Chico

Life between a little sister, boys, and a tyrant kitten.

“Do you like boys?”

Mary-Jane always chose the worst possible moments to ask impossible questions.

We were lying in our beds beneath the roof, where summer nights turned our little room into a warm bath of still air. I was fifteen. She was eleven, already far more observant than anyone gave her credit for.

“Some are… nice-looking,” I whispered. “But we shouldn’t talk about that. You heard the Reverend.”

“But you’re fifteen,” she insisted. “The other girls your age are always with boys.”

“I know, Mary-Jane. It’s different. Some girls can and some can’t. it’s family things. Now go to sleep. We can’t spend all night talking about boys in the dark.”

I laughed quietly, thinking the conversation was over.
Silence.

Then, a minute later:

“I saw tall Andrew looking at you in church. Every Sunday. And every time you look at him, you turn your head away and blush.”

“Shut up, Mary-Jane!” I hissed. “Don’t you dare tell Mommy or Daddy. Promise?”

“I promise…”

A long pause.

“…if you let me take care of Chico. He’s a boy too, even if we put pink collars with little butterfly bows on him.”
That was Mary-Jane.

And that was Chico.

Our kitten. Mary-Jane’s shadow. Our family’s daily catastrophe.

Chico arrived one summer morning looking innocent enough. He was a tiny black kitten with enormous green eyes and ears much too large for the rest of him. We thought we had adopted a cat.
We were wrong.

Chico was a sentient piece of the night sky that had somehow sprouted paws.
His fur wasn’t merely black. It swallowed light. The moment the sun went down, he dissolved into the darkness, leaving only two luminous green eyes floating through the room like haunted gooseberries.

He considered himself the unquestioned owner of the house.

Humans existed to provide food.
Curtains existed to be climbed.

Neighbors existed to be inspected.
Pitbulls existed to be politely intimidated.

Every morning began with a new expedition. Chico never walked anywhere when he could sprint. He ricocheted from chair to sofa, from sofa to table, and finally around Mary-Jane’s ankles, usually at the precise moment she was trying to cross the room. More than once he nearly sent her flying, which he regarded as an acceptable side effect of his athletic training.

His greatest passion, however, was mountaineering.

Our living room had magnificent velvet taffeta curtains that reached all the way to the ceiling. To Chico, they were not curtains.
They were Everest.

Up he went, straight to the highest support beam, where he proudly surveyed his kingdom for several glorious seconds before remembering one inconvenient detail.
He had absolutely no idea how to come down.
That was usually when the crying began.

The entire family knew the routine. Someone fetched the kitchen stepladder. Someone else held it steady. Chico was rescued with all the dignity of a stranded emperor pretending the rescue had been his idea all along.

Outside, he ruled an even larger kingdom.

The neighbor owned an enormous Pitbull that outweighed Chico many times over. Any sensible kitten would have kept a respectful distance.
Not Chico.
He marched directly to the dog’s food bowl, puffed out his tiny chest and produced one sharp, confident:

“Pfffff.”

The Pitbull quietly stepped aside.
Only after Chico had finished eating would the much larger dog approach his own bowl again.
To this day, I have no explanation.

Living with Chico also meant accepting his very peculiar philosophy of affection.
If you reached down to pet him, he vanished.
If you chased him, the game became wonderfully exciting.
If you finally gave up and ignored him, he immediately returned, purring, rubbing against your legs as though he had suffered hours of neglect.

The instant your hand moved toward him—
Gone.

His favorite performance happened at night.
He would slip silently into our bedroom, leap onto Mary-Jane’s bed, and simply sit there.
Watching.
Eventually she would wake.
The room would be completely dark except for two brilliant green eyes floating only inches from her face.
Her scream echoed through the house.
Chico never moved.
He seemed perfectly satisfied with another successful haunting.

People often say that black cats are mysterious.
Chico wasn’t mysterious.
He was impossible.

A tiny velvet panther who believed the laws of physics, common sense, and basic social etiquette were merely friendly suggestions.

Looking back, I don’t remember him as a pet.
I remember him as a personality.
One that happened to have whiskers.

I miss you Chico

I miss you Mary-Jane