The three-legged cat is trying to scratch his neck with the leg that isn't there anymore. Twitch twitch twitch, it goes, like a clipped wing trying to fly. I give him a sympathy scratch, careful not to brush against his stitches or shaved black stump.

The garage is hot and dark. It smells bad in here -- like cat; but it's quieter, and I sit beside the ten-pound sack of litter to hide from my mom, who is mad about dinner, and my dad, who is drunk.

"Why won't you try the guacamole!" her voice carries through the sheetrock. "You never try anything new."

"Sorry." His words are muffled, mumbled.

Clashing pots and pans are her response. I turn to Batwing. "It looks like vomit," I whisper to him. "Even you wouldn't eat it."

Last week I found him crunching on a dead lizard that was mostly eaten by fire ants. He was purring as he ate, only snarling when I tried to take it away, the shaved stump cocked like a pistol.

"Let's see those stitches." I grimace and lean in to where his leg used to be.

The seam is jagged; and the blood is finally turning scabby. It's not pretty, but at least he's stopped trying to chew at it. The first three days were the worst. He'd get this really angry look to his face, flatten his ears back, then lunge at his own skin.

We finally had to suit him up with a plastic cone around the neck -- one of those bright white numbers that made him look like a lampshade that had sprouted legs. But he looks better now, almost normal. I examine the area.

Clear wire like fishing line binds the fur to flesh. The vet says that I am supposed to keep the area clean -- to let it heal but keep it clean; so I take the flea comb and brush gingerly around the wound. Batwing follows every move of my hand with his beady yellow eyes. He stiffens when I get too close, but then pushes his head against my hand with a throaty purr when I pick the fleas from his back.

I scratch him all over and he collapses against my leg, nuzzling my shoe and nibbling on the laces.

"That's right, Franken-mao," I whisper. "Who's a good kitty?"

Mao is the Chinese word for cat. I know this because my friend Harry Zhang taught it to me when I got Batwing.

Correction: I didn't "get" Batwing. He just sort of showed up one night with a broken thighbone. It poked through his fur like a prehistoric fashion accessory, jutting boldly and covered with blood.

Batwing is wo-da mao. My cat.

Harry is wo-da panyo. My friend.

And wo-suh Jessie. And I am Jessie.

I don't really want to learn Chinese; but I want to learn all about Harry, who is not Chinese, but Taiwanese, and who gets really sensitive if you get the two mixed up.

Harry is not my "boyfriend," but he would be if he asked me to be. I mean if I asked him to be and he said yes -- or whatever. Harry sits next to me in biology.

He sits like a flower bending in a garden.

His posture is always straight but never rigid; and he wears the same green t-shirt every day, the one that says "Mandarin Garden Lunch Special -- $3.99" with the address of his family's restaurant where he works as a busboy printed in white, flowery letters that look like bursts of jasmine.

The shirt is always clean and free of wrinkles, and when he raises his hand to ask a question there are no armpit stains.

Harry is my lab partner.

He is responsible for the "A" we received on our recent rat dissection. His hands moved gracefully across the yellow-furred belly for two minutes before he even touched the scalpel. Feeling it -- examining it, straightening the tail until it became an exclamation point -- a dignified punctuation to an undignified death.

When he finally cut he did it in three quick sweeps: one-two-three, without grimace, without comment. There was no stickiness, no mess. The internal organs were neat and little, and he pointed to each one with the barest poke of the knife tip.

We had agreed ahead of time that I would do the pinning; but my hands started shaking when I reached for the skin. Harry helped me then, his warm hands covering my cold ones, steadying me.

Since that day I've been thinking a lot about his hands, his long fingers and warm skin. How his nails are long and clean like seashells that have just washed up on the beach. Sometimes I try to talk to him after school, but he runs off every day right as the bell rings.

"Hafta-wuk," he says in this fake Chinese accent.

He doesn't even get paid.

"Jessie!" My mother opens the door and scowls at me. "Dishes."

The way she says "dishes" makes me break into a nervous sweat. It's ninety degrees in the garage, so it's not as impressive as it sounds.

But still.

I do the dishes.

Batwing is not allowed in the house, so when I am done scrubbing the guacamole from the stainless steel bowl I sneak him a chicken neck from my mother's stew.

She is always cooking with weird parts of chicken -- necks mostly, but sometimes butts and beaks. I don't imagine she'll miss one neck.

She is out here now, folding the laundry, and as I reach out to feed the cat, she flies at me. Her hand is on my hair, yanking and ripping.

"That is not cat food!"

She jerks my head to the ten-pound sack of cat chow, which is right next to the ten-pound sack of cat litter. "That is cat food."

"Let me go!" It becomes one long word: "Letmegoletmegoletmego!" I pull away from her. Her fist releases and she pushes my head away.

I am breathing raggedly, my pulse in my ears. "What is your problem?" It's hard to speak. I'm trying not to cry. I don't mind crying. I just don't want her to see it.

She frowns at me, returns inside, and slams the door behind her, leaving the laundry in a tumble on the floor. Batwing has puffed himself up from fear -- his tail looks like a blackened cactus.

"It's ok," I whisper. I reach out to him, but he hides behind a box of old sweaters and coats. We have lived in Florida for five months now, but we still have boxes of sweaters and ice skates from Michigan because my mother will not throw them away. "They're worth money," she says when I bring it up. "It's easy to throw money away when it's not yours."

I see his yellow eyes peering from the shadows. I could try to coax him out, but I am suddenly tired, my body heavy, my head throbbing. I rub my head where she grabbed me. "Goodnight," I murmur. I turn out the lights.

On my way to bed I pass my father, who is passed out on the couch. His snoring sounds like a diesel engine, grinding and gunning all at once. His mouth is open and slack, head tilted back. In his right hand he still somehow manages to hold onto a rum and coke. I try to pull it from his fingers, but he holds tight, even as he sleeps.

"Let him drop it." My mother stands at her bedroom door, arms folded and forehead creased. She is dressed for work, her hospital scrubs as white as snow. "Let it break all over the goddamn floor -- maybe then he'll realize."

I look at her. "Realize what?"

She stares at me and snorts. "Go to bed."

I go. I go to bed. And I undress. And I pull the covers over my head. And I curl into a ball. And I drag my hand against the wall again and again until the skin is raw and my knuckles bleed, and I imagine they leave faint trails of red. Then I fall asleep.

"What happened?" Harry takes my hand in his own and traces my raw knuckles with his long fingers. I shiver and jerk away all at once.

"Nothing." I turn to our latest lab, "Grandma and Grandpa Corn," a mind-boggling logic game about dominant and recessive genes. I begin filling in the chart. "Blue goes to blue," I say in a ridiculously cheerful voice. "Yellow to yellow."

Harry frowns at me. He pulls the pen from my fingers and holds my hand again. He will not let go. His hands are warm and chapped. Rough and gentle all at once.

My heart is a block of ice that is starting to melt upwards. How can that be? I wonder. I try to work this out in my head, to push it out, but I feel it moving through my collarbone and neck, under my skin, up to my eyes, closing my throat. I am crying, sobbing. Harry Zhang still holds my hand, thawing me.

He pulls me into his green t-shirt, which smells like laundry detergent. As I weep into his shoulder I realize that he must have several green shirts, not just one. I have an absurd image of his closet, filled with rows and rows of green Mandarin Garden t-shirts like cornhusks hanging to dry.

He straightens me up when he sees the teacher walk near our lab station. He is an older man, white, in his fifties. He wears a starched white lab coat with the word "Doc" embroidered on the lapel. Today he does not wear goggles, though he often does, even to turn on water.

"Everything ok here?" he asks.

"Yeah yeah." Harry nods emphatically and points to the sheet. "Blue to blue."

"Good," the teacher says and paces to another station.

"What's his name?" I ask Harry. "I can't even remember his name."

We are lab station twenty-four in a room of twenty-five. Lab stations four and seven have an extra person because of large enrollment. All in all, there are fifty-two people in our biology class.

Harry grins. "Think he knows yours?"

I smile. "No."

Harry puts his hands on my shoulders and looks into my eyes. His own eyes are soft and brown, like the insides of sunflowers.

The bell rings.

He jerks away from me and glances at the clock, grabs his backpack, and jumps from the stool. "Hafta-wuk," he says, with the barest ironic tilt of eyebrow. As he runs from the room he waves good-bye.

I wave feebly back.

My bicycle is in lockup, and I have to wait for the security guard to open the cage that holds it. There are three such cages, evenly spaced, side-by-side.

Each cage holds hundreds of bicycles until ten minutes after the last bell. The cages are slightly raised, and there is all sorts of threatening signage around them ("Do NOT remove bikes from cage without proper authority" or "Horace Mann High School is NOT responsible for any injury or loss of property that occurs after 2:45 p.m.").

The signs make our bicycles look like wild and dangerous animals in a zoo. Harry locks his bicycle a block away from school at a sidewalk road sign. He can't afford to wait the extra ten minutes because his family needs him at the restaurant right at three. As soon as the bell sounds he runs to the street sign, unlocks his bike, and pedals like crazy until he gets to Parsons Plaza, which is where the Mandarin Garden is.

I saw him once when my dad picked me up from school. He did it all so smoothly that you'd never know he was under any sort of pressure. He didn't drop the key or hunch his shoulders; he just turned the key, reassembled the lock, and jumped on his silver ten-speed with the curved-down handlebars, flying -- a green and silver bird down MLK Boulevard.

My own green ride is buried in the corner, smothered by someone's glitzy Mongoose. It doesn't even matter. The gears are shot, the chain rusted. I wait until the fat security guard with the balding head and the oversized gun holster opens the cage, and then I unbury my bike and pedal slowly home.

Halfway there it starts to rain.

I don't try to go any faster. The rain hits harder the faster you go.

The houses in the "Shadow Bay" subdivision blur by. They are all tan, with Spanish tile roofs. They have identical driveways and mailboxes and square green lawns where you can still see the rows of sod that haven't grown together yet. Any azaleas that have been planted are small and close to the ground, propped up with sticks and string, beat down from the rain.

When I get home I check the garage for Batwing. He's not around; but I figure he's hiding because I'm soaked and noisy and he's scared.

No one's around, which is unusual. Whether it's my mother getting ready for the nightshift at the hospital or it's my dad home early from work and clanking around the liquor cabinet, someone's always here.

I don't question it too much.

I change into sweats, pull my hair back into a ponytail, and return to the garage. I've saved a piece of chicken burrito from the school "lunch," and I unwrap it as I call out. "Here kitty. Here kitty-kitty."

Nothing.

I wave the food around the garage. "Here batter-batter."

All I hear is the pit-pat of rain against the aluminum siding of our house.

I search behind the sweater box, under the sweaters, under the dull blades of ice skates. I search in the box of old paperbacks, ignoring the smell of molding paper. I search behind the stack of newspapers, rag-clothes, and cleaning supplies. Behind the washer and dryer. Behind my father's toolbox, which is blanketed in a wet dust that has covered it since we moved here.

Nothing.

I go outside, ignore the rain. "Here Batwing. Come on, kitty!"

My mother's car pulls into the driveway. It shudders to a stop. At first, when I look at her face, I think the rain is reflecting on it from the windshield, but when I look closer, I see that she is crying -- deep, gut wrenching sobs that shake her whole body. Her head leans in, sinks into the edge of the steering wheel. Her dark hair covers her forehead.

She looks at me and rolls down the window. "I'm so sorry, Jessie."

For a moment I think she is talking about last night, and I shrug angrily. "Don't worry about it. Have you seen -- "

"He ate some poison. There was nothing I could do." She holds her hands up and reaches out to me.

Everything folds within me. I fall to the ground. The rain falls with me. It falls in the grass; it falls on the dirt; it flows down the street and into the gutter. Miles and miles of rain. It beats down on my mother's hands and falls from her fingers, making them look as if they are crying too.

She fumbles with the car lock and runs to me -- tries to hold me. I push her away, sobbing. I run back into the garage, ignore the cat box, ignore the cat chow, ignore the play toys and flea comb and wide plastic cone we used so he wouldn't chew on his own wound. I grab my bicycle and ride hard, ride far, until I imagine that I am a green and silver bird who can fly to the stars.

The Mandarin Garden restaurant has a wide front window. Inside, the walls are covered in burgundy wallpaper. In the corners the wallpaper peels like thin strips of bark, curling and pale red. In the center of the restaurant there is a tiny koi pond, where several golden fish ripple under water.

Harry stands beside a corner booth; he holds a pitcher of water in one hand and a pot of tea in the other. He pours the water into three tall glasses, then pours tea into squat clay cups. He arranges the cups, each in front of the other.

When he is finished he turns smoothly, almost gliding to the next table.

He opens the door and stares at me. After several moments he turns away, goes inside, and returns with a pink tablecloth in his arms; it is neatly folded and freshly dried. I can feel its heat.

He wipes my face dry first, then works on my hands and feet. I am wearing bedroom slippers still, and they are covered in mud. He removes them carefully and wraps the warm cloth around my ankles.

He sits across from me and pours tea into two clay cups. He puts my hands around the cup; he puts his hands around my hands. The candle between us glows in a red sleeve.

"Now," he says. "tell me."

I do, and after I am done speaking he examines my face, tracing my profile with his fingers. I have been told that I have prominent cheekbones, and now, in the restaurant, Harry Zhang says to me: "You have beautiful bones. Has anyone ever told you that?"

When he kisses me, his lips taste like pecan ice cream.

A pleasant shiver goes through me.

I've been here for fifteen minutes, next to a braided ficus with leafy branches, under the awning that does nothing to block the falling water.

No one sees me.