I’d never felt more like a cartoon character. Like my head should legitimately be turning bright red as steam poured out of my ears, and a train horn shrieked.
“Like I said,” he spoke slowly, enunciating each word like I was an idiot. “They’re all packed up, their food, their litter, their litter box—” He gave me a bit of a wrinkled nose at the last. “And crated them. They were sent on to the new residence…well, they have a stop at the vet, then the new residence, but that was all taken care of.”
New. Residence.
“What new residence?” What vet? No one took them to the vet except me. “I didn’t—who arranged this? Who are you people?” My voice hit a higher pitch than I realized, echoing off the walls.
As he started to reply, my eyes landed on the piles of boxes all labeled with someone else’s scrawl.
Books.
Clothes.
Knickknacks.
Misc.
Bathroom.
The other pair of men kept weaving around us, scooping up boxes and carrying them out. Rapidly, my apartment was emptying out, bit by bit, being stripped of any identity. My home was vanishing.
I locked onto the next box of books that passed me. Jake’s voice in my head, the arguments overThe Reality Dysfunction, dog-eared pages and notes in the margins. That book, our fights, our debates… taped up in a box. Gone.
It had been more than three years since I even thought about that series and how much it pissed me off and made Jake shake his head. Now it was all I could think about. They took my cats. They took my books.
“Maybe you want to get yourself something to drink,” the man was saying, every slow drawled tone telling me that I was on the edge of losing it. Or maybe it was just me and I was already there. “We’re just here to pack and move.”
Strangers. Just here to pack and move. Packing up my stuff.
I pushed into the bedroom, swinging my gaze over the corner where the wire crate shelves had once stood. They were gone. Only the imprint of their shape in the carpet to reveal they’d even been there.
My shoebox of seashells from Galveston with Coop, sunburnt shoulders, sand between our toes when we were seven—they were already boxed. My fingers itched to hold them.Gone.
I swallowed hard, heart hammering. Then I started looking around wildly, the photo of all of them with me from Freshman year. Even after all the crap, I hadn’t put that away or hidden it. It had stayed on that shelf in the corner where I could see it every morning. All of them standing shoulder to shoulder, and for that one brief moment in time, we had all been mostly the same height.
Mostly.
It had been taken on Archie’s first birthday with us. By the following year, all four of them had shot up, some skinny like a beanpole, but even then they’d filled out. That perfect moment, captured in frozen glossy ink—gone.They’ve boxed that too.
My gaze drifted to where the holiday program from tenth grade—me as an elf, Bubba as Santa, his ridiculous grin while tipping the hat at me—had been pinned to the cork board. The cork board that wasn’t there anymore. My stomach twist. The memories were slipping away, boxed and stacked, and I couldn’t reach any of them.
I sank to the floor, phone trembling in my hand, and typed out a quick, almost desperate text to my mother.
Me:
MOM. WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS MOVE?? MY CATS ARE GONE. MY STUFF IS BEING PACKED. WHAT THE HELL?
Even as I scanned her earlier messages. Nothing said anything about usmoving. She wanted me to talk to her, to meet her, that had been once or twice. Mostly about being nicer to Mr. Standish. But nothing on this level. Nothingthisimportant. The phone buzzed with a delayed “seen” notification. No response yet. Great.
Behind me a tape gun clicked and screeched as more boxes were sealed. My fingers hovered over my phone again, opening the group chat with Bubba, Archie, Jake, and Coop. I had muted this one over the summer and never took it off mute. There were literally dozens of messages, but until the past few weeks, I’d mostly ignored it.
But I had to reach someone, anyone, who coulddo something.
Me:
THEY TOOK MY CATS. MY BED. MY DESK.
I sucked in a breath, then pushed it back out.
