Later that evening, when the rain has let up, Mimi asks Poppy and me to take Duke for a walk around the block. He gets all excited as soon as he sees me grab the leash, rushing for the door and yipping. I clip the leash to his collar, and my sister and I head out to the sidewalk.
It’s dark now and various houses are lit up with colorful Christmas lights. The air is crisp and clean, like the rain washed everything dirty away.
Duke pokes his nose into the wet grass and mossy tree trunks of every house we pass.
Poppy’s quiet for the first block or two. And then she turns to me, her face serious. “Am I supposed to choose a side?” She holds tight to Duke’s leash. “Between you and Mom and Dad?”
“No. You can do whatever you want.”
“It doesn’t feel like that. You can basically taste the tension in our house. My insides hurt when we’re all in a room together. I swear I’m going to throw up one of these days.”
“But it’s not about you.”
“Yes, it is. It’s about our whole family. And I’m a part of this family, too.”
Duke happily bounces along at my side, completely oblivious to Poppy’s annoyance. I envy him.
“You don’t have to choose a side,” I say.
We stop to let Duke do his business and Poppy hands me a plastic baggie to scoop it when he’s done.
We walk another block in silence. When we arrive back at Mimi and Bumpa’s, Duke has a spring in his step and I have a pit in my stomach. I don’t want my sister to feel sick because of me. I only ever wanted this to be a thing between my parents and me.
I can hear Mimi laughing through the front door when we walk up to it. The Christmas tree lights glow through the window, and white twinkle lights crisscross the eaves of the house. It all seems so festive and fun. Maybe being with Mimi and Bumpa is just what our family needs.
Poppy opens the front door and I unclip Duke from his leash. But when a car pulls into the driveway next door, Duke takes off running, tearing across the front yard and into the neighbors’ driveway, all barks and bounces.
“Duke!” I yell as he jumps up and down at the driver’s side of the car.
The door opens and I recognize Noah, the boy from college with the tattoo and the lawn mower and the boring-sounding internship. I wonder if he’s literally just getting home from school, his duffel bag full of dirty laundry in the trunk. I shouldn’t care. I like Nico way more than I ever liked Noah. But I can’t help but be curious after all those weeks I spent wondering about him last summer.
Noah stomps his foot and shoos Duke away.
Duke barks back.
“Get out of here,” Noah says.
“Sorry,” I say, rushing over to scoop up Duke.
When my eyes move from Duke to Noah, I notice he’s wearing a North Face jacket, the long sleeves covering his tattoo, and a baseball hat. He doesn’t look like the same guy who headed to his fancy financial internship last summer. He just looks like a regular kid home from college.
“That dog is always so out of control,” he says.
“Duke?” I scratch at Duke’s head and he leans into my hand, licking my face. “No, he’s not. Maybe he just missed you.”
Noah slams his door shut. “Doubt it. I hate dogs. That one’s always just been too dumb to figure it out.”
His tone is harsh. Like a slap in the face. I take a step back. In a split second, any fantasy I ever had about Noah is destroyed.
I’m holding a plastic baggie full of dog shit in my hand, but Noah’s attitude is way more disgusting.
“I’ll try to keep him away from your house,” I say.
“Right. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
My mom has always said you can tell a lot about a person by the way they act around animals. Now I see what she means. I grunt, turn on my heel, and walk back to my grandparents’ house as fast as I can.
And maybe that’s life. Maybe we go through it, imagining things will always be better if we do this one thing or we have this one thing or we go to this one place or we know this one person. But a lot of the time, the reality doesn’t live up to the expectation at all.
Is it the same with my vaccines? I thought everything would be better if I could get my shots, but now my parents barely talk to me and my sister feels like she has to choose sides, and she’ll probably choose theirs because she always does.
Is it worth it? At the end of the day, does it really matter, if it means I could lose everything? Maybe the fantasy of taking my parents to court is better than the reality. Maybe I’ve been so caught up in the fight that I didn’t stop long enough to think of the consequences.