support important to her. Rosie complimented Sarah frequently and effusively on her academic performance, though it never seemed to sink in. Rosie concluded that Sarah found comfort in her unhappiness. “I don’t think she knows any other way to be,” she told Jerry. “She needs to be complaining or depressed about something.”
After a few months, Rosie and Jerry had developed their own problems; they barely eked out C averages for the first semester, and their grades went downhill from there. Like many of the freshmen who chose Tulane for its reputation as a party school, they lacked the discipline to do the necessary work to succeed. By March, they both knew that returning to Tulane next year was not in the cards, but their future was uncertain. Would they live together in Cleveland or Connecticut? They both wanted to resurrect their academic careers, but how could they afford to do so? There’d be no support from their parents after their miserable grades. Could they make it financially if they both worked and went to school? Maybe they should both go home to their families, work, save some money, and then reunite in another year. As much as they discussed the options, they had no clear path forward, and the uncertainty of their future put a strain on their relationship. And most significantly for Jerry, the novelty of having sex whenever he wanted was wearing off. He desired someone different — someone black, skinny, chubby, or whatever. He wanted variation. He wanted to explore. But having put on twenty pounds, he didn’t have the same confidence in himself he had when he first arrived on campus. And who would want to go out with a guy who was flunking out?
••••
Early on Easter Sunday morning, Sarah came to Rosie’s room in tears. Francisco, one of her cats, was seriously ill. “He stopped eating and peeing last night,” Sarah said to Rosie while wiping her eyes. “Then he began howling this morning. I need to get him to an animal hospital quickly. This kind of thing is serious. I think his urethra is blocked.” Sarah was often in a crisis mode, especially when it came to school work, but never had she been this upset.
“I know where a twenty-four seven animal hospital is,” Jerry said, sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes. “It’s right by the liquor store the guys on my hall go to. Maybe a fifteen-minute walk from campus. Get the cat and I’ll meet you in the lobby and we’ll go.”
“OK. I’ll put him in the carrier and meet you downstairs,” Sarah said. “I really appreciate it, Jerry. Really.”
After Sarah left, he jumped out of bed, put on his jeans and t-shirt, and began brushing his teeth at the sink. “It’s about time I did something productive,” he said with a mouthful of toothpaste foam. “I’ve been with security for the whole damn year, and except for calling in a few plastered frat boys, I haven’t done a damn thing.”
When Jerry reached the bottom of the stairs and saw Sarah in the lobby holding the carrier, he realized he had forgotten his cigarettes. “Fuck,” he muttered to himself, but decided not to go back to get them. There was no time to waste.
Jerry and Sarah stepped out of the dorm just as the sun rose. The campus was desolate, because most of the students were on spring break. The morning was cool and cloudless, unusual weather for New Orleans in early April. Sarah handed him the cat carrier. To Jerry, Francisco’s howls sounded horrific, but Sarah said that he always got upset when transported in the carrier, so it might not be as bad as it sounded. But then again she wasn’t sure.
Walking as fast as they could toward the pet hospital, they didn’t say much to each other — focusing rather on the task at hand. Jerry felt a sense of responsibility and purpose he hadn’t felt in a long time, if ever. For the first time, he was trying to save a life. He didn’t want this cat dying on his watch. He tried his best to keep the carrier as steady as possible, to keep Francisco comfortable.
During their mile journey, they saw virtually no one as they passed through two neighborhoods — the first of mansions and spacious, finely manicured lawns, and the other of shacks made of loose and peeling wood boards. Whenever he went through these sections of town, he felt like he was in some third-world country. The juxtaposition of wealth and poverty unsettled him. How could these communities exist right next to each other? This wasn’t middle-class Cleveland suburbia.
As Jerry had hoped, the animal hospital was empty, so a vet tech, a young, blonde woman in green scrubs, took Francisco right away. Sarah went back with them while Jerry sat in the waiting area. The hospital looked like a typical doctor’s office, its walls painted light blue with a few requisite photos of its canine and feline patients. It smelled like it had just been cleaned, which relieved Jerry, because he didn’t have his inhaler. All that dog and cat dander could trigger his asthma and end up sending him to the human ER. Wouldn’t that be ironic?
Jerry was surprised how concerned and anxious he felt about the cat and Sarah. He wanted Francisco to be ok, not only for the cat’s sake, but for Sarah’s, as well. She loved her two short-haired black cats; they were like her children. Jerry had only seen them a couple of times through her open door. To him, they looked like two little panthers, prowling the dorm room. And even though Jerry’s transportation of Francisco had been the most interaction he’d had with either one of the cats, he was becoming attached to them.
When Sarah first met Jerry and Rosie, she told them how a few years earlier her family had taken in a stray female cat, which turned out to be pregnant, and Francisco and Gino were from that litter. They became Sarah’s, and she couldn’t stand to be separated from them, even for a few hours in the evening. Jerry suspected that the dorm’s resident advisor knew Sarah had cats, which was a major violation of the student housing code, but let it go knowing that Sarah would likely have a conniption without them.
After about fifteen minutes of waiting, Sarah walked out of the examining room by herself. She was sniffling, her eyes red and swollen. She looked overwhelmed. Jerry got up out his chair and walked toward her, but she couldn’t make eye contact with him. “The vet said they were going to try a procedure to unblock his urethra and give him antibiotics. He said there were no guarantees, but he was hopeful. He said it was a good thing we got him in here as quickly as we did.”
“Well, I guess overall that’s good news,” Jerry said as he put his hand on her arm. A few seconds later, Sarah broke down. Jerry hugged her as she sobbed on his shoulder. “He’ll be ok, he’ll be ok,” he said, trying to be reassuring. Then he walked over to the check-in desk and pulled a few tissues from a dispenser and handed them to her. As she wiped her eyes, the vet tech came out and told them that the doctor suggested they go home and relax, that he’d call in a few hours with an update. “He’s in good hands,” the young woman said confidently.
As they walked back to campus, the city came to life. They passed several black families heading to church. The women wore funky, broad-rimmed hats topped with arrangements of feathers and flowers. The children were in suits and dresses of yellow, pink, lavender, and powder blue, which shone brightly in the morning sun. Some of the little girls carried straw baskets filled with bunnies and painted eggs in artificial grass. For Jerry, it was surreal to see people so beautiful and well-dressed living in such impoverished conditions. Back in Cleveland Heights, the faithful were Orthodox Jews who uniformly wore heavy black attire — the men and boys with fedoras and yarmulkes on their heads — when they walked to Friday night and Saturday morning Sabbath services.
“So do you celebrate Easter like that back home?” Jerry asked Sarah, trying to make light conversation to take her mind off of Francisco.
“Not really,” Sarah answered with a quick half-smile. “My mom comes from a Buddhist family, and my dad, well, he doesn’t practice anything. Well, except golf.”
Jerry chuckled. “So are you headed back to San Francisco after the semester ends?”
“Yeah. And I’m not coming back to Tulane next
