I never thought I’d die by astral projection. When I hit the Earth, I hit hard. I’m too cold to be alive. Cold and achy.
The floor I’m laying on is damp and smells like pee and number two, and I think peacock poo and cat poo probably aren’t that different. I put my hands on the gross floor to help steady myself. My head throbs with pins of pain and my stomach is a hard rock inside of me like I’ve eaten every bad thing known to woman.
My head aches as if I drank Four Loco and Red Bull and smoked cigarettes all night. The world spins and I can’t come to my feet fast enough. When I do, a branch pokes my eye. I walk closer to the iron gate in front of me. Away from the smell. The very bad smell. But it’s not a gate.
I look up and down and sideways. I’m in a cage. There’s only one light. The light of the moon. A bright disk in the sky. And the bluish, bright light showers a jungle in front of me with a weird sort of light drapery where everything in front of it and everything behind it has this strange kind of glow. I must be hallucinating.
All the edges of things kind of blur into each other and I stumble like I might fall back down. And I wish I had Hayden’s hand to hold. I wish we were dancing to Lullaby, going on our treasure hunt.
I stroke the top of my head. Wondering if the tiara might be like a glass slipper. But dodos don’t get glass slippers. I take a deep breath and question everything. The dance. The dress. Ally. Mitch. Death. Life. Peacocks and Dodos. And then something makes a strange, very strange noise. It growls.
Right. Behind. Me. Grrrrrrr. Grrrrr. It’s sort of like a purr, but not really. And slowly, I turn around. Very. Slowly. And I see it. Crouched down low, just in front of the iron bars on the opposite side of the cage. A puma. And my heart beats like a million times a second. I’m in a cage with a Puma in a––wait for it––zoo. No really. I’m in a cage in a zoo. Exactly like Mitch said I would be. And it gets worse. Just like he said.
The puma puts one paw in front of the other. And then, even though I have a puma staring me down, practically licking my face all I hear is Mitch in my head––I’ll die. And I wonder if he got it all wrong. And I’m the one that’ll die.
I search the cage for Mitch but I’m the only human here. A fact that only makes my legs more wobbly than they already are. With every step I take, my jeans sort of slip off my hips––three sizes too big. And I’m just me. Just thirteen again. Way short, without the major boobs but with bigger ones than I left with. At least they seem bigger. And I’m so mad at Mitch.
I worry I’ll never be that seventeen-year-old again. I’ll never have a tiara placed on my head and I’ll never, ever have a boyfriend as cool as Hayden. Kill me now.
I shrink back into the cage. I can’t break free and I can’t go back to Planet Popular. I’ll die here in this cage and be like twelfth page news in the morning. What a dodo way to go. On the freaking twelfth page. Some weird footnote to the news of the day––Idiot thirteen-year-old who wanted to be popular ends up eaten by a puma.
And I start to hallucinate. Because the next thing I see absolutely can’t be real. I see a light, just as bright as the light in the attic and I think it must be some weird reflection off of the pond filled with hippopotamuses in the fake terrain cage beside me. But, no. It’s a light. Just like the orb in my attic back home. A home I’ll probably never see again.
And all I see when I close my eyes is the gymnasium at the high school and Hayden in his jeans and tuxedo jacket and his crown. And my heart beats like it never will again. I imagine him holding me. His lips against mine and The Cure and Lullaby. And I crouch back down and sink onto the smelly wet concrete as fast as my stomach flips inside of me, because I remember. And Mitch told me I wouldn’t.
I’ll die. He said.
And I feel a lick on my cheek. A rough tongue, moist. Licking and licking.
“Mitch?” I say ridiculously, but I can’t help it. There’s something in its eyes. Something I’ve known my whole life. And I know it sounds crazy, but a sister knows her own brother. Even if he’s a puma. Besides, it’s the only reason I can think of that I’m not puma chow by now. I go back and forth seeing Mitch and not seeing Mitch in its eyes.
I’m losing my mind. My head throbs with little pin pains again. I’m a morsel. I should have been chewed up in two seconds. At least pawed, examined. But it’s not curious about me at all. It knows me. It’s against all the laws of nature. A freak of nature. Just like a star-nosed mole. Just like older brothers. There must be a way back to Hayden and the treasure hunt. Back to the one place I felt like my true self. Where I realized I don’t need to be a peacock. And when I AP back to Planet Popular, I’m so going to kill Mitch myself for saving me from the one place where I felt like myself for the very first time in my life.
The small light outside of the cage bounces up and down, sort of dancing to its own song. It gets bigger and comes closer. And I run to the front of the cage hoping the light will astral project me back to Hayden, back to the dance, but then the light rides up over the iron bars of the cage and blinds me.
“What in the hell?” A man says. A strange man in the dark. “Charlie, yo Charlie, over.”
There’s some sort of static and Mr. Curious keeps the light pointed right in my eyes.
“Yeah, Wayne, over.”
“We have a situation, over.”
“Roger that.”
“A girl’s in the cage with the puma here.”
“A what?”
“A girl.”
The guard runs to unlock the door to the cage but backs away when the puma walks up beside me.
It’s hard to hear that I’m a girl when I had just started to begin to feel like a woman. Mitch The Puma has that told-you-so look in his eyes. How could he be Mitch? If Mitch isn’t the puma next to me, he has to be in this zoo somewhere. And this puma has to be the tamest puma on the planet. And this puma is so my brother, because of the way he’s looking at me. But Mitch so isn’t a puma. Mitch is an owl, a know-it-all. Super annoying.
I’m a puma. I’ve always known that. I’m a puma because while people might think they know me, they don’t know me at all. I go by lots of names––jaguar, panther, cougar, mountain lion, leopard and more names than just about any other animal––no one really knows me. I’m fiercer and faster than a lion or even a tiger. The key to me is my speed. And more than ever I wish I could really be a puma. The wild kind. It’s weird but my third grade report flashes through my brain:
Pumas have over 410 voluntary muscles that can be used when needed. It’s thought by some, that this characteristic symbolizes the ability of a puma to move into different realities.
I so just did that.
All this astral projecting leaves me kind of fuzzy. All I want to do is take a nap. And even though the man is opening the gate and I want to run away more than anything, hop over his head and speed to Hayden’s house, I can’t move. My eyes are heavy and everything goes black.