Boys Are Dogs (20 page)

I looked at the book again.
You’ve changed. The
transformation is complete.

No, I didn’t exactly believe those words, but they didn’t seem
completely
off base. I’d stood up to Jackson—something that had seemed impossible a few weeks ago. So yeah, maybe I had changed a little. And maybe it was time to change some more. Maybe the book could only take me so far and the rest I’d have to figure out on my own.

I walked downstairs and headed outside. So far so good. Jackson didn’t even notice. Picking up the ball, I dribbled and shot and missed. I got the rebound and shot again. And this time I made it. I kept shooting and soon the rumbling got louder. Then it stopped completely. I felt someone’s eyes on my back.

Taking a deep breath, I turned around. Jackson stood on the sidewalk in front of my driveway.

Arms crossed, he sneered at me. “That hoop is so dumb. It’s not even regulation height.”

I just shrugged, turned around, and shot. Luckily, I made the basket and the next one, too. Then I dribbled in for a layup. The ball hit the rim and bounced off.

“Hah!” said Jackson.

Whatever. I grabbed the ball and I threw it at him. “Think fast.”

He flinched but caught it. “You want me to play on your stupid hoop?”

“Well, obviously you want to play or you wouldn’t be here,” I said.

Jackson opened his mouth to protest, but didn’t argue. “Fine, whatever,” he said, and shot and missed.

He glared at me angrily, like he was daring me to say something, but I didn’t. Everyone misses sometimes. No big deal. I just caught the rebound and threw the ball back up.

“I’m not a dog, you know.” He said it out of nowhere.

My back was to Jackson. I didn’t want to turn around to face him, but I made myself. “Okay, you’re not a dog,” I said, looking him in the eye. “But sometimes you act like one. And not in a good way, either.”

He didn’t respond, and I didn’t say anything more, but we shot around for a while—after the sun set and the streetlights switched on.

Jackson didn’t laugh or sneer or call me Spaz or give me dirty looks. We just played in silence, like we didn’t hate each other’s guts.

It’s funny. I knew I’d changed over these past few weeks, but now I realized that Jackson had, too, although I’m not sure why. Maybe he was impressed that I’d finally stood up for myself, or maybe he just wanted to use my new hoop. It didn’t really matter. Things were different tonight. And they’d be different from now on. I’d make sure of it.

When Jackson’s mom called him inside for dinner, he tossed me the ball and said, “See you, Spazabelle.”

But for once he didn’t say it in a mean way, so I just laughed and said, “See ya.”

Then he turned around and jogged back home. I stayed outside, unable to wipe the smile off my face.

A few minutes later, a tall, glowing green blob turned the corner and jogged toward me. Dweeble. If this happened last week, I’d have joked, “He’s such an eyesore in his glow-in-the-dark clothes.”

But I couldn’t say that now, because I didn’t really mean it.

The thing is, there must be something good to all of Dweeble’s brightness. Like how, even in the dark, he still stood out.

In fact, the closer he got the more I realized something. I was happy he was almost home.

“Hey, how was the run?” I asked.

“Glorious,” he called, and stopped short at the bottom of the driveway. Holding up his hands he said, “Let’s have it. I’m wide open.”

I grinned and passed Dweeble the ball.

He charged forward and slam-dunked.

“Nice one,” I said grabbing the ball before it bounced into the street. I tossed it to him again, thinking,
who knows
? Maybe someday I’d even start calling Dweeble Ted.

On the other hand, there’s no point in getting carried away.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Julie Romeis, Michelle Nagler, Caroline Abbey, Melissa Kavonic, Nira Hyman, Nicole Gastonguay, Laura Langlie, Coe Booth, Sarah Mlynowski, Dan Ehrenhaft, Robin Wasserman, Ethan Wolff, Jessica Ziegler, Amanda McCormick, Emma Reuland, Sydney Foreman, and Jim Margolis

Think you've learned
how to master those boys—er, dogs?

Get ready for a whole different breed of
training in Annabelle's next adventure,
Girls Acting Catty

terrible T

W
hen I got to PE on Monday, I sat down on the blacktop for roll call, as usual. We always line up in alphabetical order, which means that I sit right behind Taylor, because my last name is Stevens and hers is Stansfield. Usually I smile at her and she smiles back.

But ever since Halloween, I didn’t know how to act. I wasn’t going to
not
be nice to Taylor, just because Rachel and my other friends didn’t like her. That wouldn’t be fair. Sure, Taylor had been pretty mean to Rachel, but Rachel had been mean right back. I didn’t know who started the whole thing, and I didn’t want to get stuck in the middle or take sides.

Plus, Rachel was wrong. Taylor isn’t ugly. She’s actually really pretty with shiny dark hair and wide-set green eyes. Also, she’s super outgoing. In chorus, she’s always the first one to volunteer to do solos. She wants to be a pop star when she grows up, and she talks about it all the time. Rachel thinks this makes her obnoxious and snobby, but I think it’s okay to have something you really, really want to do.

Rachel should agree. She’s the one who wants to be a drummer in a rock band. So how is that any different? I’d asked her about it on Saturday night, but she didn’t explain and I didn’t push it.

To smile or not to smile—that was the question. Before I could decide, Taylor turned around and looked at me with a blank expression on her face, like she was just noticing I existed for the first time. That seemed a little weird, but then she did something really crazy. She panned my whole body, looking me up and down like I was a secondhand bike she was thinking about buying. When she finally finished, she looked disappointed and frowned like she thought I was used and damaged goods or something.

“What?” I shouldn’t have asked, but the question came out before I could stop myself.

She scrunched her eyebrows together, as if she were thinking pretty hard, which got me all panicky. Like, maybe she found so many things wrong, she didn’t even know where to begin.

When her gaze finally met mine she asked, “Your mom won’t let you shave your legs yet, huh?”

I looked down at my legs, and she did too. I didn’t know what to tell her, or even if I was supposed to give her an answer.

True, my legs are a little furry, but my hair is so pale you can hardly see it. There’s no point in shaving. But what if every other sixth-grade girl at Birchwood already does? Maybe I’m the only holdout.

I’m not sure if Rachel or my other new friends shaved. We’d never talked about it before. Maybe they all did and thought I was weird and babyish for not doing it. Although they were my friends, and too nice to think of me that way. So maybe they didn’t bring up shaving on purpose because they didn’t want me to feel bad, which was worse.

I sat there dumbly, looking at my legs. Time seemed to slow to a crawl. Each agonizing second felt more like an hour.

Taylor stared at me, waiting for an answer. She didn’t even blink.

Finally I said, “No.” But even as the word came out of my mouth, I wished I’d had a better response.

Like, “I’m not sure, because I don’t want to shave my legs yet, so I never bothered asking. But if I did, my mom would probably say go ahead, because she’s cool about stuff like that.”

That was the truth. But the truth didn’t seem good enough. Of course, neither did the lie. Taylor turned back around and didn’t say anything else to me for the rest of class.

Probably, she’d never speak to me again.

At this point, I kind of hoped not.

PE is my last class of the day, but I couldn’t go right home when it ended because I had to meet Tobias and Oliver in the library after school. We’re in the same lab group in science, and we’d spent the last two weeks growing mold spores on bread. Now we had to write up a lab report about the experiment. It was due on Wednesday, and these reports counted for a big part of our grade, so we really had to get it right.

I just wished I had long pants to change into. I’d worn shorts to school and tennis shoes with no socks. Now I worried that everyone would notice my hairy calves and think I was a freak. It was entirely possible that I was the only girl at Birchwood Middle School who didn’t shave. And until I knew for sure, I’d just have to be careful to keep my legs hidden.

When I got to the library, the boys were already there. Oliver is cute, with dirty blond hair shaved into a buzz cut, green eyes, and skin that’s kind of dark because he’s half black. He has a nice accent, which I never noticed before, because he hardly talks. But ever since he told me he was born in Jamaica and only moved to California four years ago, I always hear it. Tobias is pale, with shaggy dark hair and glasses and a big nose and pimples that creep from his cheeks down to his neck and disappear into his shirt collar. Basically, he’s not so cute, but he seems to think he is.

Even though I was feeling lousy after the whole Taylor/leg-shaving thing, I stood up tall and swaggered over to them, throwing my backpack on the table and saying, “Hey, what’s up?”

Then I pulled out my notebook and doled out the work before they had a chance to argue with me. “There are six sections in a lab, so let’s split them up and each do two. Tobias, you can write the introduction and hypothesis. Oliver, you list the materials and supplies and then explain the procedure. And I’ll write up our observations and the conclusion.”

“How come you get to do the conclusion?” asked Tobias.

I crossed my arms over my chest and glared. “Do you want to do it? Because I don’t really care.”

“No, whatever. It’s fine.” Tobias pushed up his glasses, bent over his notebook, and started writing.

I had to smile. If someone didn’t know better, they’d think I was pretty bossy, but I’m not. Really. It’s all an act.

At the beginning of the school year, Oliver and Tobias hogged all the lab equipment and they never let me do anything, but then I used some of Pepper’s dog-training lessons on them and things have been okay ever since. For everyone, I think. We finished writing up our lab in less than two hours. Then Oliver’s mom drove us all home.

I was so glad to be back. At least, until I walked through the front door and heard loud voices coming from the kitchen.

“This isn’t a big deal,” Dweeble said. “I’m sorry, but I just assumed that you’d want to change your name when we got married. Traditionally—”

“When have I ever been traditional?” Mom asked. “And what about Annabelle? I can’t have a different last name than my own daughter.”

“You didn’t let me finish. I was about to say that I never thought about that, but—”

“Well, you should have.”

“There you go, interrupting me again.”

Yikes. I froze, just inside the front door, not wanting to eavesdrop but too curious to move. I’d never heard Mom and Dweeble fight before, and wondered if they were breaking up. They’d have to call off the wedding. Then Mom and I might have to move back to North Hollywood. I’d just gotten used to things here, and I didn’t want to move. Not even after the humiliation in gym class.

I opened the door again, and slammed it shut as hard as I could, yelling, “Hi, I’m home!”

They stopped talking immediately, and then a few seconds later my mom came into the entryway with a tight, forced-looking smile on her face. “Hi, Annabelle. Did you finish your book report?”

“It’s a lab report,” I replied. “Um, can I ask you something?” I needed to talk to her about shaving. Not only because of what happened in PE today, but also because I was curious. I wasn’t
only
asking because of Taylor. “It’s important,” I said, making my way upstairs and hoping she’d come too.

“What is it?” She glanced toward the kitchen, distracted. I wasn’t going to ask her out in the open, when Dweeble could walk in at any second. But she wasn’t following me to my room. So instead, I asked her if I could go over to Rachel’s.

Mom glanced at her watch. “That’s fine, but don’t stay for too long. Ted and I are making lasagna and it should be ready in about an hour.”

I felt like asking her if “making lasagna” was some new term for “yelling at each other,” but I didn’t want her to know I’d heard anything. So instead I said, “Okay.” Then I dropped my backpack off in my room, changed into jeans, and headed across the street.

Jackson answered the door a minute after I knocked, asking, “What do you want?”

For once, I didn’t blame him for being rude. He was probably still mad about Halloween. “Hey, Jackson. I just wanted to see if you needed to borrow my shampoo.”

“Huh?” he asked.

“So you can wash all that rotten egg out of your hair. Remember? Or did Claire hit you too hard and give you amnesia?”

“Very funny,” Jackson grumbled, and tried closing the door in my face.

I held it open. “No, wait. Sorry. I’m just kidding. Is Rachel home?”

Jackson rolled his eyes, but still turned around and yelled for her. “Hey, pizza face!”