All Pets Allowed

by Adele Griffin

  “That’s it!” Mai snaps her fingers. “That’s what we’ll do for our Pumpkin Patch booth! A pet spa!”

  “A pet spa?” Caroline squeaks. “As in, with live animals?” My sister really likes taking photos of animals. She loves her animal nail press-ons with decals, and she likes animals on journals or posters. She would be first in line to own a Given Branch: Twelve Months of Cat-itude calendar. But when it comes to the muck and mud and smelliness of real animals and the chores that come with them, Caroline keeps her distance. That’s why her board chores are things like make the salad and sort the recycling.

  “Yes! A pet spa!” says Mai. “Because everybody loves animals! We can give them pet-icures and purr-ty them up! All pets allowed!”

  “I can contribute our tin washtub—the one we use to wash Oro,” says Daisy excitedly. “It’s big enough for a Saint Bernard.”

  “Ooh, ooh, ooh!” Mai snaps her fingers. “I bet my uncle can give us a ton of towels. He owns Top Shape Gym in town.”

  Caroline doesn’t say anything.

  “I’ll make posters!” I announce into the awkward silence.

  “Thanks, Becket,” says Daisy.

  “I do all the animal chores here,” I add. “So if you need any help, call on me!”

  Caroline’s smile is like a peeling nail decal. Even though I’m not Caroline’s twin, I can guess what my sister is thinking. A pet spa means dander, sharp claws—and pet breath! If she doesn’t want to do a pet spa, she should speak up—or I will for her.

  “Caroline can do the money,” I say. “She’s great with money. She works the register at our store.”

  “Yes!” Caroline jumps in. “Just put me right in back, behind the cash box.”

  “The cash box?” Daisy looks doubtful. “That’s just a tiny side job.”

  “The money part is the easy work,” says Mai.

  “It’s not, when there’s a rush at Branch’s Farm Store,” I say. “You need to be good with numbers and keep a cool head. And there’s always that person who pays in loose change.”

  Mai chews her bottom lip. “I mean, but you’ve got to deal with pets, too.”

  “Of course! Becket just meant, I can also do the money,” says Caroline. “Nothing’s more fun than styling the pets!”

  “We’ve got Mane ’n’ Tail shampoo to contribute,” I add. “That’s what we use on Pickle and Chew.”

  “Cool,” says Mai.

  “This is going to be so fun,” says Nicholas.

  The oven timer pings. Gran pulls multiple loaves of banana bread out of the oven. “I made six total,” says Gran. “Five for the store, and one to inspire.” She shakes one of the loaves from the baking tin, and soon each of us has a warm, chunky slice. But the moment he hears the clatter of the small plates, Dibs jumps in my lap.

  “Solar panels are clean, green energy,” I sing. “Our school is going to look amazing. You should see the artist’s rendering, Gran.”

  I love singing out that Beautiful Alert phrase: artist’s rendering.

  “Cheers to green energy!” Mai raises her bread, and then it’s gone in three bites. “We should make a list of services and prices. Let’s name our spa, too.”

  “Wag Zone,” suggests Daisy.

  “Fancy Tails,” says Caroline.

  “The Fluff and Puff,” says Mai. She sits up straight in her chair. “Because the rhymes are fun, the words describe what happens at a spa, and it feels cuddly.”

  Mai gets all the votes.

  “A landslide win for the Fluff and Puff!” calls Nicholas.

  Mai smiles and does a shoulder shimmy that I know I’m going to try to copy later—in private, up in my room.

  Meantime, Given is still jumping from chair to table to lap, snuffling for banana bread crumbs. Everyone can pick her up and pat her, but she won’t stay with anybody for too long.

  Even when Nicholas gives her some treats, she doesn’t stick to him.

  Dibs stays in my lap, and his body goes tense when Mai’s parents arrive to pick her and Daisy up. I set him on the ground to see if I can get him to eat. He puts his nose in the bowl, but as soon as it slides across the floor, he skedaddles away. So I get one of Mom’s woven place mats to set under it. Solved!

  When Dibs slips outside for his night pee, I have to stay with him and hum a tune so he knows he’s not alone. It’s really dark, with only a sliver of moon to shine on the different textures of the night. He circles and sniffs, sniffs and circles, but right before he is about to pee, he has to stop what he’s doing to check in on me. Then it’s like he’s forgotten why he’s out there. He has to start sniffing and circling all over again. Waiting for him is a chore!

  “Dad is setting up Dibs’s crate in your room,” says Mom, who is waiting for me when I come back inside. “But first, you are going to wash all my woven place mats. I can’t believe you put my nice mat on the floor for the dog.”

  There’s no arguing with Mom. I wipe down all the place mats, and then Dibs follows me up the stairs.

  He sits on my fuzzy slippers and watches me brush my teeth.

  As soon as I snap off my lamp, Dibs starts whining and panting from his crate. When I let him out, he puts his front paws up on the side of my mattress and then clumsily hoists his wiggly-waggly heavy-breathing body right up onto my bed.

  I sit up, snap on my lamp, scoop him up, and put him back in his crate. “Dibs, you might injure yourself if you fall off the bed, okay? Got it?”

  Dibs’s eyes are sad. But he seems to get it.

  I snap off the lamp.

  A couple of minutes later—hello! Guess who’s back on the bed?

  On goes the lamp. Off goes the dog. Off goes the lamp.

  On jumps the dog, and then—whoopsie!—Dibs slips and falls off the bed. He is panting hard, but when I snap on the lamp and check him for bumps and ouches, he seems fine.

  Should I lock him in his crate? I scooch him back in, but I leave the door open.

  Less than a minute later—rustle, rustle—Dibs is up on the bed again, belly-crawling along my side, burrowing, and even nosing a couple of my stuffed penguins. I place my hand on the back of his head.

  Dibs goes still.

  Hand off, and he’s back to belly-crawling.

  Hand on. He stops.

  Hand off. Crawls.

  I close my eyes. His fur is soft beneath my fingers. But his breath is shallow. As soon as I shift my hand an inch, Dibs is inching his way up the side of the bed, bopping my penguins onto the rug, one by one.

  I lean over the edge. “Penguins, I’m sorry,” I tell them. “Maybe you can think of my rug as an Antarctic ice floe.”

  Dibs shapes himself into a doughnut and immediately is snoozing away. But as soon I fall asleep, I start dreaming I’m getting attacked by a snail. I wake up and feel—eeeyuck—Dibs panting and licking my neck!

  “Yuck!” I pull up the covers so that he can’t get to me.

  He’s not having a good sleep. Neither am I. It’s not until I turn on my clock radio, finding a station that plays quiet music, that Dibs finally settles down.

  Chapter 9

  Noisy Morning

  Shake, shake, shake.

  Shake, shake, shake.

  I open my eyes. Blurry Nicholas is staring over me, shaking my shoulder.

  “Becket, get up!” says Nicholas. “I need your help! Hurry!”

  I sit up and reach for my glasses on the bedside table. When I put them on, I see that Dibs must have jumped off my bed while I was sleeping. He is all curled up in his crate, his paw resting on Exo. He and Bexo are my oldest stuffies, twin penguins that I got for a birthday so long ago, I can’t remember it. I bet Dibs picked Exo for his worn-in smell. “Where did the sun go?”

  “It hasn’t come up yet! I need you in my room!” Nicholas sounds pretty panicked.

  “Okay, okay!”

  Nicholas and Dibs follow me down the hall. Nicholas stops in the doorway. He won�
��t go in.

  “What will I find in there?”

  “Given did it!” Nicholas starts hopping from one foot to the other.

  Did what? I tiptoe into the room.

  It is very tidy. Nicholas has a rule about his room: If it’s smaller than a grapefruit, he puts it in his closet.

  I spy something on the floor that is smaller than a grapefruit, or a lemon, or even a lime. It is nestled between Nicholas’s fluffy-cat bedroom slippers.

  Yipes! It’s a dead mouse!

  Given is hanging out on the windowsill. Her amber eyes are half-closed, and her tiger tail flicks slowly.

  I did that, her proud cat self seems to say. Then she jumps off the sill and disappears under Nicholas’s bed.

  “I got this, Nicholas,” I say over my shoulder. “Looks like Given wanted to give you breakfast. She probably brought the mouse into your room specially. It’s gross—but sweet of her, right?”

  “Mostly gross, and also scary, and then gross again!” says Nicholas. “Take it out of my room, Becket! I can’t go back until it’s gone.”

  “Give me five minutes.”

  Dibs and Nicholas follow me downstairs. In the kitchen, under the sink, I find a pair of rubber gloves and one of Given’s litter bags. We troop back upstairs to Nicholas’s room. I scoop up the breakfast mouse, then we all run downstairs again.

  Dibs gallops outside with me while Nicholas watches from the window.

  I drop the bag of mouse into the outside garbage. I feel bad for Given. Her cat brain thought she’d caught Nicholas a scrumptious morning treat.

  The sun is just breaking its yolky gold over the fields. Since I’m already here, I figure I might as well get going on morning chores, collecting eggs from the henhouse and feeding and brushing Pickle and Chew.

  Dibs never leaves my side. When I don’t let him into the henhouse with me, he starts to howl.

  “Stop it, Dibs,” I yell out. “You’ll scare the chickens!” I leave the henhouse and try to comfort him. The results aren’t so good. Dibs yowls, I go out, soothe him, go in. Dibs yowls again. I go out again. It’s like he’s yowling because he knows I’ll come. I hum a tune, which calms him down a bit, but it still takes forever to collect the eggs.

  Dibs sticks close by me as I carry the eggs to the Farm Store mudroom. I wave to Gran, who is already opening up for the morning rush—the store is an excellent pit stop for a cup of strong, hot coffee and a cider doughnut. “Dibs is the new family alarm clock,” she says as she takes my basket. “Better than a rooster.”

  “Given is an even better alarm clock.” I tell her about the mouse.

  “You can take a cat out of the wild, but you can’t take the wild out of a cat.”

  “What about the dog?”

  “Dibs leads with his heart,” says Gran. “He needs to get used to routines. Don’t let him in the barn when you’re there with Pickle and Chew. He might scare them.”

  I haul Dibs into the kitchen before I go up to the barn, but the whole time I’m feeding Pickle and Chew, I can hear that dog howling his lungs out. When I come back inside, Dibs has made a puddle on the kitchen floor.

  “You’ll need to clean that up,” says Mom, and I go straight to it. “And it’s your day to set the table.”

  “Sorry. He’s been upset all morning—eeeyuck!” Doggy pee has seeped through the paper towels onto my hands. “I’ve been babysitting animals since I got up, and I’m still not dressed for school.” I wash my hands, then rush around the table, setting forks and plates.

  “Better hurry,” says Dad. “I’m making egg-in-a-baskets.”

  My favorite! Egg-in-a-basket is just egg and toast, but the trick up its sleeve is that it’s stuck together. Dad cuts a small hole in the middle of a piece of bread, then fries the egg and bread into buttery, bonded deliciousness.

  Meantime, Caroline has joined us to make the fruit salad. She slices apples and bananas. Given darts past and settles on the magazine basket. Dibs scrabbles around the table, excited by all the activity.

  “Don’t let that dog scrape up my floors!” Dad says.

  Dad’s voice must have some kind of effect, because Dibs whimpers and lies down under a chair. So Dad comes over and gives Dibs a nice long scratch behind the ears. “I’m your friend, promise, bud,” he says quietly.

  Nicholas is the last one into the kitchen. He has to hurry to unload the dishwasher, which is his morning chore, before we all sit to breakfast.

  But where’s Dibs? Not here. I run up to my bedroom to see that he’s in his crate, chewing the face off of poor old Exo.

  “Dibs!” I cry. “What did Exo do to deserve this?”

  Dibs barks an answer at me in his secret dog language.

  “Not good enough.” I put all my stuffed penguins up on my highest shelf. Exo was no spring chicken of a penguin to begin with, and now he is pretty messed up, with some of his pellets spilling out of his neck.

  By the time I’m downstairs again, I’ve got almost no time to eat. “This is the longest morning,” I say. “But also the shortest breakfast morning.”

  “Let’s bring Dibs’s crate downstairs and keep him in it while we’re gone today,” says Mom. “Gran can let him out in the backyard at lunchtime.”

  One more trip upstairs.

  Once I’ve crated Dibs, I kneel down. “You got this, right, Dibs? You just need to stay quiet and calm, and not scratch or chew or yowl, got it?”

  Dibs gives me his best Sure thing face. But now I have to lock the crate, and last night I didn’t. I have a feeling I’ve confused him. This pet-training stuff is really hard. I want Dibs to feel happy and comfortable here, and I know I also have to teach him some rules, but I don’t like to be too firm, since he’s so shy and worried. My heart tugs to see him looking sad, even as I have to walk away.

  And, of course, no sooner am I out the door than Dibs starts howling like we never even had our heart-to-heart.

  Chapter 10

  The Bedazzling Branches

  “Look, Becket! The whole school is talking about your wonderful cat, and the Fluff and Puff,” says Ms. Lemons, our art teacher. She’s on the school’s website, looking at all the activities for the Pumpkin Patch. Caroline’s photo of Given is the center picture.

  “My sister took that photo,” I tell Ms. Lemons proudly.

  Ms. Lemons reads the caption: “ ‘Given one’s best—at the Fluff and Puff Pet Spa! Photo by Caroline Branch. Please share, adapt, and attribute this image.’ ”

  Ms. Lemons clicks Given’s face, and a pop-up message reads:

  Fluff and Puff is a full-service spa! We offer a premium bath with a cream rinse, blow-dry, and style flair. Click the Calendoodle board to schedule your time slot.

  “Isn’t the word ‘Calendoodle’ a perfect way to schedule a pet bath?” I say. “It sounds just like a dog breed!”

  “It really does! You know what? I’m going to choose a time for my chug, Mango Lemons, right now,” says Ms. Lemons. “He’s a pug-Chihuahua mix.”

  I applaud. “Hooray!” Ms. Lemons is cool like that. Back in September, when school started and I was trying to figure out how to draw animal tails, Ms. Lemons showed me, using a whole lunch period to sit with me at the art table and sketch.

  Now I’m pretty good at tails—even stringy ones, which are the hardest.

  “See you at the Fluff and Puff,” she says once Mango is signed up.

  “I’ll be there,” I say. “And so will Given.”

  “It’s a whole celebrity family,” says Ms. Lemons.

  A whole celebrity family? I like that!

  In the cafeteria, Mr. Peebles, our head lunch person, has printed Given’s photo. He’s also made a couple of changes, photoshopping in a Thanksgiving table and using a new caption: we’re given thanks for our can drive!

  “What can I say? I’m a total cat person,” Mr. Peebles explains when we see his poster at lunchtime. “Great shot, Caroline,” he calls across the c
afeteria, where Caroline is sitting with Mai and Daisy. His hands make that olden-days motion for snapping a picture.

  Caroline nods and looks pleased.

  “Just wait till she takes photos of my dog, Dibs,” I tell Mr. Peebles. “You’ll be a total dog person, too, when you see him.”

  “I’m already a dog person,” says Mr. Peebles. “In fact, I just used the Calendoodle to sign up my beagle, Otis Peebles, for the Fluff and Puff.”

  That afternoon, we come into the science room to find another poster of Given! This time, Given has been photoshopped wearing a lab coat and holding a beaker, and Ms. Kandila has come up with her own caption: get a paws-itive charge out of science!

  “Given’s face brightens a science room better than a dozen glass beakers,” says Ms. Kandila. “Caroline is such a talented photographer.”

  “Everyone in my family is talented,” I say proudly. “Nicholas is good at cello, and I’m good at drawing, see?” I pull out my notebook to show her. Luckily, I did some sketches on the margins of my math homework.

  “Wow,” says Ms. Kandila. “Maybe you should be known as the Bedazzling Branches!”

  The Bedazzling Branches! I like that! We really are celebrities!

  When Nicholas and I are outside the school waiting for Dad to pick us up, a few sixth graders come up to us. “You’re Given’s family, right?” asks a girl. “Your cat’s like a meme now.”

  “Yep! That’s our cat!” I shout as Nicholas scuffs his sneaker at the ground. “We’re getting to be a known family. Some people call us the Bedazzling Branches!”

  “Becket.” Nicholas looks at me. “We’re not called that.”