Mom shut the door, and Liam was alone.

First thing, he ran to the cat carrier to let Katsuki out. The carrier was tough to open—he had to push hard on the top and bottom latches at the same time, and his hands slipped over and over before he managed it. But finally, he opened the door so the cat could explore the room.

Sorry you were stuck in there so long, he apologized in his head. He gave Katsuki a few pets, then backed off to give her room to get used to the new place. After a minute or so, she stuck one paw out onto the scratchy carpet, then another, then started sniffing at the furniture and exploring under the beds.

The past hour had been crazy, full of new people and getting dragged from one place to another, stuck sitting there while Mom did dumb adult stuff that he couldn’t understand or even hear much of, just a bunch of noise in his hearing aids that didn’t make sense. This room was boring, only three little beds, a dresser, and their bags in a corner, but at least it was calm.

Liam grabbed his backpack and opened it, then spread a bunch of his stuff on the bed closest to the window, calling dibs—though if Maddie decided she wanted it, she’d probably get it. He frowned, wondering if she’d show up or not.

He climbed up on the bed and shoved some of his schoolbooks aside to make a space for himself. He didn’t go to school today, and who knew if he was gonna be able to go in on Monday. He already missed a quiz about fractions; he did the homework, but when he thought about it now, it was all jumbled in his head. Also, the next section in their science book was all about animals. He’d flipped forward and seen pictures of leaf-cutter ants and caribou herds. He wanted to be there for that.

Even if school was boring and annoying sometimes, he didn’t like being absent. When he got back, everybody would know a bunch of stuff he didn’t and he’d be stuck trying to fill in all the gaps. Not just lessons, either—it was smart to know who was in trouble with Ms. Castillo, who was mad at who, all that kind of stuff. It was hard enough for him to keep track of all that even when he didn’t miss a day! They didn’t make fun of how he sounded when he tried to talk anymore, not after Tyler and Eli got in big trouble. But he still didn’t have the kind of friends who would write out what happened for him, or bring him his homework, and it was always hard to hear the other kids and understand what they were saying. The audiologist said that it’d take time for him to make sense of all the mixed-up noises, and even longer for him to learn to talk again, but that he’d never get there if he didn’t keep the hearing aids on and try to get used to them. For now, though, they made class feel like too much, all the different sounds too hard to deal with, and he always just wanted to turn them off.

It wasn’t like anybody in class—except the aide who helped him some days—wanted to talk to him enough that they learned how to sign. Abby learned how to sign her name and a few other things, but she got bored of it quick, and she was kind of annoying anyway. It felt like she wanted to be his friend because she felt sorry for him. He didn’t want a friend like that.

So he didn’t have anyone to ask about what he missed, and he’d have to show up next week with no homework and no idea what was going on.

But today was Friday and he didn’t have to deal with all that stuff until Monday, so he didn’t want to think about it. Instead, he pulled out his favorite book, The Animal Book: A Visual Encyclopedia of Life on Earth, which was exactly what it sounded like—a book that taught you about all kinds of animals. He loved reading through the descriptions and thinking about all the different creatures out there—someday, he would go to Australia and see quolls and echidnas and fairy penguins in person, or maybe he’d go to Madagascar and get to see a sifaka leaping through the trees or a creepy-cute aye-aye. Maybe he’d find an abandoned baby lemur and take care of it, and then they’d be friends and do animal presentations for kids, like the guy who came to school with a bearded dragon and a bamboo rat snake and let him hold the snake for a little while.

He didn’t really feel like reading right now, so he just looked at the pictures. He skipped the invertebrate section at the beginning—bugs and sea creatures were interesting, but they were kinda creepy too, and he didn’t feel like looking at them now. He went right to the mammals, laughed a little at the jerboa with its long, skinny legs, then flipped to the page about all kinds of cats. Lions, leopards, and tigers were cool, but he liked the weirder ones best—the long-legged serval, the caracal and lynx with the funny tufts on their ears, the tiny-but-deadly black-footed cat.

“Hey.”

Liam looked up. There was nobody there.

“Hey. Food.”

This was weird. He never heard anybody talking that clearly, even when Mom spoke right next to his hearing aids. He waited for a second, then whipped around as fast as he could to catch anybody hiding behind him.

Still nobody.

Katsuki jumped up on the bed next to him, and he reached out to pet her and let her rub her face against his hand.

“Food. Hungry.”

Liam scowled. It felt like someone was messing with him, but he couldn’t figure out how. He absently scratched behind Katsuki’s ears while he looked all around the room for the source of the voice.

“Mmm, feel nice.”

Okay, this was really weird. He looked down at Katsuki, who’d flopped on her side on top of some worksheets and was clearly waiting for more pets.

It kinda seemed like the cat was talking to him.

He reached out and stroked Katsuki’s fur, all black with a little tuft of white on her chest, and formed words in his mind. He spelled them out carefully, like he was writing a thank-you note and wanted to use his best handwriting.

“Like this?” he asked.

“Yes. Mmm.” came the reply.

Okay. Huh. He tried again.

“Are you hungry?”

“Yes. Food.”

The word “food” felt less like a word and more like a feeling getting pushed into his head—half a memory of being hungry after a long day, and half a craving for wet, mushy, fishy goop. Ew.

Liam thought Mom might have packed some cat food in the big suitcase. He tipped it on its back and unzipped it, and sure enough, once he dug through all the clothes and random stuff, he found a big ziplock baggie with half a bag of dry cat food in it. He didn’t have a bowl, so he tipped a little pile of kibble out onto the rug—as he did it, he realized he might get in trouble for messing up the carpet, but it was too late.

Katsuki jumped off the bed and dug in.

“You can understand me?” Liam asked.

“Eating now.”

Well, Mom always said he shouldn’t bother Katsuki while she was eating. He sat on the floor beside her and watched her munch on the kibble, thinking about what he wanted to ask next.

People could talk to their pets in, like, cartoons and movies and stuff all the time, but Liam had never heard of it happening in the real world. Maybe they could sometimes, and he’d just never known? He’d read about people who had a special bond with an animal, and he’d thought that just meant they loved each other a lot and learned about each other through body language and stuff, but maybe they could actually talk in each other’s heads.

Did that mean he and Katsuki had a special bond? That would be really cool!

Katsuki finished her kibble and looked up at Liam.

“Where is can opener?”

“Can opener? I think we left it at home.”

Liam frowned—something wasn’t matching up. When Katsuki said “can opener,” she didn’t mean the kitchen tool. He wrote out another question in his head, trying to understand.

“What is can opener?”

Katsuki sent back a picture—huge slippers, massive legs in leggings leading up to a humongous body that towered over her. Sometimes smells that tickled her nose—too-strong fake flower smells—but mostly nice ones, the smell of their home, food, and the family. This was the one who gave the good food that came in cans, who cleaned up gross things.

“Oh my god are you talking about Mom?!” Liam laughed.

“The one who opens cans. Gives food. Cares for us.”

“Yeah, that’s Mom,” he replied with a grin.

“Where? Can opener food is better.”

“She’ll be back soon. She’s doing…” his mind ended that sentence with more of a feeling than a word, one that meant “big, confusing things I don’t understand.”

“Oh,” Katsuki replied simply, not seeming to care what those big confusing things were. For some reason, Liam found that kinda comforting.

He spent a while asking Katsuki questions. She didn’t understand a lot of it, and if she didn’t understand, she didn’t care—there was so much stuff from Liam’s life that she replied to with what felt like a big shrug. One thing was clear, though: the cat didn’t like this new room very much. It didn’t smell right, and some other animal had been in there recently.

“Dog,” Katsuki explained with what felt like a sneer. She started rubbing her face against the leg of the bed Liam had claimed.

“Why do you do that?” he asks.

“Smells like mine,” the cat replied.

“Can I help?”

“Face not work,” Katsuki replied, almost like she felt sorry for him and his defective face. “My job.”

Liam frowned. He didn’t like being told he couldn’t do something, and he really didn’t like people feeling sorry for him. He thought for a minute, then took off his shirt. He’d kept his jacket on for a while in the heated building, so it was kind of sweaty.

He went to the next bed leg and started rubbing the shirt on it.

“How’s this?” he asked.

The reply Katsuki sent back seemed almost impressed.

“Good.”

A few minutes later, Liam noticed the door open in the corner of his eye. He looked up to see Mom in the doorway, along with two of the shelter workers. He jumped to his feet, too excited to care that he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

<Mom!> he signed, big grin on his face, arms flailing in excitement. <Guess what? Katsuki started talking to me!>

For some reason, Mom didn’t seem too happy.