Have You Seen Luis Velez?(3)

“Nope,” Andre said. “No way, man. We’re late.”

“I just have a little thing of tuna. I was just gonna leave it.”

“Leave it on the way home. He won’t die.”

“I think she’s a she. Actually.”

“Okay. She won’t die.”

“But she’ll be hungry.”

“She was a lot hungrier before she met you.”

“Yeah,” Raymond said. “I guess that’s true. Besides, it does take me a while to get her to come to me. I could just leave it, though.”

“And then what if some other cat gets it? Or the rats and mice?”

“I guess. Yeah.”

But he couldn’t help looking over his shoulder. All the way across the street. Until they turned a corner and the building fell out of sight.

“Just think,” Andre said. “If you hadn’t bought the tuna, you’d be able to buy a school lunch.”

“Not really. Tuna’s cheaper.”

“Still. What happened to that money your real dad gave you?”

“Spent it.”

“On tuna?”

“No. Well. Partly. Well. Yeah. Pretty much.”



They walked home from school together. Slowly. Slower than they had ever walked before. At times Raymond thought it might be slower than anyone had ever walked before—that they were setting some kind of new world record. Gold medal in the mosey division.

Neither commented on why. Then again, they didn’t need to.

As they pulled level with the abandoned building, both knowing it was Raymond’s jumping-off place, they had to slow even more. And the only way to do that was to stop. So that’s what they did.

“I know you wanna . . . ,” Andre said. He didn’t finish, or mention the cat. It went without saying.

“Right,” Raymond said, realizing he was in prison. That his inability to express what he was feeling had formed such a tight and inescapable box around his being that he could barely breathe. It wasn’t a complete surprise. But the walls were definitely closing in. “Well,” he added, still in no way equipped for a jailbreak.

“See ya,” Andre said.

“Yeah,” Raymond said. “Except . . . no. That’s the whole thing. You won’t.”

“No, I will, man. It’s all good. I’ll Skype you.”

“Oh. Skype. Right. Okay. That’s true.”

“So, no big goodbyes. Just . . .”

“Skype to you soon,” Raymond said.

His friend offered a little half wave, half salute and turned for home—a building less than a block past Raymond’s. A place that would only continue to be Andre’s home for less than another twenty-four hours.

Raymond stood perfectly still on the sidewalk and watched him go, and his self-awareness—or maybe better to call it self-consciousness—ran out of control. He could feel the set of every muscle in his face, and not one muscle felt natural. He seemed to be leaning forward too far, as if the top half of him were staging some mutiny in which it attempted to follow Andre down the street without the rest of him. Even his cheekbones seemed to have something to say, though Raymond could not imagine what that might be.

Andre looked over his shoulder and waved. Raymond waved back.

Then he broke free of his pose and slid through a missing window into the basement of the abandoned building, dropping onto the concrete floor with a slap of his athletic shoes.

“Kitty, kitty, kitty,” he called. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”

He sat down on a hard stone bench that, he assumed, had been too heavy for anybody to bother hauling away. It was ornate, in an oddly affecting way. It had leaflike curls of stone where the legs met the bench. That made it special to Raymond, because nothing else in his life was ornate, especially for no reason in particular. Just for its own sake like that.

The cat jumped up on the bench and mewed to him. She was a tiny cat. Not a kitten, but young and small. Long bodied and skinny. An orange tabby with a thin little cry, like a mouse would make. Or something else not even one-tenth her size.

“I know,” he said. “I’m late. I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”

He dug through his backpack and pulled out the treat he’d bought for her. A little individual half-sized can of tuna with a ring-top lid. He opened it and set it on the bench.

For a moment—just the count of two or three—she didn’t go straight for it. Instead she lobbied for one extra moment of affection. She rubbed her long body against Raymond’s side, and when he ran his hand down her back, her tail end rose up into the air. Her tail itself stood straight up, like a furry antenna. It quivered in the air.

Then she dug into the tuna.

But that one moment. That one moment when she chose him over food. It was so sweet. It almost made Raymond want to cry. Or maybe that was his friend moving away. Or a combination.

He didn’t cry. He never did.

“Guess it’s just you and me now,” he said.

The cat raised her head and looked at him earnestly, licking her lips. Then she returned her attention to the food.



He climbed the stairs slowly, using the bannister to pull himself up. He felt drained, almost completely devoid of energy.

Just as his head came level with the second-floor landing, he saw her again. And heard her. She was wringing her hands in front of her flowered skirt.