Buster

by Caleb Huett

  Buster did start to relax at Tonio’s words, and got his bearings enough to underspeak a thank you.

  “You’re welcome.” Tonio relaxed, too, when Buster didn’t seem to be in crisis mode. “I’m sorry I messed this up so bad, Buster.”

  You?

  “I thought I could save you, or something. I don’t know. I thought I’d show up and be a hero. But of course I couldn’t do that. I can’t do anything that matters.”

  How did you even get here?

  “I asked some dogs!” He threw his arms up. “Because that’s a normal thing I can do now, I guess. I knew you were gone immediately, and everybody at the tournament was asking about you. I just said you knew your way home and were tired of the crowd. Like I was. Mozart didn’t know where you were, but I went to visit Jpeg. She …” He shook his head, not believing what he’d seen. “She printed out directions for me from the internet. And then I asked Skyler to drive me here. I didn’t even have to tell anyone why! Mia didn’t really pay attention when I was talking to Mozart, and when I told Skyler where I was going, she just said I was ‘the coolest kid ever’ for going to a place that was ‘so definitely, absolutely haunted’ and didn’t ask any other questions.”

  That’s amazing! Buster headbutted Tonio’s chest. You got here all on your own!

  “I didn’t do anything. Oh, and—” He pulled a small plastic bag of dog food and another bag of trail mix out of his cargo pockets. “Devon gave me some snacks to bring. Or he just gave me some snacks for no reason. I’m not sure.”

  I couldn’t resist the snacks but underspoke while I chewed.

  You did an adventure! You talked to people. Asked questions. Came all the way out here with no idea what you’d find. That’s brave. You wouldn’t have done that a month ago.

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. They caught me, and now we’re both just locked up. What is happening? What do they want? I know you’re in trouble for telling me you’re smart, but—”

  They decided I’m a Bad Dog. They’re going to send me to The Farm.

  “I don’t know that thing you did with your paw. Send you where?”

  I tried to figure out a way to tell him. Place … like … the Lins’ shelter.

  “A farm?”

  Yes. THE Farm.

  “What’s that?”

  It’s supposed to be a place humans have never gone. It’s where Bad Dogs go, and where Dog Court is based. I don’t know where it is, but I would be there forever. No more humans. You get all the food you need, and it’s supposed to be pretty, but there’s nothing to do. Just sitting around for the rest of your life.

  “Sounds kind of nice,” Tonio mumbled.

  Buster bared his teeth. No. I want to be here, with you.

  Tonio’s eyes filled with tears almost immediately. “Why? You’re only in trouble because of me.”

  I’m in trouble because I broke the rules. You didn’t do that.

  “Still. You were trying to help me.”

  And I would do it again!

  Tonio buried his face in Buster’s fur. “You’re a good friend.” His voice came out muffled, but Buster understood.

  So are you.

  Buster heard someone down at the base of the Ferris wheel. He stepped to the edge—but then thought better of it and stayed in the middle. The cart jerked back into motion suddenly, swinging them toward the ground.

  “Am I in trouble, too? What will they do to me?” Tonio asked.

  Buster tilted his tail into an unsure pose. I don’t know. I’ve never heard of what happens when a human finds out. He didn’t want to tell Tonio that he was scared, too. They couldn’t do anything terrible to him … right? He was a human!

  Tonio stared out of the cart and rubbed at Buster’s head absentmindedly. “If it wasn’t for my anxiety, you wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here. Mom and Dad wouldn’t spend all their time worried about me. Mia and Devon would have a friend who didn’t throw up and try to leave all the time. Bellville would have … something else. Something better than me.”

  They were halfway down now.

  You don’t know that. Buster nipped at his fingers. Anxiety or not, you are the one people got. And they all like you. We are all glad you are around.

  “But I could be better. If I was anyone else—”

  Anyone else wouldn’t have noticed that I was really smart, even when I was pretending. Buster underspoke energetically, hitting all the poses clearly and deliberately so Tonio would understand. Anyone else wouldn’t care so much about me, or Mia, or Devon, or your parents—you are worried that you aren’t doing a good job, but some people wouldn’t try at all. You care, Tonio, not just worry. That’s what matters.

  “I don’t know,” Tonio mumbled meekly. He wanted to believe it, but there was so much evidence in his head that contradicted it. Buster was just being nice, Tonio wasn’t any more caring than the average person, and wouldn’t someone who was kind and didn’t worry be even better than him? “I don’t know if you’re right.”

  Buster was about to respond, but the cart rolled to a stop at the base of the Ferris wheel. Officers Sergeant and Grizzle waited for them as the door popped open.

  “The judge wants you over at the teacups,” Officer Sergeant said, looping a thick rope around Buster’s neck. Officer Grizzle guided Tonio’s leg into another. Then the officers pulled the ropes taut and led the prisoners off into another part of Juicy Fun.

  I’m right. Buster posed as they walked. I know it.

  Tonio didn’t answer.

  Before Juicy Fun shut down, the teacup ride had been one if its most famous attractions. The cups were atop a twenty-foot-tall concrete platform decorated in a cheesy mural of palmetto trees under a sparkling night sky, and even the years of being left alone in the weather hadn’t worn down the paint. The cups themselves looked like they’d been taken from a grandma giant’s dusty cupboard—the patterns were fading, but you could still see the swirls and flowers flowing around the fake-porcelain white.

  Officers Sergeant and Grizzle pulled Buster and Tonio up the ramp that wrapped around the platform to the cups themselves. Tonio froze at the end of the ramp, staring at the cup with a blue fleur-de-lis pattern where Judge Sweetie and Lasagna sat awkwardly on the bench meant for humans.

  Judge Sweetie barked to the guards, and they unhooked the leashes from both prisoners. Buster stepped forward and noticed a change in Tonio’s breath. He turned around to jump up and place his paws on Tonio’s stomach. He barked twice, loudly, and Tonio’s head snapped down to look at him.

  Buster stood stiff and bumped into Tonio’s leg, guiding him to hold on to Buster and lower himself to the ground. When his legs were splayed on the concrete, Buster laid across his legs and took deep breaths in rhythm, trying to guide Tonio’s focus back to the physical, the real.

  “The judge is waiting!” Grizzle barked. Buster shot him a glare with his lips curled back so far the officer’s tail curled under him in a fraction of a second.

  “Bad brain!” Buster whined from Tonio’s lap while doing the Underspeak for it as best as he could. “Bad brain.” Tonio’s panic attack had started and it was past the point he would be able to cut it off quickly, but his mind raced as he tried to connect Buster’s words into full thoughts in his own head.

  I’m anxious, Tonio thought. These are anxious thoughts. Why? Which ones? It doesn’t matter which ones. Even if some of the thoughts are wrong, they’re mainly true. No matter what happens here, I’ve hurt everyone I know. There’s nothing I can do.

  Tonio’s eyes were squeezed shut, his chest heaving. It does matter which ones. Start at the beginning. Look at the evidence.

  Tonio caught one deeper breath and felt better knowing he could still breathe. It always felt like he was never going to start feeling normal again, in the middle of it.

  I still don’t know very much about dog expressions. I have no idea if any of these dogs hate me.

  He looked at Judge Sweetie, who he guessed was the judge beca
use she looked very serious.

  That sure looks like a frown to me. She seems mad.

  There’s no way for me to know that! She has a dog face, not a human one! I don’t think dogs even smile!!

  Plus, they already took off the leashes. They’re not tying us to anything. Plus, they’re dogs. They’re strong. If they wanted to hurt me, they could. But they haven’t, and they won’t. They have laws, and a court, and a whole world I don’t know much about, but they don’t seem cruel or evil. I’m not going to die.

  His breathing started to slow, and his panic attack started to pass. His heart was still pounding and he was tired, but he was going to feel better. He couldn’t handle looking deeper at some of the other thoughts right now: When the cycle got going, when his anxiety spun around itself and created more and more false thoughts, sometimes it hit a place he didn’t like to think about afterward. A sadder, darker place that made him feel empty and his brain feel fuzzy.

  But he was out of it for now. He scratched Buster’s ears and reminded himself he was a real person, in the world, with people waiting to talk to him. Well, dogs. Dogs were also people now, he supposed.

  Buster helped his human stand back up, and they walked over to the blue teacup. Tonio mumbled an apology for the wait and slid in first to sit next to the corgi; Buster slid in behind him. When they were all seated, Sweetie waved the officers away and pulled the little door shut. A tablet screen was belted down to the circular wheel in the middle of the teacup, so the dogs could rotate the cup and type with their paws for Tonio to read.

  “I wanted to make sure our conversation had privacy,” Sweetie explained, both verbally and by typing. Officer Sergeant pulled a lever in the booth and the cup began to rotate around its center, around the center of the ride, and around the other cups. The spin was gentle, but focusing too hard on the movement made Buster dizzy. He kept his eyes on Sweetie once he was sure Tonio had calmed down. “The three of us have reached a compromise—a compromise that Pronto is, perhaps, less happy about, which is why he is not here. I’d like to offer—”

  “Is everything all right?” Lasagna interrupted, placing a kind paw on Tonio’s shoulder and then typing the rest. “I’ve never seen a panic attack before. That was scary.”

  “I’m okay,” Tonio mumbled. “Thank you.” The cup curled around the edge of the platform, then slingshot its way back toward the center.

  Buster glared at the judge. “You made us spend all day in a cage. He’s tired, and scared, and you don’t even care, do you?”

  The judge watched him with a sour expression. “That reminds me.” She leaned down below the teacup’s center handle and pulled up a basket with her teeth. “I had someone make chicken salad sandwiches. Humans love chicken salad, don’t they?”

  Tonio took the basket at Buster’s signal and opened it up. “Oh, whoa, thank you! I love chicken salad.” He also found a little bag of extra meat and fed the pieces to Buster.

  “There’s a water bottle in there as well,” Judge Sweetie added. “And you can take as much time as you’d like.”

  The teacups kept spinning. Buster’s stomach, empty aside from Devon’s snacks after a full night of storytelling and a day of curling up in a Ferris wheel, growled loudly at the first smell of chicken. He gobbled up the pieces handed to him, and Tonio ate a sandwich triangle in seconds.

  “This is delicious!” Tonio gasped. “Did a dog made this? I—ack—uh—” He reached into his mouth and pulled out a long hair. “Yes. A dog made this. Thank you.”

  “Of course.” Judge Sweetie bowed her head. She waited for their munching to slow down, then started again. “Dogkind has never had a situation quite like this one. We’ve had scares before, we’ve had humans learn some of our secrets, but we’ve never had a human see Dog Court for themselves. We’ve also never had a human learn any Underspeak, which your human has done remarkably quickly. Still, our typical solution could work here—we would send you to The Farm, Buster, and assign a watchdog to Tonio, who would make sure he never spoke the truth to anyone else.” She paused a moment to catch up with the typing.

  “But because of your specific situation—and because I’m not heartless—I’d like to offer something different in your case, Tonio. I am willing to send you to The Farm as well, with Buster. The Farm is a beautiful place, truly a paradise—where you would be completely separated from the rest of the world. You would be taken care of, and you would have no responsibilities, but you would also have no further contact with anyone else. You would have no impact on the world, but you would be with Buster. And other Bad Dogs, of course.”

  “No!” Buster tried to stand but was too wobbly in the spinning cups. He sat back down. “Absolutely not. This is my punishment, not Tonio’s.”

  “I’m not offering this as a punishment.” She looked back up to Tonio. “We send dogs there because they can’t handle regular society. Based on what I’ve seen, and what Buster has told me, it seems like you might not be suited to your world, either. So if you want to leave, we can take you. You’ll be safe, and no one will find you. I promise.”

  Tonio wiped chicken salad goop off his fingers, using a napkin from the basket. He pushed his bandanna up and thought about what she was saying. This was what he wanted, wasn’t it? Freedom from worry? If he couldn’t change anything, if he wasn’t around anyone, he couldn’t worry about anything. There was nothing he could do differently, nothing he could do wrong.

  So many things about the world were scary. What would he do when he got older? What would he do for a job, or for a life? What would happen if he moved to a different city? What if he spent the rest of his life messing up and hurting people? What if he kept having panic attacks, and they never ended as long as he lived? Someplace like The Farm might make that better. And at least that way, Buster wouldn’t be alone. Right?

  Right?

  Buster watched Tonio stare at the sky as they circled the platform. He could guess at what the boy was thinking.

  “Tonio,” he said, “you can’t do this. I messed up, not you. The world needs you to stick around.”

  Tonio wasn’t sure. But he had an idea.

  “I think I understand why you do this,” he said, addressing the judge. “Why you even have The Farm, and the Law. It’s because you don’t know what will happen, right? If humans find out that you’re smart. The world will change in a big way, and you don’t know if that would be good or bad. But since it could be very bad, you keep quiet.”

  The judge bobbed her head yes.

  “I get that,” Tonio assured her. “I do that, too. When I’m worried, or I’m feeling anxious, I sometimes stop doing anything. I try not to do anything good or anything bad, just in case I might accidentally do something really bad. And I could always accidentally do something really bad, so a lot of the time I don’t do anything.”

  He took a drink of water from the bottle and watched the clouds spin in the air. “Buster isn’t like that, I don’t think. Buster helped me because he wanted to do something, even if it might be bad. He wanted to try to do good. Mia is like that, too: She is always doing something, and I think that’s really cool. And Devon is totally fine with whatever happens and doesn’t worry if he’s messing up. I want to be that way.

  “Dr. Jake says anxiety is a thing that happens in your brain—like something messes up, so you worry too much. But that, sometimes, it’s also about what’s happening to you. When something is very hard, or I’m very stressed, I can get more anxious. It seems like you are probably anxious, maybe that kind of anxious, right?” Tonio directed this at the judge. She made a pose of confusion. “I mean, you have to worry about all dogs, and about the whole world, and you’re still taking time to worry about me and Buster. You must feel pretty anxious, and I bet … I bet being a dog can make you feel pretty anxious, too. Keeping secrets all the time.”

  “Maybe so,” the judge agreed. “But what does that have to do with your decision?”

  “Why don’t you all just go to The
Farm? Why don’t dogs just leave humans behind, and go do your own thing? Why even live around us if you have to do it like this? It seems so hard. It seems like you have to put so much energy into doing so little.”

  Buster’s ears folded back in disappointment. It sounds like he thinks he should go. That everyone should go.

  Lasagna was eager to answer. “Different dogs will tell you different things. I think, though, that the deepest truth is that we love humans. We want to make a difference in the world where we can, even if it is small. Even if it’s slow. Dogs and humans make each other happier,kinder, and safer. We don’t have to do those things perfectly for them to be worth it.”

  Tonio nodded. He’d figured something out. “Yes, exactly! So if that’s worth it—making a small sacrifice to do a small good—why not just tell humans the truth? Why not try to do more good, even if it’s still not perfect?”

  “It could be dangerous,” the judge explained. “Dogs—and humans—might be hurt.”

  “Buster helped me. He helped me a little before, and he helps me even more now. I think that was worth it. So … no, I don’t want to go to The Farm. And I don’t want you to send Buster there, either, because I want him around, helping me get better at pushing past my fear.” He clenched the handle in the middle of the teacups and bowed his head at the judge. “I promise we won’t tell anyone, but I think you should.”

  They spun in silence. Lasagna wagged his tail and turned to the judge. “I told you. You see? This is it. This is exactly what I’ve been talking about. This boy is perfect evidence. He never would have said something like this before meeting Buster.”

  Buster tilted his head at Tonio. That was true, wasn’t it? He had made a difference. Tonio was still going to have panic attacks, was still going to worry, but he believed things could change. His time with Dr. Jake made that obvious, but so did his time with Mia, and with Devon. Tonio was different from how he’d been at the beginning of the summer—he was willing to take risks, to push through things even when they were hard.