“Is she clawing my seats?” Brad asked.
“No. I mean, not on purpose.”
Brad muttered something under his breath and pressed down on the gas pedal. Street signs and mailboxes zipped past us.
“I think you’re scaring her.” And if not her, than certainly me. I tried to get hold of Frisky, and she tried to hide by wedging herself in between my back and the seat of the car. I leaned forward so I could grab her, but she kept moving farther down my back. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or not that her claws were facing me, and not Brad’s precious upholstery.
Brad took his eyes off the road again to peer over at me. “What is she doing now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t speak cat.”
Luckily, we made it downtown and Brad had to slow the car for the lights and the traffic. He kept glancing over at me, perhaps waiting to see if the cat was going to explode or something.
Frisky, discovering there was no way to dig out through the seat, turned around and began crawling up my back. I attempted to gain control of the situation by repeating, “Frisky, stop that!” over and over again while I tried to grab something that was neither claws nor teeth.
I finally got hold of her, but she wouldn’t sit in my lap. This time she crawled up the front of my shirt, stopped for a moment to stand on my shoulder, and then latched on to my head, like it was the top of Mount Everest.
While he was waiting for the light to turn green, Brad glanced over at me. “The frisky cat is on your head!”
Actually, I’m not sur e frisky was the adjective he used, but the word definitely began with an F.
I was trying to calmly get her off. “I realize the cat is on my head.”
“People are staring at us.”
I had been too busy trying to pull the cat off of various parts of my body to pay attention to the other cars around us, but now I looked. The car next to us carried several teenage boys, all of whom stared openmouthed at me. Their mouths were open, I assume, because they were laughing too hard to shut them.
I slunk farther down in the seat and ripped Frisky off my hair. She clawed my ear in the process. I wanted to toss her in the backseat like a shot put, but before I did, I noticed her mouth. It had bubbles of saliva all around it. Still holding her midway in the air, I said, “Brad, I think she’s sick.”
“Not in my car!”
She was going to throw up. I knew she was going to throw up, and I sat there holding her, trying to figure out which direction to point her. Did I want to get cat vomit all over me or all over Brad’s car?
The thought of half-digested Tender Vittles—or worse yet, some mangled mouse corpse—was more than I could imagine wearing. Even to save the upholstery.
Brad was watching Frisky so intently he didn’t notice the light turn green, and the car behind us honked.
Which did nothing to help Frisky’s fragile mental condition.
Besides digging her claws into my arms, she made gagging noises.
“Don’t let her throw up,” Brad said.
And exactly how was I supposed to stop that from happening? Tell her to take deep, soothing breaths? Roll down the window and have her hang her head out? If I rolled down the window, she would be out of the car faster than I could say, “You don’t really have nine lives.” Then I’d have to go home and explain to my little brothers how Frisky had been flattened into a kitty pancake by the oncoming traffic. So, instead, I just held her, watching the bubbles of saliva around her mouth grow until they dripped onto my jeans. I looked around for something to wipe her mouth with. Did I have Kleenex in my purse?
“She’s foaming at the mouth!” Brad said.
“Would you please watch the traffic instead of the cat?”
“Isn’t that something rabid animals do before they bite you?"
“She can’t have rabies. My mom took her in for her shots three weeks ago.”
“Maybe the shot didn’t have time to work.”
I set Frisky on my lap and reached for the Kleenex in my purse. The saliva had already dripped all over me, so now along with cat hair I also had cat spit covering me. The perfect thing to complete my ensemble.
“What are you doing?” Brad asked. “Don’t let a rabid animal loose in my car!”
“She isn’t rabid. And I’m trying to get something to wipe off her mouth.”
Frisky didn’t stay to let me wipe off her mouth. While I was still fishing Kleenex squares out of my purse, she jumped into the backseat.
Brad peered over the seat at her, swerving the car toward the shoulder as he did. “Now your cat is drooling all over my car. This is great. Just great. I’m stuck in a car with a rabid, drooling cat!”
“You know, at this point I think your chances of being killed in a reckless car accident are a lot greater than being attacked by a rabid cat. So why don’t you just watch where you’re going! ”
And that’s how it was when we pulled up to the vet’s office. We were yelling at each other about how we were going to die.
Brad and I got out of the car, and I opened the door closest to the cat. Frisky was huddled in the crevice under the driver’s seat, and I wasn’t sure whether she’d thrown up or simply drooled back there. I wasn’t about to put my hand under the seat to find out. I tried to change my voice from the yelling-at-Brad tone to the here-kitty-I’m-really-your-friend tone.
“Come on out, Frisky,” I cooed. “Everything is just fine now. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Frisky didn’t buy it.
Apparently there was nothing amiss about her telepathic powers, and she was not about to let us haul her into the animal clinic.
“Come here, Frisky,” I said again.
Brad stood behind me, looking over my shoulder. “Just reach down there and grab her.”
Oh, sure. He was standing there with his hands in his pockets, but he wanted me to grab the angry, rabid cat. That’s chivalry for you.
I reached down cautiously, more afraid of upchucked mice than of being bitten, but before I could even touch Frisky, she shot past me out of the open door.
“Get her!” I yelled to Brad.
He didn’t have time to reach her even if he wanted to, which I’m pretty sure he didn’t.
I could tell by the way his hands were still in his pockets and the way he ignored the cat and stared at the backseat of his car.
I wouldn’t have thought Frisky capable of such a burst of energy, but in seconds she’d sprinted across the sidewalk, jumped from a garbage can to a tree, to the roof of the vet’s office. Once there, she sat glaring down at us from behind the rain gutter.
I walked toward the building with a moan. “Now what are we going to do?”
Brad didn't follow me. “I don’t know what we are going to do, but I am going to take my car home and clean it out. It smells funny, and who knows what that psycho cat of yours did underneath my seat.”
I turned back to him. “You’re going to leave me here with my cat stuck on the roof?”
“What do you want me to do? Climb up there after her? Maybe I could break my neck just to make the evening complete.” He flung open the car door and jumped into the driver’s seat. “I’ve got to get rid of this smell before it becomes permanent.”
He slammed the door shut, started up the car, and screeched out of the parking lot.
“Jerk,” I called after him. “Jerk! Jerk! Jerk!”He disappeared into traffic without ever casting me a backward glance.
I turned back to the building and glared up at Frisky. “And you’re a jerk too! It isn’t enough that you wake me up every morning by stepping on my face—now you’re ruining my love life! I ought to—”
I stopped my tirade when I realized several people in the parking lot had just gotten out of their cars, and they were now all staring at the crazed teenager who was yelling, for some indiscernible reason, at the side of a building.