What My Cat Knows

The thing about having a cat who stares at you judgmentally from doorframes is that you can't really hide anything. Barnaby—this orange fluff-ball my mom claimed would 'teach me responsibility'—has witnessed everything this summer. Including me crying over papaya chunks at 2 AM.

Let me back up. My former best friend Priya decided this year that she was too cool for our usual Friday night binges of terrible reality TV. Now she's hanging with Skylar's crowd, the ones who vape behind the gym and use 'aesthetic' as a complete sentence. So naturally, I did what any self-respecting fifteen-year-old would do: I became a complete spy.

Okay, not like, actual spy stuff. But I may have created a finsta just to watch her stories. I may have timed my bathroom breaks perfectly to 'accidentally' run into her at her locker. I may have analyzed her caption choices like they were encrypted messages.

Barnaby watched all of this from his perch on my bookshelf, looking at me with those weirdly intelligent eyes like, *this is embarrassing, human.*

The papaya incident happened after I saw Priya posted a story with her new friends at the beach—the same beach we'd promised to visit together since May. I couldn't even be mad properly because she technically hadn't done anything wrong. People change. Friends drift. That's what my therapist says, anyway.

So there I was, alone in my kitchen, sobbing into a bowl of papaya my dad had cut up because he's on some tropical fruit kick now. And Barnaby jumped onto the counter, knocked a piece of papaya onto the floor, and just stared at me while eating it.

Something about watching a cat eat my pity fruit made me realize how dumb I was being. I was so busy spying on someone's moving-on process that I wasn't actually living.

The next day, I deleted my finsta. I joined the robotics club. I sat with Maya at lunch—she's quiet and draws comics in her notebook and makes these weird puns that make me snort milk. We're not best friends or anything, but she's real.

And Barnaby? He still judges me from doorframes. But somehow, that feels okay now.