Cat Boy

12 | petrichor

"So, the café," Vernon starts, after an agonizing four minutes and sixteen seconds of silence, not that he's been counting. "Do you work there now?"

Daehyun glances up from the cubbyhole, an expression of alarm painted over her face. She's gotten a haircut, he notices, or given herself one, judging from the choppy loose strands of dark hair that tumble from her braid. "No, that was just one time," she says, after clearing her throat. "It was rush hour and everything, and you were late, so Joshua just—you know."

Vernon nods, only a tiny bit disappointed. It takes a moment for him to realize why. He'd been looking forward to seeing more of her around the café. "I see," he says, as seriously as he can with his cheeks burning. And nothing even happened, he thinks towards himself, the other part of himself that's blushing. Get a grip.

His seriousness makes her smile, which he catches with a sideways glance. Well, at least something good came out of that.

It's an especially rainy day at the end of August, with angry gray skies and rumbly dark clouds that had been looming over them when they'd reached the cat shelter.

Fridays are messy, what with running from school to the café and then to the shelter, not to mention the weekly unit tests on Mondays waiting for him to study up over the weekend. Before volunteering, he used to study all of Friday, since traffic is highest over his two days off, but he's not about to give up volunteering. Especially when it's the only time of the week he has Daehyun all to himself.

Ever since school started, he's been seeing less of the girl than he would have liked. During school hours, it's close to impossible save for shared lunch, and on weekdays after school he's either too busy to see her or Joshua steals her away. And it's not always for help around the café—he remembers walking in on the boy trying to teach her how to make a latte. Vernon's just beginning to wonder if Joshua thinks he's her mentor or something when Daehyun laughs.

He looks at her out of a reflex he's unable to help. She's positioned in front of one of the cat perches with a tin of unopened cat food in her hands, looking right at him. "What?"

"Are you seriously studying right now?" she asks, gesturing to the open book on the stool next to him. "Is it for the bio on Monday?"

He sniffs regally. "Laugh at me all you want," he says. "You won't be laughing on Monday when the tests get handed out."

"Cocky," she mutters, and he flattens his lips and raises his eyebrows in a can't help it look. "Have you seen the spoon? I need to scoop out this gunk and I'm not doing it with my hands even if it meant saving my life."

"If it meant saving your life, you'd be reconsidering," he says, holding up the spoon. It's practically a ladle with its size, but it does its job. He has to agree, cat food does look pretty disgusting.

"Why do you always have to sound smart?" Daehyun snatches the spoon/ladle and scoops out the cat food and holds it over the dish. Big blobs of the brown stuff drop into the dish, one by one, like turds. "I'm kind of thinking of poop right now."

"Oh, my god," Vernon says immediately, as if he hadn't just been comparing the cat food to turds in his brain.

"What? It's true," she exclaims indignantly. He pulls a face, and then she's laughing, pointing the spoon at him so it's dangerously close to his face.

Vernon pulls back hastily, accidentally knocking his book off the stool so it lands in the water dish he's just pulled out of the cage. "Oh, crap," he groans, using his fingertips to pull the book out. It's then that he notices the cat shit lying in the water dish. "Oh, crap."