"I can think of worse lives than being a stray cat," she said darkly as she unslung her backpack. She pulled out a can of neon orange spray paint. The b.a.l.l.s inside it rattled like dice as she shook it. Then she outlined the cat"s body, meticulously tracing each leg and the tail, even the jab of an ear against the pavement. She surveyed her work, then capped the paint and put it away. Without squeamishness, she picked up the little body and moved it to the gra.s.sy strip between the sidewalk and the street. The orange outline of the body remained on the pavement, a grim reminder. I was speechless.

Lonnie wiped her hands self-consciously down her shirt. "I don"t think people should just hit a cat and forget it," she said quietly. "This way, whoever hit that cat has to look at that outline every time they drive past. I put the bodies up off the street and some city guy comes and picks them up instead of the next fifty cars making him mush."

"Do you think we should try to find his owner?" I asked in a hushed voice. In a macabre way, I relished the idea of being the bearer of such sad tidings.

"Naw," Lonnie said dismissively. She looked down at the dead cat with bitterness. "Scruffy didn"t belong to anyone except himself. A stray disappears, no one wonders about it." She shrugged into her backpack. As she picked her bike out of the gutter, she added, "I figure it"s something I owe them, in a way. My loyal subjects should not be left dead in the street. I done all I can for him, now . . ."

"Your loyal subjects?" I asked skeptically. Being weird is okay unless it"s fake-weird. A lot of kids pretend to be weird just to impress other people. I wondered about Lonnie. Maybe even her scar story was fake, maybe she"d just been in a bad car wreck.

She gave her shrug again. "I"m Queen of the Strays. Even my mom says so. Which reminds me, I"m supposed to be picking up some junk for my mom. See you around."

She was already pedaling down the street. When she hit puddles, muddy water rooster-tailed up her back, but she didn"t avoid them. Fluorescent cats and a one-b.o.o.bed Barbie. Genuinely weird, I decided. I liked her. "Yeah, see you," I called after her.

I got home just as the rain resumed. I called Mom"s office and left a message on her voice mail that I was safely home. I dumped my books in my room and went to the kitchen. Not much in the fridge. There used to be little microwave pizzas or pudding cups when Mom and Dad were together. Not that we"re starving now, just on a budget. I grabbed an apple and some cheese. Then I watched television and did homework until Mom got home. I forgot about Lonnie until late that night. I thought about rain soaking the cat"s body and hoped someone had picked it up. Then I thought about all the live strays, shivering in the rain. Lonnie was Queen of the Strays. I wondered what she had meant and then I fell asleep.

Three weeks pa.s.sed. I didn"t see Lonnie. I watched for her, in the lunchroom at school or when I saw kids on bikes in the street, but I never saw her. Then one day, walking home from school, I found two outlines of dead cats in the street. The paint was bright and fresh.

I had reached the front of our apartment building and was fishing my key out of my shirt when Lonnie yelled to me from down the block. I waved back and she came in a lopsided run. She favored her right leg. As she came, I realized that her whole body twisted that direction. It hadn"t been so obvious when she was on her bike.

"Hey, Mandy," she greeted me.

I was surprised at how glad I was to see her. "Hey, Lonnie! Long time, no see. Where"s your bike?"

She shrugged. "Got stole. My mom left it out and someone took it while I was gone. She didn"t even notice until I asked her where it went. So." She paused, then changed the subject. "Hey. Look what I made." She pulled a little drawstring bag out of her shirt. It was hanging around her neck on a string. "This is my new, uh, whatacallit, omelette."

"Amulet," I said reflexively.

She tugged the bag open. Inside was a little princess doll from a McDonald"s Happy Meal. Like the Barbie, it was missing a b.o.o.b. As it was dressed in a ball gown, it looked very peculiar. Lonnie shrugged at my frown. "It doesn"t look as good as the other one."

I changed the subject. "So. Where were you, then?"

She shrugged again as she replaced her amulet. "CPS came and got me, "cause I missed so much school. They stuck me in a foster home, but they couldn"t make me go to school either. So now I got a deal with my social worker. She lets me live with my mom, I stay out of trouble and go to school."

"I didn"t see you at school today," I pointed out. "If you live around here, you should go to Mason."

"Yeah, I should," she conceded sarcastically. "But even when I"m there, you wouldn"t see me. I"m in the special-ed cla.s.ses at the end of the hall."

"But you"re not r.e.t.a.r.ded!" I protested.

"Special ed isn"t all r.e.t.a.r.ded. There"s deaf kids. And ADD. Hyperactive. Emotionally disturbed. They got lots of names for us troublemakers. They just shove us together and forget about us."

"Oh," I said lamely.

"I don"t care." She smiled and wagged her head to show how little it bothered her. "Mostly I just read all day. They don"t bother me, I don"t give them any grief."

"Well." I glanced up at the sky. "I"ve got to go in. I have to call my mom as soon as I get home from school."

"Oh, latchkey kid, huh?" She watched me stick my key in the security door. "Well, after that, do you want to hang out?"

I stopped. "I"m not supposed to have friends in when Mom isn"t home," I said awkwardly. I hated saying it. I was sure she"d take it as an excuse to ditch her.

"So who"s going to tell?" she demanded with a superior look. I quailed before it. Knowing I was going to regret this, knowing I"d have to tell my mom later, I unlocked the door and let her in ahead of me.

Our apartment was on the third floor. I was painfully conscious of Lonnie limping up the stairs. There was an elevator at the other end of the building but I"d never used it. I felt almost ashamed that my body was sound and whole and that the climb didn"t bother me. As I unlocked my door, I automatically said, "Wipe your feet."

"Du-uh!" Lonnie retorted sarcastically. She walked in just like a stray cat, with that sort of wiggle that says they"re doing you a favor to come in. She stopped in the middle of our living room. For an instant, the envy on her face was so intense it was almost hatred. Then she gave her shrug. "Nice place," she said neutrally. "Got anything to eat?"

"In the kitchen. I"ve got to phone Mom."

While I left my message, Lonnie went through the refrigerator. By the time I got off the phone, she had eaten an apple, drunk a big gla.s.s of milk and poured herself a second one, and taken out the bread and margarine. "Want a sandwich?" she asked as I turned around.

"I hate peanut b.u.t.ter and that"s all there is," I said stiffly. I"d never seen anyone go through a refrigerator so fast. Especially someone else"s refrigerator.

"There"s sugar," she said, spreading margarine thickly on two slices of bread. "Ever had a sugar sandwich? Mom used to give them to me all the time."

"That"s gross," I said as she picked up the sugar bowl and dumped sugar on the bread. She pushed it out in a thick layer, capped it with the other piece of b.u.t.tered bread. When she lifted it, sugar dribbled out around the edges. Her teeth crunched in the thick layer of sugar. I winced. I imagined her teeth melting away inside her mouth.

"You ought to try it," she told me through a mouthful. She washed it down with half the gla.s.s of milk, sighed, and took another sandy bite.

As she drained off the milk, I suddenly knew that Lonnie had been really hungry. Not after-school snack hungry, but really hungry. I had seen the billboards about Americans going to bed hungry, but I never grasped it until I watched Lonnie eat. It scared me. I suddenly wanted her out of our house. It wasn"t all the food she had eaten or the sugar mess on the floor. It suddenly seemed that by living near people like Lonnie and having her inside our house, Mom and I had gotten closer to some invisible edge. First there had been the real family and home, Mom and Dad and I in a house with a yard and Pop-Tarts and potato chips in the kitchen. Then there was Mom and I in an apartment, no yard, toast and jam instead of Pop-Tarts . . . We were safe right now, as long as Dad sent the support money, as long as Mom kept her job, but right down the street there were people who lived in cruddy apartments and their kids were in special ed and were hungry. That was scary. Mom and I weren"t people like that. We"d never be people like that. Unless . . .

"Let"s go hang out," I said to her. I didn"t even put her gla.s.s in the dishwasher or sweep up the sugar. Instead, I took a pack of graham crackers out of the cupboard. I opened it as we walked to the door. She followed me, just like a hungry stray.

I felt safer as soon as I shut the door behind us. But now I was stuck outside with her on a cold and windy day. "Want to go to the library?" I offered. It was one of the few places Mom had approved for me to hang out on my own. Even then, I was supposed to say I was going there and phone again when I got back.

"Naw," Lonnie said. She took the package of graham crackers, shook out three, and handed the stack back to me. "I have to pick up some junk for my mom. But we can do my route before that. Come on."

I thought maybe she had a paper route. Instead it was her roadkill route. Lonnie patrolled for animal bodies. The only thing she found that day was a dead crow in the gutter. It had been there awhile, but she still painted around it and then moved the body reverently up onto the gra.s.sy strip. After that, we stopped at two Dumpsters, one behind Burger King and the other behind Kentucky Fried Chicken. They had concrete block enclosures and bushes around their Dumpsters. There was even a locked gate on Kentucky Fried Chicken"s, but it didn"t stop Lonnie. She made a big deal of waiting until no one was around before we crept up on them. "Warrior practice," she whispered. "We could get arrested for this. You keep watch."

So I stood guard while she went Dumpster diving. She emerged smelling like grease with bags full of chicken bones and half-eaten biscuits and a couple cartons of gravy. It amazed me how fast she filled up bags with stuff other people had thrown away. At Burger King, she got parts of hamburgers and fries. "What are you going to do with that stuff?" I asked Lonnie as we walked away. I was half afraid she"d say that she and her mom were going to eat it for dinner.

"Just wait. I"ll show you," she promised. She grinned when she said it, like she was proud of what she carried.

"I"ve got to get home soon," I told her. "Mom sometimes calls me back and I didn"t say I was going out. I"m supposed to be doing homework."

"Don"t sweat it, sister. This won"t take long, and I really want you to see it. Come on." She lurched along faster.

She lived on the other side of the main road and back two blocks off the strip. The sun goes down early in October. Lights were on inside the apartments. The building sign said Oakview Manor, but there were no oaks, no trees at all. Some boys were hanging out in the littered parking lot behind the building, smoking cigarettes and perching cool on top of a junk car. One called out as we walked by, "Hey, baby, wanna suck my weenie?" I was grossed out, but Lonnie acted like he didn"t exist. The boys laughed behind us, and one said something about "Scarface." She kept walking, so I did too.

At the other end of the parking lot, three battered Dumpsters stank in a row. Beyond them was a vacant lot full of blackberry brambles and junk. Old tires and part of a chair stuck out of the brambles. The frame of a junk pickup truck was just visible through the sagging, wet vines. Lonnie sat down on the damp curb and tore open the bags. She spread the food out like it was a picnic, tearing the chicken and burgers to pieces with her fingers and then breaking up the biscuits on top of a bag and dumping the congealed gravy out on them. "For the little ones," she told me quietly. She looked around at the bushes expectantly, then frowned. "Stand back. They"re shy of everyone but me."

I backed up. I had guessed it would be cats and I was right. What was shocking was how many. "Kitty, kitty," Lonnie called. Not loudly. But here came cats of every color and size and age, tattered veterans with ragged ears and sticky-eyed kittens trailing after their mothers. Blacks and calicoes, long-haired cats so matted they looked like dirty bath mats, and an elegant Siamese with only one ear emerged from that briar patch. An orange momma cat and her three black-and-white babies came singing. They converged on Lonnie and the food, crowding until they looked like a patchwork quilt of cat fur.

They were not delicate eaters. They made smacky noises and kitty ummm noises. They crunched bones and lapped gravy noisily. There were warning rumbles as felines jockeyed for position, but surprisingly little outright snarling or smacking. Instead, the overwhelming sound was purring.

Lonnie enthroned on the curb in the midst of her loyal subjects smiled down upon them. She judiciously moved round-bellied kittens to one side to let newcomers have a chance at the gravy and biscuits. As she reached down among the cats, the older felines offered her homage and fealty, pausing in their dining to rub their heads along her arms. Some even stood upright on their hind legs to embrace her. As the food diminished, I thought the cats would leave. Instead they simply turned more attention upon Lonnie. Her lap filled up with squirming kittens, while others clawed pleadingly at her legs. A huge orange tom suddenly leaped up to land as softly as a falling leaf on her shoulders. He draped himself there like a royal mantle, and his huge rusty purr vibrated the air. Lonnie preened. Pleasure and pride transformed her face. "See," she called to me. "Queen of the Strays. I told you." She opened her arms wide to indicate her swarm, and cats instantly reared up to b.u.mp their heads against her outstretched hands.

"Oh, yeah? Well, you"re gonna be Queen of the a.s.s-Kicked if you don"t get up here with my stuff!" The voice came from a third-floor window. To someone in the room behind him, the man said, "Stupid little c.u.n.t is down there f.u.c.king around with those cats again."

The light went out of Lonnie"s face. She stared up at him. He glared back. He was a young man with dark, curly hair, his T-shirt tight on his muscular chest. A woman walked by behind him. I looked back at Lonnie. She had a sickly smile. With a pretense of brightness in her voice she called up, "Hey, Carl! Tell Mom to look out here, she should see all my cats!"

Carl"s face darkened. "Your mom don"t got time for that s.h.i.t, and neither do you! Stupid f.u.c.king cats. No, don"t you encourage . . ." He turned from the window, drawing back a fist at someone and speaking angrily. Lonnie"s mom, I thought. He was threatening Lonnie"s mom. We couldn"t hear what he said. Lonnie stared up at the window, not with fear, but something darker. Carl leaned out again. "Get up here with my stuff!"

Lonnie stood up, the cats melting away around her, trickling away into the shadows. A lone cat stayed, a big striper, winding and b.u.mping against her legs. She didn"t seem to feel him. Shame burned in her eyes when her eyes grazed me. This was not how she wanted me to see her. She reached up to grip the little doll strung around her neck. Her eyes suddenly blazed. She squared herself. "I didn"t go get your stuff." She put her fists on her hips defiantly. "I forgot," she said in a snotty voice.

Carl"s scowl deepened. "You forgot? Yeah, right. Well, you forget dinner or coming in until you get it, Lonnie. And it better not be short, or I"ll throw you outta this window. Get going, now!" He slammed the window shut. Across the parking lot, the boys laughed.

She stood a moment, then stuffed her hands in her pockets and walked away. The striper cat sat down with an unhappy meow. I hurried to catch up with her. It was getting really dark. Mom was going to kill me. "Lonnie?"

She didn"t look back. "I got to go," she said in a thick voice.

I ran after her. "Lonnie! Lonnie, your cats are really something. You really are the Queen of the Strays."

"Yeah," she said flatly. She wouldn"t look at me. "I got to go. See you around." She lengthened her stride, limping hastily away.

"Okay, I"ll look for you at school tomorrow."

She didn"t answer. Darkness swallowed her. Rain began to fall.

Before I got home, the headlights of the cars were reflecting off the puddles in the streets. I hurried upstairs, praying that Mom wouldn"t be home yet. She wasn"t. I hung up my dripping coat, kicked off my wet sneakers, and raced into the kitchen. The phone machine was flashing. Six messages. I was toast.

I was cleaning up sugar and listening to Mom"s frantic, "Mandy? Are you there? Mandy, pick up!" when I heard her key in the front door. I was still standing in the kitchen looking guilty when she found me.

She looked me up and down. The lower half of my jeans and my socks were sopping. "Where have you been?"

I could have lied and said I was at the library, but Mom and I don"t do that to each other. And I needed to tell someone about Lonnie. So I told her everything, from the one-b.o.o.bed Barbie to the cat-carpet and Carl. Her face got tight, and I knew she didn"t like what she was hearing. But she listened, while we fixed dinner. We didn"t have to talk about dinner. Wednesday was spaghetti. I chopped mushrooms and peppers, she chopped the onions and smashed the garlic. She put the water to boil for the pasta, I sawed the frozen French bread open and spread it with margarine.

By the time everything was ready, she had heard all about Lonnie. Her first words were pretty hard on me. "I trust you to have good judgment, Mandy."

"I don"t think I did anything wrong."

"I didn"t say you did wrong. I said you used poor judgment. You let a stranger in while I was gone. You left without telling me where you were going or when you"d be back. If something bad had happened to you, I wouldn"t even have known where to start looking."

"Why do you always a.s.sume something bad is going to happen? When am I supposed to have friends over? I can"t have them in while you"re gone, and I can"t go out with them. What am I supposed to do, just come home and be alone all day?"

"You can have friends over," my mom objected. "But I need to know something about people before we let them into our home. Mandy, just because a person is your own age and a girl doesn"t mean she can"t hurt you. Or that she won"t steal from us."

"MOM!" I exploded, but she kept on talking.

"Lonnie is probably a nice kid who"s just had a hard time. But the people she knows may not be nice. If someone knew that I"m at work all day and you"re at school, they could rip us off. I certainly couldn"t afford to replace the stereo and the television and the microwave all at once. We"d just have to do without."

"You haven"t even met Lonnie and you"re judging her!"

"I"m not judging her. I"m trying to protect you." Mom paused. "Mandy. There"s a lot of Lonnies in the world. As much as I"d like to, I can"t save them all. Sometimes, I feel like I can"t even protect you anymore. But I do my best. Even when it means . . ." She halted. Then she spoke gravely. "Mandy, if you hang out with Lonnie, people will treat you like Lonnie. Not that Lonnie deserves to be treated like she is; in fact, I"m sure she doesn"t. But I can"t protect Lonnie. All I can do is try to protect you."

She was so serious that my anger evaporated. We sat at the little table in the kitchen with our dinner getting cold between us. I tried to remember the big table in our old dining room with the hardwood floor and the wallpaper. I couldn"t. "Mom?" I asked suddenly. "What is the difference between Lonnie and me?"

Mom was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "Maybe the difference is me. Someone who cares fiercely about you."

"Lonnie loves her mom, even if she did throw her out a window."

"Lonnie may love her mom, but it doesn"t sound like her mom cares about her. It doesn"t sound like anyone does."

"Only her cats," I conceded. "And half of them are deaders." And me, I thought. I care about her.

In the end, we made compromises. I could have Lonnie over if I told Mom she was there. Mom had to get Lonnie"s phone number, address, and her mom"s name. If we went out, it had to be somewhere like the library, not just to walk around. I had to call Mom before I went and when I got back. I had to stay out of Dumpsters. And I wasn"t allowed to go to Lonnie"s house.

"But why?" I ventured.

"Because," Mom said darkly, and that was the end of that.

I looked for Lonnie at school the next day. I even went to the special-ed rooms. No Lonnie. Three days later, I found one cat-body outline, but I couldn"t tell if it was new or old because of all the rain. I was afraid to go to her building. Mom was right, it was a tough neighborhood. But on the fourth day, I screwed up my courage and took the long way home from school to walk through her neighborhood.

I saw her from half a block away. She was standing at the corner of a convenience store parking lot, her arms crossed on her chest. There were three boys facing her. Two were our age, one looked older. They had her bike.

It was so beat up I wouldn"t have recognized it, except for the Amazon Barbie. One of the boys sat on the bike possessively while the other two stood between Lonnie and the bike.

"I don"t care what he said," Lonnie told them. "It"s my bike and I want it back." She tried to circle, to get close enough to get her hands on the bike, but the two boys blocked her lazily.

"Your dad said we could have it." The boy on the bike was c.o.c.ky about it.

"Carl"s not my dad!" Lonnie declared furiously. "Get off my bike!"

"So what? He said we could have it for picking up his junk for him. Gave us ten bucks, too." There was a sneer of laughter in the older boy"s voice.

I froze, watching them. They moved by a set of unspoken rules. Lonnie could not physically touch the boys, and they knew it. All they had to do to keep her from the bike was to stand between her and it. She moved back and forth, trying to get past them. She looked stupid and helpless and she knew it. A man walked up to them and stopped. My hopes rose.

"It"s a piece of s.h.i.t bike anyway," one of the boys declared laughingly as they blocked her yet again.

"Yeah. We"re gonna take it down to the lake and run it off the dock into the water."

The light changed. The man crossed the street. It was as if he had not even seen Lonnie and the boys and the bike. He didn"t even look back.

"You better not!" Lonnie threatened helplessly. She darted once more at the bike. And collided with a boy.

"Hey!" he pushed her violently back. "Keep your hands off me, b.i.t.c.h!"

"Yeah, wh.o.r.e!"

Suddenly, in the physical contact, the rules of the game had changed. The boys pushed at her. Lonnie cowered back, and the one on the bike rode it up on her, pushing the wheel against her. Now instead of trying to grab her bike back, she was trying to back away from it. The other boys touched her. Her face. "G.o.d, you"re ugly!" Her chest. "She ain"t got no t.i.ts, just like her dolly! Your momma cut them off, too?" Her crotch. "Whoo, whoo, you like that, ho?"

Across the street, a bus stopped and two people got off. They walked away into the darkness. Cars drove by in the gathering dusk of the overcast October evening. No one paid any attention to Lonnie"s plight. Deep in my heart, I knew why. She was already broken, already damaged past repairing. If you can"t fix something, then don"t worry about hurting it even more. The boys knew that. She wasn"t worth saving from them. It was like jumping on the couch that already had broken springs. She was just a thing to practice on.

"Stop it, stop it!" She flailed at them wildly, trying to slap away the hands that darted in to touch her insultingly, pushing, poking, slapping her face. She had forgotten she was a warrior. She was just a girl, and that was a boy"s game. She couldn"t win it. Leaves in the gutter rustled by. I was so cold I was shaking. So cold. I should get home; I was cold and it was getting dark and my mom would be mad at me. One of the boys pushed her hard as the other one rammed her with the bike. She fell down on the sidewalk and suddenly they ringed her, the bike discarded on the pavement as they sneered down at her.

Some tribal memory of what came next reared its savage face from my subconscious.

"No!" I suddenly screamed. My voice came out shrill and childish. I flew toward them, gripping my book bag by its strap. A stupid weapon, my only weapon. "Get away from her, get away from her!" I uttered the word I knew Lonnie could never say. "Help! Help me, someone, they"re hurting her! Help! Get away from her!"