Snitch

by Norah McClintock

  Snitch

  Norah McClintock

  orca soundings

  Copyright © Norah McClintock 2005

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data:

  McClintock, Norah

  Snitch / Norah McClintock.

  (Orca soundings)

  ISBN 1-55143-484-9

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS8575.C62S63 2005 jC813’.54 C2005-904829-8

  First published in the United States, 2005

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2005930530

  Summary: After his best friend snitches on him,

  Josh must learn to control his anger.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.

  Cover design: John van der Woude

  Cover photography: Firstlight.ca

  Orca Book Publishers

  P.O. Box 5626, Stn. B

  Victoria, BC Canada

  V8R 6S4

  Orca Book Publishers

  P.O. Box 468

  Custer, WA USA

  98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Printed on 50% post-consumer recycled paper, processed chlorine free using vegetable, low VOC inks.

  08 07 06 05 • 4 3 2 1

  To dogs running free.

  Chapter One

  It was supposed to be easy. You choose, they had told me. You can either go to a regular anger management program, which is where, basically, you sit around with a bunch of losers once a week and talk about what makes you mad and what you could have done instead of punching out a wall or maybe a person. Or you can go to this special program where they teach you how to train dogs. Gee, let me think about it—door number one or door number two …

  I went with the dogs. It had to be better than sitting around listening to a bunch of tantrum freaks gripe, right? Besides, how hard could it be?

  Things went sour right from minute one.

  The woman at the front desk told me to go to the room that she called the training room. I opened the door. And there was Scott. He was standing in the middle of the room with some other guys. He turned when the door opened. When he saw me he grinned, as if nothing had happened, as if we were still friends. He had a kind of lopsided smile that always made him look goofy. I didn’t smile back at him. My hands curled into fists.

  “Hey, Josh,” said someone behind me.

  I spun around, thinking it was some other guy from my past. Why not? With Scott there, things were already bad. They might as well get worse.

  But it was Mr. “Call-me-Brian” Weller, who was in charge of the program. I’d met him once, just after I applied. That was part of the thing with this program. You had to go to an interview before they let you in. Mostly they asked questions about your experience with animals—whether you had ever had any pets, whether you liked animals, what you thought of people who hurt animals. I’d admitted that I had never had a pet and that I wasn’t sure how much I liked animals. I figured that would be the end of it—they’d ship me off to the regular program. But they didn’t.

  Mr. Weller smiled at me. “Did you manage to find the place all right?” he asked.

  “My brother drove me,” I said. I live with my older brother Andrew, his wife Miranda, and their kid Digby (don’t get me started on what kind of dumb name that is), who is nine months old.

  “It’s nice to have a big brother who’s so supportive,” Mr. Weller said.

  Mostly Andrew was glad I was in the program because it would keep me out of the apartment for a couple more hours. I had been living with him and Miranda for nearly a month now, ever since I got out of the group home. Miranda never came out and said she didn’t want me there, but I could tell she wasn’t thrilled. The place was so small. She and Andrew shared a bedroom with Digby and his crib. I slept on the couch in the living room/dining room. Besides those two rooms, the apartment had a kitchen and a bathroom. Andrew said I could live there as long as I didn’t mess up again. He said that as soon as I finished with the program, I had to get a job—sooner if I could swing it. But that was going to be hard because I was going to school in the mornings to make up for at least a couple of the classes I had messed up last year, and the teacher really piled on the homework. Andrew said I’d have to work all summer and keep a part-time job when school started so that I could contribute to the household. He said as soon as I got a job and proved that I could hold it, he would start looking for a bigger place.

  I looked at Scott again. He seemed right at home with the other guys. Mr. Weller looked at him too.

  “You and Scott know each other, don’t you?” he said. He asked it like it was a question. But I knew he had read my file. So I knew he already had the answer.

  “Don’t worry about it, Josh,” he said. “If it turns out to be a problem for you that Scott is here, we can deal with it.”

  Right. Like I needed someone to handle my problems for me. I took another look at Scott and said, “Why should it be a problem?”

  Mr. Weller looked at me for a moment. Then he nodded and held out a hand, a signal to me that I should go right on in.

  There were three rows of chairs set up, each row with eight chairs in it. But when I counted, there were only fourteen people in the room, including Mr. Weller. Only one was a girl. She went right over to Mr. Weller the minute he came into the room, so I figured she was a helper. She was kind of cute.

  Scott went up to her and said something. She laughed. Scott could be so charming. At least, that’s the impression he liked to give. But I wasn’t buying it. Then Scott looked at the back of the room where I was standing. He grinned at me again. I gave him my frozen look, the one that said, I don’t care. But inside I knew I did care. I was going to get even with him if it was the last thing I did.

  Chapter Two

  Mr. Weller told everyone to take a seat. Twelve of us did. I expected the girl to stay up front with Mr. Weller, and Scott to sit down with the rest of the guys. I was going to tell him to get lost if he tried to sit anywhere near me. But he didn’t. Scott stayed up front with Mr. Weller. The girl sat down with the rest of us. Another person had come into the room—a middle-aged woman. She looked like a teacher or a librarian.

  “You all know me,” Mr. Weller said. He told us—again—that we could just call him Brian. He told us that learning to train dogs would teach us a lot about ourselves. He said that dogs are like little kids—they respond well to patience and kindness, and they don’t respond well to anger. Then he introduced us to the woman. Her name was Maggie—“Just Maggie will do,” she said. She was the dog trainer. I still couldn’t figure out what Scott was doing up there.

  Then Maggie said, “And this is Scott. He’s my assistant.”

  I stared at Scott. He was standing up there, beaming at us all as if being an assistant dog trainer made him someone special. Maybe some of the guys in the room thought so too. But that’s because they didn’t know Scott like I did. They didn’t know what he had done.

  “In a few minutes,” Maggie said, “you will be introduced to your animals. But before we bring them in, you need to understand your responsibility.”

  A couple of guys groaned when they heard that word. Sometimes it seemed like the only word that adults knew. Andrew used i
t a lot. “I have responsibilities now, Josh,” he’d say. Or “One day you’ll be responsible for someone besides yourself. Then you’ll see what it’s like, Josh.” He made it sound like responsibility was a cranky old gorilla that you had to carry on your back forever.

  According to Maggie, it was up to us what happened to the dogs that were in the program with us. She said they all had serious behavior problems. She said that because of their problems, the animal shelter wasn’t able to put them up for adoption. We were going to work with them to help them overcome their problems. If we were successful, the dogs would be able to find real homes. If we failed … She shrugged and then she smiled and said she knew if we were patient and worked hard, we wouldn’t fail.

  After Maggie finished talking, she asked if there were any questions.

  No one put up a hand. No one said anything.

  If Maggie was disappointed that no one asked anything, she didn’t show it. She told us that the dogs in the program weren’t vicious. She said we shouldn’t be afraid of them. She told us how to greet a strange dog—don’t look them straight in the eyes the first time you met them (dogs see this as threatening), don’t smile at them (a dog sees this as baring your teeth, which, to dogs, is threatening), don’t rush directly to the dog (also threatening), don’t pat the dog on the head … I began to wish I was in a regular program. I understood guys with anger management problems. I didn’t know anything about dogs. And I didn’t like what I was hearing.

  Maggie nodded to Scott. He left the room. When he came back, there were three other people with him. Each of them was holding onto four dog leashes. Each leash had a dog at the end. Most of the dogs were barking and growling and jumping around. A couple of the dogs were pulling in the opposite direction, like all they wanted to do was get out of the room.

  Some of the guys looked at each other. I bet some of them were thinking the same thing I was—no wonder those dogs couldn’t get adopted. They were like hyperactive kids, yapping and jumping and not paying any attention to Scott and the other people who were trying to get them to calm down.

  “Okay,” Mr. Weller said. “I am going to call your names. When you hear your name, come up and meet your dog.”

  One by one, guys got up and walked to the front of the room. Nobody seemed in a big hurry to get there. A couple of guys walked with more confidence. Maybe they had dogs at home. One guy must not have been paying attention to Maggie. As soon as he got to the front of the room, he stuck out his hand in front of the dog he was supposed to be training. The dog lunged at his hand. The guy jumped back so fast he got tangled up in a chair in the front row. He fell over. Everyone laughed.

  Finally there were only two dogs left. One was a small hairy thing. I don’t even know what kind it was. It was one of the dogs that had been pulling to get out of the room. The other was a big white dog that looked like a cross between a pit bull and something even nastier. I looked at the girl. We were the only two people whose names hadn’t been called. Then Mr. Weller said, “Amy.” The girl got up and walked slowly to the front of the room as if she were walking to the electric chair or something. She was probably scared she was going to get the big dog.

  Of course, she didn’t.

  No, they gave her the little dog, whose name was Coco. They saved the big one for me.

  “Josh,” Mr. Weller said, “meet Sully.”

  I did everything that Maggie had said to do and didn’t do anything that she had warned us not to. It didn’t make any difference. Sully took one look at me and lunged. The guy who had been holding his leash was asleep on the job or something because he let go, and all of a sudden this dog was jumping on me. He was growling. All I saw was teeth and drool. I froze. Then someone had hold of the leash again and was talking to the dog in a soft, firm voice, telling it to “Get down. Down, boy.”

  It was Scott.

  He didn’t look the least bit afraid.

  Once he got the dog calmed down, he brought it over to me and stayed with me until the dog stopped jumping around. I wanted to tell him to get lost, but I didn’t want to get stuck alone with the dog. What a monster.

  Chapter Three

  “So, how was it?” Andrew said. He was waiting for me out in the parking lot. He had come directly from work. His main job was shift manager at a video store. He still had on his store T-shirt. He had a second job delivering newspapers. He did that between 3:30 and 5:30 in the morning.

  “What do you think?” I said. I got into the car and slammed the door. I had spent half an hour with that stupid dog. Most of the time Scott was right there with me because it turned out—of course—that my dog had more problems than any of the other dogs in the program.

  “Yeah, but dogs,” Andrew said. “That should be fun, right? Remember when you were little? You always wanted a dog.”

  I’d been mad, too, that I had never got one. My dad always said they were more trouble than kids, and kids were trouble enough. The only kind of animal my dad liked was fish—at the end of his fishing line. My main memory of my dad is going fishing with him. Hauling in a fish and dropping it into the bottom of his old boat and bashing its brains in with the weighted wooden fish basher he called a priest. My dad was calm and happy when he was in his boat with some beer and some bait. And because he was happy, I was happy.

  After Andrew figured out that I didn’t want to talk about the program, he put on some music. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep until we got home.

  The whole building smelled like food, even the elevator. I could pick out the smell of onions and garlic and curry and chicken. Some people think it stinks, especially the curry smell, but not me. Those smells always make my mouth water.

  When the elevator opened on the eighth floor, where Andrew’s apartment is, Daryl Matheson pushed his way in while Andrew and I were trying to get out. Daryl, lives at the opposite end of the hall from Andrew. Andrew doesn’t like him. He says guys like Daryl who spend all their time just hanging around, are on their way to nowhere, probably via the prison system.

  Daryl smirked at me when I stepped around him to get out of the elevator.

  “You got the worst stuff I ever saw,” he said. “Nothing even worth stealing.”

  I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about until I saw what was sitting in the hall outside Andrew’s apartment door. It was a wooden crate with my name painted on the side.

  “Hey!” I said. I’d had that crate forever. My dad had made it for me and had stenciled my name on it. It was heaped high with my stuff—clothes and CDs and a bunch of my other things. “What’s this doing out here?”

  Andrew unlocked the apartment door. I scooped up the crate and followed him inside. Miranda was standing in the kitchen, a magazine open on the counter in front of her. Great, she was going to try another recipe. She was always trying new recipes, most of them vegetarian, and they were always terrible.

  “What was my stuff doing out in the hall?” I said.

  “You’re lucky the baby’s been cranky all day,” Miranda said. “Otherwise it would be out back by the dumpster. I told you, Josh. You can’t leave your stuff lying all over the living room. That’s where I watch TV. That’s where the baby plays.”

  “Yeah, but, jeez, it’s my stuff. You can’t just—”

  Miranda reached into the box and pulled out my penknife. “The baby had this in his mouth,” she said. She reached in again. “And yesterday I found him pounding on my new table with this.” She held up the wood priest—what she preferred to call a fish club. She always made a sour face when she saw it. She thought it was barbaric to club fish. The priest had my initials on it. Well, really they were my dad’s initials. But his name was Jack, so his initials were the same as mine.

  Andrew shook his head when he saw it. “What do you even have that thing for?” he said.

  “Dad gave it to me.”

  Andrew made a sour face. “If he’d given it to me, I’d have burned it a long time ago,” he said. “I’d have burned anyt
hing he gave me, even thousand-dollar bills.” He looked at the priest again. “I can’t believe they gave that back to you.”

  I had to practically beg my youth worker, who finally managed to get it returned. I told him it was the only thing I had of my dad’s.

  “If it were me—” said Andrew. He stopped when I gave him a sharp look.

  “What do you mean?” Miranda said. She had been engaged to Andrew at the time, so she knew I’d been in trouble. But she didn’t know all the details.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing, okay? And stay away from my stuff, Miranda, unless you want to find a box of your things out in the hall.”

  “Come on, Josh,” Andrew said, trying to calm me down. Then the baby started wailing.

  “I think he’s cutting another tooth,” Miranda said. “He’s been crying all day. Go pick him up, Andrew.” She did that a lot too—bossed Andrew around, told him, “Do this, do that,” as soon as he got home from work. He never argued. He went into the living room, where a play-pen was crammed in between the sofa and the dining table. The baby yowled even louder when Andrew picked him up.

  Miranda turned to me. “This is my place, Josh. I don’t want it messy and I don’t want the baby picking up things he shouldn’t. You understand me?”

  I opened the fridge.

  “Stay out of there,” she said. “We’re going to have supper soon.”

  I reached inside for a piece of leftover chicken. Andrew went along with the vegetarian stuff, but he still insisted on meat once in a while. Miranda grabbed it out of my hand and shut the fridge door.

  “I mean it, Josh.” She was always saying that. “You’re going to have to wait.”

  In the other room, the baby was still yowling. Jeez, what a place!

  That night I heard Andrew and Miranda talking. If you ask me, Miranda planned it that way. She didn’t even bother keeping her voice down.

  “He can’t stay here forever,” she said. “He’s rude. He never helps out.”