Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen (15 page)

“Wouldn't it be something if Dorito was at the fire escape waiting for
us to
return?”

Suddenly I felt hopeful. “You think?”

“Could very well be.”

So we hurried across Broadway, and then across Main, and while we were walking, Grams said, “I think I've pieced together most of what happened with the cats and all, but why didn't you tell me this yesterday?”

I just rolled my eyes and said, “‘Cause you were all wrapped up in Lady
Lana
, and how grateful I should be that she popped in to tell me she's been lying to me for years.”

Grams let out a heavy sigh and said, “Why does this all have to be so hard? And
please
don't go back to calling her Lady Lana. I thought we were past that. I thought you supported her wanting to make something of herself. She's doing her best to—”

“There you go again!” I said, spinning to face her.
“You're sticking up for her! Why can't you admit she was wrong to lie to me!”

“Of course she was wrong! But give her credit for agreeing it was time to make things right. She came a long way to talk to you, you know.”

I started marching toward the Highrise. “Such a sacrifice.”

“Samantha, come on.”

I shook my head. “What were the two of you expecting? That I'd shrug and say, Oh hey, cool? Can't you understand that this makes everything
else
she's done come flooding back? She lies, she manipulates—”

“But she's trying to make things right, Samantha!”

I sighed. “Look, let's just drop it, okay? Thank you for being so nice about helping me find Dorito.” I gave her a little smile. “And by the way, you look really great in high-tops and jeans…”

“As you do in pink.”

We eyed each other a minute, then cracked up and headed home.

When we got to the fire escape, we discovered that Dorito was definitely not waiting for us. And after searching the area Grams finally said, “Let's take a break, okay? I think we could both use some dinner.” I shook my head. “I'm not hungry, Grams.” She sighed and said, “Well, you can stay out a while longer, but I'm going in.” So I moved into the shadows and watched as she went
up the fire escape, stopping at every level to scan the area for Dorito. Then I slid down the wall and kept a sharp eye out for him, hoping he wanted to come home as much as I wanted him to. But after a while my mind started wandering, and I couldn't help thinking how being thirteen all over again was already the worst luck ever.

I also remembered what Hudson and Meg and Vera had said, and really, I did try to think about the
good
things. But when you're stuck outside alone in the cold on your second thirteenth birthday, hoping that the cat you've told every single secret of your life to decides to maybe wander home, well, it's hard to focus on the positive.

And then, all of a sudden, out of the fog in my mind came Grams' voice. “Samantha?” It was floating above me … sort of a whisper. “Psssst. Samantha?”

I stood up and backed up so I could see the fifth-floor landing. “Over here!” I whispered.

She came pounding down the steps. “Great news!”

“What?”

It took forever for her to make it to the bottom. “Tony called!”

“Who?”

“Tornado Tony?”

“Oh.”

“He found Dorito!”

“You're kidding!”

“No! Described him to a T. Says he'll be out in front of Slammin' Dave's in five minutes!”

I looked across the Highrise lawn and spotted Tony's
white van getting ready to turn onto Broadway from Wesler. “There he is now!”

But halfway across the lawn I had a terrible thought. I was already way ahead of Grams, but I stopped and waited for her. “He's not
dead
, is he?”

“Who?”

“Dorito!”

“Why would he be dead?”

Like little visual bites, finding Snowball, bagging Snowball,
delivering
Snowball played through my head. “Because… because …”

I couldn't stand it—I took off running. I tore across the grass, jaywalked Broadway, and practically ripped the passenger-door handle off Tony's van trying to get inside.

He came out the driver's side, Dorito in the crook of his arm. “This your boy?” he said with a grin.

“Dorito!” I tore around the front of the van and scooped him up. And after power-nuzzling him for a minute, I said to Tony, “Where did you find him?”

“I spotted him on Piños, just cruising.” He nodded. “Buff cat. He'd have done fine on his own.”

“Thank you! Oh, thank you thank you!”

I noticed that Grams was sort of stranded on the other side of the street, so I held up Dorito and signaled her to stay put. Then I shifted Dorito under one arm and dug in my jeans' pocket for the forty bucks.

He looked at it and said, “No way, Triple-T. Consider it my gift to you.” He got in his van, saying, “But if the old lady ever needs some cleanin' done, you make sure she calls me, okay?”

“You got it! And thanks!”

He took off, and the minute there was a break in traffic, I ran back across the street, where Dorito and Grams had a nuzzle-nose reunion. “You naughty, naughty boy!” Grams cooed. “You gave us such a scare! Don't you ever do something like that again, you hear me?”

Dorito licked his paw like, Yeah,
right.

When we got home, the phone was ringing. Grams hurried to the kitchen to answer it, and I could hear her say, “Oh, Holly! We have wonderful news. Dorito's back!… yes … yes … hold on, I'll let you talk to Samantha.”

“Hey!” I said into the receiver.

“Where'd you find him?” she asked.

“Tornado Tony found him!”

“You're kidding.”

“No! We ran into him when we were putting up posters. He said he'd keep an eye out, but I didn't really expect him to
find
him.”

“Hey, that's great!”

Now, it's funny. Sometimes you can tell something's going on in someone's head, even when all you've got to work with is silence. Or a pause. And I could tell from the silence on the other end that the wheels inside Holly's head were definitely spinning. So I said, “But you weren't calling about Dorito, were you.”

“Well, no. But that is great news!”

“So…?”

“So I saw El Gato out behind Slammin' Dave's.”

“Yeah, and…?”

“And you won't believe who he was talking to.”

“Who?”

“That crazy cat lady”

“What? Really? When?”

“About half an hour ago.”

“Are you sure?”

She snorted. “There's no mistaking her. Or him.”

“He was wearing the mask?”

“Of course.”

“But Dave's isn't even open… is it?”

“Who knows. People come and go there at the weirdest times. It was just sort of freaky seeing the two of them together.”

“Well, what were they doing?”

“I don't really know. I saw them out the kitchen window, but I couldn't really hear anything. It looked like they were just talking… then laughing.”

“Laughing?”

I could practically see Holly shrug. “That's what it looked like.”

“Hmm.”

“But hey, who cares about wacky cat people, right? You've got your real cat back!”

I laughed. “That's right.”

“Which means your birthday wasn't a complete disaster after all, right?”

I laughed again. “Right.”

“Sorry we didn't get to do anything fun for it. Maybe tomorrow?”

“Maybe! Tony wouldn't take the reward money, so I've
still got forty bucks to buy something. I was thinking maybe a CD player.”

“That'd be cool. Maybe I'll get you a CD.”

“Hey, no way! You gave me the best birthday present possible—you helped me get Dorito back.” Then a little uh-oh tickled through my brain, and I guess Holly could feel it across the line.

“What?” she asked.

“Oh. Well, I was just thinking I should go pull all those flyers down.”

“Now?”

“Uh, I probably should. It's got our phone number on it, and Grams is worried about getting fined because posting flyers is against the law.”

“Against the … what?”

“Yeah, I didn't know that, either, but you wouldn't believe how many people gave us grief about it.”

Grams overheard my end of the conversation and said, “It's much too late to go back out tonight. Especially to that part of town. We'll take them down in the morning.”

So I said into the phone. “Never mind. Grams says it's okay to wait until morning.”

“You want to meet before school?”

“Seriously?”

“Sure.”

“Okay! I'll come over. Is seven o'clock too early?”

“Nah, that's good.”

So Grams and I ate birthday cake for dinner. It was so good! And I must've been beat to a pulp, because when

I snuggled up with Dorito on the couch, all I remember thinking was, I had my cat back and I still had forty bucks … maybe being thirteen didn't mean total bad luck after all.

What woke me in the morning wasn't the alarm clock. It was an itchy arm. A
really
itchy arm. Then my neck started itching. And my side. Then
my foot.
I was itchy all over, and when I finally got up and looked to see why, I discovered little red bumps, all over the place.

At first I thought I had the measles or chicken pox or smallpox or some other nasty rash disease. But weren't those, you know, obliterated? So maybe it was some other exotic rash disease.

But I didn't have a temperature. And I
felt
okay. Well, except for the itch. And the more I scratched, the worse it got. It was like a nursery of baby mosquitoes had smorgasborded on me.

But the minute Grams saw the bumps, she said, “Oh no!”

Her eyes were big. Her jaw was dropped. And for a second I just knew—I was gonna die. “What?”

“Fleas!”

“Fleas?”

She studied my arm. My foot. “Look at all these bites!” She wagged a finger at Dorito and said, “You naughty,
naughty
boy! Where did you go to pick up fleas?”

She scooped him up and tossed him in the bathroom. “You,” she said to me, “take a shower.” She tore my afghan off the couch. “I'll get this and your clothes washing.”

So that's what we did. And later, when we met up in the kitchen, I heard her muttering about having to get flea powder and a flea collar and vacuuming twice a day for two weeks to make sure there weren't any flea eggs, and what a mess my mom had made of things, letting Dorito get away.

“What was that?” I asked, because I almost couldn't believe that she'd said anything negative about my mom.

“Never mind.”

I got busy vacuuming and beating out the couch pillows and vacuuming some more. And by the time we'd tried a bunch of different salves on my bites to keep them from itching, it was already seven o'clock and I hadn't even had breakfast, let alone packed a lunch. “You want to write me an excuse for being tardy?” I asked. “‘Cause I'm never gonna get all those flyers down before school.”

“Don't worry about the flyers. I'll go take them down myself.”

“By yourself?”

“Of course.”

“You won't call Hudson?”

“No! I'll be fine.”

Boy. People call
me
stubborn. And since there was obviously no talking her out of it, the only way to keep her from going to the West Side—through gang territory and
who knows what else—was if I got the job done before school.

So I called Holly and told her I was running late, then powered through breakfast, threw some stuff together for lunch, and said, “Holly and I'll get it done, no sweat!” Then I tore out of the apartment before she could argue.

Holly and I did run around the neighborhoods as fast as we could, but we couldn't finish on time. Finally I looked at my watch and said, “You up for lunchroom?” because that's what Vice Principal Caan makes us do for tardy detention—eat lunch in a corner with other
A.M.
delinquents. Then he has us clean up the trash and slop left behind by everyone else. And believe me, if someone like Heather knows you've got tardy detention, she and all her friends make a righteous mess just for the fun of knowing you'll have to clean up after them.

Holly must have been thinking about scraping up mushy mashed potatoes, because her face crinkled and she said, “Can we finish after school?”