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.
Katasha thought Daria was asleep when she got back to their room. The lights were out, and she had to get ready for bed in the dark, seeing only the dim gray shades visible with her night vision. As soon as she crawled under her cozy covers, however, Daria mewed softly from her own bunk bed, “Did you find your hiking friends?”
Katasha whispered back to Daria across the quiet, empty air along the top of their room. She told Daria about the picnic on the roof of the library and Tesseract Suite. Daria stayed quiet, and, eventually, Katasha decided she must have fallen asleep. Fair enough. They’d be starting their classes in the morning. Though, Katasha couldn’t help but wonder if Daria had been so quiet because she was disappointed that it didn’t sound like Katasha would be spending more time in Cheshire Suite. Disappointed or even mad.
Once again, Katasha slept later than Daria. She hurried to the dining hall much faster than she had the morning before, butterflies filling her stomach. She’d filled her high school backpack with fresh notebooks and pens. She’d replaced the picture of herself and Howell in her breast pocket with the black-and-white campus map. (The picture of her and Howell was now tucked into the back of one of her desk drawers.) She was ready to start college.
The dining hall was open that morning. Katasha waited in line with other tired, nervous new students. There were a few upperclassmen, gregariously greeting each other after the long summer apart. However, it looked like, mostly the upperclassmen hadn’t arrived yet. Either that, or they didn’t get up this early.
Even so, most of the other new students — being canine — handled their nervousness differently than Katasha. There were lots of loud conversations, paws on shoulders, and mock-wrestling. Katasha didn’t have to try to keep a low profile, being one of the smallest in the line, but she did try to step nimbly away any time it looked like two of the other students were about to crash into each other in a cross between an introductory handshake, a posturing shove, and a hug.
At the front of the line, Katasha was asked for a student identification chip. She was confused until one of the other students helped her by pointing out that the chips were embedded in the their room keys. She pulled her key out of her pocket, passed it under the scanner, and was waved through to the buffet of steaming food. She helped herself to a plateful of chipped beef and eggs. Then, she headed out to the dining hall to look for a place to sit.
The long table where the Intro to Isleywood hikers had all sat that first night on campus was filled. There was space at some of the round tables, and she noticed Howell was eating at one of them. He was laughing and smiling with a number of students, all dogs, whom she hadn’t met.
There was a free space at the table, right beside Howell. And she didn’t recognize anyone else in the dining hall…
Drawing a deep breath under her whiskers, Katasha decided to take her breakfast and eat with Howell. There was no point in storing up hurt feelings, and it would be better to join someone she knew than to eat all alone.
Katasha took a few steps toward his table, and then Howell turned and caught her eye. Looking at her, his floppy ears strained back on his head, and his muzzle parted in a pained expression. He tried to blend it in with the grins and laughter of the conversation at the table, but Katasha was stunned. He’d seen her, and he’d looked stricken. Was he worried that the silly cat who’d begged him to take her to prom was going to come over and bother him with his cool upperclassmen friends?
Before she could recover, Katasha felt a tap on her shoulder. She looked around to see Jimothy behind her. Unlike Howell, he looked happy to see her, a smile gracing his bearded face. “Want to eat breakfast together?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, still dazed. Her half-mast ears certainly reflected her uncertain emotional state, but Jimothy didn’t notice.
“Great,” Jimothy said. “I’ll go get my breakfast. You pick a table, all right?”
Knowing that Jimothy would be joining her, Katasha considered braving one of the half-full tables. Maybe she’d make more new friends… But, she honestly didn’t feel up to it. With her first Isleywood class only forty minutes away, she needed a peaceful breakfast, not a stressful one filled with dogs barking at each other, trying to establish who would be the alphas. She’d have more than enough chances to meet the rest of her classmates later when all that had settled down. In fact, she’d hardly be able to avoid it.
Jimothy’s brushy white tail was wagging as he walked across the dining hall to join her with his tray of breakfast. He kept turning to look at all the other students and smiling. Katasha knew that her demeanor had been completely different from his — ears flattened and twisting about, while her eyes focused straight ahead trying to avoid the overly friendly glances of all these dogs she didn’t know.
As Jimothy sat down at the otherwise empty table with her, she couldn’t help but wonder why. There were so many more active tables, and he was clearly interested in the noise and boisterous exuberance of all the newer students. Yet, he was choosing to honor the friendship they’d established over the previous week, even though the rest of the group wasn’t here.
“Are you nervous about starting classes?” he asked before setting into his plate of chipped beef in earnest.
“Yes,” Katasha said. “And no.” She looked around at all the hectic confusion around her. The very air in the room was filled with vibration. She could feel it in her whiskers. “I won’t know until I get to my first class,” she said.
Jimothy laughed. Then, the two of them went over their schedules together. Her first class was math, followed by an advanced section of applied physics, then they’d meet up for chemistry.
“I think basically all the new students are in chemistry,” Jimothy said. “It’s some sort of giant seminar class.”
“Well, if you get there before I do,” Katasha said, picking her tray up and shoving her chair back into the table with a hind paw, “Make sure to save spaces for Tesseract Suite.”
“Will do,” Jimothy said. They both took their trays and placed them on a conveyor belt at the side of the room that returned the used trays to the kitchen. “We may not have rooms that are contiguous in three-space, but we can definitely sit together in chemistry lecture.”
There was still fog in the air as Katasha and Jimothy walked from the dining hall to the giant complex of academic buildings. It wasn’t really giant… Katasha knew that Corina and Dmitri were at a much larger campus this morning. She wondered if they’d have any trouble finding their classes. Would they have had time to make any friends yet? Katasha couldn’t imagine herself making friends in only one day. Of course, Ivy hadn’t looked like she expected to make any friends yesterday, and now she was part of Tesseract Suite.
They found the mathematics building easily enough by following the map. Sheets of windows paneled the front of the building in a reflected blue sky.
“See you in chemistry,” Jimothy said when they reached the door to his class. Katasha’s class was in a lecture hall a few doors down. When she stepped inside, she saw that Daria and Blue were already sitting together in the second row. Left to her own devices, Katasha would have preferred a seat further back, but she figured she’d better be sociable and go sit with her roommate. Besides, it wasn’t the worst idea to sit near the front. It would be easier to see without a lot of large dogs blocking her view of the etch-boards.
Daria purred when Katasha sat down beside her, but Katasha sensed there was still something off. Daria’s golden eyes barely flitted across Katasha’s face. Whereas yesterday, Daria had gazed at her possessively, as if Katasha were a sparkly object to capture and own. The change was kind of restful, but Katasha had to wonder what it might portend.
There was little time for conversation, however, because Katasha hadn’t exactly arrived early. The professor, a nicely dressed poodle with a shaggy haircut, began his lecture by etching an equation filled with Xs, Ys, and other mathematical figures in the etch-board. He used a single claw, and the light pressure that his claw applied while tracing along the board set off a chemical reaction that lit up the path of his claw in bright colors. He could vary the colors by varying the pressure of his claw on the board.
Some of the nicer, newer rooms in Katasha’s high school had boards like these. From what she knew of Isleywood, all the rooms here had them.
The lecture whizzed by. A deluge of mathematical symbols rained from the etch-board through Katasha’s furiously scribbling paw onto her own note paper. She barely had time to worry about Daria’s diffidence and Howell’s aversion to her at breakfast. She managed to work it in though, between copying down equations.
There wasn’t time to talk to Daria or Blue after class. The professor ran over, and they were all left to scurry to their next classes, already late.
Fortunately, the next class was Katasha’s advanced applied physics seminar. She’d been placed in it based on the strength of the physics classes she’d taken in high school. She was proud and excited to have placed into a higher level course but also a little nervous. Much of that feeling dissipated when she saw Claire already in the classroom. The two of them were able to select each other as lab partners. That meant they’d be working together the whole semester!
The first day was mostly an introduction to the lab equipment. It was a nice change from the frantic strings of mathematical logic that Katasha had raced to keep up with in the last class.
When applied physics was over, Katasha and Claire walked together to the main auditorium where the giant introductory seminar on chemistry was held.
New students trickled into the auditorium from all the other buildings. The room was a cavernous hold, filled with uncomfortable chairs with seats that folded up if you weren’t sitting in them and tiny desks that swiveled out of the arms. True to his word, Jimothy had reserved a block of seats together by an aisle. The seats were in two rows, Turtle and Preston were already sitting in the further forward of the rows. Jimothy and Ivy were seated behind them. Claire took the seat next to Turtle, of course. And Katasha sat down in the row behind her, between Ivy and Jimothy.
The auditorium was much larger than the classrooms that both her math and applied physics classes had been held in. There must have been nearly a hundred students seated in the tightly crammed rows listening to the tiny, fluffy-furred terrier lecturing them about the basics of molecules, atoms, quarks, and all their fascinating interactions. It might have been a good lecture, but the audience was antsy.
Summer was barely over. This new phase of their lives had blossomed into full bloom today. They could all hardly wait to escape the confines of the auditorium and return to the dorms — their new homes — and begin comparing notes on their morning classes, looking at the homework assignments they’d already received, and begin procrastinating in favor of reveling in the bizarre freedom of their burgeoning adulthood.
In practice, this meant there was a lot of whispering, giggling, and passing notes. Katasha almost felt bad for the professor, but not enough to stop her from scribbling sketches of tesseracts among her carefully copied diagrams of molecules. On one of the tesseracts, Katasha began to sketch little caricatures of her new friends. Jimothy’s sketch was mostly beard; Ivy’s was all about the big ears; Preston was as long and bendy as a balloon animal; and Turtle was drawn with a turtle’s shell. The sketch of Claire was relatively straightforward, except for having her head leaned against Turtle. And Katasha’s sketch of herself was feline to the point of absurdity — triangular ears, greatly emphasized feline whiskers — she looked like a hieroglyph from an ancient Egyptian tomb.
Ivy and Jimothy were in stitches, giggling over the little drawings.
Six of the squares of the tesseract were full; two were still empty. Katasha pointed an extended claw at the empty squares and then looked at Ivy and Jimothy. “We need two more suitemates,” Katasha whispered.
“Maybe Turtle’s pet turtles should count,” Jimothy said.
“We could make up imaginary suitemates,” Ivy said. “How about an imaginary British otter? Or two?”
Jimothy laughed, though he tried to stifle it for the sake of the chemistry lecture they’d stopped paying attention to long ago.
“I like that,” Katasha said to Ivy. She put her pen back to the page, ready to draw the next sketch. She smiled, but the smile took a quizzical turn as she tried to imagine exactly how to sketch the final figures in the tesseract.
Instead of an imaginary British otter, she found herself picturing a very real, blonde-furred upperclassman.
Then the smile turned to flustered confusion. After everything that had happened this week, how could she still be day dreaming about Howell? He must not even like her. Why else had he grimaced so clearly at the sight of her? Maybe… Maybe she should ask him. It was a cat-like thing to do, analyzing the details of a single facial expression. Except, it wouldn’t be catlike to ask him directly about it.
There was a whole week of indifference on top of that expression, and, no matter how he’d treated her since the summer ended, he had gone to prom with her last spring. Katasha resolved to seek him out after class or maybe after lunch. Either way, she wanted to put their tortured history behind herself.
Continue on to Chapter 25…