Pet Disasters (2 page)

Brody had brought Albert over in his small bowl, the same size as Goldfish’s bowl. Now Albert’s bowl was perched on top of the toilet tank in the upstairs hall bathroom.

Goldfish was already floating in the toilet, looking no less dead than he had before. Mason had poured him out into the toilet, along with most of the water from Goldfish’s bowl. He hadn’t felt like touching a goldfish, dead or alive, with his bare hands.

“You don’t think Albert will be too sad, do you?” Brody asked, in a low voice, apparently so that Albert wouldn’t hear.

“I don’t think so,” Mason said, stifling a sudden vision of Albert leaping in despair out of his bowl to join Goldfish in his watery grave.

“All right,” Brody said. “We can begin.”

Brody stood up straighter and spoke in a solemn voice. Brody was half a head shorter than Mason, so even when he stood up straight, he wasn’t very tall. Brody’s white-blond hair stood out every which way, unlike Mason’s dark hair, which lay nicely flat.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to celebrate the life of Goldfish the goldfish, Mason Dixon’s first-ever pet. Goldfish was a good, faithful goldfish, who lived his life to the fullest. He always took great joy in …”

Brody looked over at Mason for help in completing his sentence.

“Swimming,” Mason said.

“Swimming. And—anything else?”

Mason tried to think of something. There must have been something else that Goldfish had liked doing.

“Eating. Twice a day,” Mason said guiltily. At least Goldfish had died doing what he loved.

“Goldfish will always be missed,” Brody said, his eyes filling with tears.

Well, Brody and Albert would miss him.

The speech completed, Brody sang a song for Goldfish: “One, two, three, four, five. I caught a fish alive. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. I let him go again.”

Brody didn’t have a very good voice, in Mason’s opinion, but he sang with a lot of expression.

After the song, Brody draped one of the Dixon family’s hand towels over the side of Albert’s bowl so that Albert wouldn’t see the actual burial part of Goldfish’s celebration of life.

Then Brody flushed the toilet. Mason’s heart was strangely light. No more fish to feed—or overfeed. No more bowl to clean—not that he had cleaned it yet, but he would have had to if Goldfish had lived. No more pet to have to pretend to take an interest in.

He heard his father at the front door, talking in a low voice to his mother.

“Mason!” she called upstairs. “Mason and Brody! Come down—we have something to show you!”

Mason’s father had a peculiar smile on his face, as if he was half trying to look sad about Goldfish but half wanting to announce something wonderful.

“Mason,” he said. “I’m sorry about Goldfish, son. But …”

He and Mason’s mother exchanged a fond, expectant look.

“I stopped at the pet store on the way home, Mason, and we got you—a hamster!”

Summer art camp was not Mason’s idea.

It was his mother’s idea.

“Mason, you are not going to spend your entire summer vacation hanging around with Brody, doing nothing.”

“Um—Mom?” Mason had said. “That’s why they call it summer
vacation.
”

She had made him pick: sports camp, science camp, or art camp.

Sports camp meant running around outside in the sun for hours in ninety-five-degree temperatures. Science camp sounded like the same thing as school camp. Mason might as well go to spelling camp. Or math-fact camp. Or statewide-standardized-test camp.

So on Monday morning of the third week of June,
Mason was sitting at a table in art camp, next to Brody. Brody had wanted to do sports camp
and
science camp
and
art camp. Brody’s mother had made him pick, too. Being Mason’s best friend, Brody had picked the same camp Mason picked.

Although summer art camp was called “summer art camp,” it was held in the regular art room of Mason and Brody’s elementary school, Plainfield Elementary. So it really was school camp, after all. But it wasn’t taught by their regular art teacher. Instead, it was taught by a different art teacher, named Mrs. Gong.

Mrs. Gong wore a smock and a beret, as if she were acting the part of an art-camp teacher in a play. Mason couldn’t tell how old she was—maybe the same age as his parents. Too old to dress up in costumes, in any case.

Art camp was going to run from nine to twelve, five mornings a week, for two weeks. Right now, two weeks sounded to Mason like a very long time.

On this first morning of art camp, Brody sat drawing a picture of Albert the goldfish.

Mason sat drawing a picture of Hamster the hamster.

Hamster lived in a rectangular cage with a wooden floor and wire sides; the floor of the cage was covered with wood shavings. Inside the cage was a very squeaky wheel for Hamster to run on.

At first the cage had been in Mason’s room, in the same place where Goldfish’s bowl had been. But after the second night, Mason told his parents that he couldn’t stand it any longer. Hamster loved his wheel. He never tired of his wheel. He ran on it nonstop all night long. Maybe he thought he was getting
somewhere. Mason had a feeling that Hamster wasn’t the world’s smartest mammal. So Hamster’s cage moved to the family room, and Mason’s room was back the way he liked it: neat, orderly, quiet, without a single pet in it.

Hamster had been Mason’s pet for four whole days now, but Mason couldn’t say that they had really bonded.

At the table next to Mason and Brody, a girl named Nora sat drawing a picture of a pencil sharpener. Nora, Mason, and Brody had all been in third grade together last year. Nora was tall, thin, and bony—sort of like a sharpened pencil herself, come to think of it.

As Mason watched, Nora walked over to look more closely at the actual pencil sharpener that hung on the classroom wall. She measured its dimensions, using a ruler from the jar on the teacher’s desk, and wrote the numbers down on a piece of graph paper. Mason wondered why Nora hadn’t picked science camp. She was definitely the science-camp type.

Seated at the same table as Nora was another kid from their class at school: Dunk. His full name was Duncan, but nobody called him that. Dunk was
drawing a picture of a football. At school, Dunk was always throwing a football at recess, often in the general direction of somebody’s head. Mason wondered why Dunk hadn’t picked sports camp. Maybe Nora’s mother and Dunk’s mother hadn’t let them do the picking.

There were ten kids total in the camp. Mason didn’t know the other six and didn’t plan on getting to know them.

Making her rounds to inspect everybody’s work, Mrs. Gong stopped by Mason and Brody’s table. Because there were so few kids in the camp, they were sitting just two kids to a table.

“I love your fish, Brody,” she said. “It’s so colorful—such vibrant hues!”

For this first introductory day, Mrs. Gong had told the campers to draw anything they wanted using anything they wanted: crayons, markers, watercolors, pastels. “Choose your own medium,” she had said. “Explore its possibilities!”

Brody had chosen crayon as his medium. Mason didn’t know what “vibrant hues” were, but Albert was certainly brightly colored. Brody had pressed so hard
with his yellow and orange crayons that he had already broken both of them.

Mason felt Mrs. Gong peering over his shoulder.

“Mason, I like your …” She hesitated.

Mason decided not to help her out.

“Your little kitty.”

“Hamster,” Brody told her, since Mason hadn’t said anything. “Mason just got a new pet hamster.”

“Hamster! Of course!” Mrs. Gong corrected herself. “It’s hard to draw from memory, isn’t it? And using wide-tipped markers as your medium adds to the challenge, doesn’t it?”

She squinted critically at Mason’s picture, as if trying to decide how to make something so catlike look a bit more hamsterlike.

“Well, just keep going!” she finally said.

Mason heard her praising the realism of Nora’s pencil sharpener, which did look exactly like the classroom pencil sharpener. “You have an excellent eye! Many people can look at something, but only a few can see. Colored pencil was a good choice. Excellent work, Nora!”

Dunk had already finished his picture of a football.
How long did it take to draw a pointy oval and color it orange? Dunk’s medium was wide-tipped markers, too.

“It’s a football,” Dunk told Mrs. Gong right away so she wouldn’t have to guess.

“Ah,” Mrs. Gong said. “I’m not such a devoted sports fan, but—I believe a football has some stitching on it, doesn’t it? Some stitches in a pattern? Why don’t you add the stitches? You’ve heard the saying ‘God is in the details.’ ”

Dunk shook his head. Mason had never heard that saying before, either.

“It means that the details are what bring a work of art to life!” Mrs. Gong explained.

“A football isn’t alive,” Dunk said.

Mason thought Dunk had a point.

Mrs. Gong seemed to think he had a point, too. “It’s
your
artwork, Duncan, and I want you to make your
own
creative choices.”

Mason knew Dunk was making his own
lazy
choices. That was okay. Mason had nothing against lazy choices.

“It’s almost time for our snack break!” Mrs. Gong announced, after she finished her comments to the
kids at the last table. “But before we have our break, I need to tell you about the art show we’re going to have on our very last day.”

She made it sound as if the very last day were going to be fairly soon rather than two whole long weeks away.

“We will have all our projects displayed here in our art room for your family and friends to see. I know they will be very impressed by all we will have accomplished.”

Mason looked down at his hamster picture and glanced over at Dunk’s football picture. He wasn’t sure the art-show guests were going to be
very
impressed.

“And,” Mrs. Gong went on, “I will be selecting our very best work to send to the citywide summer art show. That piece will be displayed for the rest of the summer, together with works from artists of all ages, in the gallery downtown at the public library!”

Brody’s face lit up. With his broken orange crayon he added one more patch of vibrant color to his portrait of Albert, as if imagining Albert in all his glory exhibited on the walls of an actual art gallery.

“All right, artists!” Mrs. Gong said. “Snack time!”

Mrs. Gong had explained earlier that every day a different kid was going to bring a snack to share. On this first day, Mrs. Gong had provided the snack, setting it up on the one vacant table nearest to the sink. She served a pitcher of grape juice and a plate of little pastries from a white bakery box: cream-filled horns and fruit tarts.

Dunk took five.

“No, no, Duncan!” Mrs. Gong said. “These are very
expensive
pastries, so I just have
one
for everybody.”

Dunk put back four. That meant that four of the pastries had been touched by Dunk. Mason quickly took a non-contaminated one, wishing it were a Fig Newton instead. He always wished that a snack were cookies, and he always wished that the cookies were Fig Newtons.

The kids carried their paper plates and paper cups back to their worktables.

“Be very careful!” Mrs. Gong called over to them. “I don’t want juice spilled on anybody’s masterpiece!”

Instead of sitting at his own table, Dunk plunked his snack down on Mason and Brody’s table and stood towering over them, eating while he talked.

“Hamsters are dumb pets,” he said, with his mouth crammed full of expensive pastry. “Fish are even dumber.”

Mason had to admit Dunk had another good point. But Brody’s eyes glistened.

“Albert is a wonderful pet!” Brody told him. “And Hamster is a wonderful pet, too!”

“That’s his name? Hamster? Talk about lame!” Dunk sneered. “And who ever heard of a fish named Albert?”

Alone at her own table, Nora took a small sip of grape juice and set her cup down carefully next to her pencil sharpener drawing. “Why can’t a fish be named Albert?” she asked Dunk. “Why should certain names be just for certain species?”