And some nights, you ended up sitting in your car in a Wendy’s parking lot, feeding chicken nuggets to a cat that sort of used to be yours but now definitely was yours because your ex-roommate Benny called from his shiny new apartment across Cleveland and said, “If you want it, you can have the cat” because the cat peed on his girlfriend’s favorite coat and that was the end of that.

Last year, when you lived together, just two roommates brought together by a Facebook group, Benny bought the cat from the snaggle-toothed lady on the first floor without asking you. You came home to Benny in his boxers, sprinkling treats onto the floor like rain. Benny said he intended to “spoil the fuck out of him,” but the little grey cat hid under the couch, and refused to  come out. Benny went into his room to smoke out his open window and shut the door behind him.

No one had ever spoiled the fuck out of you.At night during that year, you’d call your parents because there wasn’t much else to do, and the cat yowled at your door, scratched at the wood. Your parents heard him all the way in Oklahoma City, the place you’d left because you’d thought a job at a no-name non-profit in Cleveland would be the key to the rest of your life.

“Does the cat ever stop?” your dad asked.

“Of course,” you said because you didn’t want to add this cat to your parents’ growing list of concerns, which already included your terrible health insurance and friendlessness.

The cat cried into the single-digit hours of the morning. Benny shut him out in the hall, and you kept him out of your bedroom because of the calla lilies on your windowsill. Benny liked to roughhouse with the cat, and when the cat bit back, Benny would dump a glass of water on him. One night, you came home late from work and heard the cat crying behind the shut door of the boiler room. You opened it, and he wandered out, rubbing himself against your slacks. Benny stuck his head out of his bedroom and said, “I was teaching him a lesson.”

After that morning, whenever Benny was out of the apartment, you were on the couch with the cat. Benny was out often because he had a group of friends that you couldn’t stand that liked a nearby smokers’ bar that you hated. The cat was better company even though he liked to nip your ankles and wrists for fun. You took videos of him playing with the string toy you bought for four dollars at Target. You sent them to your family and friends back in Oklahoma, and your grandma texted you: “What a cat!” followed by the little white and orange cat emoji even though there was a gray cat emoji right next to it. Together, the cat and you lounged, lunched, lived.

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On Halloween, Benny told you that he didn’t want to renew the lease because he wanted to live with his new girlfriend, a pleasant and quiet woman he wasn’t good enough for. The apartment was too expensive for you to live alone and the Facebook group had gone defunct, so you moved yourself into a tiny studio with a major interstate for a backyard. It was a box of an apartment, and when tractor-trailers drove too fast in the lane closest to the building, your dishes shook in the kitchen cabinets.

Two weeks after you and Benny went your separate ways, he called about the cat. You dumped your orange calla lilies in the trash, closed your toilet lid, and shoved your plastic bags from the day’s grocery trip under the sink.

Forty minutes later, you were at his door. The two of you just said, “Hey.” You didn’t hug because you’ve never hugged.

The cat didn’t recognize you. He sat on the couch, in a spot covered with shed hair, and stared.

“Seventy-five bucks for everything,” Benny said.

You paid up. Seventy-five dollars was a small price to pay for a litterbox, a half-empty bag of cat food, three dusty toys, and something to come home to. Benny lost the carrier in the move, so after you loaded up your trunk, you carried the cat to the car the way you used to, bouncing him against your chest like a little baby.

In the car, you took off your coat, put it down on the passenger seat, and situated the cat on top. You suspected he might pee on it, but you didn’t care. Even as you sat in the Wendy’s parking lot, chewing on a fry and slurping down a Frosty, he hadn’t peed yet. He just gnawed on a chicken nugget until he was done. Then, he meowed for more.

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Emmy Ritchey is a writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in The Baltimore Review and Identity Theory, among other places. She is a fiction editor for Identity Theory and a fiction reader for The Maine Review. She holds an MFA from Hollins University and currently lives in Tuscaloosa, where she is an M.A. student in the University of Alabama’s Department of English. You can find her on Twitter @emmy_ritchey.