There was no question of dinner that night. I was choked with anger. I was furious at JJ for his bold-faced lie—he had been in the car with those monsters, and he knew who had pulled the gun. I was enraged at the police for not convicting them in the first place, and at Regan for always being late. Mostly I was infuriated with myself for moronically following the dog. I stormed off to my room, where I could lock myself in, and everyone else out. Too wound up to sit still, I paced, kicking hard at the piles of stuff littering the floor, the inside-out clothes, smelly socks, unlaced sneakers, Mom’s scrapbooks, the book I was trying to read for school, and random photos. What was once merely messy was now an official trash heap: the detritus of my life for the past six months.
It isn’t fair! I wanted to punch the walls, throw the window open, and scream so loudly that when I stopped everything would be back to the way it used to be.
I’m not a tantrum thrower. I never was. We already had one drama queen in the family. I guess I figured there wasn’t room for two. When I was really young, and succumbed to the occasional meltdown, I could count on a predictable pattern. I’d get a time-out, or denied TV, or be grounded, but I knew my dad would eventually show up bearing a bowl of ice cream. It was always vanilla fudge, my favorite. That was his signal: I’d served my time, all was forgiven, and life could go back to normal.
When I got older and faced some injustice, I called Mercy, or Jazz, or even Kendra and went on a venting spree until I was calm. Failing that, at least I could usually lose myself in a book, a movie, a school assignment if necessary. I used to be able to drown out the world by turning the music way up. I had coping skills.
Skills that had deserted me now. I couldn’t even cry.
“Let me in, please, Niecy, I can explain everything.” On the other side of the door, Rex whimpered. As far as I was concerned, he could whine all night. My room was off-limits to him.
Eventually, I stopped pacing and kicking, slid down the wall, and curled into a ball. A picture of me and my dad, taken at the sixth-grade father-daughter dance, was sticking out of a pile on the floor. I picked it up. Between the wrong poufy dress and worst haircut ever and pre-contact lenses, I looked like a frizz-topped matzo ball with bad glasses. My expression was one of appropriate mortification.
My dad might have had his arm around an Olympic gold medalist or a rock star: He was beaming with pride. His cheek-to-cheek smile lit up the room. His eyes, large and round and sky blue, sparkled.
Regan’s eyes. Ironic how she’d inherited my dad’s exact coloring but not an iota of his other traits. At the memorials, they called my dad “tough but fair.” At home he was the softy. My mom had been the disciplinarian.
“How could you leave me?” I demanded of the picture. The only response was Rex, scratching at the door.
“Go away!” I growled, and went to work on the photo, ripping it again and again, into a million little pieces.
“I have to talk to you!” Rex pleaded.
Dogs don’t talk.
“I can explain …”
Dogs don’t lead unsuspecting thirteen-year-olds to bad neighborhoods.
“… about JJ.”
And they don’t lead victims to predators.
Believing Rex did all those things proved I’d sailed past merely wacko into crazy town.
And I was flunking out of school.
If nothing else was real, that was. The copy of The Pigman & Me stuck out from under a balled-up T-shirt, mocking me.
What if I’m not crazy?
Ping! A sliver of a thought popped up in a corner of my brain. Like those jarring ads for an upcoming TV show that appear on the bottom of the screen when you’re watching something else—small but impossible to ignore.
What if I played it out, just for a minute. That, what? The dog is talking, but only to me. Because, why? He’s not really a dog, but some otherworldly being, a spirit, an angel in the body of a mangy mutt. And he’s come to me … why? I shook my head wildly, fisted my hands, and rubbed hard at my eyes.
I’d gone way too far. There’s no such thing as otherworldly beings; neither angels nor devils and especially not dogs-who-are-really-spirits.
“Grace, it’s Mom—please let me in.”
How long had she been at the door? Reluctantly, I uncoiled myself and stood up. I was a mess. Dried sweat had wrinkled my top, my shorts. I swiped tendrils of springy frizz behind my ears.
In contrast, Mom was put together, all made-up, freshly shampooed hair, cute outfit. She’d even gotten a manicure, I noticed. She was holding a tray with my dinner.
I’m not hungry, I wanted to say, but the words never came out. The aroma was tantalizing. She’d made chicken, steamed mixed vegetables, and—this is what made my mouth water against my will—shoestring french fries. That was Dad’s from-scratch specialty. He used to peel potatoes, put them through a special slicer called a mandolin to get them really thin, and then deep-fry them. My mom claimed to be fried-food averse, but even she could never resist Dad’s crunchy-salty potatoes. That she attempted to make them herself sent my battered heart plunging.
“I’ll put this down on your desk,” she said, crossing the room. She managed to avoid stepping on anything, and tactfully, didn’t comment on the waste heap.
“Thanks,” I said, swiping a couple of T-shirts off the floor and tossing them on my bed. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Rex slink in.
“I know you’re mad at your sister,” Mom said, “and it sounds like you have good reason, but you can’t let anger consume you.”
“What did Regan tell you?” I asked, picking at a fry.
“That she was so late picking you up, you walked home.”
“That’s all?” I asked warily.
“There’s no excuse for her constant tardiness,” Mom declared with a toss of her curls.
“This time it wasn’t all Regan’s fault.”
But Mom was just warming up. “I’ve let your sister slip by with too few responsibilities. That’s got to change, especially since”—she blinked—“it’s just the three of us now.”
A large lump formed in my throat, thwarting a second fry from sliding down.
“I’m done with asking, or suggesting. I’m insisting Regan take over Rex’s training. Which she should have been doing from the start. Anyway, she can’t be late picking herself up.” Mom’s attempt at a lighthearted moment landed with a thud.
I sank into the chair by my desk and tried to unboggle my mind. Regan, who’d given me a full verbal thrashing on the ride home, didn’t bust me about ending up in Prosperity Farms—at JJ Pico’s house, no less. She took the heat herself. Who was she protecting, Mom or me?
Rex, who’d never taken his eyes off my dinner, offered, “You can’t let Regan take me to class. Tell her it’s helping you.”
Mom glanced down at Rex. “What are you barking at?”
Which Rex took to mean: yes, you can have chicken. He rested his snout dangerously near the tray.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Mom admonished. “This is Grace’s dinner. You had yours.”
“It’s fine, Mom. Really. I mean … taking him to training class. I think it might be”—I hesitated—“you know, helping me a little.” I stuffed four fries into my mouth this time. They needed salt.
She looked perplexed, but went into auto-mom mode. “Eat some chicken, too.”
“It was a stupid idea to walk home,” I conceded. “It wasn’t Regan’s fault that I didn’t wait for her.”
“I don’t want to stop you from working with the dog, but …” She paused. “Your sister has to go, too. Regan has to be there for you.”
She kind of is. That’s the strangest part of all. As I ate—the chicken wasn’t half bad, though the vegetables hadn’t quite been cooked through—I wondered what Regan was up to. She hadn’t busted me for flunking out, and now she didn’t say where she’d picked me up. Did she think we’d made some silent pact? If I didn’t mention Sheena’s thievery, she’d cover for me?
When my mom left, I laced into Rex. “Who invited you in here?”
“The door was open,” he said innocently.
“Not for you it wasn’t. I’m mad at you!”
“Me? Why?”
“You led me right to JJ’s door.”
“It wasn’t on purpose,” Rex said defensively, eyeing the chicken.
“It’s the mother of all coincidences, then, isn’t it?”
“I told you, it was garbage pickup day.”
“Right, we ended up in the most dangerous part of town for a turkey bone.”
“Actually, turkey’s not that good for dogs; there’s that whole tryptophan thing. Do you know about that?”
I glowered at the dog. He looked hurt. “Don’t give me that sad-eyed puppy face,” I warned him.
“I don’t see why you’re so mad at me. How could I even know where that boy lived?”
Isn’t that the question.
“But as long as we did end up there,” Rex resumed, “I have a few thoughts.”
“Keep them to yourself.”
“JJ’s not a bad kid.”
“You betrayed me, Rex. I don’t know how, or why. But Dad said I should always trust my instincts—and something tells me you knew exactly where we were going.”
“I have an instinct, too,” he piped up.
“No, you just have a stink.”
As usual, Rex ignored me and kept right on babbling. “Give the kid a chance. He’s okay, really. I feel it in my bones. Oh, and speaking of bones, if you’re not eating that one …”
I moved the half-gnawed thigh out of his reach.
“He doesn’t have a father either. He worshipped yours.”
JJ didn’t even know my dad, I wanted to shoot back at Rex. But the truth is, I didn’t know if that was true. I only wanted it to be.
“Why don’t you just ask him who had the gun?” Rex said as casually as if he were suggesting I ask Kendra how she gets the shine in her hair.
“Ask him?” I repeated. “What good will that do me? He just proved he’s a—” I almost echoed Regan, “big fat liar,” but stopped myself. I came out with the way better “slimeball.”
“Oh, come on, Lacey, you’re gonna get derailed over one lie? You think your dad would have just let it go at that?”
Rex the talking dog is comparing me, a torn-apart thirteen-year-old, to my dad? I had nothing of my dad’s skills.
“Make him tell you the truth.”
You owe it to him. That wasn’t Rex’s voice in my head. It was my own.
Meanwhile, Rex had worked his way through half the chicken.