Dog Days

by Karen English

  Suddenly he hears someone shout, “Whoa, Yankee! Get back here.”

  It’s a big, tall boy who looks like he might be in high school, maybe even college. He’s wearing a sweatshirt with some kind of school insignia on it. He has a deep, booming voice. “Now!” he yells.

  Sheepishly, the dog stops, gives the Chew-Chew a fierce shake, then trots back to the tall boy. Carlotta’s toy is still gripped between its teeth. The big guy ruffles the dog’s fur and stoops to attach a leash to its collar. Gavin needs to get that Chew-Chew back. He takes in one big breath to gather his courage and starts off toward the high school (or college) guy, who looks up as Gavin approaches.

  “Um, um . . .” Gavin starts.

  The guy shades his eyes against the afternoon sun and looks down at him, but he doesn’t say anything.

  “Um . . . Your dog . . .”

  “Yeah? What about him?”

  Gavin tries to figure out if the guy’s words are friendly or unfriendly. He looks from the dog to the owner and then back to the dog.

  “What do you want?” the owner demands. That doesn’t sound very friendly to Gavin.

  He swallows. “I think your dog has my dog’s . . . toy.” Gavin’s glad he left Carlotta tied up back at the skate park out of view. He’d be embarrassed if the guy thought Carlotta was his dog.

  The guy looks down at the toy. “What makes you think so?”

  Gavin gains a bit of courage and says, “When I got to the park, my dog had her . . .” He doesn’t want to say Chew-Chew. It sounds dumb. “. . . chew toy. I mean, when I tied her up back at the skate park, she was playing with it. Now it’s gone. And—”

  The tall boy studies his dog. He seems to be thinking. Then he smiles. It’s not a friendly smile. “Yeah. Yankee had that already. That’s Yankee’s.”

  Gavin doesn’t know what to say. He knows the guy is lying. Gavin watches as he saunters away, his big brown dog by his side. It’s not fair. The guy is bigger than Gavin. He’s older. And that means one thing. The older, larger person can tell a giant fib and the smaller person can’t do anything about it.

  Gavin retraces his steps back to Carlotta, who is now jumping and yelping and making running attempts to free herself from the pole. He stands there and watches her for a moment. How is he going to explain her missing Chew-Chew? How? He can just see Aunt Myrtle’s face when he tells her that a dog, a big dog, stole Carlotta’s toy. Wait—he can’t tell her that. He’ll never hear the end of it from her. Aunt Myrtle will go on and on about Gavin not doing his job, not protecting Carlotta from losing her precious Chew-Chew. She’ll probably complain to his mother and father. She’ll probably act like he lost some special treasure worth zillions of dollars. Danielle will love it. What is he going to do? He looks at the whining Carlotta. He scrunches his mouth to the side. This is not good.

  Gavin paces back and forth. He can feel his heart beating fast while he thinks. He’s got to come up with an idea. But what? For some reason Carlotta stops her fidgeting and looks up at him, as if she, too, is wondering what he’s going to do. He unties her leash and starts home.

  When he gets there, Gavin heads straight for the backyard. He hurries past the kitchen window, hoping Aunt Myrtle won’t spot him. He has to think. He has to come up with an idea. It won’t be long before she’ll be cross-examining him about Carlotta’s outing. That, of course, will lead her to notice the missing Chew-Chew.

  “Give her to me,” Aunt Myrtle says, startling Gavin, who’d been pacing again. He hadn’t even heard her come out onto the back porch. Gavin climbs the stairs and hands her the leash. “How was everything?” Aunt Myrtle asks.

  Gavin can smell something yucky cooking in the kitchen. His heart sinks. “It was okay,” he says.

  “Did she go to the bathroom?”

  Oh, no, Gavin thinks. He’d forgotten all about that. Maybe she went to the bathroom while she was tied to the bike rack. But maybe she didn’t. He can’t be sure. Should he tell Aunt Myrtle a tiny fib? He can’t just say that he doesn’t know. “Uh, I don’t think she had to go,” he says.

  “What? Again?” Aunt Myrtle frowns down at Carlotta. “I’m just going to have to change her kibble.”

  “Yeah, it must be the kibble,” Gavin agrees.

  Aunt Myrtle turns to go back into the kitchen, with Carlotta trotting behind her. Gavin heads straight to the kitchen sink to wash his hands—to wash all the school germs off his hands, as his mother says, and the dog germs, too. When he opens the cabinet to pull out the box of wheat crackers, Aunt Myrtle says, “What are you doing?”

  “Um—I’m making me a snack.”

  Aunt Myrtle shakes her finger at Gavin. “No, too close to dinner,” she proclaims.

  He looks over at the stove. There’s some awful stuff simmering in those pots. He just knows it. He closes the cabinet door and heads for his room so he can drop off his backpack and maybe sneak in a video game or two before homework. He’s almost out of the kitchen when Aunt Myrtle asks, “Where’s Carlotta’s Chew-Chew?”

  Before Gavin can even think about what he’s going to say, the words just come out. “I must have left it . . . outside.”

  Aunt Myrtle looks over at Carlotta. She has settled onto her new bed on the porch with her head resting on her paws. “Well, you make sure you go get that Chew-Chew before the day is over. She has to have her Chew-Chew.”

  “Yes, Aunt Myrtle,” Gavin says. He runs up the stairs. The door to Danielle’s room is closed. She must be in there doing who knows what. His dad is still at work, and his mother must be at the market or something. The house is quiet. He slips into his room, closes the door, and breathes a sigh of relief.

  Right in the middle of homework—right in the middle of writing ten declarative sentences and underlining the subject once and the predicate twice—Gavin gets his brilliant idea: Just buy Carlotta another Chew-Chew. He’ll have to dip into the money he’s been saving all year for a new skateboard, but anything is better than having to hear more of Aunt Myrtle’s complaints.

  Six

  Harper and the Sticky Fingers

  Ms. Shelby-Ortiz has written Open Topic on the white-board for their morning journal entries. Gavin doesn’t know if he really likes Open Topic. He stares at the words for a minute. Then he looks around. Some kids, like him, are taking their time. Some, like that girl Nikki, have already dived in. He taps his pencil on the desk. Ms. Shelby-Ortiz looks over at him and he stops. He opens his journal and puts the date in the upper right corner of the first clean page. Then he stares at that for a while. He could write about Richard forgetting to bring his skateboard to his house before going home, but that would only make him more annoyed. He was supposed to bring it and then stash it in his backyard. But he forgot. Gavin sighs and writes:

  Well, I’m back. Nothing new to write about. Here’s my new problem. Turns out I only have to walk the dog 30 minutes when I get home. But Aunt Myrtle doesn’t even let me get a snack. There she is at the door ready to shove that horrible little Carlotta in my arms. That must be some kind of child abuse.

  He stops to think about this. He bets it is child abuse—making a kid starve. Making a kid go into his own money that he’s been saving and saving for a new skateboard, just to replace some crazy dog toy. The problem is that he knows no one would really think it’s abuse. No grownups, anyway. They would think it’s just a way of making him learn a lesson. How come grownups never have to learn lessons? It’s not fair.

  He goes back to his journal.

  Today I’m going to run quick to the pet store and buy Carlotta another toy because I got the real one stolen. By this big dog in the park and I wasn’t supposed to even be in the park. I had snuck over there to ride my skateboard. But this big guy

  A hand comes down on his journal and attempts to pull it right out from under his pencil.

  “Didn’t you hear the teacher? She said for me to collect the journals.” It’s that bossy Deja girl. “She said pencils down, journals closed.”

 
; “But I thought the journals were collected only once a week.”

  “Ms. Shelby-Ortiz,” Deja begins, as if she really loves saying the Ortiz part, “collects them a couple of times so she can check our spelling and skipped words and stuff and see if we’re doing better.”

  “But I wasn’t finished,” Gavin protests.

  “So? Too bad, so sad . . .” she says in a singsongy voice. She does this little thing with her neck when she says “sad.” Gavin wonders if she’s mad about something, or just mean. He watches her add his journal to the stack in her hand. Then she gives him a smile that looks more like a sneer before walking away. He watches her go. What’s he ever done to her?

  At recess, Richard is ball monitor. It’s almost as good as Gavin being ball monitor, because as soon as they’re out on the schoolyard, Richard passes the basketball to Gavin, who dribbles it all the way to the court, doing a really good dribble job and hoping everyone has stopped to notice. Well, he knows they haven’t, but he can dream. When he gets there, he tries to do a layup just like he sees on TV, but the ball doesn’t even get up to the basket. It arcs away from the court, and he has to go chasing after it. He hopes no one saw that.

  Darnell’s new friend Harper stops it with his foot. He’s definitely getting a reputation for being someone to stay away from, even though he’s only been at Carver Elementary a little while, like Gavin. Kids have been saying that Harper repeated third grade. And for some reason, this makes him seem a little bit scary. Probably because he really should be in sixth grade, and that’s not even elementary school. That’s middle school—a whole different story.

  Harper just stands there, tall and big and looking stupid, with his foot on the basketball. He gives Gavin a menacing smile, reaches down, grabs the ball, and begins to toss it from one giant palm to the other. Then he begins to dribble it in a circle. Suddenly he stops and brings the ball to his chest like he’s going to shoot it at Gavin.

  Gavin holds his hands up, hopeful. But Harper only pretends that he’s going to let go of the ball. He throws his head back and laughs really loud. Gavin feels his face heat up. Several of the boys from Room Ten have made their way over, and they’ve formed a semicircle around Gavin to watch what’s happening. Gavin feels put on the spot as Harper fakes another throw. Without thinking, Gavin puts up his hands to catch. Harper laughs again, and several of Gavin’s classmates join in. A few girls have even ambled over to see what’s going on.

  “Want it?” Harper calls out, now that he has an audience. “Come on, get ready!”

  Gavin lets his hands hang. Then he brings them up again. If Harper really does throw that basketball, he could get hit hard. And that’s not going to feel so good.

  Harper does a few fakes, to the delight of everyone. The laughter grows louder. Gavin’s face grows warmer.

  Harper is in the middle of launching a new fake when suddenly Darnell comes out of nowhere and knocks the ball out of Harper’s hand. He passes it to Gavin, who’s ready and catches it, surprising himself.

  “Come on, Harper,” Darnell says. “Quit fooling around. We’ve got dodgeball this week, and you’re wasting time.”

  While Harper seems to be deciding what he’ll do, Gavin clutches the ball, feeling out of breath. He tries to calm his breathing. Harper turns on his heel and gallops off to the dodgeball court. Kids who have gathered, hoping for a show, stand around a bit and then mosey off to their own areas.

  “Why did Darnell have to spoil the fun?” Gavin hears a girl from his class named Casey ask this other girl named Ayanna.

  “Yeah, that was fun,” Ayanna agrees.

  “I gotta go to the pet store,” Gavin says to Richard as they burst through the front doors after dismissal. For Gavin, this is the “free-est” time of day. He loves the feeling of his back to the school as he takes the front steps two at a time. When school is over, he can do almost anything he wants—for a little while. He can walk down Marin and stop by his uncle Vestor’s best friend’s store for candy, or he can go home and get permission to ride his bike for thirty minutes. He even likes standing at his kitchen counter, putting blobs of grape jelly on wheat crackers to eat while he does his homework.

  Now Richard has to spoil it with, “Don’t you have to go straight home to walk that dog?”

  Gavin rolls his eyes. “I have to get a new chew toy first. Otherwise my aunt’s going to have a fit. And I’m going to have to hear her say I’m irresponsible and a whole bunch of other stuff, and she might even have my mother put me on punishment.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Richard says.

  So instead of turning toward Ashby, they head to Marin and Pet Mart, the big store that claims it has everything a pet owner could want or need for their beloved four-legged member of the family. Gavin figures if any place will have a toy that looks exactly like Carlotta’s Chew-Chew, it’s Pet Mart.

  But when they get there, they discover that there’s a whole aisle of rubber and rawhide knickknacks and thingamabobs for dogs to chew on. How will they ever find the right one? “What about this?” Richard asks, holding up a big round thing with what looks like a thousand rubber tentacles.

  “No,” Gavin says, shaking his head. “Her Chew-Chew doesn’t look like that.”

  “Her what?”

  “My aunt Myrtle calls it a Chew-Chew. It’s this white rawhide bone thing with chewed-on knotted ends.”

  Richard moves down to one end of the aisle so he can start checking everything in it. Gavin goes to the other end and begins to move slowly in Richard’s direction. So many doggie toys. He never knew dogs had such an array of toys devoted just to them. His eyes stop on something that looks a lot like Carlotta’s Chew-Chew hanging on a shelf hook by a loop of twine. He takes it down and examines it closely. No, it’s got little brown speckles on it. It won’t do. It wouldn’t fool Aunt Myrtle for a second.

  He looks over at Richard, who is twirling a rope ball on a braided, twisted string. What in the world . . . ? Richard’s supposed to be helping him. He knows Gavin has a time limit. What is he doing? Then Gavin sees Richard pick up a bag of dog biscuits from a display at the end of the aisle, gaze at them, then sniff them. He looks like he wants to eat one.

  “Richard!” Gavin hisses. “What are you doing?”

  Richard looks over at him and grins. “These look good,” he says.

  “Are you crazy? Those are for dogs! Come on. You gotta help me!”

  “Oh, yeah,” Richard says. Slowly he begins walking back down the aisle toward Gavin, looking closely at the items on the shelves. “What about this?” He holds up a dark beige dog chew.

  “Wrong color,” Gavin says. He checks the big round clock on the store wall. Three ten. Oh, no. He imagines Aunt Myrtle checking the clock on the kitchen stove right then. He turns back to the shelves and keeps searching.

  “What about this?”

  Gavin sighs and looks at what Richard’s holding up. He moves closer. Richard has a hard rawhide bone that looks a lot like the Chew-Chew. Same color, same size.

  “Let me see that,” he says.

  Richard hands the bone over for Gavin to examine. It could definitely pass for Carlotta’s Chew-Chew. “I think this is it,” he says. “This one is new, but I bet I can dirty it up. Make it look a lot like the real thing.” Gavin looks at Richard with new respect. He knew there was a brain in there somewhere.

  “Let’s go to Mr. D.’s store for chips,” Richard suggests as they pay and leave the store.

  “I gotta get home, Richard,” Gavin says, stuffing the Chew-Chew into his backpack.

  “We’ll go real quick.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “We’ll be in and out, Gavin. I promise.”

  “We better,” Gavin says. They turn toward Ashby.

  Gavin spots Darnell, Gregory Johnson, and Harper as soon as he and Richard walk into Mr. D.’s store. A feeling of unease comes over him. Because of Harper, he really doesn’t want to go near the group. But before Gavin can stop Richard,
he calls out, “Hey, whatcha guys getting?” and makes his way over to his brother.

  Darnell is looking at the display of chips. Gregory Johnson is scanning the shelves of candy right in front of the register. Harper has disappeared down one of the aisles.

  “I don’t know yet, so you mind?” With the back of his hand, Darnell gently moves Richard, who’s blocking his view, out of the way of the chip display. Gavin looks up at the big security mirror that reflects everybody who can’t be seen from the cash register, then glances at Mr. Delvecchio. He’s busy ringing up a Big Chunk candy bar for Gregory. Gavin looks back at the mirror and sees Harper running his fingers over a rack of those cheap toys that break after you’ve played with them only a couple of times: water pistols and rubber balls attached to wooden paddles, small plastic cars. He settles on a spiky rubber-ball thing. He removes it from the rack and, instead of taking it up to the register, he slips it inside his jacket under his arm.

  Gavin feels his eyes grow big. Real big. He can’t look away. Mr. Delvecchio is putting Gregory Johnson’s candy bar in a small bag. Gavin watches Harper come down the aisle with his hands in his jacket pockets, whistling. He goes straight up to the counter. Gavin knows why he’s got his hands in his pockets. He knows why he’s keeping his upper arms pressed to his sides. Because his left arm is keeping the toy from falling to the floor.

  Gavin feels his heart pounding in his chest. He stares at Harper, who’s now whistling something that doesn’t even sound like a real tune. “What’s taking you guys so long?” Harper says to Gregory and Darnell. “I gotta go.”

  Gavin looks at Mr. Delvecchio again. He can see that Mr. D. doesn’t know what Harper did. For some strange reason, Gavin feels guilty. It’s as if he has taken the toy himself. Mr. Delvecchio and his uncle are friends. Harper might as well have stolen from Uncle Vestor.