A Cat Named Spot

When she was a little girl, Kate found a fox that had been caught and torn into by the neighbor’s dogs. The fox was young still, hadn’t yet seen a coat change, and its cries sounded like a human baby’s. Its leg had been snapped between the dogs’ jaws, its belly punctured and bleeding sluggishly. Kate curled the creature against her chest and carried it home where she nursed it in the bathtub. When it could walk and eat on its own again, she carried it back to the treeline and watched it scamper off into the trees.

At twenty, Kate had long since left those woods and the wheat and soybean farms behind. It was the early autumn of 1984; the air was hot and wet and the future felt swollen and stretched out before her. Kate shared a large three-story house with ten other girls in a suburb just ten minutes from campus. Beta Kappa Tau — or Bon Appetit, as twelve matching t-shirts proudly proclaimed — was the problem child of western Michigan’s Greek community. They were a young chapter and less respected than their alumni siblings. Their house, affectionately and aptly nicknamed The Sty, had been donated by a founding member when she retired to save the whooping cranes on the Gulf of Mexico. This meant that, since they didn’t live on Greek Row, Bon Appetit’s costs were less than half of what the university would’ve liked. This in turn made their sorority status shaky at best, taped together by the whims of the archaic reptiles grinding their teeth on the board of directors.

It also meant that, unlike the other sororities, they could keep as much alcohol on the…