The Cat Prophecies: Claw Quest

1

Bienvenidos a Colombia.

The cat outside our class window had his paw so far up in the air I was pretty sure he was going to fall off the wall, but he kept his balance, like that was a totally normal thing to do. I was trying to draw his paw pads in my comic book, how they looked like little pink jelly beans stuck in his orange-­and-­white fur. Then he looked over at me, the orange M over his eyes narrowing. Our eyes met for five or six seconds before he got bored and started cleaning himself again.

Don’t ask me how I knew he was a boy. Mamá always said I had a connection to animals. When I was three, she found me digging through a pile of palm leaves in an alley. She said to get out before a rat bit me, but when I turned around, I had a tiny bird cupped in my palms. Her right wing was broken, so I splinted it, then fed her until she could fly again. After that, I’d come home with a hurt or abandoned animal every week or two. I’d keep them until Mamá found them a home with a friend or we’d let them go in the park, since they were wild animals and all.

I liked to think that was my origin story, because all superheroes need an origin story.

But I’m not a superhero. I’m just a boring thirteen-­year-­old ñoño in el barrio San Antonio in Cali, Colombia. Ñoños are hard to describe. Definitely not the popular kids or the ones with good hair like an anime hero. They’re the ones you pass by without noticing, the ones who sketch the superhero version of people en el Bulevar del Río for some extra pesos to help their mamá out.

Y’know, the ones like me, who were drawing a comic book about a lone orange-­and-­white cat trying to save the world with the help of a beautiful warrior who’s misunderstood by most of the city. And if you’re wondering how a lone cat can save the world with somebody, you need to read more comics. It makes sense when you go with it.

Anyway, I’d always wondered if being on the outside had something to do with my Tourette’s. And no, it’s not the kind you see in movies with people shouting bad words as they walk down the street. With mine, I notice patterns everywhere and have twitches I can’t control.

As I was finishing the final curve of the paw on my cat—­which was now a battlecat—­something slammed into the back of my arm, making the line go straight through the head of the warrior girl. I sighed hard but didn’t need to look up to see what had happened.

Brayan Uribe happened.

Brayan Uribe always happened.

When I “tripped” in the cafeteria, spilling all my food.

When the class guinea pig mysteriously disappeared and then showed up in my backpack, leaving behind chewed-­up books and tiny black poop pellets.

When a group of kids in the hallway of la Escuela San Patricia made clicking noises in their throats that sounded like a bag of angry wasps, mocking the noise I made during one of my episodes where I get really stressed and making that noise is the only thing that soothes me. All of which was ironic because this was a community school purposely made up of kids from different social classes to try to “unite” the city after all the bad stuff that happened a bunch of years ago. Instead, it pretty much united them against los ñoños. On the plus side, the cafeteria had some of the best arroz con leche in the world, so we had that going for us.

If I ignored Brayan, it would make the girls giggle, which would encourage him to do something more aggressive next time, and end with me sprinting as fast as I could from school, through the alleys and parks of San Antonio, and getting home in time to relock the front door of my building before Brayan and his two goons caught up to me. (Luckily, Mamá would be at work, like always, otherwise she’d come outside, swinging her chancla at them like a sword, and they’d be even worse the following day.)

Am I proud of that? No.

But am I fast? Kinda? Faster than them, at least.

I hoped I could give Brayan the bare-­minimum reaction and show I wasn’t a total loser while also hoping he’d lose interest. It wasn’t much of a strategy, but it was all I had.

I held up my hands, saying with my expression, What’s your deal, dude? You know how long I’ve been working on this comic book?

Which of course was when Señorita de la Paz, our math teacher, called on me.

“Señor Rodríguez? How kind of you to volunteer. Please come to the front of the class.”

Even if I had been listening, I couldn’t count to twenty unless I was wearing flip-­flops. I hoped there was enough time to stall.

“Señorita,” I said, hoping my voice hadn’t cracked this time, “I’d be happy to, but Cynthia could give a much more eloquent solution to the problem you’re so deftly using both to test our skills and to teach us something new.”

I glanced over at Cynthia Pérez, my lab partner in science class, but her massively unimpressed look told me everything I needed to know.

“It’s too bad you’re not in writing class, because your expansive vocabulary would help you there much more than it will proving value theorems.” Señorita de la Paz crossed her arms. “You were paying attention to the lesson, no?”

“Yeah, totally. I love extreme values. Like getting four arepas for the price of one.”

Her eyebrows made a V. “Do you even know what an extreme value theorem is?” She continued before I could say anything. “If you did, you’d be in calculus, not geometry.”

I still had no idea what she was talking about, but she just waited by the board. I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants. Brayan was probably smirking behind me. I imagined the cat bursting through the window, springing off Cynthia’s head, and landing on Señorita de la Paz’s desk, then swatting a pencil that bounced off Brayan’s forehead hard enough to knock him over.

I looked outside, just in case he was secretly waiting for my signal to act, trying to make my eyes say Now is the moment. He paused licking himself to stare at me again, and I could’ve sworn he raised his eyebrow whiskers, but then he decided to resume his public bath.

It was too bad the inside of my head was more entertaining than real life.

As I made my death march to the front of the classroom, someone made a fart noise with their mouth. It was obvious it wasn’t me, but everyone laughed anyway.

“Daniel Parado!” Señorita de la Paz yelled.

I turned around, surprised to hear Daniel’s name.

His face went completely pale, his hands covering his mouth.

“What on earth were you thinking?” she said.

Daniel stammered. “I . . . have no idea. Something came over me and made me do it.”

Which was believable. Daniel isn’t even un ñoño. He’s not anything. Doesn’t talk to anyone or act out, reads by himself at lunch. Other kids would make a fart noise, but never Daniel.

Señorita de la Paz wasn’t buying it. “You have three minutes to figure out how to explain it to the principal. Four if you walk slow.”

The weird thing was, as Daniel collected his books, I actually felt bad for him. Even though I was the one everyone had laughed at.

Then the door closed and the attention returned to me, and I wanted to disappear again.

I felt exposed, standing with my back to the class. I held my finger up and looked through it so I could see two ghost images of it. Then I lined it up with the straight line of the board, I blinked with my right eye so that ghost image turned solid, then with my left so both sides were even, then left again, then right again to complete the pattern and soothe my anxiety for a moment.

I took a long inhale and told myself to chill so I wouldn’t try to even out the pattern by starting over, with my left eye this time, and end up crashing out in front of everyone. Sometimes I got stuck inside those patterns—­going back and forth to make them more and more even, which, by definition, makes no sense—­and had a hard time pulling myself out until I realized I’d been doing it for forty-­five minutes. I couldn’t explain it and it wasn’t something I consciously did; it was just the way my brain worked, though that never stopped kids from making fun of me.

I waited for a spitball to hit the back of my head at any second.

“Whenever you’re ready, Señor Rodríguez,” Señorita de la Paz said.

I swallowed hard.

Someone in class laughed quietly. My face flushed. More kids laughed. My twitches rose to the surface, threatening to take over my body like some kind of brujería, but there were no witches involved. Just a slow-­spreading storm that made my fingers or limbs jump out for no reason.

The ripple of laughter turned into a wave, cascading toward the front of the classroom. I hung my head. Brayan was about to do something, and I had to figure out if I’d be better off letting it happen or sprinting toward the door and never looking back.

Then he yelled out, “Oh my god, is that la Vampira?”

My skin went from fire to ice.

I spun around. Brayan held up my drawing of the battlecat and warrior girl.

“When you two have babies, are they going to be werewolves or mummies?” He laughed obnoxiously hard. It didn’t make sense because interspecies babies didn’t work like that, but nothing Brayan said ever made sense.

Then, of course, he started trying to rap about it because he rapped about everything. Only problem was, he was probably the worst rapero in the history of the world. Nothing ever rhymed, all of it was off-­beat, and he tripped over his words half the time. Nevertheless, his two goons would cheer him on like he was the best of all time.

None of that stopped the room from closing in on me. My fingers twitched, my eyes fluttered. The lightning in my brain sparked. Don’t lose it, I told myself through the static.

I looked up and saw Señorita de la Paz with her head cocked to the side, eyes squinted. “That does look strikingly like Isa Echeverry,” she said.

That gave everyone permission to lose their minds. I couldn’t hear myself think, so I just acted. I snatched the drawing from Brayan along with the rest of my stuff and sprinted out into the hallway.