Pet Disasters (10 page)

“I forgot,” Mason said truthfully.

“I want everybody in the world to get to play with Dog!” Brody said.

Mason didn’t.

Finally, after two more last tosses, Brody said, “Well, I guess I’d better go home and say hello to Albert.”

Albert!

In the fun of playing with Dog all weekend long, Mason had forgotten not only all about Nora, but all about Albert. He had forgotten about him completely.

He hadn’t gone over to Brody’s house to talk to Albert so Albert wouldn’t be lonely.

Worse, he had forgotten to feed Albert. He hadn’t given him even one pinch of carefully measured fish-food flakes.

Albert was probably dead. As dead as Goldfish—not from overfeeding but from underfeeding, or in other words, starvation. Albert was probably dead, and it was all Mason’s fault.

Should Mason tell Brody right now, or let Brody find out on his own? Should he go over to Brody’s house with him, to be by his side when he found out, or wait to hear the distant sound of Brody’s heartbroken wail?

“I’ll go with you,” Mason said.

If he had been Brody, that comment would have made him suspicious. But Brody wasn’t the suspicious type.

Mason followed Brody’s quick footsteps into the Baxter house, past the heaps of camping gear lying in the front hall, and up the steps to Brody’s room, where he was sure they would see Albert’s small orange body floating lifeless on top of the water in an all-too-familiar way. And then he would say—what would he say? What could he say?

He closed his eyes as they entered the room, steeling himself for Brody’s piercing cry.

He didn’t hear it.

“Albert, I’m home! Oh, Albert, I missed you!”

Mason opened his eyes. There was Albert, swimming around in his bowl happily. Or at least swimming around in his bowl. Apparently overfeeding was worse for fish than underfeeding.

But what if Albert was close to death from starvation and Brody didn’t know it? Mason didn’t want Albert to have to wait until morning for his pinch of fish food. That would be three whole days.

“Look how glad he is to see me!” Brody crowed.

“I think maybe he looks a little bit hungry,” Mason suggested. “I didn’t feed him as much as I was supposed to this morning.” That was true. “He looks to me like he wants you to feed him.”

Brody studied Albert thoughtfully. “Do you think it would be all right if I gave him half a pinch?” Brody asked.

“Uh-huh,” Mason said. “I do.”

Brody measured out half a pinch of fish food.

“Does that look right?” he asked Mason.

“Maybe it needs to be a tiny bit more.”

Brody tapped out three more flakes. Then he scattered the generous half pinch on the surface of the water.

Albert gobbled up the half pinch of flakes
like—well, like a starving goldfish. Mason thought Albert would be okay now until his full feeding in the morning.

Weak with relief, Mason would have hugged Albert if he could, to thank him for still being alive. It was the most thankful Mason had ever felt for anything.

Monday began the second and final week of art camp. Mrs. Gong was apparently trying to cram in as many projects as possible in preparation for the art show to be held on Friday, the last day of camp. On Monday they did printmaking, using cut-up vegetables dipped in tempera paint.

Mason decided to stick with cut-up cauliflower. Probably Monet would have stuck with one kind of vegetable as well. Mason also stuck with brown paint, to match his socks. Brown cauliflower prints marched across his page in dutiful rows.

Nora used cut-up carrots and orange paint, pressing her carrot stamps on the page to form a perfect representation of a carrot. She used green paint on slivers of carrot to resemble a bunch of carrot greens on top. When she was done, her carrot made from carrots looked exactly like a real carrot. Mason thought
it was cleverly done, but it did make him wonder what the point of art was. Nora could have been content with a real carrot in the first place.

Brody’s print was a dragon. He used every single kind of vegetable to make it, with his trademark vibrant hues. If Mason were going to pick one of their prints to display in the citywide art contest, he would pick Brody’s dragon.

Dunk got into a broccoli-throwing fight with another kid.

“Really, Dunk!” Mrs. Gong said. “I want you to go sit outside in the hall until you can remember proper printmaking behavior.”

Dunk was outside in the hall for a pleasantly long time.

“I can’t come over today to see Dog,” Nora told Mason and Brody. “I’m going with my father to get our vacuum cleaner repaired, and they might let me watch while they repair it. I’ve always wanted to see what a vacuum cleaner looks like inside. Would tomorrow be okay? Did you talk to your mom?”

“Sure,” Brody said. “Mason forgot to ask her, but I’ll ask her today, and I know she’ll say yes because she always says yes to everything. Right, Mason?”

Mason nodded. He forced a smile. He knew it wasn’t a completely convincing smile.

So that was that. Tomorrow a real live girl who wasn’t Brody’s sister would be coming over to Mason’s house.

That afternoon, after Brody asked Mason’s mother about Nora, and she gave the answer Mason had known she would give, Mason and Brody ran in the sprinkler with Dog again, this time changing into swimsuits first. When they were tired of the sprinkler, it was only two o’clock.

“What should we do now?” Brody asked Mason once they were back inside with dry clothes on.

“I don’t know. What do you think we should do now?” Mason asked Brody.

“Let’s play a game with Dog.”

Mason tried to think of games that Dog would like playing. He couldn’t think of any.

“Wait,” Brody said. “I remember a game I heard about once. It’s called go get.”

“Go get?”

“We tell Dog to go get things, and he goes and gets them.”

“But—Dog doesn’t speak English,” Mason pointed out.

Brody paused for a moment to consider Mason’s comment.

“Well, I saw it on TV, and the dogs on TV could go get anything. ‘Go get ball.’ ‘Go get leash.’ ‘Go get newspaper.’ ”

“We can try it,” Mason said doubtfully.

“Dog!” Brody said in a commanding voice, to get Dog’s attention. “Go get ball!”

Dog jumped up, as if he knew something was supposed to be happening, but then he just stood there, panting with happiness, grinning his doggy grin, but doing absolutely nothing toward getting the ball. Did Dog even know where the ball was? Did he even know
what
a “ball” was?

“I think,” Brody said, “that we have to give the thing to him to smell first. That’s right. I’ll take something like my hat, and rub my hands all over it.”

Brody removed his baseball cap and kneaded it between his fingers.

“Then I’ll let Dog smell it.”

Brody thrust his cap under Dog’s nose, and Dog sniffed it obediently.

“Then I’ll tell Dog to close his eyes, and I’ll go and hide it, and then Dog will go and find it.”

“Um—Brody? How are you going to tell Dog to close his eyes?”

Brody thought some more. “Okay, he doesn’t have to close his eyes. We have to start with making it pretty easy.”

Brody let Dog sniff his cap some more, and then he stuck it behind the knitted duck pillow on the couch.

“Dog, go find hat!”

Dog didn’t do anything.

“Dog, go find
hat
! Dog, remember the smell? The thing that smelled?”

Brody put his hands out for Dog to smell and then led Dog toward the couch.

“He isn’t going to find it,” Mason told Brody.

“Yes, he is. Dog, find
hat
!”

This time Brody pointed right to the couch. And sure enough, Dog nosed aside the duck pillow, pounced on Brody’s hat, and brought it back to Brody.

“I want him to find something of mine,” Mason said. He took off his own hat and started rubbing it as Brody had done.

“Dog already found a hat. Make him find something else.”

Mason tried to think of what else Dog could find.

“Not to be insulting or anything, but your socks have a lot of smell,” Brody suggested.

Mason took off one brown sock and let Dog smell it. Then he hid the sock behind the knitted elephant pillow. Before he could even say, “Dog, find sock!” Dog had leaped upon it and brought it back to him.

Had Dog found Mason’s sock faster than Brody’s hat because he was getting better at the game? Or because Mason’s sock was smellier than Brody’s hat? Or because Dog liked Mason’s smell better than Brody’s smell?

For the next hour, they took turns hiding things, and Dog kept finding them. Mason thought Dog found Mason’s things faster. Of course, Dog lived in Mason’s house, not Brody’s, so he was more used to Mason’s smell.

Either that, or he loved Mason more.

On Tuesday at art camp, they did fabric art. “Fabric art” was another term for sewing. Each camper had a twelve-inch square of white cloth to decorate with special pens that wouldn’t wash out in the laundry. Then they had to sew their white squares onto a larger colored square, taking turns using one of Mrs. Gong’s two portable sewing machines. Mrs. Gong was going to sew the whole thing into a big classroom quilt. Dunk threatened to use his special never-can-be-washed-out-ever pen to write on Brody’s shirt, but Mrs. Gong took it away from him in the nick of time.

Mason began to hope that Dunk would get kicked out of art camp, the way he had gotten kicked out of sports camp. Mrs. Gong must be more patient
than the sports-camp teacher. Or maybe she was just counting the hours until art camp was over.

Three more days, times three hours a day: nine more hours.

After art camp, Nora walked home with the boys to Mason’s house. “Bring her for lunch!” Mason’s mother had said when Brody had asked her about Nora’s possible visit. She had given Mason a sidelong look as if to inquire why Brody had been the one to do the asking.

On the walk home, Mason tried to prepare Nora for the lunch.

“At my house, there are two kinds of food,” he explained. “There’s normal food—that’s what I eat. And then there’s—well, my mother thinks it’s interesting food, but you don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to.”

Nora appeared to be storing this information away for further thought.

As soon as Mason opened the front door, Dog raced over to greet them, so eager that he skidded on the strip of carpet in the entrance hall. Mason got his hug in first before Brody had a chance to grab hold of Dog. He had the uncomfortable sensation that if he had had a tail of his own, it would have been wagging.

Then Nora was hugging Dog, too, and Dog was licking her face as he had licked the boys’.

“He’s wonderful,” Nora said, as if she were stating a plainly observed fact.

Which, in Mason’s opinion, she was.

Mason had peanut butter and jelly, potato chips, milk, and Fig Newtons for lunch. Nora joined Brody in
spanakopita:
a Greek sort of pastry thing, like an apple turnover, but with spinach in it instead of apples.

Mason thought “Don’t eat any food whose name you can’t pronounce” would be a pretty good food rule. “Don’t eat any food that has spinach in it” would be another.

It was a cool afternoon, for a change, so after lunch, they set out with Dog for a walk. Nora was fascinated by how well Dog walked on only three legs.

“He’s a very talented dog,” Brody confirmed.

But then, unfortunately, they all had a chance to see how well Dog rolled in something disgusting on the lawn of a house two blocks away. Brody, who had been holding the leash, tried to drag Dog away, but it was too late.

“Oh, Dog!” Brody wailed.

Dog drooped down, looking ashamed.

Mason was torn between hugging Dog, to comfort him and prove he loved Dog best, and throwing up. Instead, he just stood there, appalled by Dog’s overpowering zoo-ish smell.

“He needs a bath,” Nora said.

“Can we just let him run through the sprinkler?” Mason asked.

Nora shook her head. “He needs a bath.”

Back at Mason’s house, Brody stayed with Dog outside while Nora helped Mason run warm water into the upstairs bathtub. His parents had purchased dog shampoo the day they got Dog at the animal shelter, but they hadn’t used it yet. Right at this moment, Mason didn’t mind that Brody was getting more of
Dog’s attention. Mason’s mother stuck her head out of her office to ask what was going on, but she seemed reassured by Nora’s matter-of-fact explanation. Mason himself felt reassured. How bad could a dog bath be with Nora to supervise? Maybe it was good that Nora had come over for a playdate, after all.