I have fucking awesome news and vaguely indifferent news. The fucking awesome news is that Py is coming down for the weekend. That means him and me painting the town red, our way – a binge of late-night drinking (this is my official ‘red’ alert, children: stay indoors, if you know what’s good for you), bitching about immortality and boasting about sex, and comparing notes on recent kills. It’s going to be bloody brilliant.
The vaguely indifferent news is I’ve been adopted by a cat. I don’t know what that means.
Superstition’s all bullshit, by the way. I should know – there’s about a million billion of them linked with my culture. So the whole black cat crossing your path thing – whatever. Besides, it’s not really black. It’s kind of scruffy black with brown bits and one fucked-up ear. Any self-respecting witch would microwave it rather than adopt it as a familiar. And it didn’t cross the path – it was sitting by the letterbox flicking its tail when I left for school.
And it was sitting on the door step, flicking its tail when I got home.
It’s true animals have a thing about us. For starters, they sure as hell know a natural predator when they see one, and survival instincts immediately suggest it’s a good time to leave. Fortunately for us, your kind has pretty much bred that out of themselves: I reckon professions like dentistry, law and tele-evangelism started blurring the boundaries too much. Plus we smell weird to animals – dead flesh, you know. Like with any corpse, they might have a sniff, but it usually again ends with their hasty departure from our presence. They know the unsmell of poison. Luckily again, human evolution has dispensed with such useful genetic traits – can’t even smell warm from cold, can you? Pity. For you.
So. The cat. You know why cats are apparently considered evil? Only domestic animal not mentioned in the bible. So the story goes, anyway. Not really up on the whole biblical lore thing. Egyptians worshipped them, dogs have masters while they have staff, there’s fucking awful musicals about them… You know. Cats. Cats don’t give a shit. So I get home, open the door, and the cat moves itself in. Don’t get me wrong – totally thought about throwing it out the window to see how high it would bounce off the neighbour’s SUV, or putting it in the freezer and timing the meows, or actually trying out the adage to see whether the kitchen did have enough swinging room.
But I just couldn’t be fucked right away, so slung my backpack at it, threw myself on the couch and put on the tv. The cat tensed, but didn’t bother moving because I’m a really shit shot. Then it left out the side window Pam leaves open to “air” the place. Then it came back. With a dead rat. And it ate it on the floor, watching tv. And I thought – well, yeah.
So we watched tv. And then I played Halo3 online until dawn. And the cat slept on the armchair. And in the morning it watched while I put the rat remains in the bin, and made a bit more of a human, Eddie-kind of mess for Pam to clean up too, and slapped on the sunscreen. And I grab the backpack and open the front door and look back at the cat. And the cat sits at the end of the hall and looks back at me. And I shut the door and go to school. The Cat stays.
Musings of a High School Vampire 