MY morning starts with coffee. Kitty’s with Xanax. A storm has settled over town and she perches on the windowsill and tells me that this time of year animal shelters won’t adopt out black cats. They’re afraid they’ll be killed in Satanic rituals or by psycho teenagers. It’s an empty day, like the kind that led to Christmas or Thanksgiving when we were kids. Peaceful moments with water droplets smeared on the windows and headlights tipped towards the sea.

This week’s project is indoor herbs. Real ones, to cook, not smoke. I’ve got five ceramic pots in a line on the kitchen counter and dirt grooved into the callouses of my palms. Indoor gardening is a passive activity, but I stare like the pot’s about to boil. Kitty has nodded off on the windowsill. Head drooped to her shoulder.

“When will they sprout?”

Her head rises slow and unsteady.

“What?”

“The plants.” I scratch at my morning stubble and try not to let irritation seep into my voice. Kitty is my best friend and roommate and is sometimes completely oblivious to what I try to do for her.

“They need more light,” Kitty says. “It’s the wrong time of year.”

I dig around the closet under the stairs until I find a musty box with my dad’s old photography lights. I bang around to attract Kitty and she disappears into the closet while I set up the lighting. When each pot glows in synthetic warmth, she reappears with some old acrylics and we paint small scenes of happiness onto the ceramic.

“I’ve heard this is important,” she says.

Kitty is the artist, but her fingers have numbed and her hand shakes. The thyme gets a rough barn with sheep blots in the distance. The basil she adorns with a messy forest. Her brow creases sharp waves across her forehead and she pushes it away, too hard, so the pot teeters at the edge of the counter. I call it impressionistic, Northwest Starry Night, and we both take meditation-deep breaths.

“Did you get Scotty’s text?” I ask.

She purses her lips and shrugs, eyes on terracotta.

“About the party?”

“Uh-huh.”

I continue the collage of dogs on the bay—a Boston terrier, a poodle, a long-legged greyhound, and a border collie—while Kitty paints a sailboat set off in the deep blue Pacific on the oregano. She finishes while I wind a long green lizard around the girth of the rosemary.

She gathers herself, fitting bones back into joints to stand.

“I wonder if they like punk rock?”

Kitty pauses. “You mean, like, if they’d grow faster?”

We decide they would.

• • •

I have these dreams where my teeth fall out. Sometimes they spider web like glass and then sprinkle to the floor in some sick cartoon. Sometimes I bite into an apple and instead of the outlines of my teeth left behind there’s bloody ivory chunks. Once or twice someone has punched me in the jaw and out fly a couple molars. Somehow this disturbs me less. I will be mid-sentence and they drop like rotten flies. Or I pass myself in a mirror and realize I never had them to begin with.

Every time I turn on the television a dentistry commercial appears. I stay away from hockey arenas. American tourists always try to tip me in U.S. currency. George Washington’s on every goddamn dollar bill and of course their public can’t get it together to switch over to coins like the rest of the civilized world. That whole wooden tooth story is a myth. Propaganda. I read somewhere that he wore dentures out of yanked slave teeth. Even yesterday, at a friend’s house, in between bong tokes he shows me the wisdom teeth the dentist pulled over the summer, roots still in tact. Long and alien.

• • •

The party is the party. As in: everyone I’ve ever loved will be there. Everyone else will be beautiful and talented and clothed in amusing Halloween costumes. I will walk in and my favourite song will switch on,

Kitty on my arm in an incredible outfit and perfect hair. I will be welcomed back like a lost comrade and everyone can pretend like nothing ever changes.

It goes like this: everyone I used to know is here, or will be soon.

Everyone else is beautiful and ironically dressed and maybe if they were a little less fucked, they wouldn’t sound so stupid. My favourite song does not switch on but whatever. Kitty’s on my arm dressed as Wanda the Fairly Oddparent. Less delicate than imagined, due to an earlier bottle of white.

An Adderall too, I’d guess, from her three-hour monologue on the way here. Rain drips off her eyelashes and some girl says, “Wow, shit, it’s really pouring,” so Kitty scampers off to the bathroom and after one long minute alone I follow like a lost dog.

I sit on the toilet and watch her adjust the bobby pins in her spray- dyed pink hair. We left our coats safe in the car and my white button down clings to my shoulders.

“Mother fucking rain.”

“Shit, Kitten, it doesn’t matter. Pass me my whisky.” She slides the bottle from her purse, takes a sip, and hands it over. It tastes like poison, but there are bills to pay and also who cares. I check myself in my mirror and see that the green spray dye that designates me as Cosmo the Fairly Oddparent has begun to bleed into the paper crown pinned to my head. Kitty buzzes around with black tubes and pale cream and red lipstick and in two point five seconds her makeup is perfect and her hands still jitter. I watch that the hands don’t find their way to something sinister. Kitty could pop a pill in front of a nun and not even God would notice.

“Jesus Christ Jack, you can’t hide in here forever.”

She grabs my wrist and yanks me out the door.

Outside, a million people scream drunken sound bites over a superb playlist—I gotta admit—and Kitty, hand still on mine, tangles her way through the crowd into the kitchen. She digs a glass out of a cupboard, locates ice hidden in the back of the freezer, and pours the cheap whisky over it like fine scotch. Or at least her idea of how people drink fine scotch. Like we know. She pours herself a glass, too and I say nothing.

A high-pitched scream to the left and another stick-thin, red-lipsticked girl dressed as Twiggy catapults herself onto Kitty and that’s it, we’re off. The party begins. Kitty’s swept away by the tide and I don’t even have to think of conversation because everyone wants to know the same thing.

“Holy shit, if it isn’t the long lost brother,” or “Jack, where the hell have you been?”

Here’s my cue to kick back the dregs of my second, third, fifth, and sixth drinks, respectively.

This is followed by: “Where you living these days?” or “Good call dipping out early.” Sometimes: “Where’s the girl, the other half? You guys finally fuck or what?”

And I say: “Oh, back on the island. For sure, yeah you guys come across anytime, we’ll have a beach fire,” and “Well you know what Kerouac said about college, bourgeois bullshit.” Sometimes: “Oh Kitty. Nah, but we got that pact. We’re not married by thirty-five and we’ll stop fucking around and tie the knot.”

I’m roped into beer pong, and then outside to pass a thin joint and everyone’s drunk enough that I finally lose the spotlight. It’s easier than you’d think to slip into who you used to be. The rain still comes down hard so once the weed is roached all the who-evers go back inside and I’m left with my three old friends: Dan, Chris, and Scotty. This is their house. It’d be mine too, if Kitty and I hadn’t decided to move home. They’re dressed as slightly masculinized Powder Puff girls and we all congratulate each other on our clever cartoon costumes.

Scotty digs around his pocket and pulls out a pack of smokes. “You want one?” He holds it out to me.

“No, I quit.”

“Cool, man.”

None of us know what to say and underneath the rain, I hear our old friendship turn stale until I’m alone and soaked with three guys I used to know.

“It’s fucking cold out here,” Chris says, and we go inside.

Kitty is nowhere. Her old friends, Maddie, Emily maybe, are dancing in the living room and shrug towards the bathroom but when I shove past the line-up, no Kitty. No Kitty in the kitchen, or upstairs. I go out to the car parked down the street, but it’s empty. I call her cell for the fifteenth time as I walk up the front steps and hear a familiar ringtone from the bushes.

“Kitten?”

I follow the song behind a shadowed pine tree. A recently trimmed branch lies in the grass and there Kitty perches, the hem of her black skirt soaked in wet grass, rain stringing her hair, the pink all but disappeared.

“What are you doing back there?”

“Cop drove by earlier. Didn’t want him to see me.”

“Are you okay?”

As I step closer, she kicks leaves over a puddle of vomit.

“C’mon Cinderella, it’s time to go.”

“But Jack.” She says my name a lot when she’s drunk. “Jack, you’re not my prince.”

“I’m the fairy godmother.”

I take her hand and she teeters like a faun. She grips my elbow and leans into my shoulder. Her breath is hot along my neck.

“Are we going home?”

“It’s the middle of the night, Kitten. The ferries aren’t running. Chris says we can crash on the pull-out.”

Scotty’s bedroom has a private bathroom so I drag her up there. Her shivers spread through my skin and I tie her soaked hair back and bring her water while she pukes in the toilet. She shakes even when I dial up the heat so I dig out tomorrow’s t-shirt from my backpack and a pair of her leggings. She sits on the bathroom floor and says she feels better. I help her up and unzip the skirt, but turn around when she lets it fall to the floor.

Once clothed, I offer bread slices and pretzels.

“Please, take me home. I want to go home.”

“Not yet.” I hand her a blanket to wrap around her shoulders.

“Do you hate me?”

“Why would I hate you?”

“I would—I do. I hate me. I ruin everything. I ruined your big night.”

Through the floorboards I hear music, thumping footsteps, laughter, but I’d rather sit here above with Kitty and let her cold skin seep into mine than face one more contrived conversation. This house is a ghost of what might have been. The displacement feeds through my respiratory system and I want to shove Kitty out the door and go home. I cannot resurrect the people I’ve walked away from.

I swaddle her in a raincoat and we escape to the all-night diner down the street. I stuff myself with pancakes and coffee and then we catch the earliest ferry home.

• • • Monday morning I’m dressed in work grub. I make a full pot of coffee and pour most of it in the Stanley thermos Kitty gave me for my last birthday. She does not appear, reclusive since Halloween and the silent three hours on the car ride home. A gentle knock on her door causes no reaction. No sounds except the Violent Femmes crooning the herbs awake. I flick the lamps on and head outside, only to be surprised by my roommate smoking on the porch.

“Good sunrise?” I say after a start. Six months ago she’d called cigarettes rat poison and tossed them one by one down the garbage disposal. I quit too, in solidarity. She didn’t laugh when I suggested the Addys and maybe even the Benzos might go as well.

“Let’s never go back there.”

I slide into the seat next to her and take a sip from the Stanley.

“That’s what you said about this place.”

She takes a drag and puffs it into the morning fog.

“Yeah, it’s a shit hole, but it’s our shit hole.”

“Haven’t you heard, the ocean’s turning radioactive? We’ll all be mutants in a couple of years.” “There’s always that golden monument, the View Royal Casino.” Kitty stuffs her cigarette into an old beer can and stands. “Better get going.

You’ll be late.”

I valet at the casino. Basically, I’m paid to run. It’s better than the mall or the motels and it’s got a rhythm to it. I’m fast, too so the boss gives me prime hours. The summer is busiest, but even now the foreign tourists and local retirees can’t resist the slot machines. Right down the street is the

Pacific—stone gray and ready to spit the kraken on rocky shores but no one here really cares about the sea. If they don’t come to the casino they go to the mall. Make money, spend money.

What’s work got to do with anything except time to think or not think? Depends on the day. This one is gloomy and the sky presses down against the ocean until it has nowhere to go but Canada. That’s what it looks like when I stand out in the sand on my lunch break. The mist can’t quite bring itself to touch down, so it hovers above the beach. North the trees begin to rise out of the mist, into the hills. A man and his dog walk across my vision. If a sneaker wave rears up and plucks them into the surf, would I stand here and watch them die?

It’s the kind of situation where we always say we won’t know until it happens. Except it happens right in front of us all the time. My dad drank the lining out of his stomach and I poured the scotch. When I was five years old, Marcus Lee from across the street shot his cat dead with a BB gun and I blinked back the tears and pretended to laugh. I keep my mouth shut when Kitty’s so twisted on Xanax she can’t remember her name or when she hasn’t eaten anything but vegetable broth in three straight days.

I almost pray for the sneaker wave. Twenty-one years and I’ve never seen one. If I die to save that dog, I’ll go out a hero and no one will remember that I couldn’t help Kitty. I won’t have to go on making shitty small talk with people I don’t care about while she hides away in pine trees. I breathe in the ocean and think about the dog. Not the golden retriever mucking in the sand, but the cocker spaniel in my childhood yard who fell into the drainage pipe down in Caddy Bay and drowned in the salt. But, no

I don’t think about that either. I think about the silky spot behind her ears, the wriggle of her stumped tail, and Kitty’s tiny, Crayola-stained hands as she stroked the chestnut hair.

Last night: there is a room full of people and at the center of the room is me. It’s a place that I all at once know and yet don’t at all. The faces are recognizable but distorted, somehow wrong in the details. The voices blend into one another and my ears itch, deep inside the drum. I open my mouth to speak, but stop when I feel teeth unglue from gums. I snap my jaw shut. The roots settle back into their crevices. A girl breaks from the crowd, grabs my arm and begs for help, I’ve got to help her, I’m the only one, I’ve got to speak. But I clamp my teeth together and shake my head. She begins to cry but as soon as my jaw parts the roots give way. I hold them with my tongue, trying to keep them in place, but the girl stares in horror as they begin to fall from between my lips, pearls from a broken string.

The herbs have sprouted. The delicate early basil, like little rubber jungle leaves, is art. I plan feasts of pesto pizza, basil stir-fry, creamy basil dips, pesto grilled-cheese sandwiches on perfect golden French loafs, and salmon steaks seared green. Kitty accuses me of favouritism, but I can only groan pesto and her point is proven.

“Do you think your pizza will taste like Nirvana?”

“I’d like a grilled-cheese and Pixies sandwich please.”

“Tortellini with Bikini Kill sauce.”

“Mm, wow, that sun-dried tomato really compliments the feminism.”

Kitty’s laughs croak out in short, grated Ha’s exacerbated by tobacco, and now she sits in the sill, blowing puffs out the cracked window. She slurs a little when she speaks, tongue thickened by Benzos. She doesn’t notice when the wind sends the smoke back through the crack, nor the haze that’s spiralled towards the kitchen.

“You’ll kill me and the plants.” I open the front door and wave my hand through the air.

“Aw shut up.” She shivers and puts it out. “Let’s carve pumpkins.”

“Halloween is over.”

“They still have them at the market.”

I switch the plants over to The Vaselines. Kitty struggles with wool socks and walks out the door with mismatched slippers. I find the keys and dig the other half of the black pair from under the couch and meet her in the car.

While we ease over the speed bumps in the Thrifty’s parking lot, Kitty speaks up.

“Do you remember the time we were sixteen, and Eloise had that bottle of berry vodka?”

I follow her eyes to the roof of the strip mall and know which night she means.

“Yeah.”

The third member of our old trio, Eloise, knew of a party we wanted to crash. We never made it. We decided to cut through the trees behind Thrifty’s and someone—okay me—spotted the ladder leaned against the back of Tim Horton’s.

“You were so drunk, Jack. You tried to tell Eloise that joke about the three pastors, but you couldn’t pronounce evangelical.” She laughs and I park the car. Neither of us moves to open our doors.

“Yeah and you started to sing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ when we saw the ladder. But only we climbed it. Why didn’t Eloise?”

“She was wearing that dress.”

“Oh yeah.”

“She liked you. That night was supposed to be it. That’s why she never talked to us again, because she thought we hooked up.”

I’m startled. I remember Eloise, pretty in that cable television way. She never met my eyes again in the school hallway. The roof, that’s one of those sour milk memories, rotten and molded so I don’t even touch it. I’m not afraid of those with Kitty though. She understands we tiptoe. It’s unlike her to even bring this up. My guard is down.

“You don’t remember, do you?”

I shrug. “You don’t remember how I slipped?”

I start to notice how the curve of the seat makes my back ache, the claustrophobia of the steering wheel pressed on my legs. The air smells recycled. I crack my neck, wiggle my back, and rest my fingers on the door handle, but Kitty won’t take the bait. She’s never learned to quit while she’s ahead.

“I kissed you, but you didn’t kiss back. I could hear Eloise sniffle in the parking lot and I knew you’d picked me. But you didn’t kiss back. So, you know, I stood too fast and slipped.”

I turn the ignition to crack the windows. My feet are too leaden to stand. Kitty won’t look at me; every fidget I make stands in opposition to her dead stillness.

“Why’d you stick with me all this time?” she says.

I want to remind her of my first day at Craigflower Elementary, when she let the new kid sit by her at lunch, when she gave me half her fruit snacks and invited me to play tag at recess. I want to remind her of when I kicked the teeth out of the kid who shoved his hand down her shirt in eighth grade, or the million lies to our parents we covered for, no questions asked. I want to remind Kitty that I caught her, that night on the roof, before she slipped over the edge. And about the day my father died, when she biked through sleet to meet me at the hospital. Does she remember all the nights at university she cried into the crook of my collarbone and said she’d made a mistake? I brought her home—she couldn’t do that by herself. She brought me home, too.

“You know why,” I say, and get out of the car.

• • •

Mount Washington claims its first victims of the season today. I sit at the casino bar after work and watch snowboarders spray powder and attempt flips on the fresh snow. Rose-cheeked reporters gush under wool toques and yearn for the broadcast to end so they can slip on their own ski boots. Breaking news. Every year I can’t help but watch, though my own experience with skiing began and ended with a broken leg at age thirteen.

Some mountains are death traps in the winter. Climbers go up and never come down. In the summer they’ll find the bodies in ice caves or at the bottom of a cliff. It doesn’t seem like a real way to die.

I’ve always wondered: if we find them alive, will they try again? • • •

Kitty’s mom begs her to come home once a month. On the phone usually, but she drops by often enough to stock the fridge or to take Kitty out to lunch and sometimes she breaks down. Mothers’ tears are something children are not meant to see. I never thought Kitty would go, but I come down the stairs and Kitty’s lounged in the windowsill with a cup of tea. She’s switched on the herb lamps and Sublime’s eponymous album plays soft through the speakers.

“Mom called.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m going home.”

She says it with such clear sobriety I know what she means.

Here are the reasons why it’s not that bad: 1) Kitty will eat every day.

Her mom, Liz, is the type of lady that even cooks breakfast. Pancakes or scrambled eggs or thick, sloppy porridge filled with fruit and spices.

Dinners are creamy, fatty casseroles or twice baked potatoes. 2) Smoking is banned. Liz is a bloodhound for that stuff. 3) No more drugs. Maybe. Kitty’s sharp and her mother not very street-wise, but she knows her daughter better than anyone, even me, and Kitty’s not quite Kitty when she’s high. 4) It’s not that far away. Maybe not down the street like when we were kids, but still across town.

Here’s why it’s bad: Kitty’s leaving.

Is it pathetic or stoic that I help her pack? We stuff her clothes in trash bags and old vinyl suitcases. Duct tape collapsed cereal boxes into poster tubes. I toss four-fifths of our shared bathroom into one big duffel bag. She leaves all the house stuff, even the herbs, though they were always meant for her. I insist she have the thyme, if only to say it out loud. We jam random junk into every crevice we can find until Kitty has to ride over to her mom’s with her feet curled up on the seat and my knees bump the blinker I’m so far forward.

I notice that she’s gone not by the quiet house but the empty windowsill, the four potted plants, the rings on the coffee table, the unused tea in its tin. I don’t call her and she doesn’t call me. I start to linger at the grocery store, to make elaborate detours around town, and compose fantasies of what to say when we cross paths. I panic if my phone isn’t in my pocket. I light the candle in her pumpkin every night. I start to forget what I ate for breakfast, if I even went to work. I seem to miss entire days. I’ll be in the shower with shampoo in my eyes and wonder what the hell happened. I even forget my dreams.

There are ten million explanations for anything but even good excuses aren’t rehab or therapy and they sure as hell don’t protect you from nightmares. I don’t want to go back to before we dropped out. I don’t want to be sixteen again and kiss Kitty the right way. Or even stop Marcus Lee before he killed the cat. I want to be the kind of person who never would have messed it up so bad in the first place. It’s not about forgetting this time. Maybe to remember is the key. I want to unroll the film of our lives and cut away my absences. Tape it back up and rewind so only I know the difference.

This is the plan: get Kitty back. It’s selfish but I’ve had a few. Besides, it’s been Kitty and me versus the world since the fourth grade and we can’t turn our backs on that. It’s the right night for it. There’s a gentle rain.

Everyone has gone home. The streets are so empty it could be the end of the world. Best of all, it’s the second Thursday of the month and Liz will have her book club.

I ring the doorbell and no one answers. In a couple minutes, I ring again. Still nothing. I let myself into the backyard and see the kitchen window dark around the side, and no reflection of the television through the glass doors of the back deck. No one’s home. Maybe it’s too late for grand, half-drunk gestures anyway. Life can’t play out like the movies. I thought she left because she didn’t know the answer—why I stuck with her after all this time—but maybe she realized we had enough to cling to but not to build a whole life on. I want to fight it, to say no one does, but she’s too far gone to resurrect.

I can’t bring myself to get back in the car so I walk to the liquor store and buy a mickey of fire whisky to drink on the rocks at Denniston and watch the ripples of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. If I had a can of baked beans, I’d cook it over an open fire still in the tin. Then I’d burrow under a log for sweet dreams. In the fog of the morning maybe a sneaker wave would pull me out to sea or else I’d set off with a burlap bag for the mountains. I’d live at the bottom of the ocean with the meat of shellfish between my teeth, or die in an ice cave in the clouds.

But all I’ve got is a brown bag of liquor, a half empty house, four potted plants, and a nine-hour shift tomorrow. It’s time to put an ad out for a roommate and toss the melted pumpkins in the compost, but I stay in the rain until the bottle’s empty. Sand grates between my toes on the walk back to the car and the traffic lights are green all the way home. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kelsey Robbins Lauder is a writer from the Oregon Coast now pursuing her MFA at the University of Victoria. She also has published or forthcoming short fiction in

EVENT and Found Press, and has served as an intern on the fiction board at The

Malahat Review since 2013. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel. She can be found on Twitter at @krlaudr.

LF #094

© 2016 Kelsey Robbins Lauder

Published by LITTLE FICTION | BIG TRUTHS, April 2016. Cover design by Troy

Palmer. Edited by Beth Gilstrap. Read more stories at littlefiction.com