How to Be Good(ish)

by Karen McCombie

  “So!” said Dad, handing me a plate with a huge slice of cake on it. “What’s new with you, Indie?”

  I was about to tell him about yesterday’s disaster with Fee’s hair (she’d eventually forgiven me and Soph – phew!) and my serious lack of talents (there were only three days left before I had to get back to Miss Levy with my list), when some singing got in the way.

  "Happy birthday to you,

  happy birthday to you!"

  trilled my step-mum Fiona, as she bustled into the living room with gift-wrapped somethings.

  "Happy birthday, dear INDIE!"

  Dad and Dylan joined in.

  "Happy birthday to YOOOU!"

  Well, to be exact, it was the day after my birthday, and I was having Birthday No. 2 round at my dad’s house.

  “Um, thanks,” I smiled, opening parcel No. 1, which contained a ‘pretty’ jumper with a pony’s head on it. (I was trying very hard to sound like I was thrilled about such a horrible present, but could feel my cheeks radiating telltale I’m-fibbing blushes.)

  “And that one’s from me!” said Dylan, as I tore open present No. 2, and stared at the title of the book in my hand:

  Fascinating Fossils!

  “Great!” I grinned, feeling really, truly, horribly horrible about fibbing.

  Now it was time for parcel No. 3. (Eeek…)

  “Wow! Thank you!” I giggled with proper, genuine happiness and relief, as I unwrapped a brand new mobile phone.

  “It’s got photo-messaging – look!” said Dylan, grabbing the phone from me and taking a snap of my birthday cake, which had been made by Fiona (she’s the cookery writer for the local newspaper) and decorated with a zillion girly icing-sugar roses.

  My step-mum Fiona likes girly things. She doesn’t like germs, dust and messiness. I’d already spotted her frowning at a couple of stray dog hairs on my T-shirt. I bet she was worried that they’d make Dylan start sneezing or swelling up or something…

  “So, what’s new with you, Dad?” I asked, once Dylan had showed me how to zap my cake picture to his mobile (Dylan was the only other person I knew with a photo-messaging phone).

  “Well, for the wedding I’m doing this week, I’ve bought an amazing new lens for my camera,” said Dad enthusiastically. (He’s a wedding photographer for the local newspaper, where he met Fiona.)

  “What’s so amazing about your lens thingy, then?” I asked, nibbling a bit of flowery cake very carefully, so that no crumbs or icing-sugar petals landed on the floor.

  “It does this special multi-faceted effect!”

  I must have looked totally confused, ’cause next thing, Dad zoomed off to his darkroom to get the brochure to show me.

  And as Dad zoomed, Fiona gathered up his empty plate and Dylan’s too, even though I didn’t think Dylan was finished (his cheeks were bulging like a hamster’s).

  “Hey, Indie…” Dylan mumphed with his mouth full. “Have you ever seen a picture of how flies’ eyes work?”

  Huh?

  Typical Dylan: he was always coming up with nuts stuff out of the blue, like asking if I’d ever seen a picture of how flies’ eyes work when we weren’t even having a conversation about flies, as far as I could remember.

  Also, although Dylan was only nine (and weird), he was so stupidly good at everything at school that sometimes he made me feel a bit … well … stupid.

  “I think I have seen something like that…” I said warily, wondering what he was on about.

  “With the new lens for Mike’s camera” – Dylan called my dad by his first name – “the photo comes out looking like how flies see things, with everything broken up into hexagons.”

  “What d’you mean, exactly?” I asked, feeling thick.

  “Like … like a mosaic. That’s just one picture, but i it’s made up of loads of little pieces.”

  Ah, now I got it … the bride would look like a jigsaw puzzle.

  Uh-oh…

  “The people getting married aren’t going to like that,” I muttered glumly.

  “I know. Your Wedding Day meets A Bugs Life!” Dylan giggled at his own joke.

  My mouth was starting to stretch to a smile too, even though me and Dylan didn’t normally have much of a sense of humour in common, and I was worried about Dad losing his job ’cause of taking weirdo wedding pics.

  And as it turned out, I had every reason to be worried…

  “Mike already had some bride moaning on the phone to him today,” said Dylan, reaching over to the magazine rack and pulling out a recent copy of the local paper. “Look!”

  On this week’s wedding picture, Dad had snapped the photo so that you could only see the bride and groom’s faces from the nose up.

  “Oh…” I mumbled, suddenly worried that Dad might get fired from his job soon, if he didn’t start taking normal pictures.

  “Who’s the dog?”

  For a second, I thought that this was a very rude way to talk about a bride, till I realized that Dylan was looking at the opposite page, where there was a smiling photo of my pretty blonde mum holding the world’s ugliest dog.

  It was like a black blob with wonky eyes and chewed ears.

  If the headline hadn’t read I might have thought that it was a potbellied pig crossed with a potato.

  “Dunno… I’ll have to ask Mum,” I replied to Dylan’s question, quickly scanning the story underneath and reading that the dog was called Dib and that he’d been at the centre longer than any other animal, including the parrot that kept getting returned ’cause it said rude words.

  “So what did you wish for, then, Indie?”

  See what I meant about Dylan? He was really hard to have a conversation with, the way he darted from flies’ eyes, to dogs that looked like potatoes, to wishes, without giving you a chance to catch up.

  “What wish? When I blew out the candles on my cake a little while ago, you mean?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh,” nodded Dylan, as he reached over and pinched one of the zillions of icing-sugar roses to eat. “Well, I…”

  Well, I wasn’t actually sure if I wanted to tell him what I’d wished for, in case he thought it was way too pathetic.

  “… I wished for a talent.”

  Oops – it just slipped out. Like I said, I have absolutely no talent for lots of things, including fibbing, so I had to tell Dylan the truth.

  “What – so you want to find something to be really good at?” he asked.

  “Or just good-ish” I shrugged, not wanting to seem greedy.

  Dylan sometimes does this thing where he goes quiet and blinks at nothing, as if he’s switched his brain off. But the absolute opposite is happening – it’s like he’s flicking through a thousand files in his mind at supersonic speed, trying to find some information.

  And he was doing that now; the only sound in the silent room was the crunching of icing-sugar roses between Dylan’s teeth.

  “ I know! I know the perfect talent you could have!”

  OK, so Dylan was a weirdo, but he was the smartest weirdo I knew and I couldn’t wait to hear what he had to say…

  “Mum…?”

  “Yep?” muttered Mum, frowning at the tiny hedgehog she’d just plucked out of the box of tiny hedgehogs. (She was trying to figure out which mini-hedgehog was which, and who’d been fed already.)

  “When I was round at Dad’s today–-”

  I was about to ask Mum about the dog that me and Dylan saw her with in the paper.

  “Yeah … you told me. Dylan suggested something you could try, as a talent,” muttered Mum distractedly, narrowing her eyes as she gently placed the hedgehog into my cupped hands.

  “Yeah, right. Magic tricks,” I mumbled, allowing myself to get side-tracked, as the gorgeously cute hedgehog wriggled and tickled against my palms.

  But I mean, magic tricks.

  So much for Dylan being smart.

  His idea for a talent was even more useless than hair wraps…

  “So what’s wrong with magic tricks?
You could’ve used that birthday money I gave you to buy yourself a beginner’s kit, Indie. Didn’t you fancy giving that a try?”

  “No way! Magic’s boring!” I laughed, backing onto the kitchen stool and nearly sitting on Smudge. (Smudge didn’t seem to notice, but then our cat sleeps so much she’s probably awake as often as your average cushion.)

  “Magic’s not boring” Mum laughed. “Those blokes on TV can do amazing stuff, like making helicopters disappear!”

  “Yeah, but normal magic’s just stuff like card tricks,” I tried to explain, remembering a really dull kids’ entertainer Soph had had at her eighth birthday party. “I mean, if I could learn how to turn kittens into Siberian tigers, or make Fee’s bald spot disappear, then that would be very cool. But card tricks? I don’t think so…”

  “So you still need to find a talent then?” Mum smiled.

  “Yes, please…”

  You bet. It was Wednesday already, and I only had till the end of the week to come up with my top three talents for Miss Levy.

  “Well, what about star signs?”

  “Star signs?”

  For a second, I wondered why on earth Mum had thought of that, and then I noticed the torn-out magazine page that was lining the plastic hedgehog box. On the part that wasn’t covered in bedding or hedgehog wee, you could clearly read the words:

  “But I don’t know anything about that stuff!” I told Mum.

  “Yes, but maybe you could read up and find out what different star signs are meant to be like – and then try guessing what signs people are. That’d be fun!”

  Before I could mull over that maybe-talent, the phone rang.

  “I’ll get it!” I told Mum, since she had more hedgehogs than me to look after. “Hello?”

  “Did the picture in the paper work? Has Dib got a home yet?”

  It was Dylan, not even bothering to waste time with hi or hello.

  I knew everything happened very quickly in his brainy brain, but as we were only looking through the newspaper together round at his place half an hour ago, I couldn’t see how Dib would have found a loving new owner that quickly.

  “I’ll ask Mum,” I told him, since he sounded so keen to know. (Actually, I was keen to know too, which is why I started quizzing her about it a little while ago.)

  “What’s up?” Mum asked, looking up from her feeding and sorting.

  “Tell her it’s Dylan,” said Dylan.

  “It’s Dylan,” I said to Mum.

  “Tell her we saw her photo in the paper today and–-”

  “We saw your photo in the paper today and Dylan wants to know if that funny-looking dog Dib has got a home yet.”

  “Dib?” Mum frowned. “Oh, you mean the DIB!”

  Did I?

  “Appparently, at the first rescue centre he was in, someone decided to call him DIB, because DIB is short for Dog In Black like the movie Men in Black!”

  I was totally confused. There I was, talking to my ditzy step-brother on the phone, holding a conker-sized hedgehog, and listening to my mum speaking in code.

  HELP!

  “What does she mean, ‘the first rescue centre he was in’?” Dylan asked in my ear.

  “What d’you mean, ‘the first rescue centre he was in’?” I asked Mum.

  “Well, we’re his third. He spent months in the first two rescue centres, and no one chose to re-home him, so he came to us.”

  “Mum says he spent months–-”

  “I heard,” Dylan interrupted me. “Poor dog!”

  Poor dog all right; it wasn’t just a DIB – it was a DIBWAVU. (Dog In Black Who’s Also Very Ugly). No wonder the first two centres had found it hard to get him a new owner.

  “But back to Dylan’s first question,” said Mum. “No, the DIB hasn’t got a home yet. Doesn’t Dylan fancy having a dog?”

  “Can’t,” Dylan sighed in my ear. “Allergies, remember?”

  “Can’t – he’s allergic,” I repeated to Mum.

  (I was starting to get a scrambled brain with this three-way conversation.)

  “Oh, yes… I forgot. Pity.” Mum shrugged, lifting the mewling hedgehog back out of my hands now that she’d worked out which conker-head was which.

  “OK, see ya,” Dylan mumbled, super-keen to get off the phone all of a sudden.

  “Hold on a sec, Dyl!” I said, before he disappeared on me. “Can I, er, ask you something?”

  A dumb idea had just flashed into my dumb head.

  “Uh … yeah, OK. What?”

  “Can I … er … can I try to guess your star sign?”

  Mum instantly glanced up from the hedgehogs and grinned encouragingly.

  “Um … I s’pose so,” muttered Dylan.

  “Well,” I began, concentrating hard(ish) and trying to turn all psychic. “I bet you’re … a Pisces!”

  Mum was shaking her head madly and I knew I’d goofed.

  “Indie, there’s no such sign as Sagittarium!” know-all Dylan told me.

  “OK, I give up,” I sighed, realizing that I didn’t know any more star signs or even how many there were in the zodiac (whatever a ‘zodiac’ was). “So what star sign are you?”

  “Well, my birthday was two weeks ago, so I’m Libra, same as you,” said Dylan.

  Oh.

  So maybe guessing star signs wasn’t the right talent for me either, specially since I hadn’t even known what my own star sign was till now.

  I’d decided to give the horoscope thing a proper go, seeing as I didn’t have any other talents to try, and specially because it was Thursday afternoon already and Miss Levy expected a brand new, improved CV on her desk first thing tomorrow.

  So, I was going to try out my star sign skills in a second; I just had to do a quick something first…

  Click!

  The DIB didn’t move as I held my brand new photo-messaging phone up and snapped in his direction. He was looking at me kind of blankly.

  He kept looking at me kind of blankly as I zapped his picture to Dylan (at least Dylan wasn’t allergic to pictures of animals).

  The DIB stared dopily as I put my phone away and started flicking through the horoscope book I’d borrowed from the school library at lunchtime today.

  “OK, how about this: Those born under the sign of Taurus,” I began to read aloud, “love their home comforts…”

  Glancing up, I checked out the fat, black blob sitting in the corner of a concrete pen, with the edge of a mucky-looking bit of blanket in its mouth.

  “They also love their food…”

  One empty stainless-steel food bowl, one fat blob of a dog.

  “…and can be stubborn. Here, boy! C’mere!”

  The DIB looked me up and down (and round a bit) with its wonky eyes, but didn’t move a lumpy muscle.

  “How are you getting on?” asked Mum, flippity-flapping up beside me in her rubbery green wellies.

  “OK,” I said. “I just tried to figure out the DIB’s star sign – and I think he’s a Taurus!”

  “I think you say ‘Taurean’. But well done!” Mum grinned. “Now, how are you going to figure out if you’re right, Indie? ’Cause remember, the DIB is a stray and we’ve got no idea how old he is, or when his birthday is!”

  Drat. And there was yet another possible talent, disappearing into thin air like a burst soapy bubble…

  “Anyway,” Mum carried on regardless, pulling a clunking set of keys off her belt-loop. “Want to come and meet him properly?”

  “Definitely!” I said, as I watched Mum unlock the door of the DIB’s pen and motion me to go in.

  Hey, it’s one of the perks of being a kid, isn’t it? Taking advantage of the jobs your parents do, I mean.

  We did a poll in class once, to decide whose parent had the best job, and everyone voted for Rohana, ’cause her parents ran a newsagent’s and she got ALL the crisps or sweets that were out of date for NOTHING!

  I got voted second (hooray!), ’cause I could go to the rescue centre any time I wanted and pat anyth
ing I wanted.

  (Bottom of the list was Wesley, whose dad was an electrician. What perks could Wes get? A bag of electricity? A free electric shock?!)

  “Hello!” I mumbled softly, as I stepped into the pen and crouched down in front of the black blob.

  The DIB hardly blinked.

  “Anyone in there?” I asked, waving a hand in front of his eyes.

  No wonder this dog hadn’t got a home yet – not only was he a DIBWAVU, but he didn’t seem to have much personality either.

  “I think he’s just shy,” said Mum from the doorway of the pen, as I reached a hand out to pat him.

  And then – spookily – as soon as my hand stroked his rough fur, I heard something odd.

  “What’s that knock-knocking?” I asked Mum, although it wasn’t so much a knock-knocking sound as a thudda-dudda-dudda sound.

  “I don’t know,” said Mum, coming over and crouching down beside me.

  And then I realized it wasn’t so much a slapping on the concrete floor.

  “Awww … d’you like that, doggie?”

  “Hmmmmuuurrrumff... hummumff…”

  That funny humming noise – I think it meant yes. And I could also see that the DIB was drooling with happiness from the corner of his mouth that wasn’t hidden behind his grotty blankie.

  “What if I do that ?” I said, giving him a scratch between the shoulder blades.

  The way the DIB suddenly fell over was as graceful as a warthog doing the splits.

  At first I thought he’d fainted, or maybe even died on me, but then I heard

  that familiar thudda-dudda-duddaing again, and saw that he’d raised his short, stubby legs up so I could rub his surprisingly pink, podgy tummy.