No More Dead Dogs (17 page)

He looked at me in scorn. “The Giants work hard, too, you know.”

“Then punish me!
I’m
the traitor!” I spread my arms wide. “Here, take a shot. A punch, a kick—whatever you want. Just leave the play alone.”

“And get beaten up?” he sneered. “I don’t think so.”

“We won’t lay a finger on you,” Rick promised. “Just tell us what you did.”

A wicked smile took hold of Dylan’s features. “It’s too late to stop it.”

“Stop what?” I demanded.

His grin became wild. “I put a cherry bomb on Old Shep.”

“
Where’s
Old Shep?” I exclaimed. “He’s supposed to be dead!”

“They changed the ending!” he told us. “They said it was”—he started to giggle—“
your
idea!”

My attention snapped back to the stage. Leticia was finishing off her big number. But instead of delivering the bad news, she rapped:

“This is no hype, this is no jive.

Your dog, Old Shep, is still alive!”

And suddenly, there he was, the world’s most famous dead dog, not dead at all. Back on his remote-control car, Old Shep passed through the dog door of the Lamont house into the beam of a single spotlight. I felt like I was watching someone coming back from the afterlife.

The audience went crazy. Even the kids who didn’t know the story of
Old Shep, My Pal
had for sure read
Sounder
or
Old Yeller
, and were bracing themselves for the tragic conclusion. Instead, our Old Shep returned like a sunrise, moving across the stage bathed in pink light. If Zack Paris himself could have heard the roar in our gym that night, he would have gone back in time and changed his own ending. It might have cost him the Gunhold Award, but he would have had a better book, and a whole lot more satisfied readers.

I was mesmerized. I couldn’t take my eyes off Old Shep as he closed in on the Lamont kids. He was magical, supernatural—all at once, I spotted the red of the cherry bomb stuck in the crook of his paw—
he was dynamite on wheels!

I snatched the pillow from Old Shep’s basket and ran out onstage.

“Wallace?!” It came from all directions and a lot of different throats. I recognized Rachel and Coach Wrigley and Mr. Fogelman in there somewhere, but I had no time to think about that now.

The glowing dot of orange on the cherry bomb’s wick was burned all the way down. I wasn’t going to make it.

I hurled myself at the stuffed dog in a flying desperation leap. As my feet left the floor, I was aware of a split second of complete silence—not a sound from the audience, the band, or the cast. I was in the air, and Old Shep was getting closer, and I held the pillow over my face, and—

BOOM!!!

Old Shep exploded just as I landed on top of him. I felt the blast through the cushion. Instantly, I was engulfed in a whirlwind of flying plush animal hair and pillow stuffing. I gasped for breath and inhaled a throatful of smoke and fluff.

“Wallace!”
Rachel threw herself on top of me and pulled me from Old Shep. I bounced off her, she somersaulted over me, and we tumbled along the stage. Finally we rolled to a halt at the feet of the other cast members. Trudi, Vito, and Nathaniel gawked down at us, mute with shock.

The audience was cowed, and I didn’t blame them. Picture it: Rachel and I were covered with gray soot and charred brown fur. A plume of thick smoke rose from the now-naked stuffed dog, which smoldered amid piles of its own hair. The wheels of the remote-control car were spinning, but I had busted the toy with my crash landing. It wasn’t going anywhere. Neither was Old Shep.

From the gym floor and bleachers, over fourteen hundred wide eyes stared up at us. Dr. Chechik and some of the teachers were halted halfway to the stage. I guess they stopped because they weren’t really sure if all this was an accident or just a very weird part of the show.

The cast looked to Mr. Fogelman, but our director stood frozen like a block of ice, white to the ears before his keyboard.

That was when Rachel showed why she was the president of the drama club. In the middle of all that chaos, she struggled to her feet, elbowed Trudi in the ribs, and whispered, “The show must go on!”

The Lamonts stared at her.

“What?” Trudi hissed.

“The show
must
go on!”

And with that, she nodded to the band. Joey Quick played the opening chords of “Farewell, Old Pal,” and the Dead Mangoes, even Mr. Fogelman, joined in.

I was trying to slither behind the scenery board of the Lamont house. But as soon as the singing began, I sat up in surprise. It wasn’t “Farewell, old pal!” that the Lamont kids were belting out at top volume; instead they chorused:

“Shep is okay! Hip hip hooray!

He’ll live to bark another day!”

Of course! They had to change the words to fit the new ending!

The problem was that Shep
wasn’t
okay. Shep was on fire. Shep was belching smoke at seven hundred astounded spectators.

All at once, waves of laughter and applause filled the gym. The audience was on its feet again, roaring its approval of this hilarious ending. The four bewildered Lamonts could only sing on:

“Shep is okay! His health is super!

He’s strong as the shaft of his pooper scooper!”

At that moment, the fire spread from Old Shep down into the car. With a loud pop, the remote-control toy short-circuited and blew. The crowd howled with mirth as flames shot up six inches from the stuffed dog. Still on my knees, I crawled back out onto the stage and tried to blow out the fire, but it was no use. I had to beat down the blaze with what was left of the pillow from Old Shep’s basket.

A final puff of smoke dispersed just as the song and the play came to a close. The roar of the crowd was deafening, but I missed most of it. Rachel yanked me up by the collar and frog-marched me into the wings.

“He took off, Wallace!” Rick called to me. “I turned my back for a second and—”

“Aha!” Rachel thrust her index finger half an inch from Rick’s eye. She turned to me. “Was it him, Wallace? Is this the low-down scum who
ruined
our play?”

“Ruined?” repeated Trudi in disbelief. “We’re a smash! Listen!” She pointed onstage where the tremendous ovation raged on. Vito and Nathaniel beckoned, and the rest of the cast was straggling out to accept the adulation of an enraptured audience.

“Bravo!”

“Best play I ever saw!”

“Old Shep rocks!”

“They’re laughing at us!” Rachel shrieked. “And why not? We nursed a dog back to health only to have him blow up like a hand grenade! Who was it, Wallace? Who did this to us?”

Oh, how my heart went out to Rachel just then. Her precious play had literally exploded; her acting career, her life’s dream, had been converted into a big joke; she was humiliated in front of her parents, her classmates, and half the town; and now she was about to learn that her own little brother was the cause of it all.

Poor Rachel, who believed me when nobody else would—who even risked her life to save me from a burning stuffed animal! I had to find a way to make this easy on her. But how?

“It was me,” I blurted.

Rick gasped.
“What?”

I cut him off with a razor-sharp look. “It’s been me all along,” I went on. “I’m sorry.”

She hauled off and punched me in the stomach. I barely felt the pain through my horror and disbelief at what I had done.

After fourteen years of total honesty, I, Wallace Wallace, had told a lie!

Enter…
RACHEL TURNER

My parents grounded Dylan for eight hundred years. He almost got away with it. After the play, he ran straight home and hid in a tree. When we finally found him (just before midnight), he was already blubbering lame excuses. If he’d kept his mouth shut, he might even have pulled it off.

I tried to forgive him. Well, not really. But he
was
my brother (and would be in the next room for at least eight hundred years), so I was stuck with him. I swallowed my anger and visited him on day one of his sentence. I even brought a little gift, a (repulsive) plastic skull with nasty protruding eyeballs.

“Thanks, Rach. I love it! But”—Dylan looked embarrassed—“don’t you hate me?” He studied the carpet. “Sorry about yesterday. And, you know, all those other times.”

“Well, I figured the chamber of horrors could use a little brightening up,” I told him. “Especially since you’re going to be spending a lot of time here for the next eight hundred years.”

Dylan shrugged. “Mom was just mad. I’ll bet I’m out in half that.”

I laughed. “Hey, Dylan, do you have any idea why Wallace tried to take the rap for you?”

“Sure.” He brightened. “Because he’s the greatest!”

“The greatest?” I echoed. “Last night you detonated the whole world just because you were mad at him!”

“But he proved one thing,” Dylan enthused. “He’s still got the moves!” He swiveled his computer monitor to face me. He was logged on to porkzit.com, where Parker posted all the articles he wrote for the
Standard.

Right on page one was a picture of Wallace leaping onto the exploding Old Shep. I blinked in surprise. It was exactly the same photograph as the big touchdown last year, with the stuffed dog taking the place of the football.

Parker Schmidt’s E-News Page

TOUCHDOWN STAGE LEFT!

by Parker Schmidt, Staff Reporter

I shook my head. “If he picked up a paintbrush, they’d call him Picasso.”

“Is it true that he and Trudi got back together?” asked Dylan. “And he’s taking over your job in the drama club?”

“Porker Zit is delusional. He gets his facts in fantasy-land.”

Dylan pointed over to his desk. “Hey, Rach. I’ve got a letter of yours. It must have come yesterday. It was stuck to my package from the Ooze of the Month Club.”

I picked up the envelope by the edges and brushed it off on his pillow. “Dylan,” I said, annoyed, “I like to get my mail the day it arrives. And that little green spot better not be ooze.”

Suddenly, my eyes fell on the postmark—
Hollywood, CA.
There was no return address, just the scrawled initials
JR.

I didn’t believe it. I still didn’t believe it when I had the short note open right in front of me:

Two questions jolted through my body like four thousand volts of electricity: 1) Why didn’t I know that? And 2) Why didn’t I know it
YESTERDAY
?!!

Wallace was ignoring me at school on Monday. Not that Julia’s predictions had any chance of coming true after I’d punched him, but at least I wanted to say I was sorry. I guess he was pretty mad at me, and I couldn’t really blame him. For over a month, I’d treated him like a criminal. And not only was he innocent, but the true culprit turned out to be my own flesh and blood.

I finally cornered him with a move so immature it was worthy of Trudi. In the cafeteria line, I saw Wallace filling up a taco. I picked up the salsa bowl and dumped out the entire thing onto my plate. When he reached the empty container, I came up behind him.

“Here, take some of mine,” I offered. “I got a little carried away.”