Kitty's Saga Chapter One: Humble Beginnings with Constant Reminders

With either her brisk stride or her habitual slouch, Kitty seemed to announce to the world that she felt smaller than everyone around her. To an outside observer, she was a frail teenager with little to show for her short life except an abundance of insecurities and very little hope for the future.

Kitty probably would have described herself much the same way, had anyone ever bothered to ask. Few people did. Most simply dismissed her as “the sad girl.”

Still, Kitty understood something about survival that happier people sometimes did not:

Things could always get worse.

The possibility of Pam overdosing was never far from her mind. Neither was the fear that the state would discover how unstable their situation had become and send Kitty back to a group home. Her life depended too heavily on unreliable adults, and whenever one of them made a mistake, Kitty somehow seemed to be the person left paying for it.

As far as normal life went, Kitty’s week began on a Tuesday.

It was her first day back from winter break during her junior year. Luckily—or so she initially thought—Pam’s ne’er-do-well boyfriend, Ben, had offered to drive her the three miles to school for her zero-period gym class.

Ben owned a rusted-out Jeep that Kitty silently prayed would survive the trip. She didn’t particularly trust the vehicle, but she trusted the January weather in Indiana even less. Her warmest piece of clothing was a thrift-store sweater she wore over two T-shirts, and getting a ride meant she wouldn’t have to wake up even earlier to make the walk.

Unfortunately, Ben was well matched with Pam in the reliability department.

The night before, he got blackout drunk and passed out on the floor of the studio apartment Kitty shared with her sister.

By morning, Ben was useless.

Kitty, having made the apparently foolish mistake of believing someone might actually do what they promised, had to sprint toward school in a desperate attempt to avoid getting written up for Saturday school.

Ironically, she got a more intense workout running to gym class than anyone who had arrived on time.

By the time Kitty reached the locker room, the doors were locked.

Still partly out of breath, she walked onto the track in her regular clothes to find the coach. Her classmates were casually talking when Kitty approached and asked if she could be let into the locker room to change.

The coach refused. Kitty had already been marked truant and was told to report to the office.

Her eyes filled with tears as she walked away. Somewhere behind her, another girl mocked her.

Kitty kept going.

She should have known better than to depend on Ben, she thought. She should have known better than to believe she might catch a break.

By the time she reached the office, she wasn’t sure whether she hated herself more for continuing to believe in people or hated the people who continually gave her reasons not to.

The secretary at the front desk had little patience to spare. Busy answering phones, she barely looked up before handing Kitty a Saturday-school slip and gesturing for her to move along as the bell rang for the next period.

Kitty’s next class was music history.

Her teacher was an elderly, extremely nearsighted man who spoke with the booming authority of a town crier accidentally transported into the twentieth century. He lectured over a room full of largely uninterested students before announcing that the theater department at the local community college was allowing high school students to audition for an upcoming production.

He passed out leaflets containing information about the play and then retreated to his chair for the remainder of the period.

Maybe Kitty needed something to distract her from the disastrous start to her day. Maybe it was simple curiosity.

Whatever the reason, she kept staring at that leaflet.

Something about it felt different.

For most of Kitty’s life, the future had been something that happened to her. Adults made decisions. Pam created disasters. Social workers appeared. Bills arrived. Food disappeared. Kitty adjusted.

But this was something she could choose.

She could audition.

She could walk into that theater and ask the world for something instead of waiting to see what little it intended to give her.

Maybe it was time to hope.

The thought frightened her almost as much as it excited her.

Still, sitting at that desk with a Saturday-school slip tucked among her books and sweat drying beneath her thrift-store sweater, Kitty made a decision.

She would try.

She would be damned if she was going to accept her miserable little existence without at least reaching toward the happiness that always seemed reserved for somebody else.

When school ended, Kitty walked directly to the county library and found a copy of the script.

She decided she was going to audition for the lead.

Why not?

The sensible answer was that she had no acting experience, had never heard of the play before that morning, and knew absolutely nothing about theater.

Kitty didn't care.

That night, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror and practiced.

She refused to look through the doorway at Pam shooting up on the sofa they had once found abandoned on a sidewalk. She refused to think about the ramen noodles and bowls of Grape-Nuts that had made up far too much of her diet over the previous five months.

For those few minutes, Kitty wasn't a neglected kid in a studio apartment.

She was someone with somewhere to go.

She had this one thing.

She practiced until the words belonged to her.

Kitty never stopped to consider how unrealistic it was to expect the leading role in a play when she had no experience whatsoever. That wasn't really the point.

The role was merely a destination.

Hope was the journey.

For the first time in a long time, Kitty had started moving.

She simply didn't know yet where the current would carry her.

The next few weeks were easier.

Her temporary optimism even made her classmates more comfortable around her. Over the years, Kitty had developed what she privately thought of as an aura of depression. People seemed to retreat from it. Nobody wanted to constantly hear how badly someone else’s life was going, even when bad things were almost all that person had to talk about.

Now Kitty had something different to say.

She could talk about how she might style her hair for the audition. She could discuss which bus route she would take to the college. She practiced her lines whenever she had the opportunity.

Sometimes she caught herself smiling.

Not because someone was looking.

Not because she knew people liked her better when she smiled.

Because she was actually happy.

With every line she memorized, the future seemed to expand by another inch.

Then the day of Kitty’s much-anticipated opportunity to shine arrived, and Pam, in typical Pam fashion, managed to make herself the center of attention.

At least, that was how Kitty saw it.

Pam had been arrested for shoplifting strawberry wine from the CVS across from their apartment complex.

Kitty learned about it from a message Pam left on their answering machine.

Pam ordered Kitty to retrieve the emergency cash hidden in a coffee can behind the stove and bring it to her.

Kitty stood in the apartment listening to the message.

She knew what she was supposed to do.

Pam had trained her well.

There was always a crisis. Always money to find, a lie to tell, a mess to clean up. Kitty's plans could always wait because Pam's disasters were always emergencies.

Except this time, Kitty had somewhere to be.

She could have taken the money.

She could have missed the audition.

She could have surrendered one more small piece of her life to Pam.

Instead, Kitty walked out the door.

It was a tiny act.

No one applauded.

No triumphant music played.

But for Kitty, it might as well have been a revolution.

She left fully expecting Pam to beat her when she eventually returned.

And Kitty went anyway.

In a panicked tizzy, she hurried toward the city bus as though it were the last lifeboat leaving a sinking ship. Between Pam’s arrest and the adrenaline coursing through her, the monologue Kitty had spent weeks memorizing suddenly seemed to evaporate from her brain.

By the time she reached the college campus, she had another problem.

She had absolutely no idea where she was going.

Kitty studied the map in the quad, wandered around for several precious minutes, and then nearly screamed at herself when she finally noticed the rather obvious theater building sitting at the top of a hill.

Once again, Kitty was running toward somewhere she was already late to.

It seemed to be the story of her life.

But she was still running toward it.

The theater was enormous.

Students were scattered throughout the building when Kitty entered. She tried to smile because experience had taught her that people found her more likable when she smiled, but she was so nervous that she could barely lift her eyes from her shoes.

When she sat down, another student abruptly asked why she was there.

“For the audition,” Kitty replied quietly.

The student rolled his eyes.

He informed her that auditions were being held through the rear entrance and pointed out, with unnecessary irritation, that Kitty had seated herself among people who had already been cast.

Kitty's face burned.

Her hands began shaking. Her anxiety tightened around her chest until even breathing required conscious effort.

I'm so stupid.

Why did I come here?

Then came the thought that had followed her into almost every unfamiliar room she had ever entered:

I don't belong here.

Kitty stood.

And then, despite believing every terrible word her mind was telling her, she walked around to the back of the theater anyway.

She found the dressing-room entrance.

She was very late.

Only then did she realize how exhausted she was.

It had been hours since she had eaten. Kitty cursed herself for not taking a little of the emergency cash to buy a sandwich. She was already well past the time when she would normally have eaten her ration of instant noodles, and adrenaline could only carry her so far.

Kitty was nearly the last person to audition.

Eventually, her name was called.

Her legs felt like Jell-O.

Her voice felt even weaker.

Somehow, she forced herself onto the stage.

For weeks, she had imagined this moment differently.

She had imagined herself transformed by it.

Instead, Kitty opened her mouth and discovered that knowing every word didn't mean she could make herself say them.

Her carefully memorized monologue emerged as a jumble of mumbling and stuttering.

Weeks of preparation collapsed in seconds.

Overcome with humiliation, Kitty ran from the stage crying before anyone could reject her, before she could faint, or perhaps before both could happen at once.

She hid in a bathroom stall.

For a while, Kitty thought the audition had proven what she had suspected all along.

She wasn't special.

She wasn't talented.

She didn't belong there.

Worst of all, she had allowed herself to hope.

Then another student cautiously asked through the stall door if she was all right.

Kitty cleared her throat.

“Everything is fine. I just get nervous sometimes.”

The words came out between sobs.

The student told Kitty she had seen the audition and that it probably hadn't been nearly as bad as Kitty thought.

Kitty didn't believe her.

All she wanted was to pull herself together enough to reach the bus stop before the last bus left.

The student offered to walk with her.

Kitty found the gesture slightly condescending and probably disingenuous, but she was too exhausted to argue.

As they walked down the hill, the student asked why Kitty had wanted to be in the play in the first place.

Kitty shrugged.

“I just wanted to be part of something I could go to regularly. Something that felt more important than me.”

The student suggested they stop at the job postings outside the campus store.

Kitty wanted to go home. She wanted to catch her bus. She wanted to survive whatever wrath Pam would unleash when she returned.

Instead, she allowed herself to be pulled toward the bulletin board.

“Oh, look!” the student said. “There’s a good job for you right here. You could be a janitor!”

Kitty tried not to cringe.

Years earlier, another poor kid at her elementary school had bullied her by calling her a “toilet scrubber for life.” The insult had somehow remained lodged in Kitty’s brain, and although she understood perfectly well that janitorial work was necessary, she wasn't enthusiastic about making the prediction come true.

Mostly, she needed the conversation to end before she missed her bus.

So Kitty gave the finest performance of her entire day.

She grabbed a paper tab from the only other flier within reach.

“You know what? This looks like it could be great for me! Thank you so much for helping. I feel a lot better!”

Then she ran.

Using what remained of her energy, Kitty reached the bus and climbed aboard.

She was so relieved to escape the college and put the day's humiliation behind her that she completely forgot about the little strip of paper she had shoved into her pocket.

The next morning, Kitty should have gone to school.

She couldn't make herself get off the couch that doubled as her bed.

Pam still hadn't returned to scream at her for ignoring the message.

At first, Kitty enjoyed the silence.

Then the silence became frightening.

Without Pam, the assistance they depended upon would become complicated, and Kitty knew it was only a matter of time before someone discovered that a minor was living alone.

She waited until school would normally have ended before calling the local jail.

A clerk told her that Pam had been transferred into state custody pending her next court appearance.

Kitty was confused. Pam had been arrested plenty of times before. Usually there was a familiar routine involving bail, angry telephone calls, and eventually Pam stumbling back through the apartment door.

Not this time.

Whatever the precise legal reason, there would be no simple payment that brought Pam home.

Kitty hung up.

The apartment was silent again.

For weeks, the audition had represented her escape. She had imagined herself walking onto a stage and somehow emerging as someone else—someone whose life was beginning instead of merely happening to her.

That dream was gone.

But Kitty was still there.

She sat quietly and took a deep breath.

If she couldn't find some way to support herself, her social worker would eventually discover what had happened. In Kitty's mind, that meant being sent straight back to the group home she feared.

She needed a job.

She needed somewhere to live.

She needed another way forward.

Almost absentmindedly, Kitty slipped her hand into the pocket of the jeans she had worn the previous day.

Her fingers touched paper.

She pulled out the little tab she had torn from the bulletin board.

There was a telephone number printed on it.

Kitty stared at it.

Yesterday, she had taken the tab only because she wanted to escape an awkward conversation.

Yesterday, it had meant nothing.

Today, it looked like a door.

Kitty picked up the phone.

Her audition had been a disaster. Pam was gone. Her money was running out. She had no idea what would happen next.

None of that had changed.

But neither had Kitty.

She had run to school when Ben failed her.

She had gone to the audition when Pam demanded she stay.

She had walked onto the stage while every frightened thought in her head screamed that she didn't belong there.

She had failed.

And she was still here.

Perhaps hope wasn't believing that everything would work out.

Perhaps hope was simply refusing to stop looking for the next door.

Kitty dialed the number.