It started with Mr. Whiskers. Not because he did anything dramatic. He didn’t hiss, puff up, or launch himself across the room like he’d seen a ghost. He simply walked away from Pandora. That might not sound particularly unusual, except Mr. Whiskers normally treated Pandora like she was the center of his universe. If she sat on the couch, he’d be in her lap before she had a chance to get comfortable. If she wandered into the kitchen, he’d trail behind her in the hope that gravity might accidentally deliver a snack. Whenever she opened her laptop, he’d immediately decide it was the perfect place for a nap. So when Pandora came home from class one afternoon, smiled at him, reached down to scratch behind his ears, and he calmly stood up before strolling into John Mercer’s room without so much as a backward glance, I noticed.
The next day he did exactly the same thing. Then he repeated it the day after that. I tried telling myself there was nothing strange about it because, honestly, cats are mysterious creatures. They spend half the day asleep, the other half pretending they’re royalty, and every now and then they stare at an empty corner of the room just to remind you that you’ll never fully understand them. Mr. Whiskers had certainly done stranger things before. This was the same cat who once spent nearly an hour watching a ceiling fan like it was about to confess to a crime. Still, this felt… different.
A few days later I ran into Mrs. Jenkins while checking the mailbox. She smiled and asked how Pandora was doing before mentioning that she’d looked awfully tired lately. “Poor dear,” she said. “She must be working herself too hard.”
That certainly tracked with what I’d been seeing. Pandora’s schoolwork had practically taken over the apartment. Books covered the dining table, handwritten notes seemed to multiply overnight, and more than once I’d wandered into the kitchen for a midnight snack only to find her still typing away on her laptop while everyone else was asleep. There wasn’t anything mysterious about that. Finals had a habit of turning perfectly normal people into caffeine-powered zombies.
John Mercer confirmed it later that evening without realizing he’d accidentally given my imagination another piece of completely useless evidence.
“I keep telling her she needs to get more sleep,” he said while pouring himself a cup of coffee. “She’s been pulling all-nighters for over a week.”
A normal person would have heard that and thought, Pandora really needs some rest.
Unfortunately, my imagination isn’t a normal person.
Instead, it quietly whispered, Interesting… everyone seems to know she’s exhausted.
Even as the thought crossed my mind, I knew how ridiculous it sounded. Mrs. Jenkins noticed because she was an observant neighbor. John noticed because we all lived together. I noticed because Pandora was my girlfriend. Naturally we’d all arrive at the same conclusion.
There wasn’t a mystery.
There wasn’t even a clue.
And yet…
Every ordinary little detail suddenly started feeling connected. Pandora rubbed her eyes after another late night of studying. John reminded her to take a break every now and then. Mr. Whiskers politely excused himself whenever she came home. Separately, those things meant absolutely nothing. Together, my imagination insisted they were pieces of a puzzle that somehow only I had noticed. Somewhere deep inside my head, a tiny detective wearing a wrinkled trench coat had already covered an imaginary bulletin board with photographs connected by bright red string while the rational part of my brain stood nearby asking if maybe we should all settle down.
By Friday I’d developed enough theories to embarrass myself if I’d ever admitted them out loud. Maybe cats could sense stress. Maybe Pandora smelled different after spending all day on campus. Maybe Mr. Whiskers had suddenly become offended by college textbooks. At one point I even wondered if cats could somehow detect emotional exhaustion the way dogs could supposedly sense certain illnesses. I had absolutely no evidence to support any of this, but that didn’t stop my brain from enthusiastically exploring every ridiculous possibility it could invent.
Eventually curiosity got the better of me.
“Pandora,” I asked one evening as casually as I could manage, “can I ask you something that’s probably going to sound strange?”
She looked up from her laptop and smiled.
“When you start a sentence like that, the answer is always yes.”
“I’ve noticed Mr. Whiskers keeps walking away whenever you come home.”
She blinked once.
Then she laughed.
“Oh.”
“‘Oh?’”
“I bought a new hand lotion last week.”
I waited.
“It has citrus oil in it.”
Before I could process why that mattered, John looked up from the living room chair and chuckled.
“Cats usually hate citrus.”
Pandora looked down at her hands. “I never even thought about that.”
She disappeared into the bathroom, washed the lotion off, and came back a few minutes later. Mr. Whiskers looked up from across the room, sniffed the air for a second, then trotted straight over, jumped into her lap, curled into a ball, and immediately began purring loud enough to rattle the couch cushions.
Just like that, an entire week’s worth of careful observation, increasingly ridiculous theories, and imaginary detective work evaporated because of a bottle of hand lotion.
I watched Mr. Whiskers happily kneading Pandora’s sweater and slowly nodded to myself.
“So…”
“So?” Pandora asked, already trying not to laugh.
“It really was the lotion.”
“It really was the lotion.”
“I knew it couldn’t have been psychic cat powers.”
She smiled.
“I never thought you actually believed that.”
“I didn’t.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“…Entirely.”
Mr. Whiskers opened one eye, looked directly at me for a long moment, then closed it again with the unmistakable expression of someone who had just enjoyed watching another human make life far more complicated than it needed to be.
Honestly…
I think he knew exactly what he was doing.