Snitch

Norah McClintock

orca soundings

Copyright © Norah McClintock 2005

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data:

McClintock, Norah
Snitch / Norah McClintock.

(Orca soundings)
ISBN 1-55143-484-9

I. Title.  II. Series.

PS8575.C62S63 2005       jC813'.54     C2005-904829-8

First published in the United States, 2005
Library of Congress Control Number:
2005930530

Summary:
After his best friend snitches on him,
Josh must learn to control his anger.

Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.

Cover design: John van der Woude
Cover photography: Firstlight.ca

Orca Book Publishers
P.O. Box 5626, Stn. B
Victoria,
BC
Canada
V8R 6S4

Orca Book Publishers
P.O. Box 468
Custer,
WA USA
98240-0468

www.orcabook.com
Printed and bound in Canada
Printed on 50% post-consumer recycled paper, processed chlorine free using vegetable, low VOC inks.
08  07  06  05 •  4  3  2  1

To dogs running free
.

It was supposed to be easy. You choose, they had told me. You can either go to a regular anger management program, which is where, basically, you sit around with a bunch of losers once a week and talk about what makes you mad and what you could have done instead of punching out a wall or maybe a person. Or you can go to this special program where they teach you how to train dogs. Gee, let me
think about it—door number one or door number two …

I went with the dogs. It had to be better than sitting around listening to a bunch of tantrum freaks gripe, right? Besides, how hard could it be?

Things went sour right from minute one.

The woman at the front desk told me to go to the room that she called the training room. I opened the door. And there was Scott. He was standing in the middle of the room with some other guys. He turned when the door opened. When he saw me he grinned, as if nothing had happened, as if we were still friends. He had a kind of lopsided smile that always made him look goofy. I didn't smile back at him. My hands curled into fists.

“Hey, Josh,” said someone behind me.

I spun around, thinking it was some other guy from my past. Why not? With Scott there, things were already bad. They might as well get worse.

But it was Mr. “Call-me-Brian” Weller, who was in charge of the program. I'd met him once, just after I applied. That was part of the thing with this program. You had to go to an interview before they let you in. Mostly they asked questions about your experience with animals—whether you had ever had any pets, whether you liked animals, what you thought of people who hurt animals. I'd admitted that I had never had a pet and that I wasn't sure how much I liked animals. I figured that would be the end of it—they'd ship me off to the regular program. But they didn't.

Mr. Weller smiled at me. “Did you manage to find the place all right?” he asked.

“My brother drove me,” I said. I live with my older brother Andrew, his wife Miranda, and their kid Digby (don't get me started on what kind of dumb name that is), who is nine months old.

“It's nice to have a big brother who's so supportive,” Mr. Weller said.

Mostly Andrew was glad I was in the program because it would keep me out of the apartment for a couple more hours. I had been living with him and Miranda for nearly a month now, ever since I got out of the group home. Miranda never came out and said she didn't want me there, but I could tell she wasn't thrilled. The place was so small. She and Andrew shared a bedroom with Digby and his crib. I slept on the couch in the living room/dining room. Besides those two rooms, the apartment had a kitchen and a bathroom. Andrew said I could live there as long as I didn't mess up again. He said that as soon as I finished with the program, I had to get a job—sooner if I could swing it. But that was going to be hard because I was going to school in the mornings to make up for at least a couple of the classes I had messed up last year, and the teacher really piled on the homework. Andrew said I'd have to work all summer and keep a part-time job when school started so that I could contribute to the household. He said as
soon as I got a job and proved that I could hold it, he would start looking for a bigger place.

I looked at Scott again. He seemed right at home with the other guys. Mr. Weller looked at him too.

“You and Scott know each other, don't you?” he said. He asked it like it was a question. But I knew he had read my file. So I knew he already had the answer.

“Don't worry about it, Josh,” he said. “If it turns out to be a problem for you that Scott is here, we can deal with it.”

Right. Like I needed someone to handle my problems for me. I took another look at Scott and said, “Why should it be a problem?”

Mr. Weller looked at me for a moment. Then he nodded and held out a hand, a signal to me that I should go right on in.

There were three rows of chairs set up, each row with eight chairs in it. But when I counted, there were only fourteen people in the room, including Mr. Weller. Only one was a girl. She went right over
to Mr. Weller the minute he came into the room, so I figured she was a helper. She was kind of cute.

Scott went up to her and said something. She laughed. Scott could be so charming. At least, that's the impression he liked to give. But I wasn't buying it. Then Scott looked at the back of the room where I was standing. He grinned at me again. I gave him my frozen look, the one that said,
I don't care
. But inside I knew I did care. I was going to get even with him if it was the last thing I did.

Mr. Weller told everyone to take a seat. Twelve of us did. I expected the girl to stay up front with Mr. Weller, and Scott to sit down with the rest of the guys. I was going to tell him to get lost if he tried to sit anywhere near me. But he didn't. Scott stayed up front with Mr. Weller. The girl sat down with the rest of us. Another person had come into the room—a
middle-aged woman. She looked like a teacher or a librarian.

“You all know me,” Mr. Weller said. He told us—again—that we could just call him Brian. He told us that learning to train dogs would teach us a lot about ourselves. He said that dogs are like little kids—they respond well to patience and kindness, and they don't respond well to anger. Then he introduced us to the woman. Her name was Maggie—“Just Maggie will do,” she said. She was the dog trainer. I still couldn't figure out what Scott was doing up there.

Then Maggie said, “And this is Scott. He's my assistant.”

I stared at Scott. He was standing up there, beaming at us all as if being an assistant dog trainer made him someone special. Maybe some of the guys in the room thought so too. But that's because they didn't know Scott like I did. They didn't know what he had done.

“In a few minutes,” Maggie said, “you will be introduced to your animals. But
before we bring them in, you need to understand your responsibility.”

A couple of guys groaned when they heard that word. Sometimes it seemed like the only word that adults knew. Andrew used it a lot. “I have responsibilities now, Josh,” he'd say. Or “One day you'll be responsible for someone besides yourself. Then you'll see what it's like, Josh.” He made it sound like responsibility was a cranky old gorilla that you had to carry on your back forever.

According to Maggie, it was up to us what happened to the dogs that were in the program with us. She said they all had serious behavior problems. She said that because of their problems, the animal shelter wasn't able to put them up for adoption. We were going to work with them to help them overcome their problems. If we were successful, the dogs would be able to find real homes. If we failed … She shrugged and then she smiled and said she knew if we were patient and worked hard, we wouldn't fail.

After Maggie finished talking, she asked if there were any questions.

No one put up a hand. No one said anything.

If Maggie was disappointed that no one asked anything, she didn't show it. She told us that the dogs in the program weren't vicious. She said we shouldn't be afraid of them. She told us how to greet a strange dog—don't look them straight in the eyes the first time you met them (dogs see this as threatening), don't smile at them (a dog sees this as baring your teeth, which, to dogs, is threatening), don't rush directly to the dog (also threatening), don't pat the dog on the head … I began to wish I was in a regular program. I understood guys with anger management problems. I didn't know anything about dogs. And I didn't like what I was hearing.

Maggie nodded to Scott. He left the room. When he came back, there were three other people with him. Each of them was holding onto four dog leashes. Each leash had a dog at the end. Most of
the dogs were barking and growling and jumping around. A couple of the dogs were pulling in the opposite direction, like all they wanted to do was get out of the room.

Some of the guys looked at each other. I bet some of them were thinking the same thing I was—no wonder those dogs couldn't get adopted. They were like hyperactive kids, yapping and jumping and not paying any attention to Scott and the other people who were trying to get them to calm down.

“Okay,” Mr. Weller said. “I am going to call your names. When you hear your name, come up and meet your dog.”

One by one, guys got up and walked to the front of the room. Nobody seemed in a big hurry to get there. A couple of guys walked with more confidence. Maybe they had dogs at home. One guy must not have been paying attention to Maggie. As soon as he got to the front of the room, he stuck out his hand in front of the dog he was supposed to be training. The dog lunged at
his hand. The guy jumped back so fast he got tangled up in a chair in the front row. He fell over. Everyone laughed.

Finally there were only two dogs left. One was a small hairy thing. I don't even know what kind it was. It was one of the dogs that had been pulling to get out of the room. The other was a big white dog that looked like a cross between a pit bull and something even nastier. I looked at the girl. We were the only two people whose names hadn't been called. Then Mr. Weller said, “Amy.” The girl got up and walked slowly to the front of the room as if she were walking to the electric chair or something. She was probably scared she was going to get the big dog.

Of course, she didn't.

No, they gave her the little dog, whose name was Coco. They saved the big one for me.

“Josh,” Mr. Weller said, “meet Sully.”

I did everything that Maggie had said to do and didn't do anything that she had warned us not to. It didn't make any
difference. Sully took one look at me and lunged. The guy who had been holding his leash was asleep on the job or something because he let go, and all of a sudden this dog was jumping on me. He was growling. All I saw was teeth and drool. I froze. Then someone had hold of the leash again and was talking to the dog in a soft, firm voice, telling it to “Get down. Down, boy.”

It was Scott.

He didn't look the least bit afraid.

Once he got the dog calmed down, he brought it over to me and stayed with me until the dog stopped jumping around. I wanted to tell him to get lost, but I didn't want to get stuck alone with the dog. What a monster.