by Z.Z. Boone
On my sixteenth birthday, my parents gave me a dog I didn’t want. Not that I had anything against dogs, but I’ve rather had a laptop or a new phone. Something useful.
It was early morning, early June, summer vacation just kicking off. My father and I were doing breakfast—he was pouring the Honey Nut Cheerios, I was digging out the spoons—when my mother’s Volvo pulled into the driveway just outside the kitchen window. This was unusual. She generally worked until around two on Saturday, and here it was just after ten.
“Gee,” Dad said. “I wonder why your mother is back.” But he said it in that flat, fake way that made it evident he was in on the deal.
“Look what I have,” Mom said as soon as she stepped into the kitchen, and she held her hands out like she was passing a roast. The thing was tan and white and smaller than a football. A guinea pig, I thought. Something someone had dumped off at Pet Village Supply where she worked.
“I think he’s looking for the birthday boy.”
I held the thing while it squirmed and gurgled and chewed my fingers.
“He’s a rescue,” Mom said. “A chihuahua-terrier mix. Seven months old. All he needs is a ‘forever home.’”
“Bundle of responsibility,” my dad said. “Little rascal there is gonna be totally dependent on you.”
“Are you happy?” my mother asked.
Happy isn’t the word, I wanted to say, but I just lowered the dog to the floor where it immediately began to urinate.
“You should call him ‘PeePee,’” my dad joked, and I guess that was as good a name as any because it stuck.
What I really wanted was the new girl. Her family—the MacAvoys—had moved four doors down a few weeks ago, and I found out from my busybody mom that she’d be joining me in eleventh grade once school started. I’d watched her walk out to the curb and collect the mail a few times, and that was all it took. She was cute. Petite. I had no doubt guys would be gunning for her the second she walked through the doors of Pleasant View High. I just hoped I had the advantage of time.
My mother had also brought home a heavy wire crate that she set up next to my bed, and it only took that first night for me to realize why PeePee had been abandoned. PeePee yipped and cried and banged against his cage like a derelict in a drunk tank. Earlier, he ran through the house frantically, pissed against a standing lamp, and snapped at anyone who tried to stop him.
“Feisty,” my dad had said.
“Just needs a little TLC,” my mother said, but I noticed she was avoiding the thing like it was a rat cornered in a closet.
Around 2:00 AM, when the howling started, I picked up the crate and headed down the hall toward the furthest room in the house. I stopped halfway to listen.
“I told you, Milly,” my dad was saying. “He doesn’t want a dog.”
“Well, I don’t want a second chin. That’s life.”
This wasn’t the first time I heard arguing from their bedroom, and even PeePee went silent.
“Besides,” Mom said, “the boy doesn’t have a single friend. At least now he’ll have a companion.”
This had been my mother’s mission ever since I started high school. She believed every teenage boy needed a friend, and she was going to push until I had one.
“And what happens in September when school starts?”
“Jeez,” my mother said. “I don’t know. Maybe I should check my crystal ball.”
I shuffled past their room and into the den where I put PeePee. I wasn’t religious, but I was hoping for a miracle where the dog escaped from its crate, located an open window, and made a return trip to the rescue center.
Back in bed I quickly fell asleep, but sometime around sunrise I felt the edge of my mattress sag. I opened one eye and saw Dad. He had on blue striped boxer shorts and a t-shirt that said Body by Burger King.
“I’m gonna guess you’re not a happy camper,” he said.
I sat up and shrugged.
“Let’s give it a week or two,” he said. “If you still don’t like the dog, we’ll work something out.” He stood up, a fat man on very skinny legs. “Let me jump in the shower and squirt off.”
I nodded. A glimmer of hope.
Mom and Dad were back to playing their roles at breakfast.
“Keep feeding me like this,” my father said as my mother put another waffle on his plate, “and I’ll be able to roll to work.”
“That’ll give me more of you to love,” my mom said.
It was as much as I could take. “I’m going to walk the dog,” I said.
We hadn’t gone far when PeePee decided to drop a smoldering load on the grass between the curb and sidewalk in front of the MacAvoy house. He was in mid-squeeze when a blue SUV pulled into the driveway and the entire family—a half-dozen of them—poured out.
“Hope you’re planning to pick that up, sonny-boy!” the dad called.
I waved the black plastic bag like a flag of surrender and watched the family file up the side porch.
“Oh my God!” I heard a voice say. “Is that your puppy?”
My back was to her as I tied off my sack of dogshit, but we were face-to-face soon enough.
“Okay if I pet him?” the new girl asked.
I warned her that he liked to bite, but she leaned over and rubbed him behind the ears, and the dog swooned.
“What’s this baby’s name?”
“King,” I said.
The new girl straightened up and asked if she could walk with us. I told her sure. She took the leash from me, and PeePee strutted next to her like an entry at the American Kennel Club.
“He likes you,” I said.
“I’m a very likable person.”
We walked through Bald Eagle Park, and when PeePee took another dump, the new girl took out a tissue and scooped it up like mashed turnips on Thanksgiving. She dropped it in a trash can but never stopped yakking. I learned she had ten-year-old twin brothers, a sister starting college, a stay-at-home mom, and a dad who moved them all here so he could teach phys ed at the community college. She told me I was only the second person our age she’d met since they arrived. The first was Dean Crocker who was washing his Mustang convertible over on Mallard Lane.
“He’s not exactly our age,” I said.
The fact was, even though Dean Crocker was also a rising junior at Pleasant View, he’d been left back so many times that he now had a valid driver’s license.
“Don’t you think he’s handsome?” she said. “And his hair is amazing? I could run barefoot through it.”
I had nothing against Dean Crocker. He kept to himself and didn’t bully although, God knows, he could have. Still, we were like opposing circles on a Venn diagram. I was one of the smallest kids at Pleasant View High, he was one of the largest. I was an A minus student, he had trouble finding his assigned classrooms. Tan and green-eyed, Dean tended to ignore the girls swarming around him. I was pale and my eyes, as described by my sixty-seven-year-old grandfather, looked like “two cigarette burns in a plastic tablecloth.”
The highest card in Dean’s deck, as already recognized by the new girl, was his hair. Copper-colored, curly, every strand knowing its place. Mr. Murrow, our art teacher, once compared it to the hair on Michelangelo’s David, but with a “better body.”
I decided I’d better make some sort of move.
“We have this dance at school every September. ‘Spring Into Fall.’ If you want, I could introduce you around.”
“That’s almost three months away,” she said. “I don’t like making long-term plans.”
“Hey,” I said. “I get it. I don’t like long-term plans either. Like who knows? The world could explode.”
We got back to her house and stopped at the side porch.
“I’m Liam.”
“Emma. Named after my great-great-grandmother. She came from Scotland with nothing but bagpipes and a change of underwear. For six months she stayed alive by eating crackers and drinking from a public water fountain.”
“That’s something,” I said.
“Anytime I’m not busy,” she said, “I’ll walk with you. Just come get me.” She handed me the leash, picked the dog up and kissed the top of its head. “You be a good boy, King.”
“His name is really PeePee.”
Emma placed him gently on the ground. “P.P.,” she smiled. “Perfect Pouchie.”
A second later she was gone. I looked down at PeePee who was staring back with his eyes bulging and his tongue hanging out.
“Asshole,” he seemed to be saying.
I took the dog out a few times a day, and Emma usually joined us on our after-dinner walks. I thought my mom would be happy I’d finally made a friend, but when I told her about Emma she just shook her head.
“It’s not the same,” she told me. “Guys need guy-friends.”
The streets in our neighborhood were all named after birds—we were unlucky enough to live at 69 Swallow Street—and I liked walking to the public park on Bald Eagle Lane. I’d wait for Emma in her dining room while she helped her mom with the dishes and the dad hit grounders to the twins in the backyard. The older sister, Annie, had gotten a summer job at the Grove Diner, and sometimes I’d see her in the flamingo pink waitress uniform, its fabric as tight as a stretch sock. She was sitting across from me in a white slip, a magnifying mirror open on the dining room table, working over her eyebrows with a tweezer. PeePee was on my lap chewing a rubber bone that squeaked like basketball sneakers on a gym floor.
I cleared my throat. “Emma says you’re starting college soon.”
“That’s the rumor.”
“At least you’ll be on your own.”
“Don’t tell anybody,” she said, “but I’m thinking of joining a religious cult.”
“Really?”
“Either that or submerging myself in wet cement.”
I smiled. “I think you’re playing with me.”
“Yeah, well boredom will do that.”
Pluck, pluck, pluck. Squeak, squeak, squeak.
“You and little sister doing any parallel parking yet?”
“Pardon?”
“A little waka-waka? Some boom-chicka-pow-pow?”
“We just walk the dog.”
“Yeah, well have faith. Worse-comes-to-worse you can always shave your head.”
“Why would I do that?”
Annie looked up. “Because, genius, women go for a shaved head the way men go for a nice set of norks.” She cradled her own breasts, I guess to illustrate. I heard a voice behind me. “Ready?”
It was Emma and I doubt General George Custer would have been any happier seeing the Marines land.
PeePee’s behavior at home didn’t improve. He nipped at pant cuffs and skirt hems, left unguarded shoes in shambles, and one time—alone for ten minutes—he chewed a hole the diameter of a sewer pipe through the back of my father’s recliner. My mom was growing more frustrated by the day. Especially with PeePee’s apparent indifference to housebreaking.
“It smells like shit alamode in here!” she’d say when she got in from work.
Outside, the dog was impossible to walk. He’d either pull me along, or turn and chew on the leash, or sit in the middle of the street until I picked him up and carried him under my arm like a woman’s purse.
Unless Emma came along. During those times, PeePee was an angel. Affectionate, obedient, anxious to please.
“He considers me the dominant male,” she once told me, and I wasn’t about to argue. “Do you think I’d look better with a smaller nose? My Aunt Janine says I’m gorgeous now, but with a smaller nose, I’d be magazine cover gorgeous. Except then my teeth might look big. That can happen. It’s like when you buy a new carpet and all of a sudden the furniture starts looking shabby…”
I let her keep talking. I loved listening to her. I could, I was certain, spend every hour of the day hearing her go on and on and on.
****
Then, around mid-July, a few things happened. The first was that my father began getting sick. Not much at first—some sneezing and nose blowing—but soon he started complaining about shortness of breath and not being able to sleep through the night. He said it was affecting his work performance as a customer service representative at Kohl’s, especially when his face got blotchy and the skin below his eyes turned blue.
I again asked Emma if she was interested in the ‘Spring Into Fall’ dance, and she told me six weeks was too early to make any kind of commitment. I remembered a class in earth science where Ms. Ginsberg talked about a constant flow of water eventually wearing its way through a block of granite, and I refused to be discouraged.
Final thing. Dean Crocker.
It was shortly before dinner. I was walking PeePee back from CVS with the NyQuil my dad had sent me for when Dean pulled up in his Mustang, top down.
“Yo, Shrimpy!” he yelled over the racket of a missing muffler.
I walked over and he looked down at the dog. “What is that?!” he asked. “A stuffed weasel?!”
“It’s a chihuahua-terrier mix.”
He cupped an ear. “What?!”
“A chihuahua-terrier mix!”
“What’s it eat?! Cheese?!” Dean found this hysterical, but only for a second. “Listen up!” he said. “I hear you got a connection with the Addams Family over there. I need to get together with the girl!”
“She’s kind of young for you, Dean.”
“What?!
“Kind of young for you!”
“What are you talking about?! We’re like the same age!”
Dean punched the accelerator and the car roared like the world’s largest leaf blower.
“I’ve seen her in the diner a few times! She takes my order, curls her lip, and walks away like I’m poison!”
“Wait!” I said. “You mean Annie?!”
“The waitress!”
“I thought you meant her sister!”
“That’s your girlfriend!” he said.
I’d never heard Emma referred to that way. The neighborhood gossip had apparently started, and I didn’t mind a bit.
“Why Annie?!” I said. “You could date any girl in Pleasant View!”
“This one’s different!” he said. “Treats me like garbage! I like that!”
This made no sense to me. None.
“Help me out,” he said, “and I’ll return the favor!”
On went the light.
“Would you pretend to be my friend in front of my mother?!”
Dean paused a second. “I guess I could sell that!” he said.
I nodded, then leaned in to confide. “I might know a little something,” I whispered as loud as I could.
****
The results came in a few days later. My father was allergic to dogs. He and my mom sat me down in the living room and delivered the news.
“We’re going to have to return PeePee.”
“No way.”
“We know you love the little feller,” Dad said, “but either he goes or I do.”
I honestly didn’t care about the dog, but he was the foundation that supported my relationship with Emma. I figured we were almost at the hand-holding stage and was confident we could survive as a couple. But not just yet. Maybe in a year or two, and by then we’d practically be engaged.
“Couldn’t you get some shots or something?”
“Not going to happen, champ,” my father said. “Me and needles? Picture haystack and open flame.”
“We’ll get you a replacement,” Mom said. “How about a nice snake?”
“Wait,” I said. “Suppose instead of the rescue shelter, I found him a loving home? Then no problem, right?”
“Could be the solution,” Dad said, and when he looked over toward my mother, she pushed out her bottom lip and nodded.
A few days later, Emma got the green light from her parents, and I took PeePee over. I offered her the crate along with all the other dog stuff we’d accumulated, but she told me she wanted to start fresh. I probably should have taken that as a hint.
We were at Bald Eagle Park, Emma on a swing with PeePee cradled in her arms, me standing on the side like a doof.
“So I guess now you’ll be the walker and I’ll be the sidekick,” I said.
She sighed. “I was thinking it might be good if he and I got to know each other one-on-one.”
“Sure,” I said. “That makes sense. Take a day or two. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Can I tell you a little story?” she said, and I instinctively thought, Uh oh.
“When I was a little girl, I loved getting ice cream cones. Not so much for the ice cream, which I found cold and drippy, but for the sugar cone underneath. Whenever I got money, I’d buy myself an ice cream cone. Vanilla, peach, chocolate chip…it didn’t matter. What mattered was the cone.”
PeePee settled into Emma’s embrace like a bear set for winter.
“Then one day I went to the grocery store with my mom, and there they were. Boxes of sugar cones stacked one on top of the other. And I thought to myself, ‘Wow. I won’t be needing the ice cream anymore.’”
“What you’re saying is I’m like the ice cream.”
She nodded, then smiled. “And PeePee, who from now on will be called Honey Bun, is the sweetest cone in town.”
I heard it coming, as loud as a rocket launcher, and when I looked up, I saw him pulling into our driveway.
“You little prick!” he said.
Dean turned off the Mustang and walked up to where I sat on my front steps. My parents were gone, a Sunday morning trek to one of those membership warehouse outlets.
“Want to come along?” my dad had asked. “Buy yourself one of those seventy-two-packs of chips?”
I appreciated the cheer-up attempt but passed.
“Thanks to you, I made a jackass of myself in front of the only woman I may ever love!” Dean said.
I noticed he was wearing a cap that said:
OUT OF MY WAY
I’M GOING TO BINGO
I asked what happened.
“This is what happened!” Dean said and when he took off the cap his scalp was as smooth as a peeled grape.
“You told me she’d like this! You said it would turn her on!”
“That was my impression.”
He pulled the cap back on as far down as it would go.
“Now what do I do?!”
“I don’t know, Dean. I wish I did, but I don’t.”
I figured this was where he wiped the street with me, and who could blame him. But he just stood there, then he exhaled, then he sat down next to me. “Want to hear the worst part?” he said.
“There’s a part that’s worse?”
He nodded. “Last night I paced around the diner waiting for her to get off. When she finally came out, I was a half-block away, standing under a streetlight where I figured my bald head would glow. She looked over to where I was, smiled, then raised her hand and waved. I’m in, I figured, so I raised my own hand and waved back. Except she wasn’t waving at me. She was waving at some dude behind me. She rushed right by and they started kissing, and I didn’t realize I still had my hand in the air until this cab pulled over.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? I got in and had him drive me to the airport, then I hitched back.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I got shot down myself.”
Dean smiled at this. “I heard.”
“You did?’
“You and me. Two losers. Talk of the town.” Dean shook his head. “Look on the bright side. By December my hair’ll grow back and I’ll be old enough to legally date teachers.”
“I didn’t know there was a legal age for that.”
Dean clapped me on the knee so hard that I wondered if I’d have trouble standing up. “You might want to know,” he said. “My sister Marie told me you looked really cute without that stupid mutt dragging you around.”
“Your sister’s like six.”
“Still counts,” he said.
Dean got up and was halfway to his car when he stopped and turned. “Yo. You feel like doing something?”
“You and me?”
He nodded.
“Like what?”
He shrugged. “It’s Sunday. We could drive by the church and goof on the people coming out.”
I thought for a second, stood up, brushed off. “Why not?”
Dean was behind the wheel in the Mustang by the time I reached the passenger side. That’s when he gunned it and shot forward without me. He stopped just short of the street, then turned to face me.
“You coming or staying?!”
I trotted toward the car and with my fingers just short of the door handle, he did it again. This time he stopped in the middle of the street, which is when my parents pulled up to the curb.
“Let’s go, Shrimpy!”
My mother was standing outside the Volvo now, looking like a first timer on the high-dive board.
Twice more Dean suckered me. We must have been halfway down Swallow Street before he finally let me in, and by then we were both laughing so hard we could hardly move.