Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall in Love Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  1 - My Dubious Mental State Gets an Ass-Whupping from the Great Beyond

  2 - Against All Advice, I Tell Matthew That I Have Something to Tell Him

  3 - Tick, Tock. Tick, Tock. The Longest Morning of One Kitten’s Life

  4 - The Scientific Method Swings into Action as Matthew and I Exchange Homework Assignments

  5 - I Discover Who Loves Me in a Place I Have No Business Being

  6 - Two Brownstones, Two Interviews, Too Much Information!

  7 - French Toast! For Breakfast! Everything’s Peachy in Lauraville!

  8 - Our Next Interview Leads to a Barefoot, Bruising Lesson of Love

  9 - The First Experiment Is Unleashed!

  10 - A Subterranean Lunch Is Followed by the Tale of Cheryl and Robert

  11 - The Second Experiment Falls Flat, As the Crème de la Plooz of Footwear Proves That Opposites Only Sometimes Attract

  12 - I Try and Fail to Put the Kibosh on Our Search and Encounter the Walking Embodiment of X

  Lucky 13 - The Third Experiment Results in an X-Cellent Mutual Rescue!

  14 - A Clue from Mr. Frasconi, a Letter from Dmitri, and a Serious Talk with Randall

  15 - The Fourth Experiment Leaves Us All at Sea, as Kittens and Dawgs Get Shipwrecked by the Most Fearsome X Mojo of All!

  16 - An Unexpected Switcheroo Is Our Fifth and Final Experiment

  17 - My Friend Matthew

  Copyright Page

  For Beatrix and Harry,

  who taught me the Secret of Love

  And for Miguel,

  who is a cupcake

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Elizabeth Kaplan, to Marissa Walsh, and to my early, supportive and very helpful readers: Beatrix Wood Parola, Kate Herzlin, Timothy Mathis, David Johnston, and Andrew Gerle. Thanks to Jacob Gilford for the sitar lesson, and to Rita Wood for the unfailing encouragement. My very special thanks to Emily Jenkins, without whom there would be no Kittens.

  1

  My Dubious Mental State Gets an Ass-Whupping from the Great Beyond

  Kitten meets Dawg. Soon,

  A warm yellow rain anoints

  The hydrant of love.

  “You promised me some animal poems, yes?”

  Mr. Frasconi is looking at me with one silvery eyebrow lifted a half-inch higher than the other. You would think I’d know better than to try and pull a fast one on a world-famous poet, but apparently, I don’t.

  “Um,” I say, oozing lameness. “That is an animal poem. Kitten. Dawg. Get it?”

  “It’s a love poem, Fe-li-ci-a.” He always gives my name four syllables. When you’re writing a lot of haiku, like I have been lately, you automatically count the syllables in everything. Rice Krispies, three. Matthew Dwyer, four. Mrs. Felicia Dwyer, seven. Not that I’d really take his name once we’re married, my mom would go all Gloria Steinem on me.

  Mr. Frasconi sees my mind wandering and repeats, for emphasis (insert Meaningful Echo Effect here): “A looooooooove pooooooooeeeemm.” Poem, two syllables. Some people think it’s one. Not me.

  Me, Fe-li-ci-a! Po-et-ess, Total Mess, Felicia the lovelorn. Whose name means happiness, HA!

  “This Kitten in your poem, she is you? And the ‘Dawg’—interesting spelling—still the same boy? The one with the rabbits?” Mr. Frasconi can never remember Matthew’s name, which is odd, since he’s been reading my unrequitedly-in-love-with-Matthew poetry since late September and now it’s February, and that is like ten zillion poems by now. But I guess I don’t call Matthew Matthew in the poems. Usually it’s just “him,” or “you,” or “O, perfect one!” or “unattainable boy of mystery.”

  “And the ‘warm yellow rain’—hmmmm.” Yes, thanks to me, Mr. Archibald Frasconi, mega-award-winning poet and currently a Master Mentor at the Manhattan Free Children’s School, is being forced to contemplate the symbolic use of pee-pee in a love poem.

  Poor Mr. Frasconi. Maybe I should explain the whole Sex Kitten and Horn Dawg thing to him. But a poem has to stand on its own, as Mister Master Mentor himself has often told me, and after some initial resistance I’ve come to agree with him. You can’t follow your poems around explaining them to people, it’s just impractical. So, as they say in the cartoons, I shaddup.

  Mr. Frasconi leans back in his chair. “No more love poems for a while, okay, Fe-li-ci-a? Look around. Observe. There’s so much to see.”

  There are private schools in this great city where all the students are bored fashionistas and all the teachers are boring fascists.

  The Manhattan Free Children’s School is NOT one of these schools.

  What the MFCS is, instead, is a small private school housed in a crumbly-pretty, pretty crumbly old brownstone near Gramercy Park. And we never call it the MFCS—at least, my friends and I don’t. We call it the Pound. Why? Because we are the Kittens, the boys are the Dawgs, so we go to the Pound, get it? And, frankly, it’s just too hysterical-making to think of ourselves as the Free Children. I know I go there because my mom is stuck in groovy mode (can somebody please give peace a frikkin chance already, so the poor woman can MOVE ON?), but being the Free Children is too granola for words. We’d much rather be the Sex Kittens, thank you!

  Kitten Directive Number Infinity: Kittens Are 4-evah!

  Speaking of which:

  “It’s a perfectly NICE poem. It’s just a little—you know! Gross!” Jess says, helpfully.

  “Ewww,” adds Kat, cutting to the chase.

  We are sitting in our favorite booth at the Moonbeam Diner, Official Restaurant of the Sex Kittens of New York City.

  Kitten Directive Number Twenty-three: Any Kitten can convene an Emergency After-School Kittensnack at the Moonbeam to discuss matters of personal urgency. Her littermates will listen, advise, and pounce if necessary, to perform the Kitten Heimlich Maneuver and help said Kitten cough up those painful furballs of self-doubt.

  But right now, my fellow Founding Members, Miss Jessica Kornbluth of the Upper West Side and Miss Katarina Arlovsky, born in Moscow but now residing in Washington Heights, are not pouncing or Heimliching. Instead, they are looking at me with looks of extreme dubiosity. As in, Felicia, we have read your little haik-ewww and you need to WAKE UP.

  “Really?” I say, feeling tragically misunderstood. “You don’t think it’s about animals?” Stubborn, I know, not my best quality. But Mr. Frasconi kind of bummed me out by kiboshing the Matthew poems, and if your two tightest Kittenpals can’t see your side of things, who can?

  Jess has an unusually animated face and way of talking, and her eyebrows achieve serious altitude when she’s expressing any strong emotion (sort of like Mr. Frasconi’s, come to think of it). Right now they look like they’re about to fire their booster rockets and bust a move out of the atmosphere. “Fee,” she says, in her listen-to-me tone of voice. “I’m no poet, but I think Mr. Frasconi’s point MIGHT be that you are spending way, way, WAY too much energy on this THING, you know, this nonexistent THING with Matthew, and maybe, just MAYBE you should take a BREAK!”

  “You’re obsessed,” says Kat darkly. She’s chewing on her hair, which she quit doing a year ago because it gave her split ends. “Obsession is dangerous. People go insane.”

  “The syllables are perfect, though!” Jess adds. “Five-seven-five, that’s awesome!”

  I am about to feign huffiness and get all don’t-count-syllables-to-me, but for one thing the Moonie arrives with our food (all the waitstaff here at the Moonbeam Diner wear black T-shirts with big yellow cheesy moons on them), and for another thing—

  Could they be R
IGHT?

  Am I not only obsessed with Matthew, but skipping merrily down the garden path to kookooland?

  There is only one way to find out.

  Felicia’s Private Kitten Directive Number Eleventyseven (insert New Age Music Suggestive of Imminent Communication with Unseen Forces here): When in doubt, consult the Oracle!

  What is this Oracle, you ask? To answer that we must time-travel back to late September, when the whole Sex Kitten thing started. September was when, and as for where: it happened at my mom’s bookstore, the Unbound Page. The store is right in the heart of New York City’s Bohemian Central, the East Villahge, near Tompkins Square Park and only two blocks from the humble digs Momski and I call home. (Dad currently resides in New Jersey with “Laura,” excuse me, what kind of a soapstar name is THAT?)

  My mom opened the Unbound Page right before I was born, and in fourteen years it’s evolved into a neighborhood treasure trove of esoterica and interdimensional grooviness. It has sections like Relaxology: Chilling Your Soul-Self Out, and Runes and Tunes: The Music of Ancient Wisdom. My mom believes that most people are just very very tense, and that’s why there’s war and unhappiness and bad skin.

  O, historic Kitten-making day! It was only three weeks after the start of the fall semester, and out of all the frosh students at the Pound, Jess and Kat and I were least freaked out by our new school’s delightful lack of school-ness. The rest seemed temporarily short-circuited by the absence of tests, grades, classes, and homework, and walked around muttering: “Why do the teachers ignore us unless we collar them with a question, and are you sure we can just leave during the day without telling anyone?” But though we had just met, we three shared the d’lishus suspicion that just being ourselves, fearless and fourteen, with all of New York City at our feet, was bound to be education enough for anyone.

  Initial shell shock aside, the Pound does tend to attract an unusual type of student, and even among us clueless newbies nearly everybody already had a “thing.” As in, my thing is poetry, and Matthew’s thing is science and the genius rabbits, and Kat’s thing is music, and Jess’s thing is saving the world. The bookstore is my mom’s thing, and since Jess and Kat and I were hitting it off, I figured they’d appreciate it. And so, we went.

  “What’s this?” Kat asked, picking up a boxed deck of tarot cards. My mom kinda frowns on the whole fortune-telling aspect of esoterica, but it sells.

  “The Deck of Pets,” read Jess off the box. “A Tarot for Animals and Their Human Slaves. A Portion of Our Profits Goes to the ASPCA. That is SO cool!”

  “The Beanie Deck,” read Kat, picking up another box. “Look! It’s all Beanie Babies!” Kat tends to be quite serious, but this made her giggle. I have to admit, it was pretty hilarious imagining a whole tarot of Beanie Babies juggling coins and throwing wands and stuff.

  And while we were laughing about the Beanies and I personally was feeling glad that my new friends were displaying the appropriate mix of coolness and whimsy—

  —the Oracle REVEALED itself!

  All the other decks were boxed and shrink-wrapped; otherwise, customers would riffle through them till the cards were too worn around the edges to sell (shelf wear, my mom calls this; I used to think it was some strange bookstore fashion requirement, like cruise wear). But this deck was just sitting out, unwrapped and brand-spanking-new. It didn’t occur to me till later that it was freaky that I’d never seen it before, freakier still because I’m in the bookstore practically every day.

  “Look,” I said, turning it over. “The Tarot of Kittens.”

  “Awwwwwwwwww!” Our laughter melted into the universal isn’t-that-cute noise all at once, like we planned it. I mean, okay, everybody loves kittens. But THESE kittens were just so esoterically irresistible. Cute to the point of spooky, if I may coin such a phrase.

  We went through the deck card by card, each picture more weirdly heart-tugging than the next. The Kitten of Cups. The Queen of Kittens. The Death Kitten (that was a fluffy white one staring hungrily into a goldfish bowl). And then, not even thinking, I said, “Okay, cards! What does the future hold for US?” I flipped over the next card, and there it was.

  The Sex Kittens! Three adorable baby kitties nestled in a strappy, sexy high-heel shoe. The text on the bottom of the card said something about the life force and connection and rebirth, but we were too busy screaming with laughter. My mom even came over to see what was up, but all we could do was point and scream louder. She brought us glasses of lemonade and didn’t ask questions, my mom’s kinda cool that way.

  So that’s how we became, and remain, the Sex Kittens. We are not sluts, nor do we dress like jailbaitporno-pop-stars, navels to the wind. But during the weeks that followed (and naturally, after an experience like that we KNEW we were indisputably the best of friends 4-evah!), Kat and Jess and I agreed that we are each juicy and beautiful in a unique, one-of-a-kind kind of way, so the Oracle was right and Sex Kittens are obviously what we must be, matters of wardrobe and relative boob size notwithstanding.

  Kitten Directive Number Thirty-nine: Kittens ROCK!

  Now, just in case you’re starting to think we’re silly, superstitious girls with too much homework-free time on our hands to spend making up kittycat nicknames, don’t. I won’t speak of myself, but apart from Matthew (sigh!) Dwyer, I would say Jessica Kornbluth is the most purely rational person I know, and Katarina Arlovksy is one of the hardest-working (not to mention talented), and neither one of them is the least bit silly except in a fun-loving way. But it’s not every day you jump up and get a high five from the Great Beyond, and that’s what this was. (Okay, SkeptiKitten Jess retained the right to interpret it as a metaphor, but whateva-4!)

  Once we were the Sex Kittens, it was a very short leap to realize that our mysterious cotravelers, occasional pals, and frequent objets of Kittenish affection—that is to say, les garçons—could be none other than the Horn Dawgs (excusez-moi for that quickie French vocabulary review, but I have to squeeze my education in somehow). So our school became the Pound, we’re-Kittens-and-Dawgs-so-we-live-in-a-Pound, get-it-get-it, and, I mean, this all makes perfect sense, right?

  So, pardonnez-moi, Monsieur Frasconi, but I STILL don’t understand why it’s not an animal poem!

  Obsession is dangerous. People go insane.

  Shaddup, brain. I’m looking for the Oracle.

  After today’s Moonbeam meeting, my feelings of being tragically misunderstood about the haik-ewww now overshadowed by the fresh worry that I might be mentally ill, I hightail it to the M15 bus and whiz downtown to the bookstore. Off the bus, past the vintage dress shop, the body piercing/tattoo parlor, and the take-out falafel place I go. Through the door of the Unbound Page (insert a soothing ding-dong of wind chimes here), a quick wave at Motherdear, who’s at the cash register with a customer, and straight to the Tarot of Kittens.

  Am I sickly and weirdly obsessed with Matthew and in need of a serious reality check and maybe some meds? Or are Matthew and I karmically preordained to be in loooooooooove and it’s just that I realized it first and he’s taking his slow, sweet time to come around to the cosmic inevitable? These are the questions I plan to ask the Oracle.

  Once I find it, that is.

  “What are you looking for, honey?”

  I always hide the Oracle behind something else, like a book of Chinese astrology or a copy of Find Your Inner Goddess Archetype Within That’s Inside You. (At one point I had considered buying the Oracle, or just asking my mom to give it to me, but I decided that would diminish its mojo. No One Can Own the Portal to the Great Beyond!)

  “Felicia, what are you doing?”

  But it’s not here.

  “FELICIA!” The customer has gone, I hear the mellow Tibetan wind chimes ring as the door shuts. Mom is staring at me like I’ve been ignoring her or something.

  “I can’t find the Kitten deck,” I say.

  “The Tarot of Kittens?” she asks. “Cute deck. I just sold it. Why didn’t you tell me you wanted i
t?”

  Because that would diminish its mojo, Mom-o! But I can’t say that. I’m speechless. The Oracle is gone, just when I needed it!

  (I am actually the only one of the Sex Kittens who’s maintained an attachment to the Kitten deck. When Jess has pressing life questions she asks herself, “What would Gandhi do?” and Kat just practices her violin till her fingers bleed and then she feels better. But I have consulted, the Oracle regularly. Does Matthew love me yet? How about today? Will he ever love me? Et sweatera.)

  (Et sweatera, by the way, is Kat’s expression for when you’re giving a recital and you’re nervous and can’t stop sweating and so you put on a sweater over your sleeveless gown to hide the sweat and that just makes it worse, et sweatera.)

  Mom sees my panic attack and sighs. “There are thirty other decks here, Felicia, what’s the big deal?”

  Can you understand why I might not have shared with Motherdear that my friends and I call ourselves the Sex Kittens? Mom is cool, but no mom is THAT cool.

  Before I can say anything, she puts her hands over my eyes. “Here,” she says. “Calm down for a minute. Say to yourself, ‘The Kitten deck already gave me its gift. Now I’m ready for fresh wisdom.’ ”

  “Kittengiftreadyfreshwisdom,” I mumble.

  “Choose a new deck. No peeking,” she says, clamping her hands tighter over my eyes.

  I reach my hands out, run my fingertips over the shrink-wrapped boxes. I stop, exhale. “This one,” I say. The Oracle isn’t gone, I tell myself. It’s just changed portals. My questions will be answered and everything will be fine and Matthew will lovemelovemeloveme. . . .

  “The Tarot of Hollywood Stars!” Mom says, handing me the box. There’s a picture of Clint Eastwood on the cover. Obviously, the Death card.

  “Ewwww,” I say.

  “Don’t judge.” Mom smooches me on the head. “Be open. You’ll learn something.” Mom considers “being open” one of the cardinal virtues. This was a big problem in her relationship with Dad. Dad is not “open” enough for her.

  Near the front of the store, a customer is struggling to get one of the big laminated acupuncture charts down off a high shelf. “I gotta go,” says Mom, tearing the shrink-wrap off the deck and handing it to me. “Have fun.”