by Galia Oz
“And another thing!” Brody shouted, getting more and more excited. “Remember when we went to Danny’s house and he asked if you came to get back at him?”
“Sure,” I said.
“He thought you wanted to break his window, just like he’d broken yours. He even asked if you were looking for a stone, remember?”
I sat on the edge of my chair and sucked my finger, which was still bleeding a little.
“We’re geniuses!” said Brody. “But where’s the dog? And what’s a ‘celery head’?”
The morning started off really badly. Danny and Duke were making trouble even before the bell rang. They pushed lots of kids and Effie fell down.
They always did things like that, as if it was by accident, and then they said “Sorry” and burst out laughing. This time they also threw Effie’s pencil case on the floor, and I crawled around and picked up the heart-shaped stickers she collects, and a pencil sharpener that was clogged with orange Plasticine, and a little fairy toy that was now covered with white-out that had spilled on it when everything fell out.
I gave Effie the fairy, which was ruined, and I turned to Danny because I could see no one was listening, and said, “I know you broke the window in my room. Brody’s grandmother saw you from the balcony.”
Danny didn’t know what to say, so I went on. “Breaking a window isn’t funny. If I tell on you and Brody’s grandmother says what she knows, you’ll be in big trouble.”
Danny didn’t know that Brody’s grandmother was a little confused and she might not have been able to say exactly who threw the stone, and that no one ever believed her anyway.
He whispered so the other kids wouldn’t hear, and he said that he and Duke really did come to my house and that they did throw a stone at my window, and then this old lady started shouting ‘Thieves! Thieves!’ and they ran away. He said there really was a small dog that ran after them, a spotted dog. They whistled to her and she ran after them for a while, but then she disappeared.
I knew he wouldn’t tell me more, but I wouldn’t give up. “Tell me what happened to her or I’ll tell on you.”
“You said you wouldn’t tell on me if I told you what happened, right? So that’s it. I told you what happened. Now move.”
I wouldn’t move, and Danny pushed me. Suddenly Effie said, “Leave her alone, Danny.”
Danny wasn’t used to hearing Effie talk. Actually, no one was used to hearing her talk, but after a moment he decided that it wasn’t such a big deal and he pushed me again. “I won’t leave her alone,” he said to Effie. “So what’s going to happen to me?”
Nothing will happen to you, I thought. You’re Danny plus Duke. But then Effie moved super fast, using one of her karate moves as if she had four hands, and before he could react, Danny found himself sitting on the floor. She really liked that fairy, and maybe she also decided to stick up for me, and those Vietnamese Martial Arts classes she’d been taking finally came in handy.
When Mrs. Brown walked into the class—she always knew just when to show up—Brody told her that Effie was showing us how to do cartwheels. “It’s my fault,” he said. “I asked her to do that. She just didn’t notice Danny standing there and she accidentally bumped into him.
“It’s not a big deal,” Brody went on. “Danny has knocked down Effie by accident so many times, and this time she accidentally knocked him down.”
Everyone smiled, and I thought that sometimes good things could come out of Brody’s big mouth, but Mrs. Brown said that she wouldn’t put up with violence, even if the whole class stood by the kid who did the hitting. She went over to Danny and helped him up and asked him if Effie had hit him.
“Are you for real?” Danny said, and he tried to send a sneering look in Effie’s direction. “The floor was slippery or something. Someone spilled some white-out.”
“That’s not true,” said Effie.
Effie was in seventh heaven because of the note she took home that day, a genuine letter addressed to her parents saying that their daughter had hit another child, and not just any child, but Danny.
At recess and after school, all the little kids pointed at Effie and said that not only was she the fastest in her whole grade, but she beat up boys too.
It was only much later, when we were leaving school one day, that Effie told me that she didn’t really mean to do it. It just happened. And the only thing she could think about was how good it would feel to knock Danny down.
“And afterward I was really angry with myself because in martial arts you’re not allowed to lose control,” Effie said.
“Never mind,” I told her. “Think about Danny. He always loses control, and he never feels bad about it.”
“Yeah, I know a lot of kids got all excited about it,” said Effie. “But I didn’t. Hey, what happened to the plant?” We walked out of school and stopped by the pipe where the water always dripped. All the other kids had already forgotten that a plant had ever been there, but Effie had only just noticed it was missing.
I looked around carefully to make sure no one could hear us, and I said, “I threw it at Danny, but don’t tell anyone.”
“Too bad,” said Effie. “It was a nice plant.”
And I remembered how I threw the plant at Danny, and how I lied and blamed him and everyone believed me. And then I butted Effie’s shoulder softly with my head. Why did we love Effie? Because with all her speed and all her strength, she was just as innocent as my baby brothers were. She was like a pretty plant in a pot, and she could never tell a lie.
The day that started with Effie’s fairy getting wrecked, the day when Effie knocked down Danny and went home with a note for her parents, ended in the vegetable patch. Brody and I were pulling up weeds when he said, “Before, you had something to hope for because you thought Danny knew something. But now it’s the worst. You know that you don’t know anything.”
Then he said, “Maybe the dogcatcher really did get her.”
And then he said, “The more time passes, the less chance there is of finding her. That’s what the police always say when people disappear.”
I said, “Okay, enough.”
“Maybe she got run over by a car,” Brody said, pulling up a plant.
“That’s a lettuce, not a weed, lamebrain,” I said, and I pushed him.
Brody got angry. “Why are you pushing me?”
I didn’t answer him. I just went over and sat down on the side, on the chair with the crooked leg—the one that looked like it had rotted in the rain.
I pretended I was fixing the straps on my sport shoes, and I could hear Adam telling another one of his stories about how when he took the dog out for a walk last night he passed by the air-conditioner factory and there was a robbery going on, so he called the police on his mobile phone, and before the police arrived he heard gunshots from inside because the security guard must have found the burglars and they were probably trying to get away.
Nobody believed Adam because everyone remembered how he once caught a burglar who was trying to climb in his bedroom window but it turned out that the burglar was just a guy who came to fix the shutters. But this story was a pretty good one, and he managed to tell it without stuttering too much, so in the end the whole class listened to him, except for Danny and Duke, who were busy punching each other.
I was also sort of listening, and at the same time I was using my foot to draw a big rectangle on the ground, which was supposed to be the air-conditioner factory. Then I tried imagining where Adam was standing and where the burglars were, and I knew there was something else about this fairy tale that I should be paying attention to, but what could possibly be important in another one of Adam’s made-up stories?
In the meantime, the bell rang and everyone went home, and Brody went too, and only I kept on sitting there on the rotten chair, thinking about how if someone disappeared forever, bit by bit you started to forget all about her. That was the rule. If I didn’t manage to find Shakshuka, all her spots and stripes would slo
wly be erased from my memory like the numbers in math class were erased from the board.
Suddenly I realized that Danny was sitting next to one of the flower boxes, putting on his torn sneakers. “I don’t care about you breaking my window. I only care about my dog,” I said to him as if he was my friend, as if he cared about me, as if he cared about a little dog that hadn’t eaten in four days and was maybe tied to a tree somewhere, or wandering the streets, or worse.
“I really don’t know where she is,” said Danny. He sounded almost nice when he said that.
I just sat there for a little longer, and then I figured it out. Why didn’t I think of this before? I was at the gate in a flash asking everyone where Adam was, but he’d already gone. Luckily, Brody was still there, and I told him we had to get to Adam right away.
We ran two blocks until we caught up with him. “Adam! Adam!” I shouted. “What color is your dog?”
Adam looked scared. He turned as white as a sheet of paper, as white as a first grader who bumped into Danny behind the nature teacher’s greenhouse.
“You said you were taking your dog for a walk past the air-conditioner factory when you caught the burglars. Since when do you have a dog? And what color is it?”
“All s-sorts of c-c-colors,” said Adam, who seemed to be stuttering more than usual.
“A little one? That likes to jump?”
Adam looked as if he was about to burst into tears.
“Right, on one side it looks like there’s a path drawn on her, with two hills? And her tail is all striped? And one ear is white with a bit of black?”
Adam said he didn’t remember exactly. He only remembered that a few days ago he saw a little puppy near his house and he fell in love with it, and he put some blankets in a cardboard box from the super in the basement of his building so it would have somewhere to sleep, and he didn’t tell his parents because they’d never let him keep it.
Since then, every day, first thing in the morning and right after school (and once before bedtime), he had brought the puppy food and taken it for a walk with a leash. And he really, really didn’t think it was my Shakshuka. He thought it was a boy dog.
Adam stuttered pretty fast but talked very slowly. It took him a long time to get the whole story out. While he was talking, we walked him home, and then there we were, outside the basement door, and the door opened and I saw her and I was afraid that it wasn’t really her, but then I felt her tongue licking my cheek and I wanted to hug her, but there was no chance because she wouldn’t stop jumping.
I touched her and thought, It’s her, it’s really her, and I was still scared that in a second I’d wake up and discover it was all a dream, but then I realized that a dream didn’t bark and didn’t lick your face, and I started crying like a baby even though Brody and Adam were right there. I could hear myself and I couldn’t believe it. I sounded just like my baby brothers. And Shakshuka was howling too.
“Now you’re crying?” said Brody. “What are you crying for? You’ve found her!”
I wasn’t listening to him because I was too busy trying to hold Shakshuka still so I could look her in the eyes and tell her that she was the stupidest, ugliest dog in the world, and Brody told Adam that was how I always talked when I got emotional.
The first thing I did was check her other ear, the one I couldn’t remember. It was bluish-gray. Some kids might have thought that wasn’t important, but those kids had probably never seen a dog with such an amazing coat. Those kids probably thought that all dogs were the same.
I used to be like that too, actually. Before the Munchkins were born I was sure that all babies were the same. That they all cried and spit up and there was no difference between them. But now I could tell with my eyes closed which of the twins woke up first in the morning and started babbling.
Just as we got to the entrance of the building, Brody and Shakshuka and I, Effie came back from her Underwater Pottery class and saw us. She stopped and held her head in her hands and said, “I don’t believe it!”
“Believe it, believe it,” I said as I stroked Shakshuka.
“You got a haircut!” said Effie.
Brody and I gave each other a look.
“Two weeks ago…maybe more,” I told her.
“It suits you. It’s a new look,” said Effie.
What could I say? I said thanks, and I really did feel brand-new.
That night I spent a long time looking at the angry chicken hanging on my wall and I thought that maybe there really were people eavesdropping through the pipes in our building, like Brody’s grandmother said. Why not? Stranger things had happened.
Fact: Danny got mad in computer class and threw a chair at a boy two years younger than us, and the boy actually wasn’t badly hurt, but the chair broke and one of its legs went flying through the window and got stuck on the head of the scarecrow that we built in nature class, and now the scarecrow looked like an alien with a horn.
And another fact: The police really did invite Adam to a special ceremony—Mrs. Brown even told us in class—because he really did hear gunshots and called the police when he was walking past the air-conditioner factory with Shakshuka, and that was how they caught the burglars and now he was going to get, Brody said, a cer-cer-certificate of m-m-m-merit for his b-b-bravery. I really hoped that it made him feel better about his dog not being his anymore, and about his he-dog really being a she-dog.
And Dad was coming back from his business trip tomorrow. And tonight, at long last, I wouldn’t be cold, first, because my bedroom window was fixed, and second, because my striped and spotted dog was going to sleep with me and keep me warm. I even told Mom about it while she was baking cookies, and without even thinking she said that dog would be in serious trouble if she started climbing on beds. She might even end up on a cookie tray with icing sugar on top!
And Max said, “Da!”
It all started when I tried to build a toy for my little brothers, and it got more complicated when Danny decided to annoy my cousin Effie with some dumb tongue twister just when she was training for a race and his stupid woodchuck-chucking made her fall and hurt her knee.
I tried really hard to build that toy. I wanted it to be a present for my twin brothers, Max and Monty. It was supposed to be a smart toy, a wooden block with a music box inside, and the smart part was that every time you shook it, you heard this loud corny music. But it kept falling apart, whether I used ordinary glue or superglue.
As if all that wasn’t enough, we had a new principal at our school named Blue Dawn, and she’d decided that everything was going to be different from now on, and she could turn our school into a place where everyone behaved all the time, and whenever she caught two kids fighting she called everyone into the school yard and once we were all there explained that violence was not okay, and she also checked to make sure that everyone was wearing the school uniform.
Last week she managed to spin a whole lecture out of what happened when Danny distracted Effie with his tongue twister. He made her lose her concentration at the exact moment when she was about to take off from the starting line.
It was really too bad she fell and hurt her knee because there was an athletic meet coming up, and we were supposed to send Effie to represent our school. Effie was our fastest runner, she ran even faster than the boys, and this time it was really important that she ran and beat Donna Silver from Pine Way School because Donna Silver said, “That Effie, her legs run fast but her head runs slow.” But now Effie was walking around with a bandaged knee and it looked like she didn’t stand a chance against Donna Silver, and Blue Dawn the principal said all the kids should learn from what happened to Effie, and they should get up every morning and do a good deed, simple as that, get up and think of something nice to do instead of fighting.
Of all people it was Danny—the kid who speeches like that were invented for—who turned away when he thought no one was looking, his hands in his pockets, and in a loud voice recited the same dumb tongue twister he’
d been shouting every day—“How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”—so he could block out every word that the principal was saying. That tongue twister had been running through his head because the kids in first grade had been repeating it nonstop for the past few weeks, ever since one of them learned it from his dad, who told him that about a hundred years ago they would say it together on the bus on field trips.
Danny was always hitting kids and annoying them and causing trouble, and it was too bad that of all ears he chose to recite his “woodchuck” right into Effie’s, but this time I could understand why he was saying it to himself while the principal was talking. She’d decided to make a good boy out of him, and lately he was getting scared that she might actually succeed.
After school the three of us went to my house to eat—Brody, Effie, and me. Sometimes they came over to eat spaghetti. Mom looked at Effie’s knee and told her not to give up on the race. She said she should train every day and in the end it would all work out.
Afterward she told us to be careful because Shakshuka looked like she was getting ready to attack.
Shakshuka was lying under Brody’s chair, having a snooze. Effie stared at my mom with big, round eyes, since between races most of the time Effie was pretty spaced out and she hadn’t learned yet that you couldn’t believe anything my mother said.
“I don’t understand how you can raise such a scary animal,” Brody said in a pretend-serious voice because he was pretty evil himself, especially when it came to words, and he always got my mom’s jokes.
And Mom said, “Really, Julie, you’d better control that wild dog of yours. Do you think we live in a jungle here?”
Shakshuka rolled over and sighed in her sleep. “But the dog is fast asleep,” said Effie, who didn’t always understand that kind of joke, and she leaned down to get a closer look at Shakshuka, and her hair fell into her soup but she didn’t notice. That was Space-Effie for you.
