“Hey, Rachael!” Connie said excitedly into the phone. “It feels like forever since I last talked to you! You haven’t even been answering my texts lately, are you okay?”

My tail twitched with slight nerves as I watched the conversation front my curled up position next to the laptop. Much to the happiness of my cat brain, the laptop gave ff a near constant stream of warm air from the machine’s fan. It was very convenient considering that I never wanted to be very far from my newly discovered communication method.

“Well, since we haven’t hung out for a while, want to come over? It’s been basically forever and a day since you’ve been over here.” Connie glanced at me with a small smile.

While I couldn’t hear exactly what Rachael was saying, I could see that it was not a very comfortable conversation. Rachael had been dodging our attempts to get her to visit or even just talk through text about how what we needed to do to help me become my true form again.

“Oh…” She turned to face me, with a shrug of her shoulders. “I see. I thought you avoided your parents as much as possible.”

My tail twitched again. I had no idea what the deal was with her parents, but the tone of Connie’s voice informed me that it was a strained relationship at best.

“We hope you have fun then!” She was trying to sound happy for her, but it sounded hollow. “ Eric and I, that’s who. We both would like a chance to talk with you when you have a chance. We could use some help getting him back to normal.”

Though I couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation very well, I heard enough to know that the line had gone silent. Connie cast me a hopeless look and let out a long sigh.

“What’s wrong?” She asked. “You’ve been so distant and weird since we found out about Eric.” She listened for a moment before saying goodbye and setting her phone onto the table next to me. “She said she had to go, but she didn’t seem to be in a hurry before I asked.”

“What do you think is wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know exactly,” she replied, sliding her phone away from her like she didn’t want to see it right now, “but if she’s going to be seeing and talking to her parents, it can’t be good.”

“I’m guessing they’re not great parents?”

“Mmm, I’m not sure I’d say that exactly, I mean, she never was hungry, beaten, or belittled by them. It’s just they’re so restrictive in how they think she should live her life that if it were up to them, she’d still be living at home having daily Bible study and swearing off even talking to the opposite sex until she was at least thirty.” Connie rolled her eyes and sat heavily into a dining chair. “When I first met her Freshman year, she looked like she was dressed for church during the fifties every single day and wouldn’t even make eye contact with anyone. It took a little convincing, but eventually I got her to realize that she needed to get some space between her and her parents so that she could act a little more like a normal, functioning member of society.”

“That probably means you’re not very popular with her parents.”

“Understatement,” she said with a smirk, “they despise me. As far as they know, Rachael never sees or talks to me anymore. That was the terms of the deal they struck where they don’t come over as long as she regularly talks to them. Of course, I convinced her that she wouldn’t know the difference as long as she didn’t say anything. She apparently had never really thought to just not tell her parents anything and do what she wanted anyway.”

“And now she’s not talking to you,” I stated. I was beginning to understand fully why she was so worried about Rachael being standoffish.

“Exactly,” Connie sighed. “I have a bad feeling that she’s regressing back and listening to them again. I think having you with her might have triggered her to feel guilty.”

“Because I’m really a man.” I said with a shake of my head. Of course, it hadn’t just been that I had been creeping around her apartment with her unaware, it was that she was breaking a hard set rule that had been drilled into her for her entire childhood.

“Yeah, she’s kinda… extra sheltered. She didn’t even have a brother or anything like that and her father, well… I don’t think she ever saw him in anything less than a button up shirt and pressed slacks. I have only met her parents once and that was enough for me to totally get why she has the weird quirks she does.” Connie picked up the phone and unlocked the screen, hovering over the text messaging app for a long moment before shaking her head and looking back up to me. “She won’t care what I have to say right now no matter how convincing I might be able to be. If they’re in her head, there’s nothing I can do until she comes up for air again.”

“Do you think she’ll say anything?” I hadn’t considered what might happen if the word got out that there was a talking cat on the loose. I couldn’t actually think of many people who would even start to believe that kind of thing anyway, seemed that it would be more likely to get the accusing party questioned about their sanity more than anything else.

“Despite the other crazy things they tend to believe, I don’t think they’d really think much of her talking about you other than other than maybe assuming she had been possessed by demons or some explanation like that.” Connie laughed dryly, but the look on her face said that she believed that was possibly much more than she wanted to admit. “Honestly, though, I don’t think she’ll tell them anything about you, because if she messed up and used a male pronoun or your name even once, they would instantly be hyper-suspicious of what she was doing.”

“Even if she mentioned I’m a cat?” I typed. “It’s not like she really knows me in any other form. That would be like you saying you live with a man right now. I mean, it’s kind of correct, but only in the weirdest of ways.”

“She is really terribly, awfully good at telling on herself in ways that might astound you. I wouldn’t be surprised if she managed to explain the whole thing to them and leave out the whole part where you’re a cat,” Connie said with a sigh. “Rachael knows herself well enough to just not say anything, but guilt will probably make her feel like she will need to atone for something.”

I looked to the keyboard, but couldn’t think of anything to say. I knew it wasn’t exactly my fault what had happened and that I was definitely better off where I had ended up now, but I couldn’t help but feel a little bad about Rachael’s guilt. I wasn’t about to say that had I known the outcome I wouldn’t have let her catch me anyway, but I would have strongly considered trying to get Connie to pick me up instead.

“Ah well, she’ll come around,” she said with a wave of her hand, “this isn’t the first time that she’s crawled back to them. It won’t be long until it dawns on her once again that they are not normal people and are bad for her overall and I’ll be there when she’s ready to join back with the real world.”

“You sound like a good friend,” I offered. In a lot of ways she reminded me of my old friend, Terry. He had gotten me through a lot of weird times and never blinked at the weird situations I sometimes got myself into. It was pretty unlucky for me that his mind hadn’t immediately gone to the fact that I might have been that weird cat that was trying to follow him. Perhaps I should have stuck around his building for a while and he might have caught on eventually. Hindsight is always much too painfully clear

“I try, I really do.” She sounded sad, the kind of sad where you don’t even quite realize it, but it colors the rest of your interactions with the world. “Oh well, there’s nothing I can do about it right now. If I try to help, she’s likely to defend them out of habit and it just makes it worse for her later. Might just be the two of us for the ritual.”

There was only a week until the moon would align in the perfect spot and give me the best shot at reversing the transformation. We had already picked out and prepared the optimal ritual instruments, but I couldn’t help but feel we were missing something. The thought nagged at the edges of my consciousness between sleep and awake, the prime time for our truest, deepest thoughts to bubble to the surface and make themselves known. The more I meditated on the feeling, the clearer it had become that perhaps even if we did get everything perfect and in the perfect space, that I would be unable to speak and ritual words and obviously I could only clearly do that in my head. I had never come across instances of animals using complex magic on their own, so as far as I knew, it was not possible. I had been mulling over the idea of giving the words for Connie to say, but that made me feel uncomfortable given her current status with the mysteries of magic. Initiates should not be tasked with complex magic they do not yet understand and I wouldn’t even classify her as an initiate quite yet. No, I needed a different plan.

“I know this might be a bad time,” I typed, “but at some point I need to talk to you about the ritual again.”

Connie shrugged and flipped her phone over on the table to keep it out of sight. “Nothing else I can do about that situation, so what’s up?”

“We have all of the items ready to go and the place picked out, but we’re missing a piece: the orator. There is a certain… poem, I guess, for the lack of a better word that needs to be recited with the exact right tone and intention for this whole thing to work. I would normally do it, but of course I can’t do anything but meow or text-to-voice, neither of which I think will work.”

“And I don’t know what I’m doing.”

My shoulders relaxed in relief. I was glad that she already understood why she would be a poor choice, I was worried that I would have to delicately explain to her that she would be as useful as a metal pasta strainer in a thunderstorm.

“Right, so we need an alternate and I think I have an idea, but it might be difficult in the time we have left. I want us to find one of my old friends, knowing him, he’s probably still around the area.”

“Do you know both his first and last name?” She asked, flipping open her phone again and beginning to type.

“Terry Samson,” I replied.

“Hmm, common name, but we can work with it. Is he from this area originally?”

I nodded my head and sat back on my haunches to watch what she was doing. I had missed out on the smart phone and social media revolution, so it was fascinating to me that she could do the sleuthing directly from the palm of her hand.

“There’s a couple different possibilities, take a look and let me know which.”

Connie held the phone out to me displaying a picture of a man I had never seen before. I shook my head and she reached with her other hand to swipe to the right, revealing a new picture. This picture showed a tall, thin man with short, black hair going salt and pepper in the front, and jovial brown eyes. The laugh lines around his eyes were deeper and it was obvious that he was now solidly middle-aged, but it was definitely Terry. I nodded to her that it was the right guy.

“So do I just message him and tell him you’re a cat?” She asked with an amused laugh. “Do you even think he would believe me?”

“Maybe, he probably assumed something happened to me since I disappeared over night and haven’t been seen for twenty years. To be safe though, might want to open up with telling him you know he threw up at Mikey Hanes’ birthday party in the seventh grade, I’m one of the only people who both know and would remember that.