The Summer Everything Unspooled

The orange cat showed up three days after my parents announced their divorce. He was mangy, missing half an ear, and looked like he'd seen better decades, let alone better days. I named him Rusty because I was fifteen and not creative at all.

"You can't keep him," Maya said when I FaceTimed her from the garage. "Your dad's allergic. Remember when his eyes swelled shut that one time?" She was currently sporting freshly dyed orange hair—school spirit colors for the upcoming year—and looked like she was about to tell me something huge.

"He's not staying," I lied. Rusty wound around my legs, purring like a tiny motor. "Just temporary. Like everything else."

The cable guy came the next day to shut off the internet. Dad was moving into his apartment across town, and apparently, high-speed internet was a casualty of the split. I watched the guy uncoil the thick black cable from the wall like he was pulling out my life's veins. No WiFi meant no streaming, no gaming, no doom-scrolling through everyone's seemingly perfect lives while mine was falling apart.

"Rough summer?" the cable guy asked, glancing at the half-packed boxes.

"You have no idea," I said.

That night, sitting on the garage floor with Rusty asleep on my lap, I finally called Maya back. My phone buzzed with barely any signal, the orange-haired girl pixelating and freezing every three seconds. But through the glitches, I heard her say it: "I think I'm bi."

"Oh," I said, stupidly. "Okay."

"You're the first person I've told," she said. "I was scared you'd think it's weird."

"Dude," I said, watching Rusty's tail twitch in his sleep. "My parents are splitting up, my dad's allergic to the cat I'm definitely not keeping, and I have literally zero internet until further notice. Nothing's weird anymore. Everything's just... everything."

Maya laughed, and it sounded like music through the terrible connection. "Fair enough. Also, you should totally keep the cat. He's cute."

The next morning, I found Rusty curled up on a box of Mom's old photo albums. Inside, there were pictures of her at my age—crazy hair, wild clothes, this look in her eyes like she was figuring out who she was. I thought about identity, about how it shifts like light through different angles. About Maya, about her orange hair and the courage to say who she was. About my parents, who'd apparently been pretending for years.

About me, and how maybe this whole summer—the divorce, the cat, the disconnection from everything I thought was normal—was actually my own beginning.

Rusty opened one eye, judgmental. I scratched behind his good ear.

"Yeah," I told him. "I'm keeping you. Deal with it."

Dad's eyes were going to swell something fierce when he came to visit. But some things were worth the reaction.