1.
Lucy found a spool of shiny, narrow ribbon. She liked the bright purple color. Pulling the end of the ribbon free, she tugged experimentally. It seemed strong enough to lift the cat. And it was a big spool; there was a lot of ribbon.
Lucy looked around. No one was paying attention to her. She unwound a length of ribbon and tied it to the handle of her elevator: a basket she had found empty in the TV room. She carried the basket and spool into the front hall.
“Lucy,” said her mother as she passed by with the mail, “what are you making?”
“An elevator,” said Lucy.
“For yourself?”
“No!” Lucy decided not to mention the cat. “I just want to lift stuff.”
“Okay. Don’t break anything.”
Lucy watched her mother continue on into the den. She wondered briefly what her mother thought she might break. She returned to her work.
Tying one end to the handle of the basket on the floor, Lucy carried the spool of purple ribbon up the stairs and around to the landing overlooking the front hall, unwinding as she went. She leaned over the railing and admired the shiny purple Slinky-like spiral. She pulled on the ribbon. The slim bright line tensed. The basket lifted. She let it dangle, tugging periodically to test the weight.
“What’s that for?”
Lucy looked up. A boy about her age sat on the floor, watching her. “Who are you?”
“I’m John,” he said.
Lucy frowned. “Where did you come from?”
“Everywhere,” he replied.
“You can’t come from everywhere,” Lucy said. “You have to come from somewhere.”
“What’s the difference between everywhere and somewhere?” asked John.
“Don’t be stupid, everybody knows that.”
“I don’t,” he said. “If I did, I wouldn’t ask you.”
“Maybe you asked because you’re a butthead.”
“I’m not a butthead.”
“How do I know you’re not a butthead?” said Lucy.
“I’ll swear on anything you want.”
“Swear on your mom.”
John crossed his heart. “I swear on my mom that I’m not a butthead.”
Lucy was undecided.
“I’ll help you with whatever you’re making, if you want,” John offered. “Unless you don’t want me to.”
“I don’t know. You might be a psycho.”
“I’m not a psycho.”
“Says you!”
“We can go ask your mom.”
This seemed reasonable. “Okay. She’s downstairs.”
Lucy carefully laid the spool on the floor and ran down the stairs. John followed her. They found Lucy’s mother in the den, frowning over a stack of papers. “Mom?”
“Yes, honey.”
“This is John, is it okay if we play upstairs?”
Lucy’s mother nodded without looking up. “Yes, it’s fine if you play upstairs,” she said.
Lucy looked at John and shrugged. “I guess it’s okay. Come on. I’ll show you my elevator.”
He followed her upstairs. She glanced back at him, noting details: green striped shirt, cutoff denim shorts, battered sneakers and dirty untied laces. Messy brown hair. Blue eyes like rain on the ocean.
They reached the upstairs landing. John looked down over the railing at the basket below. The shimmering purple ribbon swayed gently in an errant breeze from the open back door.
Lucy explained her elevator plans. He looked doubtful. “You want to lift your cat?”
“Yeah. It’ll be cool.”
“What if the cat doesn’t want to?”
“I’ll do it when he’s asleep,” Lucy decided. “He’s always asleep. He’s asleep right now.”
John shrugged. “Okay.”
Lucy decided to tie a second ribbon to the elevator, just in case. John suggested that they test the device with weights. “How much does the cat weigh?” Lucy wondered.
“We could weigh him,” John said.
“He might wake up.”
John considered. “Well, what do you have in your house that weighs as much as your cat?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to pick stuff up and see if it feels like Fuffy.”
“Fluffy?”
“No,” said Lucy, “Fuffy. Not Fluffy.”
“Oh.”
They wandered through the house, picking up and testing various objects for their weight. Pillows were immediately discounted: appealing, but not heavy enough. Lucy rejected her mother’s Chinese vases, sensing some risk to the chosen test subject, and feeling sure that don’t break anything almost certainly included Chinese vases.
“How about those?” asked John, pointing at a basket of lemons on the living room side table.
“They’re not real, they’re plastic, and they don’t weigh hardly anything,” said Lucy. She brightened. “But we have real stuff in the fridge.”
“Lemons?”
“No, a watermelon.”
“Cool!”
It was a medium-sized watermelon; not the enormous striated green beast that Lucy’s mother bought for parties, but a more modest fruit for family consumption only. Lucy hefted it in her arms. “This feels like Fuffy,” she said. “Except cold. And not furry.”
“Let’s try it.”
The experiment nearly derailed when the melon turned out to be too large and unyielding to fit completely inside the basket. “Fuffy is soft and squishy,” said Lucy. “He would totally fit. He got inside a shoebox once and this basket is much bigger than a shoebox.”
“Do you want to find something else?”
“No, I have an idea.”
Tape, in Lucy’s opinion, solved a great many problems. A roll of sticky, silvery gray tape lived in a box in the garage. Its capabilities had impressed her in the past. She had used several feet of it so far in various projects without mentioning it. No one had noticed.
The tape resisted tearing, which Lucy saw as a feature. She borrowed her mother’s sewing scissors. She struggled to cut the tape with the shiny chromed blades.
“Aren’t they sharp enough?” asked John.
“The tape keeps sticking to the scissors,” Lucy said. “I’ve never cut this many pieces of tape before.”
She stuck the pieces to John’s outstretched arm for safekeeping. She counted the pieces, considered, then added two more. With some effort, she maneuvered the melon into place. “Hold out your arm.”
John winced as she removed each piece of tape for use. “Ow.”
Eventually the watermelon was securely taped to the basket. It stuck up and out from one side of the handle like the nose of a submarine breaking the surface of a splintered wicker sea. John inspected it. “How are you going to get the tape off to eat it?”
“Don’t have to,” said Lucy. “You don’t eat the outside.”
“Oh, yeah, right.”
“I’m going to go upstairs,” Lucy said. “Stay here and make sure the ribbon doesn’t break.”
“How do I do that?” John said. “If it breaks, it breaks.”
Lucy rolled her eyes. “Just watch it.”
“Okay.”
From the landing upstairs, Lucy looked down. John sat cross-legged on the floor, his gaze fixed on the basket. His brown hair parted raggedly, like a fault line. His striped shirt had a ketchup stain on the front. Lucy scratched her elbow and frowned. He was at once familiar and strange: a thumping sneakered boy like the boys at her school, but not one she knew. He was not John Taylor or John Wickman or even small nervous Jon Feldman without an H.
John looked up at her. “Everything okay?”
Lucy blinked. “Yeah. Just watch the ribbon. Are you ready?”
“Yup. I’m ready.”
Lucy pulled hard.
The ribbon did not break.
“Watch out!” he yelled.
The ribbon slipped through Lucy’s grip, a sudden swift purple burn against her palm. “Ow!” she cried.
She heard a thud and a wet crumbling sound.
Lucy’s mother called from the den. “Lucy? What was that?”
“Uh oh,” said Lucy.
“Yikes,” said John down below.
2.
They stood looking at the aftermath.
“But Mom,” Lucy said.
“Lucy. Do you see that giant mess on the rug? That was a watermelon that you, for some unknown reason, decided to drop on the floor from upstairs. Did someone else make you do it?”
“No.”
“The watermelon didn’t drop itself?”
Lucy glanced quickly at John, who stood silently near the front door. “No.”
“An evil witch didn’t drop the watermelon?”
Lucy rolled her eyes. “No!”
“All right then. I think we know who’s cleaning it up, right?”
“Yeah,” said Lucy.
“Good,” said her mother. “You know I’ll have to have that rug cleaned. I won’t even ask about the duct tape. What were you thinking?”
“I don’t know,” said Lucy. It seemed wise to continue silence on the topic of the cat.
Lucy’s mother sighed and turned away. “I’ll be checking on you,” she called over her shoulder as she disappeared back into the den.
Lucy regarded the splattered mess on the floor. It was wet and pink. Pools of watermelon juice soaked slowly into the hall rug. A few seeds were stuck to the wall.
“It could have been worse,” said John.
Lucy looked at him. “Why didn’t you say anything to my mom? You know. Back me up.”
“How could I back you up? You dropped a watermelon on the floor from upstairs. It’s not like I could pretend you didn’t.”
Lucy conceded. “Yeah.” She looked at the watermelon on the floor. “The tape kind of held it together, huh?”
“A little,” said John. “And the basket helped.” He looked at her. “I’ll help you clean it up.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he said.
A bucket from the garage and a large number of paper towels from the kitchen were in order. Lucy liked paper towels. She liked pulling the end of the roll and the soft zip of the perforations as they tore.
As they worked, Lucy looked at John from under her bangs. “Do you live near here?”
“Sort of.”
“How can you sort of live near here?”
He smiled and shrugged. “It depends on what you mean when you say ‘near here.’”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Sure it does. Think about it. You can go someplace in a car in five minutes that would take an hour to walk.”
Lucy sat up and frowned. “Did you come here in a car?”
“No.”
“You walked.”
“No.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He did seem sorry. “Have I seen you before?” she asked.
“No.”
“Have you seen me before?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Are you some weirdo that follows people around?”
“No.”
“Well, I don’t get it,” said Lucy.
“I just want to play with you,” said John, shrugging.
Lucy considered. “Okay.”
“Okay.” John smiled. “Good.”
The matter settled, they bent to their labor.
Late that night, Lucy was woken by noises from downstairs. Hoping for a flying horse or an alien, she crept to the upstairs landing and looked down. Her mother was in the front hallway with a mop and rags, quietly cleaning. The rug had been taken up and dragged outside. Lucy watched her mother scrape up watermelon seeds that Lucy and John had missed, rub away sticky spots, wash stains from the walls. She hummed softly as she worked. Lucy crept away back to bed and dreamed of a flying horse with a mop.
3.
Lucy was sorry about the watermelon. She tried to cuddle Fuffy extra hard, in remorse for having planned to transport him in her faulty elevator. Fuffy did not appreciate her attempt at apology and squirmed away as quickly as possible, dropping to the floor and immediately bouncing straight up when he was startled by a discarded toy fishing rod. Lucy observed this and chewed her lip, interest piqued.
She began to follow Fuffy around the house and place unexpected objects near him while he was eating or sleeping. She noted his reactions. He often jumped, which made her laugh, but he quickly recovered and investigated the unfamiliar thing with his paw. She realized that she was unimportant in this process; Fuffy had no idea that she was responsible for the strange new object that had entered his world. She was an unrecognized agent and therefore of no consequence. Lucy thus learned that she was less intriguing to Fuffy than a surprise pear. In the world of a common domestic housecat, she was nothing. She could be taken for granted.
She began creeping up on Fuffy, trying to see if she could startle him. It was more difficult than she had anticipated. She never caught Fuffy unawares, and would always end up frozen a few feet away, the cat staring at her with slitted green eyes, tail-tip twitching. She realized that her plan to stuff the sleeping cat in her elevator basket would never have worked. Things had thus probably worked out for the best, she thought. Except for the part where the watermelon smashed all over the front hallway.
Fuffy did not like bananas, she discovered. Thunder alarmed him. He had small, pointy teeth that showed when he yawned, but which seemed irrelevant to the smelly gray-brown contents of cat food cans. Lucy tried to befriend him, to no avail; offers of treats and toys went ignored. Her overtures rebuffed, she sat and watched him sleep in the sun from the living room window, his long lithe waking form transformed in sleep into a puddle of inviting softness that she could not touch without fear of retaliation.
Lucy’s father, Mike, had brought a teenaged Fuffy to his marriage. His girlfriend Regina had helped her future husband choose from a litter of long-haired kittens and inadvertently named the tiny squeaking feline. When Mike had grinned and suggested the name Fluffy, Regina had misheard. “Fuffy?” she asked. “Is that some kind of weird joke?”
“Fluffy.”
“That’s worse,” she said. “Stick with Fuffy.”
For Mike, Fuffy was a compliant ball of adoration. He mewed and purred and rubbed and rolled before Mike with loving abandon. He liked Regina well enough. He tolerated Lucy.
Lucy’s father had fought and won a battle before Lucy’s birth to keep the cat. Regina had worried.
“He’s not going to eat the baby while we sleep,” Mike said firmly. “He doesn’t have the motivation.”
Mike was correct. Fuffy was almost completely indifferent to baby Lucy. He sniffed her and occasionally stared disapprovingly at her, but Fuffy was generally disapproving. He was more disapproving of Lucy two years later when she squealed and chased him through the house, her diaper sagging hilariously. Mike captured their chases on grainy Super-8 that was later packed into boxes and forgotten.
Being immeasurably faster and nimbler than a two-year-old human, Fuffy ultimately retreated to bookshelves where he stared down at her and hissed when she shrieked, “Kitty!” By the time she was four, wariness had become ingrained. After that, their relationship was mostly set. By the time Lucy was eight, they had long since reached détente.
Lucy’s father watched his daughter’s new cat engagement experiments, amused. He reminded her that Fuffy had the right to defend himself. “Don’t be surprised if you get scratched or bitten,” Mike said when he caught her patiently nudging a tomato near the sleeping cat. “You won’t get any sympathy if you do.”
Lucy considered the risks. “Okay,” she said, and continued to advance her tomato. She knew where the Bandaids were.
“And wash that tomato when you’re done with it,” her father added.