Leftovers (2 page)

“What about your graduation next year?” Mom blathered on. “Or your wedding? What if you have your own children some day? Will you never take pictures of them?”

I gulped. “Never.”

“Fine,” my mother said, crossing her arms in defeat. “But Sarah, someday you'll be sorry that you have no photos. You can't always rely on your memory...”

Ha. Joke's on her. I have plenty of photos to look at. All I need is one more chance to find them. I'd bungled my first attempt horribly, but I can't let that—let anything or any
one
—stop me.

Finding those photos was—and still is—my mission in life.

A search-and-destroy mission.

Nothing else matters.

Sweaty under the midmorning sun, covered in wet dog hair, my hands smelling of tar shampoo and oatmeal conditioner, I call a break and pass out Milkbones to my charges. These old, disabled, quirky dogs wag their tails like crazy. They love me—love anybody who brushes them and gives them affection and biscuits. Especially biscuits.

Here's the truth: I don't mind them either. The dogs never gawk at me or peer over the rims of their eyeglasses and coffee mugs like my teachers, neighbors and even my boss down at the Doughy Donut Emporium, question marks flashing in their eyes. The dogs never say things like:

“Sarah's usually so responsible. Intelligent. Not reckless at all! Wasn't she lucky to have survived the crash?”

“Yes, Ian's death must have been hard on her, but it's been almost a year now. Her marks haven't suffered. So what happened?”

“It's always the quiet ones you have to watch out for, isn't it?”

And the dogs don't gather in the high school cafeteria either, like my classmates back home, whispering about my so-called accident behind my back.

“Sarah's such a freeeeeeeak!”

“So Sarah doesn't like her mother's new boyfriend. That's no reason to steal his car, is it? She hasn't even finished driver's ed!”

“OMG!!! Is it true that Sarah raced down Commerce Street like she had the cops on her ass?”

MORONS, all of them.

Remember that old
Sesame Street
song, “Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?” I don't know about the people in
other
neighborhoods, but the people in
my
neighborhood are idiots. Or, as we say here at Camp Dog Gone Fun, barking up the wrong tree.

Because no one ever asked
where
I was going that night.

Good thing too.

The only other thing you might be interested to know about my “neighborhood”—Riverwood, Ontario, population 3,700—is that it's a sleepy rural community of hobby farmers, Ottawa commuters and their families, and a handful of assorted oddballs. And that it looked even sleepier while I was careening down the main drag in a stolen car on that foggy, fateful night last March, hell-bent on reaching the highway that would take me an hour's drive northeast to the city of Ottawa. To my dead father's restaurant.

Tanner's car was in fast-forward that night, but I saw only still shots out the windshield. Garth Brooks was singing on the radio, but I heard only sound effects worthy of some cheesy Hollywood action flick. Some highlights:

SWOOSH!
St. Bart's United Church. The place is packed with women each Sunday. And it's not because the town's females are all seriously into the God thing. It's because Reverend Donaldson is single
and
a dead ringer
for Matthew McConaughey. Even the blue-haired choir ladies jockey for the chair closest to the pulpit.

VRRROOOOMMM!
Old Man Kevert's body shop. Mr. Kevert is Riverwood's one-man freak show. He brags about keeping a two-headed baby raccoon in a jar of formaldehyde in his refrigerator. Mr. Kevert doesn't give out candy at Halloween; instead he shows kids his “trick,” which involves popping out his glass eyeball and rattling his false teeth and nobody knows what else because kids generally take off down the street screaming at that point.

ROARRRR!
Jeff Grenville, the star of Riverwood High's concert band, was slouched against the Coke machine in front of Alvin's Arcade, eyeing my Paul Tracy impersonation with—was that curiosity? Concern? No, more like envy.

BEEEEP!
I waved and blasted the horn at him just for fun, knowing there wasn't much chance he'd recognized me through the unfamiliar windshield and the after-dinner darkness.

ZOOOOM!
Over the bridge. Melvin's Grill to the left. Phil's Pharmacy to the right. I've always thought that the two places should get together and offer some sort of promotion: buy two grease-burgers for lunch and get a free frothy pink Pepto-Bismol shake to go. I was glad I'd eaten supper before escaping in Tanner's car. As fast as I was driving, it would still take a while to get where I was going and do the nasty but necessary job that needed to be done. I hadn't exactly thought to bring a snack.

A white streak of fur darted in front of Tanner's car. Fluffbucket. He belongs to Ms. Jeppsie, my math teacher. What I want to know is, if felines are so smart, why don't they look both ways before they cross the street? Then again, Fluffbucket is
old
, eighteen or nineteen, and in all those cat-years he'd never known Commerce Street to be a particularly hazardous roadway. Until that night, Riverwood was a town where people stuck to the speed limit and obeyed the
Slow. Watch for Children
signs, extending the same courtesy to cats, dogs, squirrels and even the occasional skunk.

SCREEEEEEEEEEEECH!
I slammed my foot down on the brake pedal, swerved to the left and lost control of Tanner's rusty red Neon, a car which, under normal circumstances, I wouldn't be caught dead driving. If I actually knew how to drive.

Clenching my eyes shut didn't help matters any. But when the concrete likeness of Harold Medeler, World War One fighter pilot, standing at attention atop the town war memorial as proudly as a plastic groom on a wedding cake, comes straight at you at eighty-odd kilometers per hour, the less you can see the better.

At the moment of impact, all I heard was an ear-splitting
CRACK,
which I assumed was my head going through the windshield. It turned out to be the front bumper against the cenotaph, and Harold's head flying through the Neon's front window into the passenger seat.

Then the
WHOOSH
of the airbag.

Then the sirens.

Obviously I survived (so did Fluffbucket) despite what I've heard about the left-hander's tendency toward poor hand-foot-eye coordination and the increased probability of dying in a motor-vehicle accident. Harold was rescued and sent to the city cement works to have his head reattached. He was back at his post a week later. Tanner's car was a write-off.

That I could have killed old Fluffbucket, who has been in the world longer than I have, makes me cringe, and thank God, or Matthew McConaughey, that he had at least one of his nine lives left. That I could have killed a child or someone's grandma out for her nightly stroll was something new to lose sleep about. That I had defaced—accidentally, but
literally
—the only real monument in town, made me feel as shamed as if I'd shot down Harold's plane in France almost a century ago. That I could have killed myself was beside the point; I had no breaks, no bumps, no scratches even. Then again, I've never bruised or scarred easily.

At least not on the outside.

At Camp Dog Gone Fun, everyone is too tired and rushed at breakfast to notice or care what Dr. Fred sets out on the table. Which is good, because if you really think about it, facing cold cereal, hard-boiled eggs, canned fruit cocktail and terrible coffee every morning might be the most punishing aspect of life here.

Camp tradition dictates that dinner is prepared by lottery. It's hit or miss depending on who draws the short straw at flagpole and what's on the unimaginative menu sent to Dr. Fred by a dietitian hired by the courts to make sure the “volunteers” aren't fed kibble. Some nights it's spaghetti or hamburgers, which are awfully hard to screw up, even for the kitchen-challenged. But some nights it's tuna casserole or chicken stew, which at best (I don't mean to brag, but when
I
cook) is edible, but at worst (when anyone else cooks) tastes like glue and smells like something the dogs horked up.

But everyone loves lunch. Lunch is always a buffet. A smorgasbord of fruits and veggies and ham and cheese and pickles and nuts.

Not unlike those of us who gather at the big round table to eat it.

At one o'clock sits Dr. Fred, forty-eight, bald as a bowling ball, veterinarian and all-around Mr. Nice Guy.

Two o'clock, Victoria, forty-five, wife of Dr. Fred. A fiery-haired social worker with so much energy she should come with a warning label.

Three o'clock, me. Sarah. Just turned sixteen. As you know, the crash-test dummy of the group.

Four o'clock, Johanna. Also sixteen. A wild-eyed party girl. Last fall, one of her self-described “beer bashes” spilled over to her neighbor's yard. In the morning, a bed of prize-winning Brussels sprouts was dead and an entire family of ceramic lawn gnomes was decapitated. “Oops” was all she had to say about it, punctuated by a toss of her waist-length blond hair.

Five o'clock, Taylor, seventeen. A green-haired artist/poet with enough metal in her face and spikes around her throat to build a motorcycle, and a penchant for spraying pro-choice graffiti on the sides of Catholic churches.

Six, seven, eight
and
nine o'clock, Nicholas, thirteen. Three hundred and sixty-two pounds. Guilty as charged, he admits, of chronic shoplifting to feed his appetite for... well...just about anything.

Ten and eleven o'clock, Brant, seventeen. Mr. Muscles. Star athlete, at least in his own mind. Unlike the rest of
us “volunteers,” who are from various towns within an hour's drive of the St. Lawrence River, Brant, like Dr. Fred and Victoria, lives just half a mile away, on the mainland in Gananoque. His crime: breaking into a college science lab on a dare and letting out all the mice. His purpose: to impress his vegan, animal activist, now
ex
-girlfriend.

And last but not least, at noon and midnight, sits Sullivan, sixteen. He's from Riverwood, same as me. He's...hey, wait a second. What the hell is Sullivan Vickerson doing at Moose Island? Sullivan wasn't at Camp Dog Gone Fun yesterday. He wasn't even here at breakfast this morning.

Sullivan isn't the best-looking guy or the smartest guy or even the most athletic guy at Riverwood High School. He's actually a short, skinny, somewhat dorky guy who gets called Bozo by some of the meaner kids at school. Mostly because of his enormous feet, which seem clownish attached to his stick legs, and which Sullivan shows off in a vast collection of loudly colored canvas high-tops. I sneak a peek under the table. Today he's wearing a bright yellow pair that conjures up an image of Big Bird.

But Sullivan has something. Maybe it's the Tigger-like bounce in his step as he jaywalks with abandon across the well-worn paths of the jocks, artists and brains, leaving trails through the school drama club, the concert band, the yearbook committee, the cross-country ski club and who knows what else. Sullivan chats up the goths and geeks and gangstas-in-training during lunch hours, volunteers to push the wheelchair kids around on class trips and sells
truckloads of chocolate bars for every school fundraising campaign. Even the sourest teachers are known to crack a smile after encountering him. So even if he did find the motivation—or time—to commit an “impulsive action,” any judge would take one look at his Colgate grin and let him off scot-free.

So what gives?

“Hi, Sarah,” he says, giving me a little wave across the table. I can't remember the last time—or
any
time— that Sullivan has spoken to me directly. I did sometimes catch him gawking at me in English last term, with an odd wrinkle above his left eyebrow like I was some impossibly awkward paragraph he'd been assigned to edit.

“Hey,” I reply.

“You two know each other?” Victoria asks.

“Sarah goes to my school,” Sullivan replies, grinning as he crunches into a giant dill pickle. Juice dribbles down his chin. He wipes it on his T-shirt sleeve. “She was in my English class last term.”

“Sullivan's my son,” Victoria explains. “He'll be joining me—joining all of us—again this summer.”

My eyes dart from Sullivan to Victoria and back. They don't look much alike. Sullivan is only about five-four— maybe half an inch taller than me—and skinny. His hair is thin and dark brown, spiked on top, probably to make him look taller. Victoria, who is at least five-ten and built as solidly as a pit bull, has thick, fire-engine red curls, whose color, judging by her roots, comes from a box. But yeah, they share the same high cheekbones and bright blue
eyes and the seeming inability to sit still for more than ten seconds at a stretch.

Not a chance, though, that Dr. Fred is Sullivan's biological father. And it's not just because Dr. Fred Wong is Chinese. It's because I know that Sullivan's father teaches geography at Riverwood High School. He was my home-room teacher in ninth grade.

“You're here by court order too?” Brant snorts.

“Yup. Custody arrangement,” Sullivan explains. “I live with my dad in Riverwood during the school year and spend summers out here. At Al
dog
traz,” he adds, winking at me across the table.

I give my mouth a wrist swipe. Knowing me, the grape juice I slurped moments before has left a purple mustache.

Nicholas laughs out loud, a deep, booming belly-roar that bounces off the walls like a volleyball. “Like Al
cat
raz. The prison, get it?”

“Hi, Sullivan,” Johanna says, batting her lashes at him. If I ever tried to pull off a move like that, guys would think I had a facial tic or Tourette's or something.