Snitch (3 page)

I missed the bus by about two minutes, and the next one was late. By the time I got to the shelter, the session had already started. I headed for the door, but Scott blocked my way.

“You know the rules, Josh,” he said. “If you're late, you have to wait for the break before you can go in. And then you have
to apologize to everyone for not being on time.”

Mr. Weller had told us that the first day. But that was none of Scott's business. I tried to push past him, but he grabbed my arm.

“What does it have to do with you?” I said. “You work with Maggie, not Brian.”

“When you didn't show up on time, he asked me to watch for you and make sure you wait out here,” Scott said. Boy, he really seemed to enjoy sticking it to me.

“This is all your fault, Scott,” I said, my fists curling at my sides. “If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't even be here.”

“And I have you to thank for my being here,” Scott said. He said it like I had done him some kind of favor. That would be the day.

Twenty-five minutes later, I heard chairs scraping inside. The mid-meeting stretch. Scott opened the door to let me in.

“Josh, we were wondering what had happened to you,” Mr. Weller said. I glanced around. Nobody else looked like they cared about me one way or the other.

After a few minutes, Mr. Weller clapped his hands to call the meeting back to order. Everyone sat down. Then Mr. Weller said, “I believe Josh has something to say.” He looked at me. “Josh?”

Jeez, he was really going to make me do it.

“Sorry I'm late,” I mumbled.

“We didn't hear you, Josh, did we?” Mr. Weller said.

Great. It was like being in kindergarten.

“I said, I'm sorry I was late,” I repeated in a louder voice. “But my baby nephew threw some strained carrots at me and I had to find a clean shirt and the stupid elevator didn't come and—”

“Um, Brian,” someone said. Travis. “Didn't you tell us that any apology that includes the word ‘but' isn't really an apology, it's just an excuse?”

“I did say that,” Mr. Weller said. He looked at me. “A sincere apology is just that—an apology. It doesn't include all kinds of justifications for being in the wrong.”

Travis grinned at me.

Amy cleared her throat. “Sometimes it's really not a person's fault,” she said in a quiet voice. “Sometimes you have a bad day when everything seems to go wrong.”

“That's true too,” Mr. Weller said. He turned to me. “But when you joined the program, Josh, you agreed to be here on time. Maybe if you'd aimed to get here a few minutes early instead of just on time, you wouldn't have missed the beginning of the session.”

“Maybe if you didn't have that stupid rule about having to wait until the break, I wouldn't have had to stand out in the hall for the past twenty-five minutes,” I said.

“Excuse me, Brian,” Travis said, “but I don't think Gillick is making a sincere apology.”

Mr. Weller looked at me. “Care to try that again, Josh?”

I apologized again. I didn't care whether it sounded sincere or not. Mr. Weller gave me a schoolteacher look. He told me to sit down and then moved on to the next part of the session.

Things didn't go much better after Maggie and Scott brought in the dogs. This time everyone got their dogs to sit at least once. Most of the dogs sat several times. But not Sully. He wouldn't listen to me.

“Stupid dog,” I muttered, jerking on his leash.

Sully growled.

“He's tense,” Scott said. Who had even asked him? “He's tense because you're tense. What you're feeling, Josh, it travels down the leash. If you want him to calm down and listen, you have to calm down. You can't make him do what you want by jerking his leash and yelling at him.”

He took the leash from my hand and calmly told Sully to sit. It took him three tries, but he did it. Show-off. I wanted
to hit him. But Mr. Weller was watching me, his arms crossed over his chest as if he was mad at me for not apologizing the way he wanted.

“Here,” Scott said, handing the leash back to me. “Why don't you try? Just take a deep breath and think about something nice so you can calm down.”

Mr. Weller was still watching me.

I thought about Digby and how he always looked so happy to see me when I got back to the apartment. Then I took a deep breath and tried to remember everything Maggie had told us about getting a dog to sit—what to say, how to move my hand. I did everything just like she had showed us.

Sully didn't sit.

“Your technique is good,” Scott said. “Try it again.”

I took another deep breath and started again.

I think I was the most surprised person in the room when Sully's butt finally hit the ground.

“Good dog,” I said. “Good dog.”

“There you go,” Scott said. He flashed me his goofy, lopsided grin. “If he did it once, he can do it again. Let's reinforce what he's learned so he doesn't forget.”

Sully sat again. And again. And again. He sat every single time I asked him to. I couldn't believe it.

“Good dog,” I said, smiling at him. “Good dog.”

I could just about handle living in that cramped apartment when Andrew was home to distract Miranda. But lately he was pulling double shifts at the video store, on top of his second job delivering morning newspapers. That meant I was stuck with Miranda a lot. And she was always after me about something, sometimes the minute I came through the door.

Like the next day, when I came home after school to grab a bite to eat before I went to the program. She was in my face before I even closed the door.

“Did you think I wouldn't notice, Josh?” she screamed at me. “Do you think I'm that stupid?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” I tried to get past her and into the living room. But she blocked my way.

“What did you spend it on, Josh? Did you go to the arcade? Or maybe you hooked up with some of your old friends. Is that what you did?” She was so mad that she shoved me. And, boy, I don't like being shoved.

“What's your problem, anyway?” I said.

“I had forty-five dollars in my wallet this morning. It was for baby food and diapers. And it's gone.”

Wait a minute.

“You think I stole money from you?”

“I don't think it, Josh. I know it. It was there this morning and now it's gone. And Digby sure didn't take it.”

“Neither did I,” I said. Andrew slipped me a few bucks every now and then. And I had this gig every Friday evening delivering a community newspaper. It didn't pay much, but it was enough for Cokes and fries every now and then.

“I'm telling Andrew,” she said. She sounded just like a baby.

“You can tell him anything you want. I didn't take your money.”

I pushed by her to go into the living room. And, okay, maybe I shoved her a little, to pay her back for pushing me. I turned on the TV.

She came into the room and snapped it off.

“You're not supposed to watch TV in the daytime,” she said. “You're supposed to do your reading for school and then go to your program.”

“I don't have any reading to do.” It was a lie. My history teacher always assigned pages. But I didn't want to do anything just because she told me I had to.

“Then clean up this room,” she said. “Your stuff is all over the place again.”

I was about to tell her what I thought about her and her nagging when the apartment door opened.

“Hello?” Andrew called. He came into the living room.

“What are you doing home?” Miranda said.

“I'm not staying. I just stopped to give you this.” He handed her some money. It looked like a couple of twenties and a five. Miranda stared at it.

“What's this for?” she said.

“I took some money out of your purse this morning.”

Miranda stared at him. “You did?”

“To pay Rich. Remember when I blew that tire last week? Rich said he'd give me a deal on a retread if I paid cash. He came by this morning when I was on my way out. You were in the shower, so I took the money to pay him. I should have left you a note. But you said you
weren't going out until this afternoon so no problem, right?”

“Right,” she said.

“She accused me of stealing it,” I said.

“What?” Andrew said.

“She was ragging on me for stealing it. She asked me if I was hooking up with my old friends.”

Miranda's face turned red. “I was angry,” she said lamely, to Andrew, not to me.

“Josh is doing great,” Andrew said. “He wouldn't steal from you.” He looked at me. “I'm really sorry, Josh.”

“What are you sorry for? You didn't accuse me of being a thief. She did.”

Andrew looked at Miranda. “I think you should apologize,” he said quietly.

I could tell she didn't want to. She didn't even want to look at me.

“Come on, Miranda. You accused him of something he didn't do.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. She still wasn't looking at me. “But you have to admit, it was an understandable mistake.”

“She's sorry,” Andrew said.

“No she isn't. If she was sorry, she wouldn't be using the word ‘but.' Mr. Weller says that ‘but' turns an apology into a justification for being wrong.”

Now Miranda looked at me, her eyes burning. “I said I was sorry,” she said. She didn't sound sorry at all. She was angry at me. Again.

“You're sorry, all right,” I said. “Sorry I live here. Sorry you have to look at me every day. Sorry I haven't messed up again so I'd be out of your life and this crappy little apartment.”

“Josh—” Andrew said.

But I didn't want to listen to him, either. He was always making excuses for her. I pushed past both of them and left the apartment. I heard Andrew call my name, but I didn't stop. I ran all the way down the stairs to the ground floor and out the door.

“Hey,” someone called. “Hey, look who it is.”

I glanced over my shoulder. It was Travis. He was hanging out in the little
park in front of my building with Daryl Matheson. Boy, it figured that those two knew each other. I kept right on going. I jumped on the first bus that came by.

I got to the shelter nearly an hour early. Mr. Weller was already in the training room. The chairs for the group had been set out in a circle, but Mr. Weller wasn't sitting there. He was sitting at a table on one side of the room. His briefcase was open on the floor beside him and he was reading a bunch of papers in file folders and making notes. He looked up when he saw me.

“Nice to see someone's actually taking my advice, even if you appear to be taking it to the extreme,” he said, smiling. Boy, it was the first time I'd seen a smile that day. “Do me a favor?”

I shrugged. Why not? I didn't have anything else to do.

“Take this down to Maggie.” He handed me a file folder. “You'll find her in the dog area. You think you can find that on your own?”

I nodded, even though I wasn't one hundred percent sure. The shelter is pretty big, with lots of hallways going off in all directions. I followed the signs and got lost a couple of times. Finally I heard barking. I walked toward the sound and found Maggie sitting at a little table at one end of the long hallway in the dog area. There were dog kennels on both sides, and the dogs all started barking when they saw me coming. Or maybe when they smelled me.

Maggie looked up and smiled. The second smile of the day.

“Brian asked me to give this to you,” I said.

She took the folder and thanked me.

“Why don't you say hello to Sully while you're here?” she said. She handed me something. A treat for the dog.

“I don't know,” I said. I was going to see him soon enough. And I had no idea if he was going to listen to me today or if he was going to ignore me and everyone was going to end up laughing at me again.

“He's lonely,” she said. “They're all lonely. And dogs are social animals by nature. Go on.”

I walked back down between the kennels until I came to Sully's. He was standing right at the entrance, which was like a gate in a chain-link fence.

“Hey, Sully,” I said quietly. He wagged his tail. “Sit, boy.”

To my complete astonishment, he dropped his butt down onto the ground.

“Good boy,” I said. I slipped the treat through the gate into his mouth. He gulped it down and barked. Maybe I was wrong, but it sounded like a happy bark.

I felt pretty good—until I got back to the training room. Travis was standing right outside the door.

“Hey, Gillick,” he said. “I see you're on time for a change.”

I ignored him and went into the room. Mr. Weller wasn't there anymore.

“I bet you're surprised to see me here,” Travis said. He had followed me inside and was standing close to me. He liked to
stand close to people. He thought it scared them. “Bet you thought you'd got away from me, right?”

The best thing about getting out of the group home was getting away from Travis. He was a bully. He got kids into trouble all the time. He'd got me into trouble when I punched him out. The scar under his eye—that came from me. I wasn't sorry though. He deserved it for the way he was always picking on this one kid named Jonathan. He was only in the group home because he kept running away from the foster homes they put him in. Jonathan hardly ever talked and he cried a lot at night, so naturally Travis decided to give him a hard time.

I ignored him now.

“I know where you live,” he said.

“Big deal.” If he thought he was going to scare me, he was going to have to think again.

“I've seen your sister-in-law and that little baby. Cute kid, Gillick. Guess he takes after his mother's side of the family.”

“You stay away from my place,” I said.