FICTION: CATS AREN'T ALLOWED IN THE DORMS by Pearl

It was terrifying. I remember her little nose peering at the opening and then disappearing into the dark slit. I coaxed and coaxed and when I realized she wasn't coming out all of the terrible situations that could happen bounced around in my head. Shit, I thought. She would get stuck under there and then start to protest. Meaning meow, those high pitched meows that plague my sleep and rouse me better than any alarm clock, sometimes accompanied by those sharp sharp teeth biting up and down my arm for no apparent reason since my sleeping arm makes no physical reaction. Perhaps she can sense my mental reactions, as I've heard animals have been said to do. The dull throbbing thoughts of pain intercepting my slumber might stimulate her little brain. She also meows when she needs food, water, is about to throw up (this is a particularly strangled, yet comical, sound) or just wants my attention. But anyway, her meowing is loud, and more detrimentally, very high pitched. One of her mews is certainly not a sound that should be coming out of your typical dorm room at college.

Yes, my college dorm room. I have an "illegal-dorm-kitty," something shocking to some people but surprisingly expected by others. Ah, yes, a "college dorm cat". Just a "college" thing to do, like "binge drinking" and "cramming" and "pranking" and "casual sex" and "condoms breaking" and all that. My roommate and I heard that there were some stray kittens under a house in her home town, Houma, Louisiana. Of course, us being future crazy cat ladies and already feeling deprived of pets in the stagnant dorms, we had to have one. We jumped in her car late one Thursday evening after seeing a show at Tulane, drove the 45 minutes south and got one. It was heart-wrenching to take her away from her mother but the neighbors were going to send her to the pound where she'd probably never leave if we hadn't taken her. It was impulsive but we followed through, getting food, a litter box, and even medication that very same night.

She is a huge hit on campus even though the risks are high. Or they are potentially high. We've heard rumors everything from 200 to one thousand dollar fines, mere requests to "please get rid of it" from a residential assistant to severe disciplinary action or being kicked out of the dorms. We can't ask somebody official what the consequences would be because that might be pretty incriminating. But we figure our RA is chill and the benefits outweigh the elusive risks. We are known as "the girls with the cat" and we have even been introduced to other cat owners, current, or from previous years. I personally think that we are just following good Jesuit ideals by taking this poor creature under our protection and saving her life, to penalize us for this would make ole Iggy turn in his grave.

She is literally and figuratively a handful. She is rapidly growing, however. She is black with white feet and a white belly and the cutest little white mustache, hence her name, Mona (Like the Dali version of the Davinci painting). She is very curious, as kittens are, which led to the terrifying situation that caused my panic weeks ago. Mona loves drawers. If missing, she can most likely be found napping curled up among my underwear and hugging an empty Jaeger bottle. She also knows which drawers have her food in them and will leap in before I even have time to get out a can. But one day, I opened the largest bottom drawer under our counter area. Mona darted over but instead of jumping in actually went under this pulled out drawer. Silly cat, I thought, and tried to reach under to swat her out of the way. But she wasn't there. I peered down and to my horror realized she had actually crawled into the woodwork, in between the sliding drawer and the wooden frame. I couldn't shut the drawer or open it any further, she needed to come out on her own will. My heart was pounding. I had my cheek to the filthy floor, pleading, begging for her to come out. If she got stuck down there we would have to call somebody to get her out. But how, since we technically aren't even allowed to have her? I grabbed the tastiest thing to a kitten I could think of from our fridge, some cheesy spinach and artichoke dip.

"Come on baby, come on, come on Mo Mo!" I begged and bribed and baited and finally she poked out enough of her upper body for me to yank her out of the crack. I hugged her close to me and slammed the drawer shut, and did the same to every other drawer in the room.

"You scared me," I cried. I took her to bed with me and realized just how much I love this damned cat. She isn't just a cuddly toy or something to take cute pictures with. She's mine and she depends on me.

I watched her boxing her arms at anything, at hands and scissors and even thin air, the prospect of boxing something. I looked at her face, that darling little face, looking so scared but curious but bewildered. How do cats know exactly how to make eye contact with you? How do they know how to isolate our eyeballs from the massive blobs our faces must be to them, especially to Mona's relatively recently opened eyes?

This made me realize how deeply I cared about this little creature. It all made sense; why I could now get up before my alarm clock had ever even rung if Mona needed me when previously I couldn't even make it to class. Why I didn't mind getting a handful of cat urine as I plucked her squatting off of my roommates bed and ran her across the room to the sink. Why I could laugh about pee streaming down my leg that wasn't mine at all. Why I continue let her suck on my neck, greedily, with her eyes closed and purring, leaving strange red marks all over my neck that make me look like I have some sort of flesh eating disease. Its because she thinks I'm her mother. It's because she needs me.

I often wonder what she thinks of me. She has seen her mother laugh and cry. She has probably met more people at this school than some students have. Her habitat is a strange one, such a small space packed with so many stimulating objects and small grated windows to peer out of. I wonder if she got confused when she saw her mother's neck get sucked by somebody else than her, and that progress to a whole lot more. I wonder what she thought as she inquisitively sniffed the discarded object resembling a snake, broken and slippery. She is a lucky cat in terms of her access to technology, of which we joke she is addicted to. She loves typing odd combinations of special characters into online conversations and she loves switching the music to Lil Wayne.

The litter box is disgusting and she knocks over her water onto her dry food daily creating a disgusting mushy mix, but my newfound motherhood previously allowed me to clean it up without even thinking, similar to my newfound tolerance for cat urine and being covered with cat hickeys. But this morning as I leaned down to sponge up some food I uncontrollably puked. Everywhere. Mona watched me with large eyes before running over to curiously sniff the sick. I had been really tired but thought it was just my finals, really hungry but thought it was just the weed, nauseous but thought it was just hangovers...along with my MIA period this was all I needed to make a trip to the drug store.

So now I'm sitting on the toilet with this fucking pregnancy test in my hand. I'm intently staring at the indicator and Mona is sitting on the floor staring intently up at me. She lets out a "meow" and I know she wants me to close my legs so she can jump up and join me. As she settles down and starts to purr and knead my bare thighs I focus in on what has already registered in my mind: the blurry red lines signifying pregnancy. I don't know why I'm not freaking out more, I must be in shock. I pick up Mona by the scruff of her neck, stand up, pull up my jeans and stuff the pregnancy test back in the box and into my pocket. I briskly walk to my bed and throw Mona onto her favorite blanket and then lay down and reach for my cellphone.

"Hey, we need to talk. So remember what happened the other week? Yeah. I guess the pill didn't work. Well. I'm pregnant." It almost seems like my voice is coming out of me at its own will. Mona leaps onto my chest staring into my eyes.

"Yeah uhh... I'm not asking you to pay for an abortion. No. Yeah. I think I'm gonna keep it."

You must all be thinking; wait, what? Me, a young, bright girl with a future ahead of me? Me, non-religious, liberal North Easterner, going to have a baby at age 18? Yes, I am pro-choice. But this is the only choice I see possible. Just as I got Mona on a whim and later accepted (and learned to love) the responsibility that came with her, I've decided that I will do the same with this child. Why would I put an end to something that could potentially bring me exponentially more joy than Mona already has? Yes, there will also be exponentially more hardships and risks to come than the now seemingly simple cleaning of a litter box or potential thousand-dollar fines. This will change my entire life but I think maybe, possibly, for the better. I don't regret getting Mona and I don't want to regret this. I'm not sure about anything; my education, how my parents will react, or even the father whose voice I am now temporarily tuning out, entrenched in my own epiphany. Motherhood. I let the phone fall down onto the bed from the crook it was resting in between my cheek and shoulder and stroke Mona as she purrs, sleeping on and kneading my already-growing abdomen.

By Pearl (Sorry to post this late I left my computer at school by accident over break!)