P.A.W.S.

by Debbie Manber Kupfer

  Miri’s uncle, David Katz, drove a huge SUV. Miri climbed into the back with some difficulty. The back seat was piled high with fur jackets in plastic covers.

  “Be careful not to touch the coats, Miriam.” These were the first words Miri’s Uncle David ever said to her. She sat in the back, gazing at the bald spot on the top of his head. He was a large man and was expensively dressed, yet somehow still looked disheveled. He wore a fur jacket, even though the weather was quite mild. He had a loud, booming voice, and he directed a number of questions her way, none of which he gave Miri a chance to answer.

  Miri wondered why, in all these years, David and Cynthia had never visited her and Omama in New York; why David never even went to his mother’s funeral. What could have happened to have torn the family apart like this? David and Cynthia were obviously doing very well financially, a fact that became even more apparent as they drove into the long driveway of what Miri could only consider to be a mansion.

  “Nice, don’t you think?” boomed David as Miri walked in through the door and gazed at the massive living room with hardwood floors and leather upholstery. “Much better than that hovel you lived in in New York. You know, I left there as soon as I could and never looked back.”

  Miri didn’t answer. She couldn’t answer. They showed her to a room upstairs, a room with its own bathroom and balcony and a huge walk-in closet that was bigger than their whole apartment had been in the Lower East Side, yet she would have given anything to be back there.

  Then they closed the door and left her there. Miri sprawled out on the oversized plush bed and cried. She couldn’t sleep; images of everything that happened in the last two days kept repeating over and over again. She thought about her world in New York so suddenly torn away from her. She thought about Jenny. Did she come by with a birthday gift to find her gone?

  She thought about Kitty and Suzy out on the street by themselves. She wondered if some other kind soul would take them in and feed and care for them. And, most of all, she thought about Omama. Miri took out the cat charm from beneath her shirt and looked at it, her last gift from her omama. It felt warm and tingly in her hand. She closed her eyes and tried to picture her omama’s face as it had been when she gave Miri the charm in the middle of the night, but instead, she saw the gray cat with the green eyes that she’d seen twice now in her dreams.

  Miri got up and used the bathroom, gazing at her face in the mirror. She had long, messy, dark brown hair and blue eyes. Her skin was blotchy and covered in freckles. She knew she was plain at best, but that had never really bothered her. In her omama’s eyes, she was beautiful. That was all that had mattered. Miri realized she was hungry. She hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday, as she had refused the food on the plane, so she decided to go downstairs to see if she could get something to eat. Slowly she walked down the stairs and was going to walk into the kitchen when she heard raised voices inside. It seemed that her uncle and aunt were having some kind of argument in the kitchen. She stopped just outside the door and listened.

  “You know I never wanted children, David!”

  “I’m sorry, Cynthia, but we don’t have a choice. She’s got nowhere else to go.”

  “But look at her! She’s a mess! That mother of yours hasn’t brought her up properly. You should see the junk that was piled up in that apartment. And cats – ugh. I never could understand why anyone would want an animal in their house. Unless, of course, they’re already dead and made into a nice fur jacket!”

  “I agree, Cynthia, but what can we do?”

  “We can send her away, of course – a boarding school. I hear the Saul Emmanuel Academy is extremely good. You know we have enough money. The last thing we want is a brat permanently around the place. I believe they even run a summer camp, so we’ll hardly ever have to see her at all.”

  Suddenly Miri was no longer hungry. As quietly as possible, she went back up the stairs and into her room.

  Chapter 3

  Three years later

  The school bell rang. Classes were over for the day. Everybody packed up their stuff and rushed out of the classrooms in groups of twos and threes, laughing and joking. Some students went up to the dorm rooms or the library, but as the weather was pleasant, a balmy late- September afternoon, most of the students wandered outside. A few kids tossed a Frisbee back and forth, but most sat in groups, chatting, flirting, and exchanging text messages.

  The Saul Emmanuel Academy sat on vast grounds that included a big lake in which, during summer camp, students canoed and swam, and a large forest area populated with an abundance of wildlife. It would all be very pleasant if the other kids were nicer, thought Miri. However, in the years since she had been living here, she had yet to make one friend. Miri still missed Jenny terribly, and often wondered if Jenny ever thought about her.

  Today Miri was the last to leave the classroom. She took her time packing up her heavy bag of books. She gazed down at her white blouse, a regulation part of the school uniform they were forced to wear here at Saul Emmanuel, and sighed. There was a big brown smudge on the front. Must have been from lunch when that creep Jeremy Bloom tossed his leftover meatball at me, thought Miri. There was a tear in her skirt too, from when Jeanie Myerson had tripped her yesterday.

  Miri walked out into the grounds, avoiding the giggling groups sitting around the edge of the lake, and made her way back to the forest area. Here, beneath the furthest oak tree, was her special spot. No one else came here, so here, she stopped, dropped her heavy bag, and flopped down onto the ground. She took out the book she was reading and her notebook. She liked to read fantasies these days, stories where the hero or heroine got to escape into magical worlds. Miri often wondered what it would be like to be able to escape, to vanish without a trace.

  Miri also enjoyed writing her own stories and thoughts in her notebooks. Maybe she would be a writer one day. It was the only subject she was any good at here at the academy. Everything else was tough, especially the math, and Miri often found herself zoning out into her fantasy worlds instead of concentrating on algebra problems. Then inevitably she ended up with yet another detention.

  The thing about being in a boarding school, Miri discovered pretty early on, was that they can keep you in detention as long as they like; there were no worried parents at home to call and wonder where you were. Not that David and Cynthia (her legal guardians now) would care if she ever came home. She was sure they went out and celebrated the day she left for Saul Emmanuel. Their fancy house in the exclusive Town and Country suburb of St. Louis had never felt like home anyhow. She may as well be here. She had lost the only home she ever had the day Omama died.

  Some days she would write about her old life in New York, about Jenny, Suzy, Kitty, and Omama. She felt a strong need to keep those old memories alive, if only for herself. Miri still wore her omama’s cat charm under her shirt always, as she had promised Celia she would, and sometimes in her dreams she was visited by the gray cat with the green eyes.

  Under the oak tree Miri read for a while, and then she took out her notebook and began to write. Recently she had been writing down some of the stories Celia had told her when she was small, about her early life in the Lower East Side with her Opapa Max, and about when they first came to New York. Miri believed it was very important to remember those stories and also to remember her previous life in New York. One day, when she was done with school, Miri had promised herself that she would go back there and try to find what was left of her old community.

  Miri lost herself in her words for so long that she didn’t notice that the sun was setting and that she had probably missed dinner again. That’s all right, she thought. I should be able to beg a few leftovers from the kitchen staff later if I offer to wash some dishes. The kitchen staff at Saul Emmanuel at least were kind, especially old Mrs. Brookes, who sometimes let Miri help her when she baked the challahs for Shabbat.

  Miri stood up, stretched, gathered her belongings, and started trudging back towards the scho
ol building. In her mind she went over the details of the story she had been working on, planning what she was going to write next. So lost in thought was she that she didn’t notice Jeanie Myerson, out with a bunch of her cronies, until they had surrounded her.

  “Hey, Fleabag! What you got there?” jeered Jeanie, jumping out in front of Miri and making a grab for her bag. “Look at you, Fleabag! You’re a mess, a disgrace to our school. Maybe we should give you a special shampoo, you know, in the toilet bowl!” The group surrounding Miri laughed and egged Jeanie on. Jeanie made a grab for Miri’s bag and extracted a notebook from inside.

  “Hey, Mandy, Gemma. Hold her, will you? I want to see what’s in here. She writes all the time. Maybe she’s writing crap about us.”

  “No, leave that alone! It’s private!” Miri screamed, but Gemma and Mandy pulled her back and held her tightly.

  Jeanie opened the notebook from Miri’s bag to a random page and read aloud:

  “‘Everyone always said Max was a good man...’ Who’s Max, Fleabag? Your boyfriend? Nah, no boy would ever look at you – you freak!”

  “Give that back!” Miri shouted, struggling, but Gemma and Mandy were still holding her tight.

  “You know what?” Jeanie said. “How about we do a little science experiment? I wonder how long this thing would take to burn. Taylor, you got any matches?”

  “Of course I do,” replied Taylor. Taylor, who always stank of smoke, had been caught countless times sneaking out of class to smoke cigarettes behind the bushes. She tossed the matchbook over to Jeanie.

  “So watch closely, ladies,” announced Jeanie, striking a match. “We take a little flame, like this.” She held the sizzling match up to Miri’s face. “And then we light the edge of the book, like so.”

  “No!” Miri screamed and managed to break free and grab her notebook that had just started to smolder. As she grabbed it, one spark from the smoldering book flew out into Jeanie’s hair.

  “Ow!” Jeanie screamed. “Help! I’m on fire!”

  But Miri didn’t wait to see what happened next. She just ran as fast as she could. Normally Miri could not run very fast, as her asthma tended to flare up, but now it was imperative to save her notebook. She reached the edge of the lake and carefully used just enough water to douse the flames. She breathed a sigh of relief; at least she had saved her book.

  Miri looked back and saw that Jeanie and her friends were a little further down the lake. Jeanie obviously had gone head-first into the water to put out her flaming hair and now looked a little like a drowned rat. Miri tried to suppress a giggle. Unfortunately, Jeanie heard Miri’s laughter.

  “What are you looking at, Fleabag?” Jeanie demanded, and started towards Miri, shaking off the drops of water from her hair vigorously, like an annoyed poodle.

  Miri took off in the direction of the forest, not really sure where she should go. It was getting dark, and she thought that it must be close to curfew. She had hoped the girls would not want to risk yet another detention, so wouldn’t follow her, but no such luck. As she ran back into the forest, Miri heard their voices not far behind her, taunting her.

  “Look at that Fleabag run!” “Scaredy cat, scaredy cat…” In desperation Miri ran through the forest, making her way back to her oak tree. Maybe, she thought, I can hide in there.

  When she reached the tree, Miri pushed herself through into the foliage and sank to the ground, out of breath. She reached into her pocket for her inhaler and then stopped. Something odd was happening. Underneath her shirt, just by her heart, Miri felt an intense heat. She reached inside and pulled out the cat amulet, Omama’s cat amulet, and gasped in surprise. Its eyes were glowing bright green. Instinctively, she held it in both hands and closed her eyes. A strange warmth permeated her entire body, and she heard the voice of the gray cat. “Now, Miri, mein Katzel – you can do it!”

  Miri concentrated and felt the essence from the cat charm entering her and shaping her. First her body began to contract and reform. Then her clothing, skin, and hair blended together into dark black, glossy fur. Miri looked down at her hands, and in their place she saw, for the first time, paws, her paws. She flexed one and discovered that it had claws that she could retract. Miri felt strength in those claws, a power she had never felt before. Cautiously, Miri now stood up on all four paws and felt her tail giving her balance from behind.

  Now Miri was beginning to understand. This charm was her heritage. Maybe this was how Celia, her omama, escaped from the Nazis. She’d never really explained about that. She always said it was something she would understand when Miri was older. She had known that Celia had an affinity to cats, but now it appeared it was more than that; that through the silver cat charm, Celia, and now Miri, had the power to choose their form, to be human or to be feline.

  “Where’d she go?” Miri heard Jeanie shout. The others came running too. All were out of breath. “She must be around here somewhere.”

  Miri’s new cat form was small and thin, and she could fit easily into a hollow crevice up high in the oak tree. From that vantage point, she was just above the heads of Jeanie and her friends, and Miri could not resist. For over two years now, they had been taunting her, making her life at Saul Emmanuel a living hell. Now, for the first time, she had the upper hand (or maybe paw). The branches of the oak were filled with acorns. Gingerly, Miri reached out of her hiding place with one of her front paws and shook the branches just above Jeanie and her friends’ heads.

  “Ouch!” shouted Gemma as the first acorn hit her squarely on the top of her head. “What was that?” She peered up at the tree just as Miri managed to dislodge a whole branch full of acorns. They rained down on the heads of all the girls. Quickly, Miri darted from one part of the tree to the next, sending down showers of acorns upon the girls below. Every so often Jeanie and her friends would peer up into the tree, but Miri’s new black fur was the perfect camouflage, especially with the approaching darkness, and they could see nothing.

  “Must be a squirrel,” said Mandy.

  “Wonder what happened to that fleabag, Katz?” asked Taylor.

  “Oh, she must have gone back to the dorms by now,” answered Jeanie dismissively. “We’d better go back or we’ll get detention for being out past curfew.”

  “Anyone have a smoke?” asked Taylor as they began to trudge back through the forest.

  Miri stayed perfectly still in the tree until the girls’ voices were far in the distance.

  Chapter 4

  When the girls were gone, Miri jumped down from the tree. Ouch! I thought cats were always supposed to land on their feet. She rolled head-over-heels and landed on her back with her legs in the air.

  She stretched her body and flexed her muscles, feeling the cool wind whip through her fur. Miri felt a lot better now. She felt energized and far less alone than she had felt for a long, long time. She explored her new heightened cat senses. It was almost completely black now there in the forest (if I ever get back into the school tonight, she thought, I’m going to be in so much trouble), yet she could see the details of the new world around her as clearly as if it was day. Miri listened, her pointed ears picking up even the slightest sounds: insects scratching beneath the ground, a lone owl far overhead, bats awakening in the trees.

  Beneath her paws, Miri could feel all the contours of the earth and could even sense a worm wriggling just below the surface. Her sensitive feline nose picked out scents she could not even imagine existed, such as field mice in their burrows, which, she was horrified to realize, made her feel hungry. Miri could also smell the lake and the fish beneath, and (she shuddered) a stale canine smell seemed to cover the whole area.

  She tentatively licked one of her front paws. Her fur tasted slightly salty, and it felt comforting to lick. Miri understood now why Suzy and Kitty had spent so much time washing.

  Miri’s whiskers tingled. It seemed that she had a new sense she had not possessed before. When she concentrated through her whiskers, she could sense something else. V
oices? Energy? Auras? It was as if there were hundreds of voices all around her that she could pick up through her whiskers. They were not talking to her but chattering endlessly to one another. Maybe they were ants, or maybe worms, or mice. High up in the trees, snug in their nests, she could sense sleepy birds, robins and cardinals bedding down for the night. And far, far in the distance, beyond the realm of this small forest, Miri could sense other cats.

  Slowly, Miri walked through the forest, picking her way back towards the school building. The energy from her whiskers was almost deafening now as she picked up the hundreds of thoughts of the students and staff inside the building. It was far too loud, a cacophony of voices impossible to bear. She backed away from the building, and the noise in her head diminished somewhat so that she was once more able to think. She crouched under a bush by the lake and wondered what she should do.

  Now Miri began to get worried. Was she always going to be a cat now? How would she survive? She licked her paws several times for comfort. She was hungry. She inched out from her hiding place to the edge of the lake. The moon was high in the sky now, and as she gazed into the water, she saw her feline reflection for the first time. Looking back up at her, Miri saw a furry, black face; small, pointed ears; and black whiskers – wait, not entirely black. She noticed that she had one white whisker among the black!

  Hunger gnawed at Miri’s stomach. She could smell the fish in the water. Maybe she could catch one? She made a few half-hearted swipes with her paw in the cool lake water, but the fish dashed away far beneath the surface and she heard an odd chattering in her head, as if they were laughing at her clumsy attempts.

  She looked down at her reflection again and noticed something else that she had missed the first time. Around her neck she was still wearing the silver charm necklace. Surely, she thought, this must be her link with the human world, if only she knew how to invoke it. Miri closed her eyes tightly and concentrated, hoping to be visited by the gray cat with the green eyes, but she did not come.