Kitty's Saga Chapter Eleven: Wildest Dreams Against Demotivation

The Greyhound trip carried Kitty farther than she had ever traveled before. By the time she stepped off the bus into the heavy air of a Chicago summer night, she was exhausted, damp with sweat, and awestruck by the city lights.

Her first persistent thought about her new home was that it was beautiful.

Chicago seemed cleaner than the places she had known in Ohio, grander and somehow more alive. Within weeks, she decided that the trains were infinitely better than buses. The buildings looked polished. The streets seemed to lead somewhere. Navy Pier had better food than anything she could remember eating back home. Even the lake astonished her. Standing beside it, Kitty sometimes had to remind herself that it wasn't an ocean.

For the first time in her life, she fell in love with a place.

That love became another reason to succeed. School was no longer simply an escape from where she had come from. Finishing her degree meant earning the right, in her mind, to stay.

The price of that future frightened her.

Her scholarship money had run out, and financial aid covered only so much. The university required Kitty to take out student loans if she wanted to continue. She sat in the finance office staring at the paperwork for what seemed like an eternity, reading numbers she understood perfectly well and wishing she didn't.

Debt was a dangerous thing to someone who had never had money.

Kitty swallowed hard, picked up the pen, and signed on the dotted line.

There was no other direction she wanted to go but forward.

This time around, Kitty had her dorm room mostly to herself. Roommates appeared and disappeared with surprising regularity, some dropping out, others effectively moving in with boyfriends or girlfriends until the university finally stopped pretending they still occupied the room. Kitty didn't mind. Solitude had become familiar to her.

Her weekdays disappeared into classes, assignments, tutoring sessions, and studying. On weekends, whenever she could spare the time, she explored Chicago.

She was different here than she had been at community college.

Back then, after years of living with Pam and later Sandy, Kitty had been starved for the company of people her own age. She had wanted friends desperately enough to believe friendship itself could fix something in her. Marnie had cured her of some of that optimism. Stafford had cured her of considerably more.

Now Kitty kept people at a comfortable distance.

She began writing to Pam more often instead.

Pam usually answered within a reasonable amount of time, although Kitty increasingly dreaded opening her letters. With each one, she learned a little more about how completely Pam had been absorbed into the penal system. Pam wrote about prison politics, regulations, guards, commissary prices, other inmates, and petty institutional dramas with the familiarity other people used when describing coworkers or neighbors.

Kitty sometimes finished those letters with an ache in her stomach.

She felt guilty about her own success.

She rarely told Pam about Chicago in any meaningful detail. She didn't describe the lake or the skyline. She didn't mention how proud she felt when she earned a high grade or how strange it was to walk across a university campus and realize she belonged there. Whenever something good happened, Kitty either omitted it or diminished it until it sounded ordinary.

Some part of her feared Pam would resent her.

Pam had once expected Kitty to become something like herself. For years, Kitty had expected much the same thing.

Every semester made that future seem farther away.

Her academic plan had been carefully mapped out. If Kitty attended classes every summer, she could finish her degree in three years. The university required more prerequisites than her community college had, but Kitty attacked them with feverish determination.

For nearly a year, determination was enough.

Then loneliness began eating through it.

By her second semester, Kitty had become so accustomed to being alone that she barely recognized what was happening to her. The realization came in the checkout line of a supermarket when another customer tapped her lightly on the shoulder and asked if she could cut ahead.

Kitty startled at the touch.

It occurred to her then that no one had touched her in months.

Not affectionately. Not casually. Not even accidentally.

Outside of study groups, class projects, and tutoring sessions for math and science, she sometimes went days without having a meaningful conversation. She was surrounded by thousands of people and knew almost none of them.

For the first time, Kitty understood something about Marnie that she hadn't understood before.

Maybe Marnie hadn't been blind to Stafford.

Maybe Stafford had simply filled a silence.

Marnie had been ambitious too. She had devoted herself to music with the same obsessive discipline Kitty now devoted to school. Perhaps Stafford, awful as he was, had provided noise where otherwise there would have been nothing.

The thought disturbed Kitty because, increasingly, she understood it.

By winter break, Kitty decided she was going to salvage what remained of her twenties.

Her first act of rebellion was crashing a campus New Year's Eve party.

The party belonged to another resident on her floor, a business marketing major Kitty knew mostly by sight. She was an aggressively cheerful, over-bleached blonde who managed to work the word networking into nearly every conversation. Kitty had always suspected that "networking" was simply the excuse she used to justify throwing enormous parties in the dorm.

Kitty arrived wearing a cheap black dress from the mall and lipstick abandoned by one of her former roommates. Looking at herself in the mirror beforehand, she decided she looked almost convincing.

She also knew she needed to keep her head down.

Kitty had spent months complaining about parties and reporting noise violations. Showing up at one now presented certain complications.

The room was packed with familiar faces belonging to people she had passed a hundred times in hallways without ever speaking to. Kitty positioned herself against a wall and waited for someone to start a conversation.

No one did.

Someone spilled beer on her dress.

Then someone else spilled beer on her dress.

Across the room, Kitty watched several students snort cocaine off a desk that someone had already vomited on.

She stared at the scene for a few seconds.

So much for salvaging her twenties.

Fifteen minutes after arriving, Kitty headed for the door.

She had nearly escaped when someone caught her lightly by the arm.

"Where are you off to looking so good?"

Kitty turned.

She recognized him from the library.

They had spoken once before when he'd asked to use her printer card and Kitty had refused. He wasn't unattractive, exactly. Under different circumstances she might even have considered him handsome. But his hair hung long and unkempt around his face, his beard grew in uneven patches, and every conversation Kitty had overheard him having seemed eventually to become a sermon about marijuana.

As far as Kitty was concerned, there were more interesting things in the world.

"I'm heading to my room," she said.

The instant the words left her mouth, she regretted them.

His eyebrows lifted.

"Is that an invitation?"

"No."

Kitty tried not to let her disgust show.

"I don't even know your name."

He stared at her for a moment as though tiny wheels were turning somewhere behind his eyes.

"That's rude. I know your name. It's Kitty." He grinned. "I'll introduce myself again. I'm Charlie."

Kitty smiled awkwardly.

Apparently they had spoken more than once.

Apparently she had mentally categorized him as undatable so efficiently that she had erased the conversations altogether.

"It's good to see you," she said. "Bye."

Then she bolted.

A few days later, Kitty saw Charlie again. She learned that he lived on the floor below hers and frequently migrated upstairs whenever one of the party rooms became active.

She also finally learned the name of the bubbly networking student at the end of the hall.

Blair.

Oddly enough, discovering that Kitty had attended her New Year's party seemed to change Blair's opinion of her.

The following Sunday, they crossed paths in the laundry room.

"You know," Blair said, leaning against a washing machine with a wine cooler in one hand, "I thought you were the asshole who kept snitching to the RA about me. But when I saw you the other night, I knew you were cool."

Kitty nearly stopped folding her jeans.

She was, in fact, the asshole who kept snitching to the RA about Blair.

Instead, she smiled.

"Yeah."

Blair took another drink.

"Charlie is crushing on you. You two would be such a cute couple."

Kitty paused over a pair of secondhand jeans.

"You think?"

"Definitely."

"I thought he was too into the party scene to be a one-girl kind of guy."

Blair swished the wine cooler around her mouth before swallowing.

"He's a stoner, not a techno freak."

She laughed.

Kitty laughed too, although she had no idea what was funny.

Still, the suggestion lodged itself in her mind.

Charlie wasn't Stafford.

That seemed like something.

And Kitty was approaching an age when the absence of romantic experience had begun to feel less like a choice and more like another item on a growing list of ways she had failed to live normally. Surely she had to have a boyfriend eventually. Surely she couldn't reach thirty having spent her entire youth studying, surviving, and watching everyone else live.

"I'd go out with him," Kitty finally said, "if you really think we'd be a good match."

Blair's expression brightened.

Kitty gathered her neatly folded clothes into her plastic hamper and returned to her room.

Less than two hours later, Charlie knocked on her door wearing what appeared to be his best Zumiez T-shirt.

So much for subtlety.

He wasn't what Kitty wanted.

But at that particular moment in her life, wanting someone and wanting someone there had become dangerously easy to confuse.

Their date consisted of a trip to the movies. Kitty paid because Charlie had spent most of his money on shatter. During the film, he repeatedly put his hand on her leg. Kitty repeatedly removed it.

By the third or fourth time, she stopped pretending she was enjoying herself.

When the movie ended, Kitty announced that she had a headache. She kept her voice calm. She didn't want a confrontation, and she certainly didn't want Charlie interpreting anger as flirtation.

He followed her back toward the dorm anyway, pestering her for sex most of the way.

Every block they walked confirmed what Kitty already knew.

She had made a mistake.

Outside her room, Charlie tried one last time. Kitty declined, stepped inside, and gently closed the door in his face. As it shut, she heard him muttering insults about women under his breath.

Kitty locked the door.

Then she checked the lock.

Then she checked it again.

She stood there for a moment staring at the cheap dorm-room door and wondering what, exactly, she had expected.

Maybe nothing.

That was the problem.

Later that night, loneliness began its work again.

Kitty lay awake thinking about Charlie, then Marnie, then Stafford.

She wondered whether Stafford had been as exhausting for Marnie as Charlie had been for her. Whether Marnie had sat alone afterward and known perfectly well that she deserved better, only to decide that something unpleasant was preferable to nothing at all.

The possibility frightened Kitty.

Sometime later, against her better judgment, she texted Charlie and invited him over.

She regretted it almost immediately.

Even while he was there, Kitty found herself thinking about Stafford and wondering whether he had been every bit as much of a waste of Marnie's time as Charlie was proving to be of hers.

Maybe loneliness didn't make people blind.

Maybe it simply taught them how much they were willing to overlook.

Kitty decided her second year at the university would be better.

It had to be.

For the time being, she privately resolved to keep Charlie around until someone better came along—a decision that would later embarrass her almost as much as dating him in the first place.

As it turned out, Kitty never had the chance to follow through.

Before summer returned to Chicago, Charlie dropped out of school and moved back into his parents' house.

Just like that, he disappeared.

Kitty remained.

And for all the mistakes she had made that year, all the debt she had accumulated, all the nights she had spent alone and all the people she had tried unsuccessfully to make fit into the empty spaces of her life, that distinction mattered.

People came and went.

Kitty stayed.