Eventually I have to call in professional reinforcements.

          “She’s been like this for hours now,” I say. “She hasn’t eaten or slept or even stopped to groom her little paws.”

Kitty Cat shoots me an annoyed glare, whiskers twitching, then goes back to typing furiously away on the laptop she commandeered from my desk.

         “Hmm,” says my little brother. “This is bad. Maybe the worst I’ve ever seen.”

         “What is it?”

         “She has Space Case. Look.” He gestures to the mess of notebooks and paper and textbooks scattered in a halo around Kitty Cat like the remnants of a supernova. It’s research, I realize—research on stars and planets and outer space, written in a surprisingly neat hand but nonetheless dotted here and there with errant, inky paw prints.

         “Oh,” I say. “Well, is it fatal? What can we do about it?”

         My little brother shakes his head. “Incurable, I’m afraid. But with proper care she can still live a happy and fulfilling life.”

         The thought that her life might be sad and unfulfilling hadn’t occurred to me, but suddenly it’s all I can think about, and my eyes water. I sniffle. Kitty Cat loses her patience and chases us out of the room, hissing and spitting.

***

         Later I sit on the kitchen counter peeling almonds while my mother makes dinner. I tell her about Kitty Cat, and then, when she looks up from the vegetables and reveals she hadn’t been listening, I tell her again. She makes a noise deep in her throat.

         “She’s a weird cat. This morning I caught her staring at her own reflection in the bathroom mirror.”

         The almond in my hand proves difficult. I use my thumb nail and accidentally gauge out a divot of the nutmeat.

         “Do you know what Space Case is?” I ask. “Apparently it’s incurable. She’ll die with Space Case.”

         “I mean, how long do cats normally live, anyway?” 

         I stay silent and peel the almonds. When I’m done, she tells me to set the table, then get the ghee from the fridge, then sit down and wait. 

***

         I can’t sleep with the glow of the computer lighting up my room in eerie blue-white light, though, admittedly, Kitty Cat’s tip-tapping at the keyboard is soothing.

         “You should start an ASMR channel,” I whisper. “I’ll fund it—buy you different keyboards.”

         She grumbles. The sound of her typing stops; I strain my ears and hear the faint scratching of a pen on paper.

         “How are you holding a pen? How did you learn to read and write, anyway? Is that a side effect of the Space Case, or did the literacy come first?” I pause to swallow. My throat feels oddly tight and thick, like velvet held taut. “I’ve never heard of Space Case. Do you know you have it? Can you think of anything except space? Does it hurt, Kitty?”

         The pen-scratching stops. I wait for the typing to start back up again, but it doesn’t. Instead the glow of the laptop goes abruptly dark. I blink hard, waiting for my eyes to adjust, and the motion finally causes my tears to spill. The bed dips near the foot. I track Kitty Cat’s footsteps as she weaves up toward my head, holding my breath, as if any sudden movement might scare her away. But she touches my cheek with her cold wet nose and curls up against the space where my neck and shoulder meet. She purrs like a little alien, an oddly high-pitched trill, and I resist the urge to turn onto my side and hold her tightly, knowing that would only scare her away.

         The next morning I wake up with salt on my cheeks and the echo of alien purring in my ears. Kitty Cat is at the desk again, typing.

***

       “Dude,” says my little brother. “She stole my star poster.”

         I know the one; he got it on some school trip from a museum gift shop. I can see the empty patch of wall from the doorway, where I’m leaning against the jamb waiting for my mother to get out of the shower. I don’t tell him I woke up this morning to find Kitty Cat standing on my desk, carefully taping the poster to my wall.

         “I’m sure you can find another one,” I say. “They probably sell that exact poster online.”

         He scoffs. “She’s a little thief.”

         “She has Space Case! She can’t help it!”

         “Just keep her out of my room, or I’ll turn her into a hat,” he says, and closes the door in my face.

         There’s a shuffling sound behind me, and I glance over my shoulder to see Kitty Cat lugging a roll of aluminum foil up the stairs. “He didn’t mean it. Don’t let mom catch you with that,” I warn her. But she’s still on the stairs when my mother opens the bathroom door a minute later, releasing a billowing cloud of eucalyptus-scented steam. Luckily for Kitty Cat, my mother is too preoccupied with her skincare routine to notice.

         “I need to use the bathroom,” I say.

         “In a minute,” says my mother distractedly. “You know, you should start using this face mask. It’s good for preventing wrinkles. If you don’t take care of your skin, you’ll age poorly.” She casts me a brief, judgmental look.

         “I just need to pee.”

         “Don’t be impatient. This needs to dry, and then I need to wash it off and rub my serum in, and then I need to moisturize.”

         After another minute or so I give up and head to my room, where Kitty Cat is carefully crafting some kind of model out of aluminum foil. I lie on my bed and watch her. Eventually the foil takes the shape of a rocket, and I sit up to watch more intently. It’s not just about learning, then, this Space Case of hers, not just about studying the stars, but reaching them. My heart pounds in my chest.

         “You can’t go to space! I’ll never see you again! It won’t work and you’ll blow up, or it will and you’ll die out there alone!”

         Kitty Cat hisses at me, her ears flat against her head and her eyes suspiciously wet. I refuse to take any of it back because it’s true and I meant it. But when Kitty Cat slices open her delicate pink paw pad on the foil a few minutes later, I carefully dab styptic powder on the cut and bandage it, and we both pretend that the pearly tears slicking down the fur of her cheeks are because of the pain of the wound. 

***

         Slowly my bedroom starts to look like a NASA command center. Kitty Cat plasters the walls with infographics she prints from the Internet, pages and pages of her own notes, photos of stars and galaxies marked up in bright red pen. The aluminum foil rocket is soon joined by a toothpick model, a model made of my brother’s Legos, and then, finally, a model the size of my dresser made of scrap metal Kitty Cat scavenged from outside. This last has a cockpit with a working hatch, and Kitty Cat sleeps in it during the times when she actually sleeps. Out of pity, I give her one of my pillows so she doesn’t wake up sore from sleeping on metal all the time. I miss the days when she would sleep on the bed with me like a guardian.

         My little brother has started spending his free time here. Sometimes he lounges on my bed on his phone, offering pets to Kitty Cat as she paces back and forth across the room. Other times we sit together on the floor, watching Kitty Cat’s   whiskers twitching furiously as she types or writes.

The Space Case is getting worse. I have to coax her into eating or pausing to visit her litter box. Her fur is clumpy and matted; she won’t clean herself, and I can only brush her when she’s sleeping. She has her own first aid kit now, filled with bandages and styptic powder and antibiotic ointment, and it lives under my bed for easy access. Kitty Cat works with a fervor I’ve never seen before.

         “What do you think she’s after?” I ask my mother once as we watch a movie. Since I first told her about Kitty Cat’s Space Case, we haven’t really spoken about it; but then, my mother never wanted a cat in the first place and we didn’t really discuss Kitty even before this.

         “Who?” my mother asks.

         “Kitty. She’s getting worse. I don’t know how to help her. I don’t know what she wants.”

         “I’m sure she’ll be fine. I mean, she’s a cat. What kind of trouble can she get up to?”

         “You’d be surprised.” Last night I woke up to a rough clattering sound. Outside, Kitty Cat was dragging a tarp weighed down by tools across the moon-drenched backyard. Her eyes glowed like two green marbles when she looked up at me through the window. She’s been in the shed ever since.

         My mother runs a hand over my hair. “I don’t know why a cat would be obsessed with space, but I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”

         “I do, though. She’s not taking care of herself. This obsession is ruining her life. But if I knew what she wanted, I could help her get it, and then this would all stop.”

         My mother shrugs. “Maybe she wants something she can’t actually have. I’ve found that the things you want the most are the most impossible to get.”

She still has her hand on my head, and I lean into the gentle pressure, turning back toward the TV. “Yeah,” I say. “I know.” A moment later she pulls her hand back into her lap.

***

I don’t dare enter the shed, but twice a day I go out there to leave cat food and clean the litter box. Every few days she emerges and comes up to my room to be bathed and brushed. Normally a bath would be out of the question, but Kitty Cat is too exhausted to put up a fight and too filthy with dirt and oil to clean herself. After she’s clean and dry, we curl up on the bed; I pet down her back in long strokes and scritch under her chin and behind her ears, and she purrs tiredly at me, her odd alien warbling. Some nights we fall asleep in silence. Other nights I talk to her, trying to convince her to stop working on the rocket and telling her that I love her. She’s always gone when I wake up.

         In her absence I discover the depths of my own loneliness. I knew I was lonely; that’s why I adopted Kitty. But to experience it again is jarring. I can’t relate to my brother. I have no friends. I’m so starved for affection that I find myself leaning into my mother’s hands whenever she reaches for me, even though most of the time it’s to adjust my clothes or fix my hair, scolding me all the while for my appearance.

         During one of the infrequent breaks Kitty allows herself, I explain it to her.

         “There are so many people around me all the time.” We’re lying face-to-face on my bed, bathed in the gloom of the sickly green glow-in-the-dark stars Kitty and I plastered all over my ceiling. “There are so many people, but sometimes it feels like none of them will ever understand me. Or no one will ever care enough to understand me.”

Kitty Cat licks her little pink nose with her little pink tongue. Recently she’s learned to nod or shake her head in response to yes-or-no questions—or I should say, I guess, that recently she’s deigned to start answering our questions by shaking her head or nodding. I’ve no doubt she always knew how and was too proud to do so before. But maybe it’s only desperation diving her to give in now. Maybe she refused to meet us where we were before because we couldn’t do the same in return, not speaking cat and all.

         “You understand, don’t you?” I ask.

          Kitty Cat licks her nose again, and then, blinking slowly at me, she nods.

***

The rocket begins to come together. My brother and I don’t know where Kitty Cat gets most of the stuff from. Our shed contained countless wrenches and screwdrivers and enough loose screws and nails to fill two gallon buckets, but we didn’t have soldering tools or any of the little fiddly bits that Kitty Cat has been messing with at my desk for the last few weeks. My brother tells me that the little fiddly bits are for the computer system.

         “Navigation, life support—you know, spaceship things,” he says as we sit in the sun and watch Kitty one afternoon. Our mother is still at work, otherwise she’d be throwing a fit. The rocket is nearly complete, and it towers over the shed. Kitty Cat herself is a little pinkish-orange blob, indistinct through the glass of the windshield she’s welding into place.

         I rest my chin on my knees. “I don’t know anything about spaceships. Where do you think Kitty learned it? From you?”

         “She knows more than me. I don’t know if she learned it from anybody. She might have just known.”

         Like a monarch butterfly just knows how to fly thousands of miles to Mexico in the winter, even though her mother and mother’s mother and grandmother’s mother had never made the trip. I gaze up at Kitty and wonder what that sort of certainty must be like.

         Eventually she lets us help with the smaller, easier tasks. By the time we’ve lost the light, we’re both smeared with dirt and oil and sweat, and my hair is a frizzy halo around my head. My mother is just getting home when we come in, and her mouth drops in horror when she sees us.

         “Have you two been rolling around in the dirt?” she demands, striding toward us. She casts my brother a disgruntled look but reaches for me first, grabbing my jaw with one hand and my arm with the other. Her long nails dig into the soft skin of my cheek, and I squirm, trying to dislodge her grip. “Hold still. Honestly, what were you thinking? Look at your clothes! Look at your hair!”

         “He’s dirty, too.” My brother grimaces apologetically at me and uses my mother’s distraction to slip away. I burn with jealousy.

         “He’s a boy,” says my mother dismissively. “And he’s eleven. You’re a young woman now. You can’t act like this anymore.”

         “Why not?” I demand. “I’ll still be a young woman; I’ll just be a dirty young woman.”

         She lets go of my jaw to rear her hand back; I rip myself away from her. For a moment we freeze, my wide brown eyes staring into her wide brown eyes. She has never tried to hit me before. In the lull, her sudden shout of pain claps like thunder, and I wince at the noise. She kicks out, and Kitty Cat hisses, her fur standing on end and her ears flat, and then scampers away to hide. My mother’s ankle isn’t bleeding much, but the four thin red lines scored across her skin must sting like fire from the way she’s flinching.

         “God damn that cat! Get me a bandaid and the Neosporin. Who knows what kind of germs she has on her claws.”

         She hobbles to lean against the counter. I go upstairs and into my room and reach under my bed for the first aid kit. Kitty Cat peers out at me, her eyes enormous and frightened in the dark, but she doesn’t stop me from snagging a few bandaids and the antibiotic ointment from the kit. I sit back on my heels and peer toward the stairs, and I clench my jaw and look up until the wet prickling in my eyes goes away, and then I go back down. My mother has finally noticed the rocket in the backyard. She looks at me, speechless for once.

         “It’s Kitty’s,” I explain. “She’s trying to go home.”

         Home, home, home. I realize as I say it that it’s true.

         “The cat?” exclaims my mother. “The cat built the rocket?”

         “Yes,” I say in a small voice. “She just wants to go home to where people love her.”

         “Well, good riddance,” my mother snarls, snatching the bandages and ointment from me. Optimistically, I think she isn’t going to interfere, but twenty minutes later she’s on the phone, screaming to the HOA or the city or the police or someone about the rocket in the backyard. She wants it dismantled and lugged away. She keeps glancing at me with fright in her eyes, like she’s looking at me and seeing a different person. She turns back to her phone call, and I sneak upstairs.

         My brother has crawled under my bed with Kitty. More surprising: Kitty has let him. I’m too big to fit under there with them, but I lie on my stomach on the floor so we’re all on equal footing.

         “How close is the rocket to being done?” I ask. “I mean, can we finish it tonight? Mom’s on the warpath.”

         Kitty Cat twitches her whiskers as she thinks, but after a moment she looks up at me and nods. I nod back.

“Okay,” I say. “Then as soon as she’s asleep, we’ll sneak out and get it done.”

And as soon as she falls asleep, we do.

***

It’s well into the small hours of the night by the time we finish. I’m exhausted; my brother can barely keep his eyes open. But Kitty Cat is as excited as I’ve ever seen her, all enormous pupils and ears perked up and tail quivering. Like some sort of warped mirror, it parallels the dread that sinks into my gut as the night wears on and the rocket nears its completion. Kitty Cat has been my companion for two years at this point, and while she’s never really relaxed into life with us, she’s been a fixed point, my North Star, and something I’m terrified to lose.

Kitty Cat’s breathing is quick and shallow as she stares down at the computer in the cockpit of the finished rocket. In deference to her lack of opposable thumbs, the controls to start the rocket are a series of simple switches and buttons, and my brother and I balance carefully on the metal rungs on the side of the rocket, leaning into the cockpit, to watch as she starts the sequence. The lights flicker on; buttons and dials begin to flash as the computer system comes online; air hisses softly, and the whole rocket judders in place as the engines whine. Kitty Cat yowls in satisfaction.

My brother whoops ecstatically. “It works! I can’t believe it works! Okay, we have to go! Bye, Kitty! Good luck!”

He maneuvers carefully around me and clambers down the ladder, and Kitty Cat casts me a dubious look as if wondering why I’m sticking around when the rocket is coming to life beneath our very feet. She’s in a glass dome of a helmet and four chunky white boots. Her orange fur glows under the moonlight. I don’t know what to say to her, but I feel frozen to the ladder, unable to make myself leave now that the time has come for Kitty Cat to go. My eyes prickle with tears.

“Take care of yourself,” I croak finally. She flicks an ear at me, distracted by the computer, but I reach into the cockpit to pet down her spine, and she freezes and looks at me over her shoulder. “I mean it,” I stress. “Take care of yourself. Come visit if you can.” She blinks slowly at me, her purr ratcheting up a notch, and then she nudges my wrist with her cold, wet little nose, and I pull my arm back. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

My mother bursts out of the house, frazzled with her hair in a messy braid and her robe thrown haphazardly on over her pajamas, as my brother and I stand at the edge of the yard to watch the rocket take off. She’s barefoot. She looks up at the rocket with the terrified eyes of an animal, the whites showing all around her irises, and stumbles over to grab out shoulders painfully.

“What is going on?” she shouts over the roar of the engines.

“Kitty Cat is going to space!” my brother exclaims. This doesn’t assuage my mother’s fear. The flames flare, casting the entire backyard in a bright orange glow that makes us squint. The blast of dry heat that explodes outward sends the three of us stumbling back against the side of the house. My mother yanks my brother and I against her and then turns us so that she’s between us and the rocket, her head tucked down between ours and her heart pounding against my back. The sound of the engines hits its fever pitch. The ground shakes violently; we stumble to our knees. Despite the danger, I crane my head to peer at the rocket over my mother’s shoulder, squinting against the glare and the wind. Liftoff is slow at first—the rocket lifts an inch, then a few more, then an entire foot—but picks up speed until it clears the top of the supports and hangs for a moment like a great silver angel in the sky. My heart soars with it, even as my mouth opens and a chest-wracking sob pours forth.

My brother and mother turn to watch with me. Even my mother’s terror has turned to slack-jawed awe—which quickly turns back to terror as the engines sputter and die, the orange glow cutting out with alarming swiftness. The rocket plummets toward the ground. My mother yelps and yanks us down, and not two seconds later, the rocket makes impact with a great crash, sending a plume of smoke and oil-scented dust outward in a great wall. I whirl around to look at the damage, coughing and squinting. The rocket is little more than a pile of scrap, sparking here and there and smoking everywhere else. Nothing moves—but then, from deep within the wreckage, a single, mournful wail rings out into the night.

“Kitty!” I shout, stumbling forward, but my mother pulls me back.

“Wait!” she hisses. “It’s too dangerous.”

“I can’t leave her there!” I protest, tears pouring freely down my face now.

My mother is pale and tight-faced underneath a thick coating of dust, but she blows out a careful breath and dislodges my terrified brother from her side and passes him to me, where he promptly buries his face in my shoulder. “Stay here,” says my mother firmly, and then turns and carefully walks toward the wreckage. Soon she disappears into the dust. My brother and I wait for long minutes, flinching every time we hear the screech of metal on metal or the sharp sound of my mother cursing. But eventually she returns, even more filthy than before and limping on bloodied feet, with Kitty Cat cradled in her arms. Kitty Cat is awake but completely limp, staring off at nothing, and occasionally letting out a pitiful little mewl.

My mother drops to her knees next to us, and I pull Kitty Cat against my chest. She doesn’t look hurt, just shell-shocked, and she doesn’t protest how tightly I hold her.

“Are you two okay?” my mother asks. “Are you hurt?”

I don’t answer, and my brother only says, “What is she going to do now?”

This is apparently too much for Kitty. Her ears flatten against her head and her eyes fill with tears that slick dark trails through the fur of her cheeks. She opens her mouth and wails again, a long, low caterwaul that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. It rings out into the silence of the night, muffled by the white dust hanging in the air and glowing faintly with moonlight. Kitty Cat calls out again and again and again while I sniffle into her fur and my mother looks around helplessly.

Long minutes later, Kitty Cat has exhausted herself and gone silent, and the rest of us are getting cold and uncomfortable. I’m about to suggest that we head inside when Kitty suddenly perks up, tilting her ears this way and that. She looks straight up, and I copy her, only to yelp in pain at the spotlight that bursts to life high above us. It’s an odd light, tinted green and sparkling a little at the edges, and I can’t see whatever is casting it, but I can tell that it’s enormous. It blocks out the sky and stars as far as I can see, hovering silently like a cloud.

“What’s happening?” my brother shouts.

“I don’t know!” My mother exclaims. “Get inside! Hurry!”

But Kitty Cat is calling again, meowing plaintively in a high-pitched little voice I’ve never heard from her before, and she cranes her head up toward the light and tries to wiggle out of my arms. I let her go, then gasp and grab her again when, instead of leaping to the floor, she floats in front of my face, her tail waving leisurely and her eyes like two green stars in her face.

“Let her go!” says my mother.

“What?” I shout. “Are you crazy?”

My brother is inside, cowering behind the kitchen counter and peering at us through the window, and my mother grabs me by the shoulders. “It’s okay,” she says. “I think this is her ship.” She casts an incredulous glance upward. “Her mothership. I think they’ve come for her.”

My heart twists in my chest. Kitty Cat is purring so hard in my arms it’s making me vibrate from the force of it. The green beam disappears, then comes back even brighter than before. My own feet leave the ground; only my mother’s hands are keeping me grounded, and she clutches me to her. “Let her go! It’ll be okay.”

My mind whirls, and my stomach churns, a combination of uncertainty and vertigo. “Do you promise?” I ask in a small voice.

My mother’s lips thin. “I promise.” 

So, reluctantly, I press my forehead to Kitty Cat’s, smiling sadly when she puts her paw on my cheek, and then I let her go. She doesn’t hover this time but floats upward with an ecstatic cry. Soon she’s gone. The green beam fades, and my feet hit the floor again. But my mother’s arm stays around my shoulders as the disc-shaped spaceship flips a joyful loop-de-loop and then soars up into the sky, twinkling like a star until it disappears entirely.