The Turning Season Read Online Free PDF

She takes a sip and sighs with satisfaction. “Here we go.”
    *   *   *
    O ver the next forty-eight hours, Celeste and Alonzo watch about ten movies and eat about a hundred pounds of food. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but she
does
drive into town Sunday evening to load up on more junk, and comes back with three pizzas and a bucket of fried chicken. I don’t know why she isn’t fat. Well, certainly this weekend she’s been working off the calories, but I think she eats like this all the time, and I don’t think she hits the gym more than once or twice a week. It’s a mystery.
    Alonzo, of course, could stand to gain a little weight, so I don’t think two days of abysmally bad nutrition will hurt him. Though I also don’t think the few apples and salads Celeste requires him to eat will really negate the fat, salt, cholesterol, and
crap
he’s put in his body under her supervision.
    Monday afternoon I wake up from a catnap to find myself human, lying on my side on a tufted rug on the living room floor. I’m naked. I’m also cold and a little stiff, but mostly I’m really,
really
happy to be back in my own body. I jump up, grab a decorative blanket to wrap around myself in case I run into Alonzo, and hurry to the kitchen to grab a bagel, because transformation always leaves me ravenous. Then I head to my bedroom, which takes up about a third of the second story. I’ve made the big space more manageable by dividing it into zones. A smallish section is a sitting area composed of two chairs and a small table. A larger section holds the bed, an armoire, and a couple of dressers. There are so many windows that the room is filled with light if the sun is anywhere to be seen, and the view is open and calming—acres of uncultivated land dotted with trees and waving with tall prairie grasses.
    Used to be the room Janet shared with Cooper, her boyfriend. After they died, it was a year before I could bring myself to move into it. But it’s such a comfortable, welcoming place that I couldn’t let it go to waste. In this room, I never feel trapped or suffocated. I don’t feel like my options have narrowed down so much that there’s only one place in the world I can live and be safe. Or, I still feel that way, but I don’t mind so much.
    My feline alter ego was a pretty finicky creature, but I still feel a need to rinse off the residue of my last incarnation, so I take a shower and wash my hair, reveling in the feel of hot water on my bare skin. Once I step out of the shower into the steaming bathroom, I apply extra moisturizer, scented body cream, just a few touches of makeup. Human luxuries. I don’t bother trying to style my shoulder-length hair, which is a dense, heavy brown that takes three hours to dry on its own; I just pull it back into a ponytail. A red sweater, black jeans, tennis shoes, and I am once again my familiar human self.
    I hunt down Celeste and Alonzo and find them playing a game of horse at the battered old basketball hoop. It’s stuck in the ground in front of what used to be a patio and is now a broken and crumbled slab of concrete; clumps of grass and weeds have pushed up between the cracks, and they cause the ball to take odd hops when it bounces against them.
    At first, neither one sees me, and I watch them take a few shots. From what I can tell, both players are stuck at
O
, and it’s not because either is politely holding back so the other person won’t feel bad about missing a bucket. Even when she’s facing off against a teenager, Celeste has a competitive streak, and Alonzo can’t bring himself to deliberately miss a shot. He’s a decent basketball player, and one of the few group activities he’ll participate in is a pickup game in his neighborhood. He’s good enough that the other players always welcome him—good enough that I think he’d get better with a little coaching.