It’s spreading.”

  Octavia shouts, “Get your hands off her!”

  Nick pulls away. “It’s not me who started it! She can’t catch it from me when I’m like this.”

  Like this. I glance beside me and take him in. Nick Martin. Nick Martin. Nick Martin! Medium-height, medium-dark, and pretty-gosh-dang-close-to-handsome. I twist my head toward Octavia. All she sees is filth dressed up like a boy doll.

  She says, “Mary, we have to fix you. We have to fix you right now.”

  Her hand opens and closes around the door handle. She’s debating whether to jump out at the next red light and pull me along with her. Her other hand grips the tiny Greek book in her lap. Apart from Papou, we don’t have any other translators at the ready. If I’m going to be fixed, he’s the one to tell me how. Octavia knows I’m turning. She doesn’t want to see my full transformation again.

  Nick reaches across me and grabs Octavia’s hand with the tiny book. “Only physical contact with cats can start Mary off.”

  “Get off me!” Octavia shrieks, jerking away.

  “It doesn’t matter if I touch you—nothing will ever happen.”

  “But I didn’t touch Country Club,” I point out.

  “But you wanted to. Urges to be a cat will make you turn too.”

  I think about the whisker Yoon plucked from my head. His nearness didn’t put it there; it was my urge to catch the mouse. The fur on my neck grew from my thirst for Country Club’s blood. The turning is upon me. And now it’s spreading on its own.

  Nick says, “You’re a kitten. Each time you turn, the turning will come quicker. Your cat self will get bigger. The more full-grown cat you become, the easier the turning will be to control. Eventually, in season, you’ll be able to turn without triggers whenever you want.”

  Octavia asks, “How long has she got before she turns this time?”

  “If she doesn’t touch a cat or get herself in a situation where she wants to be a cat, she should have until tonight.”

  “But if she does?” Octavia pleads.