My Boyfriends' Dogs

by Dandi Daley Mackall

  Here they all are.

  “We are all ears, Ms. Bailey Daley,” he tells the pretty young girl wrapped in the green sweater. “You want Rune to fetch you something to eat while you tell us your story?”

  “Kitchen’s closed!” Rune shouts back.

  Louie worries that Rune will give himself an ulcer one day . . . or somebody else. How that man stays married to his fine wife is one of life’s great mysteries. “Now, now, Rune. We got bread and cold cuts, don’t we?”

  The girl reaches across the table and touches Louie’s hand. Her hand is warm now, at least. The last strand of her coal black hair escapes from the fancy curls she had plastered to her head when she walked in. Now the curls bounce around her face like coils of fine black licorice. She reminds Louie of his granddaughter, Jason’s girl.

  “I’m not hungry, Louie. Really. Thanks, though.” She turns toward the kitchen. “Thank you too, Rune!”

  She’s something, this little gal in her fancy gown.

  “I’m not sure where to start,” she admits, shaking her hair so it falls around her shoulders, covering the green sweater.

  Colt moves his chair in closer so he can see her face. Louie figures the young fella wants to hear this as much as he does.

  “How about starting at the beginning?” Louie suggests.

  “The beginning, huh?” Bailey sighs. She reaches down and strokes the old white mutt at her feet. “I guess that means I start with you, doesn’t it, boy?”

  “Adam, right?” Colt asks.

  “Right.” The girl settles back into her chair in a relaxed way she hasn’t done since walking into Louie’s. “It all started with Adam.”

  the first fall

  adam

  1

  They say there’s a line that crosses the middle of the whole universe. They say you can’t see that line. But if you step over it, if you cross it, there’s no going back.

  I crossed that line on March 19 of my sophomore year in high school. And I didn’t even realize it—not fully anyway—until the end of May, so of course by then it was too late to do much about it.

  The morning began like most school mornings. I woke, showered, and then stood in front of the full-length mirror, my eyes firmly shut while I recited my morning mantra:

  “I am sixteen, with extraordinarily large breasts, a fantastic bod, and hair to die for.

  “I am sixteen, with extraordinarily large breasts, a fantastic bod, and hair to die for.

  “I am sixteen, with extraordinarily large breasts, a fantastic bod, and hair to die for.”

  I opened my eyes and studied my reflection. Then I tossed my dog-eared copy of Teen Mind Over Teen Matters: The Art of Positive Thinking into the trash, where it belonged.

  “Bailey!” my mother hollered up the hall at me. “Hurry, will you?”

  “I’m hurrying,” I called back, examining the horribly outdated contents of my closet. What would a sixteen-year-old with extraordinarily large breasts, a fantastic bod, and hair to die for wear on a bright spring day?

  I might have settled for stonewashed jeans and a wrinkly T-shirt, but Amber and I had vowed to hold each other accountable for our last two remaining New Year’s resolutions: 1) Dress better, so that we’d 2) Land our first boyfriends.

  I’d had zero luck with number two, so the least I could do was try to stick with number one. I settled on a denim mini (Amber assured me they were back) and a gray-and-white-striped rugby shirt.

  “Look at this,” Mom said as soon as I stepped into the kitchen. She didn’t look up from the classifieds. “Three garage sales between here and school.”

  “Mom,” I whined. “Not on the way to school. Promise.”

  Now she looked up. My mom could have passed for my sister, which was sometimes fun, like when we went to Florida and they carded her every time she ordered white wine, which was exactly why she ordered it. Or, not so fun, like when the lifeguard hit on her instead of me. She was shorter than me and could still wear jeans she’d worn in high school. Plus, she had great hair, and great hazel eyes that were now aimed at my semi-bare thighs. “Bailey, was your skirt that short when we bought it, or did you grow six inches when I wasn’t looking?”

  I grabbed a bagel. “Isn’t it garbage pickup day in Grove?”

  “You’re right!”

  My mother was so easy to distract it almost took the fun out of it. Rich people in the Grove district threw away furniture that cost more than our house.

  “We have to go there on the way to school, Bailey.”

  “Grove isn’t on the way to school.”

  “Well, sort of. If Fourth Street were blocked off like it is for parades. And if they were doing construction again on Elm.” Mom gulped her coffee.

  Me and my big mouth. Mention a garage sale or a garbage pick, and my mom salivated. She’d been renting a stall at one of those antique malls, Aunt Teak’s—get it?—for almost a year. I don’t think she’d sold anything yet. Our own garage was so filled with the junk she bought from other people’s garages that she’d had to park outside all winter. Her real job was as a receptionist in a dentist’s office. She got the job because of her great smile. My mom could get any job she interviewed for. Keeping them wasn’t that easy, though. She was always ready to move on to something new.

  “It’ll be great furniture,” she muttered. “Heavy. It’s good you’ll be with me.”

  “Yeah. Really good.” But I knew there was no use arguing with her. “We better leave right now, because Mrs. Weaver will kill me if I’m late for English again.”

  Mom dashed out of the kitchen, and I cleared the table. When I put away the cereal, I saw that she had cut out the contest entry from the back. Mom loved contests. She’d won more appliances than we’d use in a lifetime, but we always had gifts on hand for weddings.

  Mom shuffled back into the kitchen. “Where’s my purse?”

  “On your arm.”

  She yawned. “I stayed up for WKMM’s Midnight Madness phone-in contest. Worth it, though. I was the twenty-eighth caller. Got us two free tickets to some band named Disaster’s Death.”

  “Cool.” I aimed her toward the front door. “Seriously, I can’t be late, Mom.”

  “Late schmate,” she muttered with her unique brand of motherly logic.

  Once outside, we both headed for the driver’s side of the van.

  “You have to let me drive, Mom,” I insisted, snatching the keys out of her hand. “I’m never going to get my real license if you don’t let me practice.”

  She gave up, and I started the van and backed down the driveway. Backing was my best driving skill. I wasn’t too bad going forward. But I kept failing that stupid parallel parking exam. “What’s so great about parking along curbs?” I asked halfway across town. “Nobody’s parallel parked in Missouri since the Stone Age.”

  “Left!” Mom shouted when we were still a solid block from our turn.

  We spotted the West End vultures, two women from a rival antique store. They revved their engine. “Pull over to the curb so they can’t get in!” Mom screamed.

  I swerved. My front wheel rolled over the curb in an unorthodox parallel parking maneuver. We leaped out and snatched a table out from under the beaks of the vultures, which wasn’t half as hard as cramming the disgusting thing into the van.

  “This will look fantastic when I refinish it,” Mom declared, shoving the last pockmarked, splintered table leg inside the van and sliding the door shut fast.

  “When you refinish it? Like the day after I pass my parallel parking test?”

  “Hey! This table is a diamond in the rough, Bailey.”

  Maybe. But as far as I knew, all of Mom’s “diamonds” were still sitting in our garage, as rough as the day she’d discovered them.

  Mom dropped me off at the deserted schoolyard. Everybody was already inside. “Sorry I made you late, honey. Worth it, though. You can have the table when I die.”

  Great. Clutching my pack, I backed up the sidewalk, turne
d to run in, then tripped over something and sprawled flat onto the sidewalk. Dazed, I lay on my back and squinted into the sun, hoping nothing was broken and that maybe Mrs. Weaver would count this as excused tardiness now.

  “Arf! Arf!” A skinny white dog scrambled out from under me.

  “You tripped me?”

  The dog pranced to my face and started licking. I scrambled to my feet, but he scratched at my bare legs until I picked him up. He had the most gorgeous green eyes, but seriously bad breath. “Thanks a lot, doggie.”

  He wagged his tail and wiggled, still trying to get at me.

  I set him down and jogged over to my fallen backpack, trying to ignore my sore backside and bruised pride. When I turned back around, the dog was gone.

  “Fickle, fickle you,” I muttered.

  2

  After English, Amber and I bucked the crowded halls back to our lockers.

  “Did you really get knocked down by a giant dog on your way to class?” Amber didn’t sound like she believed me any more than Mrs. Weaver had.

  “Yeah. Only he wasn’t giant.”

  “Whose dog was it?” Amber asked, as if that were the crucial question here. Not “Are you hurt? Did you get rabies? How will you get Weaver to stop hating you?”

  “I’ve never seen that mutt before,” I answered, finally breaking the secret code of my smelly locker, which had smelled even worse before I’d inherited it and filled it with cinnamon sticks. Now it smelled like Christmas vomit instead of regular vomit.

  Amber shut her locker. She stood two heads taller than me. In her silky top and lace-up jeans, she could have been a model, and not just because of her height and sleek body. She was more graceful than the rest of us put together. She kept her blond hair short and never looked anybody in the eyes, except me. I’d told her a million times she’d be the one guys would go for in college, after they got over themselves and could deal with a tall woman looking down on them.

  “You know every dog in Millet,” she said. “Or at least they know you.”

  I pulled out my tattered science notebook and leaned against my locker. “I’m telling you, Amber, I’ve never seen that dog before.” She was right about dogs knowing me. It was kind of a joke with us that dogs loved me, but guys not so much. Not a very funny joke when you come to think about it.

  “Oh . . . my . . . gosh!” This outburst came from Carly, who had the locker next to mine. Carly Fields almost never appeared without a boy attached to her arm.

  “What?” I asked, shutting her locker so I could see what the fuss was about. “Did you just notice that you don’t have a guy hanging on you?”

  She didn’t take her gaze off the hallway behind me. “Will somebody please tell me who that is?”

  Amber and I turned around to see what she was talking about.

  And there he was.

  He came strolling down the hall as if he were a carnival passing through town—as if he owned every inch of the place, even though he’d never been here before. We could all swear to that. It’s hard to explain the way he obviously didn’t belong in our school, yet he did belong. Like he was a part of somewhere else in the same way geese are a part of the sky, even though they fly over Millet every season in their crisp, soulful V. But here he was, one lone creature of flight, who had looked down on us, glimpsing Millet from above, and peeled himself from that V, leaving his world for ours.

  “Where did he come from?” Amber whispered.

  Nobody answered.

  We watched him stride through the hall. Heads turned. People stopped laughing. A couple of teachers stepped out of the faculty lounge and watched him pass.

  Any new kid who moved into Millet, Missouri, population 2,302, was big news. But this kid—with his California tan and his Hollywood body, thick golden hair that brushed his forehead, and a confidence that made him look too old, too cool, for school—he wasn’t news. He was a news flash. A news bulletin. A we-interrupt-your-regular-programming-to-bring-you-this-special-announcement event.

  Amber, Carly, and I pressed against our lockers, waiting until the absolute last second to face Miss Jones and the Paleozoic era. I, for one, willed him to walk our way.

  “Unbelievable! Does anybody know this guy?” Carly tugged down her peasant top and scooted up her mini-miniskirt, which already made my denim mini look granny length. Carly would be the one to end up getting to know this stranger. She’d known every datable guy in our school. And I’m talking known in the biblical sense. True, I couldn’t swear to that part. But Carly Fields never bothered to deny the rumors.

  “He’s coming for me,” Carly said, fluffing up her long blond hair.

  “Waste a little time, why don’t you?” Amber teased. “Might want to let the guy get to his first class before you take him to first base.”

  Unlike Carly the Home Run Queen, Amber and I were the never-been-past-first-base girls in our group, which explained our New Year’s resolution.

  Sure enough, Mystery-Godlike Guy changed hall lanes and headed straight toward us like he’d known we were there all along. Like he’d left his flock of geese for us. For this very moment.

  For a second, the hall blurred. People moved in slow motion. Sounds and shapes melded into each other, into time and space, sky and earth.

  He walked so close I could smell him. Breathe him.

  He was moving too fast. He was going to pass us by.

  My heart sank. I bit my lip. I held my breath. Think of a cliché, and I did it.

  Left, right, left, right. He was in front of us, not slowing down. . . .

  Then just as he passed, he turned his head—a head worthy of a spot on a Roman coin, deep-set eyes, strong chin—and he smiled.

  At me.

  “What was that about?” Carly asked, obviously astonished that Mystery-Godlike Guy had smiled at me. Me. She glared at me, her gaze moving up and down like she’d never seen me before and was sizing me up for a new suit.

  “What, Carly? What’s what about?” But I knew. I wondered if they all knew. Did everybody in Millet feel what had just passed between me and this stranger? Could they hear my heart pounding in sync with his footsteps as he moved down the hall?

  “You know this guy, Bailey?” Carly sounded as peeved as she was puzzled.

  I shook my head. The bell rang, and Amber and I were scooped into the crowd of last-minute students.

  We were so late to science that we ended up in the front row. Amber slumped in her chair and whispered, “He definitely smiled at you.”

  “Nuh-uh,” I answered, not sure why I felt the need to deny it. Because in my mind, I could still see him smiling.

  And I was still smiling back.

  3

  The rest of the morning, everywhere you went people were playing the new-guy guessing game. But by lunchtime, nobody I knew had even learned his name.

  Amber and I stared at the menu board. “Why didn’t I bring my lunch?” I complained.

  Amber groaned. “You’re not going to do salad again, are you?” She hated salads and didn’t need to like them since she could eat ten cheeseburgers and a gallon of ice cream for every meal and not gain weight.

  “So, you come here often?”

  I turned and found myself looking into eyes as green as that dog’s eyes, the mutt that had knocked the wind out of me only hours earlier. These eyes had the same effect. I nodded, but no words came out.

  I felt Amber’s elbow in my back, urging me to more intelligent repartee. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to talk to guys. Amber said she’d grow two more inches if she could have half of my wit or a fraction of my quick-thinking comeback lines.

  But the lines weren’t coming back now.

  “So, what do you recommend?” he asked, staring at the menu board.

  Come on, Bailey,I urged myself. Calling Bailey’s brain!

  Then words kicked in. “That would be . . . BYOL.”

  He squinted at the menu. “Do you mean BLT?”

  “No. Oddly enough, ev
en Missourians can read. Not BLT. BYOL. As in, Bring Your Own Lunch.”

  “Nice,” Amber, my personal cheering section, whispered behind me.

  Mystery-Godlike Guy grinned. “I’ll keep that in mind. What else? ”

  “Hamburgers,” I answered. “Real beef mixed in with that soy.”

  “Or . . . ?” His profile showed perfect bone structure (I read that in a romance novel) and zitless tanned skin.

  I shook myself back to the conversation at hand. “Or hot dogs. But I’m ethically opposed to any food bearing an animal’s name.”

  “Always nice to meet someone ethically opposed to hot dogs.”

  “And horseradish. And catsup.”

  “And chocolate moose?” he asked in mock horror.

  “Always an exception to prove a rule.”

  I was standing too close to him. My mouth felt dry. I had to quit while I was relatively ahead. “Well, good luck with lunch.” With that, I made my way to the salad bar and piled things onto my plate without really looking at them.

  Amber followed me and piled vegetables on her plate, too. It had to be the first time she’d been this close to the salad bar. “You did great,” she whispered. We edged through the cafeteria together. “Why didn’t you introduce yourself? Tell him your name so he’d give you his?”

  “He’s not interested, Amber.” But she was right. Why hadn’t I asked his name? Why hadn’t I written my address on his arm? My phone number on his forehead?

  I plopped down at a half-empty table, which on most other days I might have considered half-full. My backside hurt from the morning’s fall.

  Amber frowned at her plateful of lettuce and cucumbers. “Want my salad?”

  “I can’t even eat mine.” Somewhere between green eyes and green lettuce, I’d lost my appetite.

  “Bailey!” Carly hissed at me from the table behind us. She was seated at the football table between our quarterback and our tight end. I couldn’t remember which one she was currently seeing. Apparently, neither could she. Rob had his arm around her, and she had her hand on Kent’s knee.

  “Who is he?” Carly demanded. “And what’s his name?”