Lucky...

The Tourist Nest >>> · · I'm a school janitor. Last Friday I found a cat locked in a locker. School's been closed for summer for three weeks. She'd been in there since the last day of school. Locker 142. Bottom row. Someone shut their cat in a school locker and went on summer vacation. She was alive. Barely. She weighed four pounds. She'd been drinking condensation dripping down the inside of the metal. She'd been eating paper. There were chewed-up notebook pages all over the bottom of the locker. Three weeks in a metal box in a dark hallway in July. She was looking at me when I opened it. She didn't meow. She just looked at me. I've mopped that hallway a hundred times this summer. The locker was ten feet from where I mop every night. She was ten feet from me every single night for three weeks and I didn't know. I'm a night janitor at a middle school in a suburb outside of Memphis. I've been here eleven years. During the summer I clean the building three nights a week. Floors, bathrooms, trash. The building is empty. Just me and the echo. Last Friday I was mopping the seventh-grade hallway. Same hallway I've mopped every shift since school ended June 6th. I walked past the lockers like I always do. I heard a sound. So faint I almost missed it. A small tap. Metal on metal. Coming from inside a locker. I stopped. I listened. Nothing. I started mopping again. I heard it again. A light scratch. I put my mop down and got close to the lockers. Bottom row. Locker 142. I pressed my ear against the metal. Something was alive inside. I got the master key from the office. I came back. I opened locker 142. A cat. Small. Grey. Lying on her side on a pile of shredded notebook paper at the bottom of the locker. She lifted her head and looked at me. She didn't meow. She didn't have the energy. She was skeletal. I could see every rib. Her eyes were sunken. Her fur was falling out in patches. She was lying in her own waste. The inside of the locker was covered in scratch marks — deep grooves in the metal paint from weeks of clawing. Her claws were worn to nothing. The locker smelled like something I don't want to describe. I pulled her out. She weighed almost nothing. I held her in one hand. I called the emergency vet twenty minutes away. They said bring her now. The vet said she weighed just over four pounds. A healthy cat her size should weigh nine or ten. She was severely dehydrated but not dead from it. The vet was confused about how she'd survived three weeks without water. Then I told her about the condensation. The building's AC runs on a reduced cycle during summer. It keeps the building around 78 degrees but the metal lockers in the interior hallway get cooler at night. Condensation forms on the inside of the metal doors. Small droplets. Barely anything. She'd been licking the inside of the locker door. The vet went quiet for a second. Then she said "That's how she's alive." The paper. The shredded notebook pages in the bottom of the locker. The vet said she'd been eating them. Not for nutrition. Cats can't digest paper. But chewing and swallowing gave her stomach something to work on. Kept the hunger signals at bay just enough. She said she'd seen feral cats eat grass and cardboard in desperation but never paper in a sealed space for this long. Three weeks. Twenty-one days. In a metal box eighteen inches wide in a dark hallway with no light, no food, no water except what formed on the metal walls. I keep thinking about the math. School ended June 6th. I started my summer cleaning shifts June 9th. I've mopped that hallway nine times since then. Nine times I walked past locker 142 with a mop and headphones and didn't hear a thing. She was ten feet from me. Every shift. For three weeks. The vet stabilized her on fluids. She's eating soft food now. She's gained a pound in five days. She's going to make it. The vet says she'll fully recover. She says it's one of the worst cases of confinement she's seen and one of the best outcomes. I don't know who did it. Nobody's come forward. The school is reviewing security footage from the last day but the cameras in that hallway haven't worked since April. The locker was assigned to a seventh grader. The school contacted the family. They said they don't own a cat. Someone brought a cat to school on the last day, put it in a locker, closed it, and left for the summer. I'm not going to say what I think about that person because my daughter reads my posts and I'm trying to set an example. I took the cat home. The vet bills so far are $340. I make $16 an hour. My wife looked at the bill and looked at the cat and said "She lived in a locker for three weeks. She's earned the $340." I named her Locker. My daughter says that's a terrible name. She wants to call her Lucky. I said there's nothing lucky about what happened to this cat. She said "She's lucky you finally heard her." She's right. I almost didn't. Nine shifts. Nine times I mopped past her. Whatever sound she made on that ninth night that I finally heard — a paw against the metal, a shift of weight, whatever was left in her — it was enough. One sound. After three weeks of silence. She's on my daughter's bed right now. Eating and sleeping and eating again. Getting fat. Getting safe. Locker 142 is open now. I leave it open on every shift. I can't close it. I know that's irrational. I know it's just a locker. But I mop past it three times a week and I leave it open and nobody's asked me why because I think they already know.