Kitty's Saga Chapter Eight: Hard Luck Bonuses

The bus arrived on campus earlier than expected.

Students slowly filed out into the sunshine of the late-spring day, stretching their legs after the long ride and scattering toward the buildings beyond the stop.

Kitty remained still for a moment.

The campus looked different.

The last time she had been there, it had been evening. She had been cold, starving, frightened, and uncertain whether she had any business being there at all.

Now the trees were green.

The sidewalks were bright beneath the afternoon sun.

Kitty was warm.

She was still a little hungry, but warm was an improvement.

She adjusted the bag on her shoulder and headed toward the main administration building.

Inside, she approached the information booth and asked where the weekend tours were meeting.

Something else had changed since her last visit, though Kitty had only recently begun noticing it.

People were nicer to her.

Regular meals had filled out her face. Her clothes were clean. Her hair was washed. She no longer carried the exhausted, half-starved appearance that had followed her everywhere before Sandy took her in.

Strangers looked at her differently now.

They smiled.

They said excuse me when passing.

They answered her questions without looking irritated that she had asked them.

Kitty found the transformation unsettling.

She was still the same person.

Nevertheless, she remained prepared for someone to become snippy with her at any moment.

The woman behind the information desk checked a list.

"I'm sorry. The tour registration forms were due a month ago. You'll have to wait until the next session."

Kitty's shoulders dropped.

"Oh."

Of course.

She should have expected something like that.

"I wish my social worker had told me. I just went two hours out of my way for nothing."

She turned toward the door.

"Wait."

Kitty stopped.

The clerk was looking at her differently.

"You said your social worker?"

"Yeah."

"Were you a ward of the state?"

Kitty shifted the bag on her shoulder.

"I guess I am. Or was. I turned eighteen a couple of days ago."

She hesitated.

"My diploma didn't come in the mail until today, though, so I guess the timing just didn't work out."

The clerk glanced at the registration list again.

Then she began shuffling papers.

"In this case, the timing didn't work out for somebody else."

Kitty stared at her.

"We had a no-show."

The clerk pulled several forms from beneath the counter and handed them over.

"You're getting their place."

Kitty did not take them immediately.

"Really?"

"Really."

"Why?"

"Wards of the state get head-of-the-line privileges for this program."

The clerk placed another packet on top.

"Here's your information packet, meal vouchers, and the dorm assignment for tonight. You have the weekend to finish the forms. Everything needs to be turned in by Monday."

Kitty finally took the stack.

She looked down at it.

A dorm assignment.

Meal vouchers.

Enrollment forms.

Things were being given to her instead of taken away.

"Thank you."

She said it so quietly that the clerk barely heard her.

Kitty walked back outside.

The same campus stretched before her.

The same sidewalks.

The same buildings.

The same people.

But as Kitty stood there holding the packet against her chest, it seemed impossible that this could be the same place she had visited before.

Perhaps it wasn't the campus that had changed.

Perhaps, somehow, the world had finally decided to let her through the door.

The dormitory room was a shared space, although Kitty's roommate had not checked in yet.

Kitty entered alone.

She set her bag on the bed.

Then she stood in the middle of the room and breathed.

No Stafford.

No voice demanding to know why she was not working.

No footsteps that made her wonder what criticism was coming next.

No Sandy silently allowing Kitty to retreat whenever her grandson entered the room.

For the first time in months, Kitty was somewhere neither of them could reach her.

Then she remembered the letter.

Pam.

Kitty sat on the bed and pulled the envelope from her bag.

The news had become worse.

Pam's trial had been delayed after another fight in prison. Now she was facing two trials in the same week: one stemming from the original drug charges and another involving violence.

The list seemed impossible.

Drug trafficking.

Theft.

Assaulting an officer.

And now attempted manslaughter after choking another inmate unconscious in the prison library.

Kitty lowered the letter.

For a while, she simply stared at the floor.

It seemed that every time something good happened to her, something terrible happened to Pam.

The thought produced a familiar guilt.

Kitty had a dormitory room.

Pam had a cell.

Kitty had meal vouchers.

Pam had court dates.

Kitty had just been handed a chance at college.

Pam might spend years behind bars.

Some irrational part of Kitty wanted to connect those things, as though fortune were a fixed quantity and every bit of it that came to Kitty had somehow been stolen from Pam.

But that was not true.

Kitty looked at the letter again.

She had not put the heroin in Pam's possession.

She had not made Pam bite an officer.

She had not made her attack another prisoner.

Nobody had.

Pam had done those things herself.

That was the terrible truth Kitty had spent most of her childhood trying not to understand.

Pam was like a wild animal that lashed out whether it was threatened or not. There had always been a reason afterward. Somebody had insulted her. Somebody had provoked her. Somebody had cheated her. Somebody had looked at her wrong.

There was always somebody to blame.

But the violence was Pam's.

Kitty folded the letter.

For years, she had wondered what she could do to keep Pam calm.

What she could say.

What she could avoid saying.

Where she could stand.

When she should disappear.

Now Kitty understood something she had not been capable of understanding as a child.

There was no correct way to live beside a person determined to destroy herself.

The only way Kitty knew to avoid becoming Pam was to stop following her.

She wondered whether Pam would ever leave prison.

The question saddened her.

The answer frightened her less than it once would have.

Perhaps, Kitty thought, Pam was safer from herself there.

She put the letter away.

Dinner was a strawberry salad Kitty assembled herself in the dining hall.

It was lovely.

Not merely because of the strawberries, although Kitty ate more of those than anything else. It was lovely because she had been handed a meal voucher, walked into a room full of food, and selected what she wanted.

Nobody counted what she took.

Nobody reminded her what it cost.

Nobody told her she had eaten enough.

Kitty returned to the dorm afterward and discovered that her roommate had arrived.

Her name was Cara.

To Kitty's surprise, Cara was almost as small and shy as she was.

Even more surprising was the realization that Kitty knew more about the campus than somebody else.

"I can show you around," Kitty offered.

So she did.

Kitty, who only hours earlier had been asking where she was supposed to go, now led another girl through the halls.

It was a small thing.

To Kitty, it felt enormous.

By the time they returned to the dorm, exhaustion had caught up with her.

She climbed into bed and held her bag close.

Inside were her documents.

Her diploma.

Her identification.

Her forms.

Pieces of paper that proved, in one bureaucratic way or another, that Kitty existed.

She thought about Sandy.

Leaving her produced an ache Kitty had not anticipated.

Sandy had given her shelter when Kitty had nowhere else to go. She had given Kitty a bed, regular meals, and, however imperfectly, a chance to stabilize herself.

Kitty would always know that.

But Sandy's house had become a dead end.

Kitty had stopped growing there.

If she remained much longer, she feared she would become like a house cat that had forgotten how to hunt—warm, fed, and entirely dependent on whatever scraps somebody else decided to provide.

Then there was Stafford.

Stafford had been given every advantage Kitty could imagine.

Education.

Family.

Money.

Opportunity.

A new car.

People willing to excuse him.

Yet somehow he had become an adult who could barely maintain a job or a relationship without driving people away.

Kitty had been given almost nothing.

And here she was.

For once, things seemed to be moving in the direction she wanted.

Kitty curled around the bag containing her precious documents and closed her eyes.

She slept deeply.

The rest of the weekend disappeared beneath paperwork.

Enrollment forms.

Financial-aid forms.

Housing forms.

Schedules.

Signatures.

Kitty had no college credits, which made scheduling her surprisingly simple.

For the summer, she would take English and remedial mathematics.

In the fall, she would begin a full schedule of general-education courses.

Cara disappeared from Kitty's life almost as quickly as she had entered it. She decided to attend another school farther upstate, closer to her boyfriend.

Kitty wished her well.

Then she turned her attention to staying.

She left Sandy a message on the answering machine.

Kitty did not return to the house.

There was almost nothing there she needed. A few pieces of old clothing. Odds and ends. Things she could replace.

Cara had given her some extra makeup and a used hairbrush before leaving. Better still, the college had a "free closet" where students could take clothes abandoned in the dormitories after graduations and dropouts.

Kitty thought it was one of the greatest ideas she had ever encountered.

She could not understand why more students did not use it.

"People are proud," Cara had explained. "They don't want anyone knowing they need stuff."

Kitty laughed.

"My pride's too poor for that."

For Kitty, the choice was considerably simpler.

Use the free clothes or be naked.

She chose the clothes.

But the free closet was only the beginning.

There was financial aid.

A scholarship.

Room and board.

A student bus pass of her own.

Kitty no longer needed Sandy's.

For years, Kitty had known Pam received assistance for taking care of her, but Kitty had never known how much support existed or whether Pam herself had understood everything they were entitled to receive.

Now Kitty was discovering an entire network of resources one office at a time.

The campus even had a clinic.

Once fully enrolled, Kitty went in for a flu shot. The doctor examined her, asked questions about her diet, and sent her away with an enormous bottle of calcium and vitamin D tablets.

"You've still got some catching up to do," the doctor told her.

Kitty looked at the bottle.

Apparently even her bones had homework.

College was not easy.

That mattered to Kitty.

She did not arrive and suddenly discover some hidden genius that everyone else had overlooked. Her academic foundation was poor. Years of inconsistent schooling had left gaps everywhere, and in the beginning she struggled simply to understand what other students seemed to know automatically.

Mathematics was particularly brutal.

But for the first time, struggling did not result in someone telling her she was stupid.

Someone told her where the tutoring center was.

So Kitty went.

Then she went again.

And again.

The tutors showed her how to organize her notes. How to break problems into steps. How to study for an exam instead of simply staring at a textbook and hoping knowledge somehow entered her head.

Slowly, Kitty gained footing.

Her permanent roommate was hardly ever around. The girl slept late, took afternoon classes, and seemed to spend every night in a different boy's room.

Kitty did not object.

When her roommate did sleep in the dorm, she snored with a ferocity Kitty had not known a woman could produce.

Even that seemed manageable.

After Stafford, nearly everyone seemed manageable.

In her classes, something stranger happened.

People liked her.

They asked if she wanted to study with them.

They saved seats.

They borrowed her notes.

They said hello when they saw her outside class.

Kitty remained wary of it for a while.

She kept expecting the trick.

There wasn't one.

One thing continued to bother her.

She never saw anyone from her old high school.

Not once.

Kitty occasionally scanned crowds for familiar faces, wondering what their absence meant.

Had they gone somewhere better?

Had they gone nowhere at all?

Had Kitty somehow done better than them?

Worse?

There was no way to know.

Eventually, she stopped looking.

Comparison belonged to a life Kitty no longer had time to live.

She had classes to attend.

Assignments to finish.

Meals to eat.

A bus pass with her own name attached to it.

She had clothes in a closet and vitamins beside her bed. She had professors who expected her to return the following week and tutors who expected her to keep trying when she failed.

For most people around her, these things were ordinary.

For Kitty, they were evidence of something almost miraculous.

For years, she had assumed that she was the problem.

Pam's world had rejected her.

School had rejected her.

Sandy's house had eventually become another place where Kitty learned to make herself small.

But here, when Kitty struggled, someone showed her what to do next.

Here, doors did not always close simply because she was the person standing in front of them.

Maybe Kitty had never been incapable of belonging.

Maybe she had simply spent her life trying to belong in places that had no room for her.

She stopped looking backward.

Sandy's house already seemed strangely distant, like a purgatory she had escaped without realizing there had been an exit.

Ahead of her was summer.

Then fall.

Then whatever came after that.

Kitty did not know where any of it would lead.

For once, she did not need to.

She only needed to keep going.