I don’t know when exactly I lost Cat Burger. What I do know is this:
- At 10:28 am on Wednesday, March 27th, 2024, I hurriedly boarded the Yuttle, swearing that I would never be late to my Gen Chem lecture ever again.
- Catching my breath, I hugged my backpack in my lap, reaching for the main pocket zipper to fiddle with the little keychain that dangled from it.
- I grasped at nothing but air.
Two weeks earlier, Cat Burger had tumbled into my life, encased in a little translucent box, out from a random vending machine in the back of the Japanese grocery store in Coolidge Corner.
“Do you want it?” I asked, opening the box and cradling the flat piece of rubbery plastic. A very two-dimensional white and brown cat, blanketed by a green piece of lettuce and nestled between two burger buns, stared blankly up at me.
“Let’s see what else we get,” Joyce replied, slipping in more of the tokens she had bought with the $10 bill in her purse. She adjusted her glasses as the machine made a whooshing noise. Another keychain emerged, this time depicting an orange cat inside of what resembled a chicken sandwich. “I think I’ll take this one!”
- Frantic, I opened GroupMe, tapped on the Trumbull ’27 group chat, and typed, “I lost a cat burger (literally a cat inside a burger) keychain on my way from the 5th floor of Bingham to the shuttle (College/Wall N)—lmk if you happen to see it!”
I used to tell people that Joyce and I grew up together. Even though she and I are first cousins, I always call her jie jie, older sister. As a kid, I spent a lot of time at my aunt and uncle’s house. Joyce would let me play on the rug in her room, and she would show me how to draw. She would let me borrow her things: her Little Mermaid beach towel, countless Hello Kitty hair ties, and the entire Harry Potter series, except for The Deathly Hallows, which she had bought in hardback.
At some point, I realized that it would be more accurate to say that I grew up with Joyce around. The year I graduated from high school was also the year Joyce graduated from med school. This fact had only really sunk in that May, when she had pulled out her Nikon and her tripod and suggested a joint graduation photoshoot. Even though she had gone to Chicago for med school, the pandemic had meant that I wasn’t seeing her much then anyways. In my head, we were still both in Massachusetts the entire time, living in parallel.
- After my classes were over for the day, I walked from Science Hill back down to Old Campus, scouring the path I’d taken in the morning.
“Update: I walked the whole way back and can’t find Cat Burger :(”
The summer before we left for college, my best friend from high school dragged me to the Warby Parker in the Burlington Mall, where he was picking up his glasses. Joyce and I used to go to the mall with my aunt, where we would window shop at the Lego store and feast on mediocre teriyaki chicken from the food court. The Lego store is still there these days; the chicken place is not.
I marveled at the towering rows of glasses and grimaced at the price tags.
“Maybe this is your sign!” my friend joked. “Then you won’t have to squint in lecture.”
I gingerly plucked a pair of green, oval-shaped frames from the tallest shelf I could reach.
“Well, what do you think? Does it feel like you?”
I looked at myself in the mirror and laughed a little awkwardly.
“I look like my cousin,” I said. “I think I look like Joyce.”
- I took the elevator up to the fifth floor of Bingham and shuffled into my suite.
I stood in front of the full-length mirror. I felt like I was about to cry.
Because I mostly saw her at my aunt and uncle’s as a kid, I barely spoke in English with Joyce until my senior year in high school. It was then that I realized that—due to my waning Mandarin fluency and the fact that we never spent time together without other family members around—my knowledge of her vaguely fits into a “likes and dislikes” format, as follows:
Likes: cats; Harry Potter (views on J.K. Rowling unknown); sewing (people up); baking; drawing; photography; cute socks; noodles; microwave popcorn; Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, in which Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams pretend to be from a small town in Iceland.
Dislikes: small children; indecisiveness; patients who forget to fast before a colonoscopy; patients who ask if she and the other East Asian doctor she works with are siblings.
I wish I knew more of the stories behind these things. I wish I could construct categories beyond “likes” and “dislikes.” At the very least, I wish I had more things I could add definitively to each list.
It would feel weird to ask Joyce directly. But it’s also strange that it would feel weird to ask, after knowing her all this time.
- At 4:37 pm, two notifications popped up on my phone screen.
“Hey, by any chance is this what you were looking for?”
Below was a photo of Cat Burger, a little scuffed up but staring blankly as ever.