Kitty's Saga Chapter Nine: Autumn Came with Thistles

That summer consisted mostly of Kitty learning the odds and ends of campus life.

She was still an undeclared major, but no one seemed particularly concerned about that. Freshmen were allowed some uncertainty. This itself was a revelation to Kitty, who had spent most of her life feeling as though every decision she made was permanent and every mistake carried consequences she could never undo.

College allowed mistakes.

College even seemed to expect them.

By the time fall arrived, Kitty's roommate had dropped out. Within days, the empty bed was assigned to another girl.

Her name was Marnie.

Kitty liked her almost immediately.

For once, she had a roommate who was neither boy-crazy nor interested in parties. After a lifetime of living in a party house, Kitty flinched at the smell of alcohol and cigarette smoke. Those smells did not mean fun to her. They meant shouting through walls, strangers stumbling through rooms, things breaking in the middle of the night, and waking up unsure of who might still be passed out somewhere nearby.

Fortunately, Marnie wanted nothing to do with either.

She was asthmatic, avoided carbohydrates with almost religious devotion, and treated smoke-filled rooms as if entering one would constitute an assassination attempt.

More importantly, Marnie was kind.

She was a music major who played an astonishing number of instruments. Kitty eventually signed up for an elective with her and learned the rudiments of the ukulele.

Kitty was not especially talented.

That hardly mattered.

She and Marnie laughed through their mistakes, whispered between exercises, and sometimes became so distracted talking that the instructor had to remind them that they were supposed to be playing.

Kitty had never smiled so much in her life.

It had been years since she had possessed something as ordinary as a friend her own age.

She had almost forgotten how much fun ordinary could be.

By the end of September, cool air had begun settling over the campus.

Kitty loved it.

She walked between classes beneath changing leaves, filling her lungs with crisp autumn air and marveling at the strange turn her life had taken.

This was the world she had once feared would destroy her for being an outsider.

Instead, she was thriving in it.

She had friends.

She had classes.

She had a room.

She had somewhere to be tomorrow and people who expected her to arrive.

Naturally, Kitty thought, later, happiness seemed to possess some mysterious beacon capable of summoning the exact person most likely to ruin it.

That afternoon, the beacon summoned Stafford.

Kitty saw the Mustang first.

His flashy sports car was illegally parked beside a fire hydrant outside her dormitory.

Then she saw him.

Stafford sat behind the wheel with the convertible top down, wearing sunglasses despite the cloudy sky.

Kitty stopped.

Every pleasant sensation of the afternoon vanished.

"Hey! Kitty!"

She kept walking.

"Kitty! Come here!"

Perhaps, she thought desperately, if she pretended not to hear him—

"Over here, stupid! It's me. Stafford. Duh."

Several students looked over.

Kitty closed her eyes for half a second.

She silently cursed herself for mentioning the name of her college in the last message she left for Sandy.

Then she walked toward the car.

"Uh...Stafford? Why are you here?"

Stafford did not remove his sunglasses.

"My grandmother died."

Kitty's breath caught.

"You missed the funeral."

Before Kitty could absorb the first sentence, he had already weaponized the second.

"The funeral?"

"This afternoon."

Kitty stared at him.

No one had told her.

"Now let me in. I don't have the code to the door."

Every instinct Kitty possessed told her not to allow Stafford into her dormitory.

But another feeling pulled against it.

Sandy was dead.

Kitty had never received closure from her.

Some part of Kitty had always wondered whether Sandy had loved her at all, or whether she had merely been convenient unpaid labor who happened to live upstairs.

And somewhere, buried beneath years of resentment, remained another impossible wish.

An apology from Stafford.

Kitty knew better than to expect one.

Still, people sometimes wanted impossible things.

Besides, he had just buried his grandmother.

So Kitty let him inside.

Years later, she would reconsider that afternoon and understand something she could not yet prove at eighteen.

Stafford had almost certainly known how to contact her.

He had found her campus easily enough afterward.

And if he had deliberately kept her away from Sandy's funeral, there was one obvious reason: Stafford had spent years worrying that Kitty might have a claim on something he believed belonged to him.

In retrospect, that answered both of Kitty's questions.

Marnie was in the library cramming for an exam when Kitty brought Stafford upstairs.

Kitty was grateful for that.

Marnie was a delicate soul. Stafford's manner could crush the atmosphere of a room merely by entering it, and Kitty did not want him anywhere near her friend.

Stafford walked into the dorm as though inspecting property.

Then he sat on Kitty's bed without asking.

Worse, he sat directly on her pillow.

Kitty frowned at him.

He settled in as though planning to remain there all afternoon.

"So..." Kitty began. "What can I do for you, Stafford?"

Stafford looked toward the ceiling.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then his face collapsed.

He began sobbing.

Kitty's defenses faltered.

Whatever Stafford had done to her, Sandy had been his grandmother. Grief was grief.

Kitty nearly stepped toward him.

"The funeral was this afternoon," Stafford managed. "And Grandmother..."

His words dissolved into crying.

Kitty waited.

"At the reading of the will..."

He struggled to compose himself.

"She left me some savings bonds."

Kitty did not understand.

Stafford wiped his face.

"That's it."

He looked at her.

"She double-mortgaged the house years ago. There's nothing left for me."

Something inside Kitty became very still.

Suddenly, years of Stafford made sense.

His questions.

His resentment.

His obsession with how much Sandy paid Kitty.

His constant attempts to have her fired.

Stafford had never believed Kitty was merely taking care of his grandmother.

He believed she was consuming his inheritance.

What Stafford did not know was that there had never been much inheritance left to consume.

Kitty had seen the overdue notices Sandy tucked away.

Red lettering.

Past-due balances.

Bills she did not discuss.

Envelopes she hid beneath other envelopes as though rearranging them could somehow change what was printed inside.

Sandy had been in debt deep enough to frighten a gambler.

Stafford had expected Sandy to leave him something that would rescue him.

Sandy, Kitty now suspected, had spent years quietly hoping Stafford might someday become successful enough to rescue her.

Each had been waiting for the other to become the solution.

Neither had known they were both drowning.

"Oh, Stafford."

Kitty almost crossed the room to put an arm around him.

Then she remembered who he was.

She remained where she stood.

"I'm sorry."

Stafford looked around the dorm.

He ran his hand over Kitty's blanket.

"You seem to be doing well for yourself."

There it was.

Kitty recognized the tone.

The grief was already giving way to something else.

She needed him out.

"Stafford, my roommate is really skittish."

He looked at her.

"She'll be back any second, and if she finds a strange man in here, she'll call campus security."

Kitty added quickly, "I can't have that on my conscience. Not after what you've been through today."

Stafford made a pouting expression.

"So you should probably go. Keep me posted on everything, okay?"

He stood reluctantly.

"Yeah, Kitty. I'll stop by next week."

Kitty's stomach tightened.

"Tell your roommate to get over it, though. I'm not in the mood to deal with hysterics."

"Okay."

Kitty opened the door.

Stafford walked into the hallway.

As he made his way toward the stairs, his head turned from one open doorway to another. He stared too long at every young woman he passed.

One door closed.

Then another.

A girl farther down the hall saw him looking and immediately disappeared into her room.

Her door slammed.

Then another followed.

Kitty stood in her doorway watching the hallway close around Stafford.

Something became clear.

He had not merely found her.

She had given him access.

Kitty felt sick.

Whatever Stafford wanted from her—sympathy, attention, control, an audience, access to women who wanted nothing to do with him—she wanted no part of it.

She closed her door.

Only when she heard the Mustang roar away did she relax.

From then on, Kitty decided she would use the side entrance.

Stafford did not return for the rest of the year.

Kitty considered that one of autumn's many blessings.

Sometimes she wondered whom she disliked more: Stafford or Pam's boyfriend, Ben.

It was difficult to decide.

Ben was terrible in a chaotic way. Somewhere underneath his addictions and failures, Kitty believed he occasionally wanted to be a decent man. He simply sabotaged himself too often to become one.

Stafford was different.

Stafford did not seem interested in becoming better.

He seemed interested in becoming better at being cruel.

He studied people for weaknesses, then leaned against them until they gave him what he wanted.

Kitty had spent enough of her life around people like that.

She had no desire to study him further.

After finals, Kitty received notice that she needed to choose a major.

Remaining undeclared much longer could complicate the financial aid that had become her lifeline.

So she met with her academic counselor.

The meeting began pleasantly enough.

A greeting.

A little conversation about her first semester.

Then the counselor leaned back.

"Well, what are you good at?"

Kitty stared at him.

"We can start there. You can always change your major later if something else appeals to you."

What was she good at?

Kitty opened her mouth.

Nothing came out.

She searched her mind.

Nothing came there either.

Apparently, her expression gave away the problem.

The counselor smiled.

"How about an aptitude test?"

Kitty looked relieved.

"They're giving them next Saturday in the computer lab."

"I'll do that."

She left the office somewhat reassured.

Kitty knew plenty about what she was bad at.

Art.

Science.

Dancing.

There were entire categories of human endeavor in which Kitty had accumulated compelling evidence of incompetence.

But knowing what she could not do was different from knowing what she could.

No one had ever asked her to identify her talents before.

Mostly, people had identified her deficiencies for her.

Marnie volunteered to take the aptitude test too.

Not that either of them expected any revelations from her results.

Marnie had begun studying music as a child and had never seriously imagined doing anything else.

Kitty envied that certainty.

When Kitty looked backward through her own life, she could not identify a single thing she had consistently done better than other people.

The test contained two hundred questions.

They had three hours.

Marnie finished early.

Kitty used every minute.

She answered questions.

Changed answers.

Changed them back.

Returned to earlier sections.

Stared at questions as though hidden somewhere inside them was a verdict on the rest of her life.

She knew intellectually that an aptitude test could not determine her destiny.

Emotionally, it felt very much as though it could.

When the final minutes approached, Kitty reluctantly submitted her answers.

The moderator printed her results.

By then, she was the last person in the room.

Marnie wandered back inside to see how she had done.

The moderator studied the page.

"You scored very well in hospitality."

Kitty waited.

"Not so much in analytics."

Her heart sank.

Hospitality.

Of course.

Serving people.

Cleaning things.

Cooking things.

Making other people comfortable.

Kitty felt tears gathering before she could stop them.

Somewhere in her memory, an old insult returned.

Toilet scrubber.

For years, people had been telling Kitty what she was suited for.

Waitress.

Servant.

Cleaner.

Someone who existed to make life easier for people more important than herself.

Now even a computer seemed to agree with them.

Marnie saw her face.

"Oh, Kitty."

Kitty turned away, humiliated by the tears.

She did not want hospitality.

She did not want a future that looked like an upgraded version of everything she had spent her life trying to escape.

A few days later, Kitty returned to her counselor's office.

He pulled up the test results.

Kitty stared at the wall behind him.

"I get the impression you're disappointed."

Kitty shrugged.

"Hospitality isn't a bad aptitude."

She said nothing.

"We don't have a dedicated hotel-management program here, but our sister school in Chicago does."

Kitty looked at him.

Hotel management.

That sounded marginally better.

A hotel manager was not exactly a toilet scrubber.

She could be the manager of the toilet scrubbers.

The thought was intended to comfort her.

Instead, it made everything worse.

Kitty slumped back in the chair.

She hated that the insult still possessed enough power to reach her years later.

Her counselor continued.

"You could build a very stable career in hospitality. Your scores suggest you'd be well suited to it."

Kitty looked down at her hands.

Maybe he was right.

Maybe the test was right.

Maybe the counselor from middle school had been right too.

Maybe all these people had simply seen something in Kitty that she had refused to accept.

The possibility terrified her.

"What degree is the most general?"

Her counselor paused.

"What do you mean?"

"Something I can transfer with. Something that doesn't decide everything yet. If I want to go to a university somewhere else."

He leaned back.

"Liberal arts, I suppose."

Kitty nodded.

"But I strongly recommend that you at least consider the aptitude-driven path. Hospitality could offer you a very steady career if you apply yourself."

Kitty felt something inside her push back.

Not against him.

Against all of them.

The counselor who had told her to take home economics.

The students who had mocked her.

Pam.

Stafford.

Every person who had looked at Kitty's circumstances and mistaken them for the boundaries of her ability.

Perhaps Kitty was making a mistake.

Perhaps she would discover later that hospitality really was where she belonged.

But if she chose it now, she knew exactly how it would feel.

It would feel like surrender.

"I'm choosing liberal arts."

Her counselor regarded her for a moment.

"You can still change it later."

"I know."

He turned toward his computer.

Kitty watched him type.

A few keystrokes.

That was all it took.

Major: Liberal Arts.

The counselor shook his head slightly as he saved the change.

Kitty knew he disagreed.

For once, somebody's disappointment did not frighten her into changing her answer.

She left his office without knowing whether she had chosen wisely.

That was new too.

For most of Kitty's life, other people had made the important decisions and left her to survive the consequences.

This decision might turn out brilliantly.

It might turn out terribly.

It might someday need to be undone.

But when Kitty walked out of the office, the uncertainty belonged entirely to her.

So did the choice.