16

“You’re a jerk,” Reagan Royall said. “You saved a guy from the electric chair and you didn’t bring me along! What kind of friend are you?”

“Alabama doesn’t have the electric chair,” I said.” We inject people with poison. And nobody was going to inject him with poison. He was signing a plea deal to avoid exactly that.”

Jethro didn’t plead guilty, of course. But clearing his name didn’t work as fast as I thought it would. After we broke up the plea hearing, they sent him right back to jail. Dad said he’d be out in a few days, released without bail because he’s no longer considered a “flight risk.” The cops were pretty sure they could let Jethro go home without him running away. 

“It’s a sign that they know they’ll probably drop the charges eventually,” Dad said. “Down the road, when it won’t sound like such a drastic shift.”

The hammer didn’t fall on Gary Dudley—Cloudy Hair—just yet, either. They brought him in for questioning, and he had his lawyer present from the start. I’m told he didn’t give the investigators anything glaringly obvious. But a bunch of other stuff popped up that fit our theory of the case nicely. Folks at the marina said Dudley returned to the marina without any fish that day, and that he had a limp when he came back that afternoon, and told people he injured himself falling out of his boat, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Deputies even found a red ball cap under the seat of his boat.

There wasn’t any video from the pawnshop itself. But a camera at a service station on the corner caught an image of a dog limping past, leaving a trail of blood. The same camera caught Jethro strolling toward the pawnshop and back, long after Easy went by. The police had watched the video before, but at the time they didn’t think the part with the dog was relevant.

I can’t tell you how I know those details. They’re not from Dad. I have my sources. I’m a colonel, you know. 

And word of the whole thing just seemed to get out there. Cloudy Hair was free, but I bet that anywhere he went, he was hearing the same thing I was: that Jethro was innocent, that the cops were looking at Gary Dudley closely, that some meddling kids had solved the case. With their faithful dog. All we needed was a van and Scooby Snacks, I guess. 

And Scooby himself. Now that Easy was pretty much cleared of biting without provocation, we had a new reason to look for him: We could bring him home safely to Megg. And deputies were on the lookout, too, now, because Easy was a walking, barking piece of evidence.

It’s weird to be congratulated for solving a murder. Particularly in the hallway, while your ex-sort-of-boyfriend is holding another girl’s hand. 

“Atty, I heard you save a guy from prison,” Premsyl said. “Pretty cool. It will look good on a college application.” 

See? Weird. 

“Saved,” I said. “The past tense of save is saved.”

Premsyl shook his head. “Atty, you’re still the same girl I broke up with,” he said, brushing a fist playfully past my chin. Braces Girl surveyed me with a lordly look and they turned and walked away. 

“Zumpfink bothering you?” Reagan prodded, imitating Premsyl’s accent. “Can’t keep your feelings in Czech?” 

I dismissed Premsyl and girlfriend with a wave of the hand. “Not them necessarily,” I said. “But look at this. Look at this hallway closely. What do you see?”

I’ll tell you what I saw: boy-girl pairs. Everybody was coupling up, talking beside lockers, walking together in the hallway, flirting anxiously. It was mating season all of a sudden, and somehow I’d missed it. 

“The Halloween Dance,” Reagan said. “Didn’t you see the signs? Everybody’s looking for a date. You were too busy saving the world to notice. What, does it bother you?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I think it bothers me that it doesn’t bother me. Is there something wrong with me that I don’t want to be a part of this?”

“Not at all,” Reagan said. “You and I are destined for much better boyfriends than we can get here. Much cooler situations. All these people are pairing up out of fear. Because they think if you can’t get a date to the seventh grade dance, you’ll die old and alone in a house full of cats. And no one will come to feed the cats for days, and they’ll eat your face to stay alive.”

“Well, I want to die old,” I said. “And I kind of take comfort in the idea that cats would eat my face. I mean, note to self, get a cat-sitter. But if they’re really hungry and I’m dead, I hope they would eat my face.”

“I want cats to eat my face because it’s the most goth thing I can think of,” Reagan said. “So no dance for you then?”

“On Halloween?” I said. “Heck no. I’m going trick-or-treating with Martinez.”

“Oh, isn’t that sweet?” Reagan said. “Older sister taking time out to help widdle brother twick or tweet?”

“Help, nothin’!” I said. “I want candy! I love Halloween. I’m going to trick-or-treat for as long as I can. I’m going to trick-or-treat when I’m twenty. I’m going to be a baghead.”

I don’t know if they have bagheads where you live, but everybody in Houmahatchee knows them. They’re the big kids—sixteen, maybe seventeen years old—who come around late at night with a paper sack over their heads to ask if you’ve got any candy left. Kids who scoff at the idea of trick-or-treating, and say they’re too old, but then start feeling remorse as the night goes on and the little kids start bringing home candy. So they reach for the bag and the scissors and make one last pathetic effort to get in on the action. 

Of course, there are little bagheads, too. Houmahatchee has lots of kids who are too poor to buy a costume, so they draw a face on a bag. The rule in our house is that little bagheads get to pick through and get all the chocolate and other top treats, while big bagheads get candy corn and peppermints, the yucky stuff. 

“Colonel, you are the least punk person I’ve ever known,” Reagan said. “What are you going to be? Little Bo-Peep? Princess Jasmine in a plastic Walmart outfit, like a five-year-old?”

“Oh, come on, this is a high goth holiday,” I said. “Surely you haven’t given up on trick-or-treat? How old were you when you stopped? What was your last costume?”

Reagan hung her head. “Don’t tell anybody, okay? I’ve never trick-or-treated.”

“What?” I said. I couldn’t believe it. 

“Look, it’s a church thing,” she said. “They’re not super-anti-Halloween at my church, but I guess the thinking is that if it even looks like it’s of the devil, a Christian shouldn’t be doing it. So they do lock-ins and judgment houses instead. The closest I’ve ever come to wearing a Halloween costume was when I played a car crash victim in a judgment house.”

I’m not a fan of any kind of haunted house. I’ve never thought it was fun to be chased around in the dark by a guy in an ugly mask with a chainsaw. Judgment houses sound even worse. You go to a church and they walk you through a show where a bunch of rowdy teenagers die in a car crash. The haunty part comes when all the teenagers go to hell because they’re not Christians. 

“You’re coming with us, then,” I said to Reagan. “You’re going to come and trick-or-treat with us.”

“I don’t know,” Reagan said. “I still think it’s kid stuff.”

“Come on,” I said. “You know you want to.”

“I’m not wearing a costume,” she said.

“Just linger in the back and pretend you’re my big sister,” I said. “You’re so much taller than me anyway. I’ll give you half my candy if you come.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said. “Meanwhile, you need to think about what you’re going to be for Halloween.”

Just then, I felt a buzz in my pocket. I fished out my cell phone and leaned against my locker to hide it from the teachers. 

Do you ever feel those phantom buzzes? You think your phone’s ringing when it’s not? There was nothing on my phone, not even an annoying message from Princess P. She’d gone completely silent since we cleared Jethro’s name, and yet I found myself expecting a message from her, checking my phone every few hours to see what kind of abuse she had for me today. 

I scrolled back through the old messages Princess P had sent me.

Princess_P: Pudgy little girl with an annoying voice. You’ll die alone.

Princess_P: You should work on saving farm animals. You’re such a little piglet.

Princess_P: Oink oink nobody loves me. 

Why hadn’t I erased these already? Taking occasional glances around to look for teachers, I erased Princess_P’s messages one by one. I hadn’t responded to a message from her in weeks. I wished there was a way I could show her up, a way to prove I wasn’t really bothered by her, without meeting her on her chosen battlefield. 

Then I had an idea.

“I’ve decided,” I told Reagan. “I know what I’m going to be for Halloween.”

Taleesa is kind of an expert on body acceptance. You know, the whole idea of accepting your body in the size and shape that it is. She’s written more than a dozen articles about body acceptance for magazines. Funny, but most of those magazines are the ones that have all the photos of skinny-minnie models in them. Still, Taleesa knows as much about the topic as anybody I know.

“You’re the one who decides when you’re overweight,” Taleesa said. “If you can’t run and play the way you’d like to, if you get out of breath before you want to, it’s time to lose weight. There are people who’ll think you’re beautiful no matter how big you get, and there are people who will call you fat no matter how skinny you get. The right weight isn’t about looks, it’s about being able to do what you want.”

I never fully understood that until I tried on my Halloween pig suit. 

In my family, we go all out for Halloween. So when I told Taleesa I wanted to be a cute pig, she drove all the way to Panama City for the perfect costume. A bright pink mascot outfit full of stuffing. Pudgy stuffed legs, cute three-fingered cartoon hands at the ends of the sleeves. It zipped up in the back, and climbing into it was kind of like burying your face in a beanbag chair—a beanbag chair that smelled like the sweat of all the people who’d rented the costume before. 

As soon as Taleesa zipped me up, I thought about her advice on how to know you need to lose weight. In the pig suit, I was definitely too big. I couldn’t put my arms down all the way. I couldn’t see my feet. Getting out of the bathroom was hard: there was barely enough room for my pig body to wiggle through the open door. 

But man, was I cute! The suit was perfectly cartoony, with a big stuffed pig head with a face hole that allowed me to breathe well and make expressions and roll my eyes at people. (There was a pig nose I could have worn, but I liked having my own face in the pig body.) I stood a long time in the mirror, enjoying the mascotty cuteness of every move I made in this outfit. Dancing the Charleston, doing the Cabbage Patch. Pointing, with my three-fingered fabric hooves, was especially adorable. 

“Take that, Sexy Barmaid costume!” I shouted, pointing. “Take that, Sexy Pirate! Take that, Naughty Librarian!”

Take that, Princess P!

Still, I could keep up the act only for a little bit at a time. It was so hard to move, and Halloween costumes aren’t made for southern Alabama. It was seventy degrees outside on Halloween afternoon in Houmahatchee, and under all the stuffing, I was sweating like . . . well, a pig. 

I couldn’t even reach my own chest. Taleesa had to pin on the finishing touch: a sign that read “NOT HAM.” On the back, another: “PIGS ARE FRIENDS, NOT FOOD.” Taleesa laughed when I picked up my cell phone and stuffed it into the pig head next to my face, the only place I could carry it. 

“How are you even going to use that with pig hooves?” she asked.

We left Dad behind to deal with the bagheads, and we piled into the car. Or tried to. I couldn’t get my seat belt around my big belly without help. Taleesa, decked out as a Spanish countess from an opera, had to make several tries to get her skirts into the driver’s seat. Martinez shouldn’t have had a problem, but he refused to take off his old-timey sea captain hat even in the car. Reagan, the only person not wearing a costume, had to sit in the back and watch him struggle to sit up straight. 

“Just take off your giant hat, there, Cap’n Crunch,” she said. 

“I’m not Cap’n Crunch,” he said. “I’m an admiral. Get it right. I’m Admiral Peale.”

“Music!” I shouted, pointing to the radio. For some reason, being dressed as a cuddly thing made me feel the power to be bratty and demanding. “I want ‘Monster Mash!’”

Taleesa flipped through the stations. Somebody preaching a sermon. Country music. Football talk. And then: “. . . coming home from our house Christmas Eve. You may say there’s no such thing as Santa, but, as for me and Grandpa, we believe.”

“No way,” Martinez said. “Christmas music? On Halloween?”

“They get earlier every year,” Taleesa said. “Don’t be a hater. Christmas music is great. Christmas is the only time most Americans listen to jazz.”

“Oooh, leave it on there,” Reagan said. “Maybe they’ll play the Charlie Brown stuff.”

“Or maybe they’ll play The Song,” Taleesa said, looking over at me with a devilish look. “If they do, Reagan will have to dance with us.”

“Dance, what? I ain’t dancing,” Reagan said. 

“It’s a family tradition,” I explained. “Every year, we wait to hear the first broadcast of the best, most rockinest Christmas song ever recorded.” I paused to see if Reagan could guess it.

“Ummm, ‘All I Want For Christmas is You’ by Mariah Carey?” Reagan said.

“Yes! See, everybody agrees! And we have this tradition: the first time we hear that song, we stop what we’re doing and dance. We could be fleeing our burning house, and we’d still stop and dance,” I said.

“I’ll stop this car if I hear it,” Taleesa said. “And we’ll all get out.”

Reagan slumped in her seat. “Oh, no. This sounds really cheesy. Change the channel.”

“Come on,” I said. “You have to do it. Just wait; it won’t take long.”

We drove over to Marjory Estates, Houmahatchee’s one really fancy neighborhood. Well, I guess the historic district where we live looks fancy, but it’s just normal people who live there. Marjory Estates is one of those places with big houses and little trees, with a gate at the entrance to the neighborhood. The richest people in town live there, and rich people have the best candy. 

It was already dark when we piled out of the car and started moving with the crowd from door to door. The candy-givers didn’t quite know what to make of us. Well, they knew what to make of me.

“Look, it’s Napoleon, and Pat Benatar, and a pig!” said one woman who handed out fistfuls of little chocolate candy bars. 

“It’s Andrew Jackson, and the lady from The LEGO Movie, and a pig!” said a gentle old man with big glasses, who invited us to sort through the candy bowl and take just what we want. 

“LEGO Movie,” Reagan huffed. “Why does everybody think I’m in costume?”

“Oh, Phillip,” said Glasses Man’s wife, nudging him on the shoulder. “Can’t you see this one’s not in costume? She’s the mom.”

I got a good laugh out of that one. For the rest of the way through Marjory Estates, I clung to Reagan’s shoulder. “You’re so cool, Mom, you look like Pat Benatar, whoever that is,” I said. 

Reagan wasn’t listening. She kept looking over her shoulder. “Something’s wrong,” she said. “See that ugly brown car back there? With the guy in the hat in it? He’s just sitting there, but he hasn’t let any trick-or-treaters in or out. Creepy.”

“You’re just being paranoid, Mom,” I said. “Life is not a judgment house.”

“Don’t be offensive,” Reagan said. “You realize that’s offensive? And I’m serious, that guy is creepy.”

I looked back at the brown car, but couldn’t see the guy inside, because just as I looked back, the guy turned on his lights and started his engine. Hm. 

“Well, let’s catch up with Taleesa and Martinez,” I said. “Just in case.”

We cleaned out Marjory Estates and soon we were back in the car, trolling for new neighborhoods to plunder. Finally, we stopped on Kilby Street, near the historic district, which was lined with old creaky houses like ours, but even smaller. They always put out good Halloween decorations here, and the street was lined with kids. 

“Baghead alert,” I said as we emerged onto the sidewalk. “I see one or two big kids out already. They may have picked this neighborhood clean before we got here.”

“Hat Guy alert,” Reagan whispered to me. “The brown car is here again. I think he’s following us.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “Everybody’s visiting the same few neighborhoods. You’re paranoid, I tell you.”

Somebody in the neighborhood was offering a backyard haunted house, which Martinez just had to wait in line for.

“But we’re missing all the candy,” I whined.

“You guys are big enough to go by yourselves,” Taleesa said. “I’ll stay here with him. But promise me you’ll stay together. And promise me you’ll only go to the end of the street.”

“No problem,” I said, and Reagan and I took off. 

And then we heard it. A mom, parked on the street and waiting for her kids, had the Christmas station on. It was The Song. I don’t want a lot for Christmas. There is just one thing I need.

I started shaking my piggy fanny.

“Come on, Reagan!” I said. “You gotta dance!” I whipped out all the pig-suit dancing moves I’d tried in the bathroom. I’m pretty sure I saw people from school driving by. I thought I even saw Premsyl, riding in the back seat of the Braxtons’ car, with Braces Girl, on their way to the Halloween Dance. I shot my hoof in the air and shouted. Pig suits and Mariah Carey make everything better.

Reagan stood there with her arms crossed. I was just getting going when the mom with the radio drove away.

“Man, Reagan,” I said. “For an outlaw, you’re no fun. Can’t you dance and be crazy?”

I tried to get Reagan to pretend to be my mom at a couple of houses, but I guess the folks there knew me already: they called me Colonel. We were on the way to our third house when I heard a deafening blast of music in my ear. 

“Ugh,” I said. “I should have turned the ringer off before I stuck my phone in this pig hat.” I fished out the phone and handed it to Reagan. “Can you turn it on? I can’t do it with pig hands.”

Reagan pressed the screen and handed the phone back to me.

“Hello, are you the girl who’s looking for the lost dog?” said a man’s voice on the other end. “The one with the signs everywhere?”

“That’s me,” I said. 

“Well, I saw him just now, like a minute or two ago, on Kilby Street,” the man said.

My heart leaped. We could get Easy back!

“I’m on Kilby right now,” I said. “Where did you see him? Where are you?”

“Oh, I drove on by five minutes ago,” the man said. “But he was down at the end of the street. Over in the woods near the Ridley house at the dead end.” 

I looked down the street, then down the street the other way. Kilby dead-ended into a darkened old abandoned two-story house. On either side, tufts of forest.

“I bet if you hurry, you could still find him there,” the man said. I thanked him and hung up. 

“Reagan, I’ve got a caller who says Easy is right over there in the woods next to that house. Let’s go!”

I ran as fast as I could, spilling candy behind me. I tumbled over and fell on my piggy knees, then got up and ran faster, leaving my candy bag behind. I was out of breath by the time we got to the dead end.

“EASY!” I shouted. “EDWARD! Come here, boy!”

I hadn’t given up on my dog. Now that he was cleared of unprovoked biting, he could be adopted out to some family and live the rest of his life in peace—if we could just find him. 

“Reagan, I’ll look in the woods on this side, you search that side,” I said. 

“We’re not supposed to split up,” Reagan said. 

“It’s an emergency,” I said. “Just do it. Go on!” 

I plunged into the woods on my side, shouting for Easy. I had planned to turn on the flashlight on my phone, but my piggy hands wouldn’t let me. I just pressed ahead, batting aside branches and shouting for my dog. 

And then I stopped to listen for him. 

I could hear Reagan on the other side of the house, calling Easy’s name. Very distantly, I could hear the sound of organ music from the haunted house down the street. 

And then I heard something moving in the leaves. I knew from the start that it wasn’t Easy. It was a person. You could tell they were human footsteps. Crunch, crunch crunch. 

That was when I realized what I’d done. I was that girl, the one who stupidly wandered off alone into the dark on Halloween, where some strange man lay in wait. Those stories, the ones you read in the newspaper, are true. And I was about to become one of them. 

I was pretty deep in the woods. It was so dark, all I could see was the outlines of leaves on the trees silhouetted against the dim orange glow from the streetlights. But I could see the outline of the man as he stepped forward. A man in a ball cap, just like Reagan had said. And when he took off his ball cap to wipe his brow, I could see a halo of white hair outlined in that light.

Cloudy Hair! I took a couple of steps backward, hoping to blend into the trees and hide myself, I guess. Though it was so dark, I had no idea what kind of dark I was stepping out of and what kind of dark I was stepping into. I must have made a rustling noise, because I could see Gary Dudley’s head suddenly turn my way.

Have you ever felt real fear? I mean, a kind that turns you inside out, in an instant? I felt as though someone had poured some kind of hot acid into my body. I felt sick but unable to barf. I felt capable of running a thousand miles but somehow unable to take a step. 

In an instant, Cloudy Hair was on me. His arm around my neck, one of his feet trying to sweep my feet out from under me.

“You little piggy, let’s see how you squeal when I slit your throat!” he said.

It was then that I caught a dull flash of light. In his free hand, Cloudy Hair had a knife. 

I really don’t know how I got free of him. The pig suit was so thick, it was hard for me to tell when he had hold of me and when he didn’t. But I did get free, rolled to the right for a few turns to get fully clear of Cloudy Hair, then sprang up and ran. I bet I’ve never run like that before in my life: full tilt into complete darkness, tripping over roots and popping back up again, slamming into branches and going right on like a machine. In my mind, Cloudy Hair was just inches behind me, and there was no time to stop and check if I was right. 

Finally I ran out of the woods and into some light. The back of some kind of store. There was one dim streetlight, a pair of dumpsters, and a little alleyway between the back of the store and a cinder-block wall. I took off at a sprint down the alley, thinking I could run around to the front of the store and be among people again.

Wrong.

Passing the dumpsters, I came to a dead end. More wall, cinder block on all three sides. Just as I realized my predicament, I tripped and tumbled. 

Cloudy Hair was there, at the entrance to the alley. With a gun. And wild, wide eyes. 

“Go ahead and scream, piggy,” he said. “It’s Halloween. Nobody will take you seriously.”

Okay, lawyer, I thought. Talk your way out of this one. What do you say?

“Don’t shoot me,” I said, simply. “Please don’t shoot me.”

And then all the fear inside me broke. I started weeping. Snotty, sloppy crying. Thoughts flashed through my mind. Dad handing me McNutters for the first time, Martinez in the car with his video game, Taleesa helping me put on my pig suit. All of that, all those memories, would vanish forever if he pulled the trigger. Death, and the permanence of it, is a hard thing to take in all at once. 

“Please, mister,” I said. “Don’t kill me.”

“Well, now I have to, don’t I?” Cloudy Hair said. “Not only are you testifying against me in one murder, but now you can testify that I did this, too. Sorry, you’ve gotta go.”

“Anything,” I said. “I’ll do anything.”

“Really?” Cloudy Hair replied, still pointing the gun at me. “What if I ask you to take it all back? Tell the grand jury you don’t really think I did it. Can you do that?”

I nodded. I’m sorry, readers, but that’s what I did. A man pulled a gun on me and I promised to take back the most important thing I’ve ever said. 

“Promise me you’ll testify against Jethro? Say that he put you up to accusing me? Say that you were afraid of him?”

I nodded, still weeping, on my hands and knees. “Say it!” Cloudy Hair shouted. 

“I promise,” I said. 

Cloudy Hair smirked. 

“It’s good to hear you say it,” he said. “I’m gonna kill you anyway. I just wanted to see how easy it was to make you say it. You’re so weak. A pudgy, soft freak. ‘Oink oink, nobody loves me!’”

Suddenly something fell into place. Something so shocking, it overwhelmed my fear for a minute.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re Princess P! You’ve been texting me all this time!”

Cloudy Hair nodded. “You see, you can’t get away. I’m inside your head. I’m there all the time. You can’t get away from me. I win.”

All the texts from Princess P flooded back. It did, in a weird way, make sense. Cloudy Hair knew, when nobody else knew, that Easy was evidence in a crime. He knew that every time we posted a flyer with Easy’s photo, every time someone forwarded the news story about him, there was a chance someone would recognize the murder victim’s dog and start asking questions. So all of that trolling—the fat pig stuff, the stuff about my mom’s suicide—it was all just a dumb, weak attempt to make my work harder for me. 

Suddenly, I was angrier than I was scared. I stood up on my little piggy feet, pointed a hoof right in Cloudy Hair’s face. 

“Just hold it right there,” I said. “All this time you’ve been lecturing me about who’s a freak who can’t survive. But you killed your own brother-in-law. For money!”

Cloudy Hair just stared at me with dead eyes, but he didn’t shoot. I took another step forward. 

“You couldn’t cut it in business, so you killed your best friend!” I said. “You couldn’t cover that up, so you’re going to kill a twelve-year-old girl!”

Cloudy Hair didn’t move. I took another step. 

“I may be a pig, I may be weak, but you’re a MURDERER!” I shouted. 

What happened next happened very fast. I could see Cloudy Hair blink, dumbfounded, and I knew I’d landed an insult that really hurt him. I could see the muscles in his forearm flex as he started to pull on the trigger. I heard nothing, but I did see a flash, just a blip of light on the end of his gun. And I saw a blur of black and white that seemed to pull Cloudy Hair down to the ground.

It was Easy! Where he came from or how he happened on us, I don’t know, but in an instant, Easy had Cloudy Hair on the ground, his teeth locked into the old man’s upper thigh. 

I don’t know if you have ever seen a man attacked by a dog, but it isn’t a pretty sight. Cloudy Hair screamed like he was being eaten alive, and Easy wasn’t letting up. There was blood. I saw Cloudy Hair’s gun on the ground, and initially thought of picking it up and holding him at gunpoint. But not with pig hands. So I kicked it, and it skittered into the leaves. 

Later, as he struggled to crawl across the alleyway, Dudley dropped his knife, too. I kicked it away. 

Then I heard a blip from a police car’s siren. At the exit of the alleyway, cops were silhouetted in red-and-blue light.

“Don’t hurt the dog!” I shouted, throwing myself on top of Easy. “The dog is fine! The dog’s protecting me! Don’t shoot!” 

Dudley tried to limp away, and got caught and cuffed by one cop. The other came up to me and Easy, hands held open. It was Troy Butler.

“Atty Peale?” he said. “Is that you in there? Are you injured?”

Butler’s voice was shaking a little, something I’d never heard from him. That scared me. Was I injured? I started patting myself down with my piggy hands, looking for a bullet hole. 

“Looks like you had a close call,” Troy said, reaching up to touch the side of my head. I heard a POP of breaking string and Troy held out a fuzzy costume pig ear. “You’re lucky, Not Ham. He shot your ear half off. An inch or two down and to the right, and that bullet would have hit your head, instead of your costume.”

From time to time, people ask me if working at an animal shelter is fun.

“Yes,” I tell them. “But I don’t think my shelter experience is typical.”

Not every shelter volunteer gets to meet the governor. And even though that’s not anything any sensible kid really wants to do, meeting the governor might turn out to be useful after all. 

And not every shelter volunteer gets a free pig suit. The costume company wouldn’t take the suit back, with an ear blown off and stains on it from crawling around in the woods. They wouldn’t even cut us some slack because I was the victim of attempted murder. (I know they knew about it. It was all over the news as far away as Orlando.) Dad and Taleesa had to fork over $300 for it, and because we didn’t know how to clean the thing, it’s hanging in my closet now, dirty and smelly as it was the night of the attack.

Toni says that’s probably not healthy. Toni’s my therapist. Yes, I have a therapist now. I’m talking about a therapist for your head—a psychologist—not a therapist for your body. Dad and Taleesa set up weekly sessions for me because of Cloudy Hair’s attack on me.

Being a crime victim is weird, even if you’re the lucky one the bullet missed. After they hauled Gary Dudley away that night, a couple of young deputies—Sam and Lizzie were their names—examined me like I was a captured alien. Or really, I guess, they examined the pig suit while I was still in it, taking photos and collecting fuzz samples in little bags. Then the paramedics did a medical check on me. Then we went back to the jail, which is also the sheriff’s office headquarters, and they made me tell the story of the attack again and again, which I told the same way again and again just like I told it to you. Even the part where, with a gun pointed at me, I renounced everything I believe in. That part seemed to bother me more than it bothered anybody else. 

Still, the whole story bothered somebody, because they gave Dad and Taleesa a bunch of brochures about post-traumatic stress disorder and warned them that I should get into therapy to avoid any problems down the road, including—duh duh duuuh—depression. Dad had me set up with Toni the next day. 

I like therapy, because I like Toni. She’s in her late twenties, I guess, and has a cute short haircut—like, boy-short—and big, thick, but totally fashionable glasses, and she’s always wearing cool retro fashions, like combat boots and flannel shirts. Her office shelves are full of plaques with punchy slogans: “Well-behaved women rarely make history,” or “Be the change you want to see in the world.” She even has a cross-stich sampler that says “Hell is other people.”

“That looks familiar,” I said the first time I saw it. “Where did you get it?”

“I bought it from a middle-school kid on Etsy,” she said. 

Toni wants me to talk about Cloudy Hair, about my bouts of what she calls “depression,” about my mom and how she died. But I try my best to talk instead about Toni’s love life. I know she has kids—I’ve seen the photos on her desk—but there’s no wedding ring. And her desk also has photos of her hiking and canoeing with cute hipster guys. I really want to know the story there. 

“I imagine you living this perfect life,” I say. “Climbing mountains, growing huge vegetables in your garden, flitting from boyfriend to boyfriend, writing papers about all of us screwed-up people in Alabama and presenting them at a conference in Stockholm.”

“That’s transference,” Toni said. “There’s a point in therapy when the therapist becomes your idol. It will pass. Usually we’ve made more progress than this before transference happens.”

Toni hasn’t said it, but I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m tough patient to crack. I have a problem with this whole post-traumatic stress disorder thing. I mean, if I get shot at, and later I have nightmares or flashbacks about it, how is that a disorder? I mean, isn’t that normal for a person who’s been shot at?

Anyway, Toni says I need to work out some issues in case I have to testify against Gary Dudley in court. But you and I know that won’t happen. If Jethro Gersham felt like he had to cut a plea deal—when he knew all along he was innocent—then surely Cloudy Hair will cut a deal, too. After all, they’ve got a statement from the victim, a weapon with his prints on it, and a thousand photos of a pig costume with a bullet hole in it. And that’s just from his attempt to murder me, not to mention the murder he successfully committed.

Jethro is of course out of prison, and maybe that’s what I really need therapy for. What do you say to a guy who’s been through this? He came by the house a few days ago, to say thank you. He brought me flowers and brought Martinez a football.

“I thank God for you,” he said to me. “I know the light of God is in you, because you saved me. You saved my life.”

For once, I kept my mouth shut. I could have said that Martinez did most of the work on his case, which was true, and I could have said that his life wasn’t really at stake because he was already about to plead down to a non-capital charge. Instead, I just hugged Jethro, and that seemed like exactly the right thing. 

Taleesa says flowers are losing their smell. It’s something about the way they grow them, in greenhouses. Sniff the flowers on sale at the grocery store and you’ll see. But the flowers I got from Jethro that day—purple, spiky-looking blooms, sprigs of green ferny stuff—had a perfumey smell to them. I still wonder where he got them.

We didn’t really see much of Jethro after that visit, which I guess was just as well. The last time we drove by his place, the city’s warning sign was gone, the yard was trimmed nicely, and the painting was done. I like to think of him puttering around the house happily all day like McNutters, though even McNutters has times when the hot tub won’t heat and the cork won’t come out of the champagne bottle. 

According to Wikipedia, kids suffering from post-traumatic stress sometimes experience regression. In other words, after a big shock, you might go back, for comfort’s sake, and start doing little-kid things you did a couple of grades ago. I tried to milk that for all it was worth, reserving plenty of time to play with McNutters in his dollhouse. It was fun at first, but after a while I started to think that McNutters’s life of luxury wasn’t as interesting as it used to be. Why lounge in the hot tub when you can climb mountains and fight injustice, the way I imagined Toni did in her off hours? 

Maybe this “transference” was really a thing. I found myself thinking more and more about Toni’s life during my daily work at the shelter. Cleaning litter boxes, walking dogs, devouring name-your-baby books and thesauruses in search of new names and descriptions to liven up the pet-of-the-week column. It all felt like a long climb up a mountain, but I wasn’t always sure we were getting any higher.

“Megg,” I said one day. “Remind me again why we can’t have a no-kill shelter like they have in San Francisco or wherever? A shelter that commits to not killing a single animal?”

“I don’t think those no-kill shelters are always as no-kill as they make out to be,” Megg replied. “I think some of them are just less-kill shelters. And state law pretty much says we have to kill the dogs that bite. But I never said we can’t have a no-kill shelter. There are just a lot of reasons we don’t. A lot of people here can barely afford to feed themselves, much less their pets.”

“Maybe we can find a way to be the first poor county to have a no-kill shelter. An honest-to-gosh place where no animal has to be killed,” I said. “Maybe there’s a way no one’s considered.”

“Maybe it’s possible,” Megg said. “But it would take a while. It might take twenty years.”

“I guess we should start planning now, then,” I said. 

Megg smiled at me. “Atty, I think you could do just about anything you set your mind to,” she said. “Bring me a twenty-year plan to set up a no-kill shelter and I’ll present it to the county commission. I’ll put everything I have behind it, I promise.”

And so here I am, on my bed with my dog, about to start writing my plan. 

Oh, I didn’t tell you about Easy? He’s ours now. After the incident with Cloudy Hair, Taleesa gave in and said we could adopt him if J. D. Ambrose’s family didn’t claim him. Megg took the dog to Ambrose’s only heir, the same sister who was married to Cloudy Hair, and was told she and the dog could both go rot.

So now Easy sleeps at the foot of my bed. And when I go to school, he sleeps on the wood floor in the foyer. And when I come back, he sleeps in front of the couch at my feet. He’s like a real-life McNutters, living a life of luxury. 

And he’s a great help if you’re writing. I’ve started talking out loud when I write, bouncing ideas off him. He listens earnestly to everything but never says a word, good or bad. 

Like just now, when I’m telling you and Easy this story, when I should be writing the introduction to my twenty-year plan.

“What should I start with?” I say, looking down at Easy. “I need an inspiring story of an animal someone saved from being put down.”

Easy yawns.

“What’s that, boy?” I say. “That’s a great idea. I’ll start with you.”