Cat

Tonight, after work and a short trip to pick up some essentials, I made the usual turn onto my street to come home. This time, as I crested the hill, I found my dad walking across the driveway with a shovel. Though it had been dark for some time and an irregular drizzle fell every few minutes, I thought that he was just doing some nighttime yard work. I pulled into the driveway, where mom was standing in front of the opened garage door watching me pull in. I parked and stepped out of the car next to mom.

"Somebody hit a kitty and he's taking it to the back," she told me, with a curled lip and a look of dismay.

I looked toward the side of the house just in time to see the last of dad disappearing into the dark. Then I turned my head to the right and saw a large, dark spot on the road.

"Is that what that is?"
"Yeah."
"Is he burying it or chucking it?"
"Probably just chucking it."

I made my way to the side of the house and caught dad on the way back from the backyard, carrying an empty snow shovel.

"Did you bury it?"
"No, I just threw it."
"Where?"
"I just stood at the edge and chucked it."
"Well I'm gonna bury it."
"Then you'll have to do it in the morning. You probably won't be able to find it."

I walked back to my car, grabbed a flashlight out of the glove box, then went into the garage and took a shovel that was leaning against the wall. I made my way to the backyard and walked down the slope at the edge of our backyard into the huge field of rocks and small, gnarly shrubs and sticks that extends outward behind our house.

I darted the flashlight across the rocks and bushes looking for anything that resembled a cat. It didn't occur to me until a minute into my search that I was likely to find the limp, broken body of someone's pet. As small a thing as it may seem, it was something I hadn't prepared for. I just couldn't stand the thought of being thrown out into the dark of night and left to decay in the soft rain. For the first time, holding the shovel in my left hand, I realized that I was a gravedigger. Standing in the dark out in the middle of a barren field, a small light began to glow at the bottom of the empty, abysmal feeling I had inside of me since mom had told me about the cat.

The drizzle started up again, but I spent several more minutes walking around in the dark searching between the small bushes. Every now and then a dark spot would appear on the ground. But as I walked toward it, I realized that it was just the shadow of another bush against the beam of my flashlight.

I turned to search the line of small trees and dense brush that acted as a boundary between our yard and the vast, barren field of rocks. I shined my light underneath every pine tree, hoping that dad's throw hadn't been so strong and might have just rolled the cat to the bottom of the slope. But after several more numb minutes of looking, I found nothing. I ascended the hill to check the line of brush from the other side. Still nothing.

I walked up the hill back toward the house to see a silhouette against the light shining through the back doors. As I came closer, I realized it was mom, waiting to see if I had buried the cat.

"Did you find it?"
"No, I have no clue where he threw it."
After a pause, I started up again.
"I just don't understand why you wouldn't bury it. It was probably someone's cat... it was a living thing. And if nothing else, why would he just leave it out there so the dogs and coyotes could come behind our house and eat it? I just don't see why you wouldn't bury it."

Mom turned and went into the house through the back door and I walked back down to the driveway. I put my flashlight back in the glove compartment and leaned the shovel against the wall in the garage. I closed the garage door and made my way up the stairs. I went to my room and opened the door to check, but she wasn't there. I walked back across the house and found my sister on the computer.

"Where's the cat?"
"I dunno."

I walked over to my parent's room and opened the door. There she was, sitting on the floor. She stood up to greet me as I reached down and petted my cat.

Now I sit here in my bed and listen to a steady patter against my window. Somewhere out there is a cat, left in the rain.

"I don't wanna be a student, mama, I don't wanna die"

College visits have always been somewhat of a surreal experience for me. They tend to remind me of every reason why, deep down, I really have no desire to go to university. 
Two days ago I took my fourth college visit in the past year and it proved to be no different. College visits present more than enough opportunities to fall into severely awkward situations, but this latest one put the icing on the cake.  

To start off, I already have one major "awkward strike" against me: I'm in the middle of a gap semester (and one that I didn't intend to take). So while all of my friends are off at school somewhere, I'm still in the same old place with the same old job doing the same old things until January rolls around. People tend to have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that people can go to college in seasons other than Fall.

"So you're going to school next Fall?"
"No, this Spring."
"So you're a transfer student?"
"No, I'm starting college in the Spring."
"..."

Another "awkward strike" is that I've chosen to completely shut my parents off from any of my college decisions. I've found that there is an interesting one-to-one ratio of times I tell my parents about a college and times I don't go to any college. This actually speeds up the college decision-making process quite a bit, but brings it to a grinding halt when it comes to actually visiting a school. Think about it: how weird would it be to go on a college visit alone? To alleviate this problem, I asked my grandfather to accompany me on my latest visit. Was it an ideal solution? No, nobody wants their grandparents around them in a college environment. But it was the best I could work with.

So it was that I awoke the morning of my college visit, already two strikes down, with one pitch left to go: the actual visit. 

Grandpa and I settled into the seats of the car and began the day's journey into the unknown. North Missouri is a desolate land of bean fields and mobile homes, and it only becomes more desolate when everything starts to die after the first frost. Needless to say, barren fields and double-wides offer little for striking up a conversation. So the ride was mostly silent - a silence supplemented with the unwrapping of sausage McMuffins and the occasional yawn. I should have taken this as a cue that I was already starting to strike out. The awkwardness was already here, and the day had hardly begun.

We finally rolled into the town we had been heading for and parked the car in front of the admissions office.  Things were already beginning to look up: most admissions offices I've visited were either in houses the university bought up or were located on the umpteenth floor of some state-office-tower-style building. These offices were in a modern-style building that doubled as a museum. With a hopeful outlook on how things might turn out, I opened the door to find...

... a woman sitting at a desk in black sweats with a giant felt "P" pinned to her chest and an upside-down colander on her head talking on the phone.

 Oh god no, not today. What the hell is this?

"Hi, how may I help you?"

"Uh... I'm here for a 9:30 visit."

"Oh, okay. Just a minute and your admissions rep will be out to see you. If you'd like, you can check out the museum. Be sure to vote in the Halloween costume contest!"

I glanced at a small index card on the desk that indicated that the secretaries were dressed as salt and pepper shakers.

No, no no... why had I scheduled the visit for Halloween? Now it simply meant that I'd have to spend the day putting up with all manner of ludicrously dressed university representatives, who are usually already overly giddy, outgoing, and ultra-positive. This was only sure to add a whole new layer of awkward to the visit. Then came the admissions rep, who was by no means ready to disappoint. 

"Hi!" I'm Kara!"
What the fuck are you wearing, Kara?

I continued with the usual greeting and introduction of my grandfather, all the while ignoring the cheap pink jacket with the "I Heart Insurance" pin attached to the chest.

"Nice to meet you! I'm Frenchie from Grease today! Hahaha!"
What a fucking horrible musical.
"Ah, sorry, I've only seen it once."
"Oh, well you should definitely go see it again."
How about no.

I figured that as long as I avoided the whole acknowledging-Halloween-costumes thing I could get past the day fairly pain-free. Of course I was forgetting all about the "super happy college rep" thing.

Despite her bright-pink, obnoxious get-up, the meeting in Kara's office went without a hitch. She ended up being a gold mine of information. However, she would have been in my lap if she had gotten any closer during our conversation. There seems to be an across-the-board admissions rep job requirement that you have the full will and ability to crawl up the ass of any future student. Personal space never exists in admissions offices.

Having successfully avoided all the potential awkward situations in the meeting, I wiped my brow in relief and looked over the day-long schedule Kara had printed for Grandpa and I. Next was the tour. The tour is, infamously, the most risky part of any college visit - they present the most opportunities for social awkwardness. In the best case scenario, you get thrown into a large group in which you can hang around the back and fight to see things without fear of it being weird because that's what everyone else is doing. You might even get to take a tour with no one but your guest and the guide. But the worst category of college tours is the tour with one other student, and the worst scenario in that category is if the only other student is a girl. That is the epitome of awkward. Whether the girl is Marilyn Monroe or Steven Tyler, there is nothing you can do right as a man on a tour with a girl and her parents.

Kara walked us back to the entrance for the beginning of the tour as I girded my loins and hoped for the best.

"You'll have people to help you find everywhere you need to go, okay? We've got a tour lined up for you next. You might just have it on your own..."

Yesyesyesyesyesyesyes...
"... but I think there's another family with you."
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck... 

And sure enough, there they stood, the bane of comfortable campus tours: a curly-headed brunette girl and her mom. This was sure to be the hour with no end.

Our tour guide, Sean, introduced himself and gave me a sliver of hope. We walked out of the admissions offices and he made a sugar-coated complaint about the ridiculous salt-and-pepper shakers sitting at the desk. Finally, someone agreed with me that the costumes were only making the day that much more uncomfortable. On top of that, he made an unofficial agreement with us that he would avoid the usual "omg! you should totes come here it's great" crap. The tour began and Sean asked the girl and I about ourselves. She barely spoke. It was also becoming more evident by the second that she was the hyper-shy, avoid-acknowledging-that-anyone-of-the-opposite-sex-exists-nearby kind of individual. Was this really going to be a silent tour in which no one could say or do anything without it being weird?

I resolved to just act like the girl and her mom didn't exist and to simply pay attention to Sean and whatever he was showing us at a given time. Doors immediately trashed my plan. I would courteously let the girl go first when entering a new building, then step forward to follow behind when her mom would dart in front of me as if I were going to knock her daughter out with my club and drag her off by her heels to my cave. So I decided to just let the mom through before me at later doors. Problem solved, right? Of course not. When I tried my plan out she would put her hand forward and say "No, go ahead, you need this info more than I do." What the fuck do you want, woman? 

As the tour progressed, it became increasingly evident that Sean was gay. While his uniquely gay (clarification: snarkily feminine) demeanor added some zest to the tour, it became tiresome as "fantastic" suddenly became the only adjective in the English language and our tour route slowly began to mirror a late-night pub crawl of campus coffee shops.

About halfway through the tour Sean began showing us different dorm rooms. We shimmied down a narrow hall until Sean stopped outside of a door and began fingering through a ring full of keys. He finally unlocked the door and ushered us in to a small, cozy room. One of the guys who evidently lived there and wasn't expecting us slid up against a wall and immediately began flipping through menus on his phone as Sean began pointing out the room's few features. 

"Now open the door here, and this is the shared bathroom..."
I turn toward the bathroom door and look up to see Kesha staring down at me in nothing but underwear underneath the huge word "MAXIM."

"... now they share this with the room next door, so only four people use it," Sean went on without missing a beat. Everyone stood engrossed in the bathroom.

I had never witnessed such a coordinated, unspoken effort to ignore the immense presence of a half-naked party-pop star brought to us by one of the world's premier porn magazines. This was not the sort of moment that anyone wants to spend with their grandfather.

After another awkward half hour of walking through buildings and a sit-in on a class, Grandpa and I walked back to the admissions offices to meet up with a student for lunch. There we met Curtis, a short, husky classics major. When I scheduled the visit, I marked classics and Latin down as an interest because I had liked the subjects in high school. The admissions folks had really taken off with the idea, so here I was with Curtis walking to the nearest cafeteria. 

Five minutes into our walk I began to realize that our conversation was already sputtering out. You can only talk about Latin for so long before running out of things to say before you start having a who-can-be-more-pretentious-and-list-off-their-knowledge-of-mythology contest. And I was not about to do that with a classics major. This was bound to be an awkward lunch.

We finally made it to the cafeteria and Curtis disappeared into the lines of people. 

I froze. I hadn't been in a lunch line since the second grade. I had been Lunchbox for 12 years, and now I stood before a massive interchange of fast-moving lunch lines without any clue about what to do. There is a scene in Talladega Nights in which ESPN interviews Ricky Bobby and he botches the interview because he doesn't know what to do with his hands. For once, I was Ricky Bobby. Where am I supposed to get a plate? What if I don't know what I want? What am I supposed to do with my hands?

Grandpa, Curtis, and I sat down at a table and resumed our failing, sickly conversation. But all I could think the entire time was "God damn, I am going to be the most awkward person at college. I'm going to have to avoid human contact and live on PB&J sandwiches in my room while my neckbeard grows thicker every day...."

The day continued on, awkward and uneventful. "Awkward" became the word of the day, and I wore a giant, imaginary red "A" on my chest the entire time. The visit may not have been promising, but hopefully I'll be able to adapt to life in a colleg enviro - wait, hold on. I have an email from Kara about something....

These next four years are going to last forever.