An excerpt from In a Dog’s World. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead to the next chapter.
The atmosphere of the Persian restaurant was thick with tinkling music and the scent of spiced meat. The walls were draped with gold and magenta curtains, and the floor was strewn with silk pillows. The whole place reeked of luxury and affluence.
“Do college students come here much?” Katasha asked Daria as they entered. “It seems kind of fancy.” It was also about a fifteen minute walk from campus.
“This is the big celebration dinner for graduating from Pathways,” Daria answered. “From what I hear, the really popular restaurant among Isleywooders is the breakfast place a few blocks back. It stays open all night.”
Katasha could see how that would be a plus.
“And they have bacon in just about everything,” Daria added.
That sounded like a good idea, too.
The Pathways cats were in a back room, curtained off from the rest of the diners. Daria plopped down on a royal purple pillow as soon as they entered. Katasha selected a powder blue pillow, placed it beside Daria, and settled down more tentatively. Looking around, she saw Blue and Leon lounging nearby. It almost looked like they were carrying on the same argument about religion that they’d been having at the cat-mixer four months ago. Rover was in a corner, by himself, scribbling away at a sheet of paper. Possibly, he was putting final touches on his essay.
A few of the other faces might have been familiar from the cat-mixer… Katasha wasn’t sure. More likely, the rest of these cats hadn’t been local enough to make it to that. So, she was probably seeing them for the first time.
She noticed there was a dog in the room too. He was a skinny, wiry fellow with very, short gray fur. Probably a whippet or Italian Greyhound. His cotton tunic and trousers hung on him like he was a scarecrow, and he kept his shoulders hunched. He had a brightly colored Mobius puzzle in his paws and was working the interwoven strands of it faster than Katasha had ever seen done before. He wasn’t even looking at it, except for the occasional quick glance, and yet the strands rapidly shifted from one intricate pattern to another. He was clearly an expert with it.
“Who’s that?” Katasha asked, bumping Daria with a paw to get her attention.
“Oh him? That’s Moby,” Daria said. “He’s one of the upperclassmen advisors. Everyone calls him Moby because he’s so good with that Mobius puzzle. The other one is Aaron.” Daria pointed an extended claw at a long-haired, orange, smoosh-faced, Persian cat wearing a star-swathed cape and a rakishly tilted beret. He looked truly ridiculous.
“Wait…” Katasha said, trying to remember back to the cat-mixer. “Is Aaron the upperclassman in the suite with Blue and the others?”
“That’s right,” Daria said. “He’s very strange. He runs around campus reciting poetry. At first I thought he was a vampire. Okay, not really. But, he does kind of act like one… what with all the poetry.”
Katasha tilted an ear skeptically at Daria. What do vampires have to do with poetry? Katasha wondered. Besides, the last time she’d been told that one of these cats was reciting poetry, it turned out to be First Race scripture. She hoped all these cats weren’t crazy First Racers like Blue. That was one of the things she really liked about Jimothy. He had such an even head.
Katasha sighed.
There was so much gossip and chatter around her here, all about cats she hadn’t really met yet and things that had happened in the last week while she wasn’t around. It was fast-paced and complicated, and it made her head hurt. She wished she were having dinner with Claire, Turtle, and Jimothy.
Turtle might talk a mile a minute, but it was all about… turtles. Jimothy and especially Claire were both very measured in their statements, nothing unnecessary said. Here, Katasha had heard pieces of at least five conversations analyzing other conversations already. It made her dizzy.
Even so, these Pathways cats would be her classmates too. It would do her well to get to know them. She could always catch up with her hiking friends later.
Aaron called the final meeting of the Pathways Program for Cats to order as soon as the waiters finished bringing around platters of saffron scented drumsticks and curried cubes of lamb.
The difference between this experience and her week long hike could not have been more striking — soft pillows, gourmet food, and gossip. For a moment, in the heady thrill of tasting the excellent food, Katasha wondered if she’d made the wrong choice. Perhaps she should have signed up for Pathways. It certainly would have been easier than trudging through those mountains. And, as the cats took turns reading their essays, she couldn’t help getting drawn into the intrigue of politics she could see in all the subtle glances and eye rolls, whispered words, and discretely gesturing paws that provided the constant background to the readings.
Besides, it wasn’t like things had worked out with Howell or Jimothy.
Blue, however, kept glancing her way. Would it be so bad to date the kind of tomcat that her sister wanted for her? Not so bad, perhaps. But Katasha couldn’t get excited about it either.
Closing her eyes to shut out all the extra stimulation — which cats were looking at each other, whose ears flattened and when — Katasha listened to the final few essays blindly.
“Are you okay?” Daria asked when the essays were over. She was so tuned in to Katasha’s slightest movement that she’d noticed the closed eyes, of course. “Do you have a headache?”
“I’m just tired,” Katasha said. “It’s been a long week.”
“I can imagine!” Daria mewed. “All that hiking. Sleeping on the ground.”
When Katasha opened her eyes, she saw Daria staring adoringly at her.
“You’re very brave to go on the hike instead of doing the Pathways Program,” Daria said. “Are you worried that you’ll have trouble keeping up with the coursework?”
Katasha dipped her ears in irritation. She didn’t see how a single week of playing catch-up would make much difference once the school year started. Nonetheless, she had to admit, at least to herself, that she was worried. “Not really,” she said.
Daria purred. “You are brave. Maybe we can work on homework together sometimes.”
“I’m sure we will,” Katasha answered. It would be hard to avoid it while living in the same small dorm room.
Katasha was relieved when the waiters came around to take the empty platters away. All the Pathways cats started standing up to leave.
“How was your summer?” Blue asked, stepping up beside her and Daria. “Has your sister gone off to college yet?”
“Corina and my brother Dmitri should still be at home,” Katasha said. “Mama’s driving them to college tomorrow, and my brother Dominic will be driving here.”
“Oh,” he said, “You don’t have any of your stuff yet?
“Her side of the room is still completely bare,” Daria said, taking Katasha possessively by the arm. Katasha had mixed feelings about Daria adopting her so thoroughly as a surrogate sister. She supposed that Daria must have a littermate or two out there who were suddenly having to cope with their sister being gone. Katasha wondered if they were at other colleges, being adopted by other cats who missed their sisters…
Would Corina adopt a surrogate sister at Orrington State to replace Katasha? Suddenly Katasha felt terribly lonely, surrounded by strangers, walking back to a room that was supposed to be hers but was completely empty except for a bed with a bare mattress. She’d sleep tonight wrapped in a quilt borrowed from Daria, who was acting like her sister but was not her sister.
“Well, if there’s anything you need,” Blue said, “my suitemates and I are all set up.”
At that moment, Aaron came pirouetting past, twirling his cape dramatically. He pranced around them in a complete circle and then stopped, with the cape drawn up to his amber eyes. “You must come to our suite,” he said. “Consider it a compulsion of the spirit. You will be well fed on fine conversation and fun competition. Can you play chess?”
Katasha flattened an ear. “You do sound like a vampire,” she said.
Aaron flung his cape wide and laughed maniacally. Then he turned about and ran ahead, meowing into the night, “Learn to play chess! It feeds the sooooul!”
“Can you play chess?” Blue asked. His simple earnestness was a bizarre contrast to Aaron’s theatricality.
Katasha shook her head no. “My brother Dmitri plays chess,” she said. She wondered if he’d join a chess club in college too.
“It’s a wonderful game,” Blue said. “The rules are so complex and simple at the same time that it’s survived since the early days of the First Race.”
“Yes, but you all haven’t been playing chess,” Daria said. “I mean, I know that you’re using a chess board, but I’ve watched you guys, and that was not chess.”
Blue’s ears flicked, and a smile crept into his green eyes. “True, we’ve played with the rules a little.”
For the rest of the walk back, Katasha was bombarded from one side with the specifics of the different chess variants that Blue’s suitemates had been playing and from the other side with gossip about what all the other Pathways cats thought of it all. Apparently, Cheshire Suite, as Blue’s suite was called, was somewhat infamous among the Pathways cats, both loved and hated at the same time. But then, wasn’t everything? At least, when you’re hanging out with cats…
Blue invited Katasha and Daria to come back to Cheshire Suite with him and learn some chess. Aaron swooped by, flapping his cape like wings, and urged them not to defile their eternal souls by turning down Blue’s offer. Daria said that she didn’t mind defiling her eternal soul if it meant she didn’t have to learn chess. Katasha simply told Blue she was too tired.
Aaron screeched, “Fools!” and ran straight toward the farther arm of Greene Dorm. He got to the wall of windows, hopped toward one of them, and disappeared right through it.
Katasha’s eyes widened.
“We leave the window open,” Blue said, “That way we can get into and out of our room from the courtyard.”
“Right,” Katasha said, realizing that she could see the curtain billowing lightly in the breeze. “Good to know.”
“Yeah, I wish we had a first floor courtyard-facing room so that we could do that too,” Daria said.
Their room was not only on the second floor, but it was on the wrong side of the hall to have a courtyard-facing window. Instead, their window faced the scramball fields and the enclosure around the swimming pool. It was a nice view, actually. And Katasha was not at all sure that she’d trade it for a “door” onto the courtyard.
That night, Katasha fell asleep to the soft sound of Daria snoring. The quilt wrapped around her felt strange and bulky from its ruffled edge. She liked the sensation of sleeping way up in the air on the bunk bed, but she was a little bothered by how close the ceiling felt. Mostly, though, she was sad that she hadn’t had a chance to catch up with Claire and the others. She wondered if all the Intro to Isleywood dogs had gotten together for a big dinner like the Pathways one. The thought made her sad, because that’s where she’d really belonged, with the dogs who’d spent all week hiking with her.
Except… Clearly not. Because they’d thought she belonged with the cats.
Katasha wasn’t sure she belonged anywhere.
Continue on to Chapter 20…