Bad to the Bone Boxer

by Tui T. Sutherland

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  TEASER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO AVAILABLE

  COPYRIGHT

  The truth is, I wanted to get a dog so my best friend would be my best friend again.

  That plan didn’t work out so well. In fact, it made things much, much worse.

  But how was I supposed to know what would happen? Really, it was Mr. Sanchez’s fault. He shouldn’t have told me about the shopping trip.

  It was a Saturday in October. I was done with all my homework, except for some stuff for Ms. Applebaum’s big community service project, so Mom and Dad said it would be OK if I went over to my friend Rosie’s to play with her new dog, Buttons.

  But when I called the Sanchez house, Rosie’s dad answered the phone and told me she wasn’t there. Which would have been enough, right? That’s all he had to say! “Sorry, Michelle, Rosie’s not here. I’ll tell her you called.” And then my day would have been fine, and maybe the whole mess with Tombo never would have happened.

  Instead, Mr. Sanchez said, “Sorry, Michelle, Rosie’s not here. She’s at the mall with her mom and Pippa.”

  Now why did he have to tell me that? I mean, really! Someone clearly has no understanding of the psychology of ten-year-old girls.

  I said, “Thanks very much, Mr. Sanchez. Please let her know I called.” And then I stood by the phone for five minutes, doing the deep breathing exercises Mom taught me to stop myself from crying. Of course, she also gave me a long speech at the same time about how crying is really OK and I should let my emotions out when I need to, but for instance, when you’re in the middle of PE and your best friend just picked someone else for her team instead of you, I think that’s maybe not the best time to “let out your emotions.”

  So I’ve gotten pretty good at the deep breathing exercises lately.

  After a moment, my older brother popped his head over the banister of the stairs and stared at me.

  “Uh,” he said. “Michelle? I can hear you breathing from my room.”

  “So?” I said. “Would you like me to stop breathing? Is my existence bothering you, Deandre?”

  His eyebrows shot up. “OK, I know I haven’t done anything,” he said. “So you must be projecting your anger at someone else onto me. Do you want to talk about it?”

  This might be a good time to mention that our parents are both psychologists. They’re really big on communication and family dynamics and talking through problems and all of that stuff. It has kind of rubbed off on me and Deandre.

  “No,” I said, sitting down on the bottom stair and resting my chin on my hands. The end of the bright green scarf tied around my hair slipped over my shoulder and I pushed it back. Not even the pretty dark green frogs printed on it could cheer me up.

  Deandre sat down on the top step of the stairs. Our stairs go up to a landing, turn, go up to another landing, and turn again to go up to the top, so he was actually facing me, just one story up. He leaned against the wooden banister and waited.

  Waiting is a trick he picked up from Mom. I guess it works on her patients all the time. If they say they don’t want to talk, she just sits there calmly and quietly until they finally say something. She’s had to wait more than one session sometimes. Not with me, though; the waiting trick can break me down in less than five minutes.

  “All right,” I said. “It’s just Rosie.”

  “More Rosie trouble?” he said. “Haven’t you guys been fighting for forever?”

  “No, and we’re not fighting,” I said. “It’s just this year. Fourth grade was so much easier than fifth grade.” In fourth grade, Pippa was in a different class. In fourth grade, I was definitely Rosie’s best friend. In fourth grade, she told me everything, and we were the ones who went on shopping trips together, and I never thought that she liked anyone else more than me.

  But now Pippa was in Ms. Applebaum’s class with us, and it was like Rosie spent every minute with her. Pippa went to her house nearly every day after school. Sometimes they invited me, too, but sometimes Rosie forgot — or, I was afraid, maybe sometimes she just decided she didn’t want me there.

  It’s not that I mind Pippa. There’s nothing to mind about Pippa; she’s quiet and sweet and boring and practically not even there. It’s not like she did this on purpose, I don’t think. She doesn’t seem clever or underhanded like that. But for some reason Rosie just loooooves her, and it makes everything all different from how it’s supposed to be.

  Deandre snorted. “You think fifth grade is hard?” he said. “Try —”

  “— high school,” I finished along with him. “Yeah, yeah, I know.” He’d just started his freshman year and kept telling me horror stories about how big the high school was and how much work he had to do. He said it was better to prepare me so I wouldn’t be surprised in four years, but I was like, Um, that’s OK, thanks anyway!

  “You should see how much geometry homework I have,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Hey, whose session is this, yours or mine?” I asked.

  He grinned. Deandre decided to start wearing his hair in cornrows this year, which makes him look older and kind of cool. It almost makes me want to try something new with my hairstyle, although I’ve been pulling it back in one big curly puff since first grade and I love tying my different scarves around it, so I’m not sure I’m ready to change that yet.

  “Maybe you just need to find something you and Rosie can connect over,” Deandre said. “Something you have in common.” He shrugged. “Or maybe you should get a new best friend. She’s kind of loud anyway.”

  That’s when I had my fantastic, terrible, brilliant, dreadful idea. I was so excited about it, I forgot to get mad at Deandre for insulting my best friend.

  “That’s it!” I said, jumping up. “You’re so right!” I started to run off, then turned to wave back at him. “Thanks, Deandre!” Mom and Dad are also very big on expressing appreciation and saying “thank you” for everything.

  “Uh-oh,” I heard him mutter. “What —”

  But I was already around the corner into Dad’s office by then. He was sitting at his computer, writing one of his articles for some fancy psychology journal.

  “DAD!” I shouted, and he jumped about three feet.

  “Michelle!” he said, sounding shocked. “What have we discussed about polite interaction and inside voices?” He pushed his glasses up and gave me his stern look, which I happen to know he practices in the mirror sometimes, because I’ve caught him doing it. I’ve tried practicing a look like that, but nobody seems to take it seriously on me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “But I just had the best idea!”

  My dad’s office is actually a small room between the living room and the den, so through the door on the other side I could see my mom on the white leather couch, reading. She looked up from her book and I hurried around to the other side of Dad so they could both hear me.

  “Ready?” I said. “I think we should get a dog!”

  “A dog,” my mom echoed, giving my dad an amused look.

  “It would teach us responsibility,” I said. “And we’d learn how to train it and take care of it and I bet you’d learn all kinds of cool things about the psychology of animals and maybe you could write some articles about th
at and dog psychology is totally a growing field right now so it would actually be really cool and —”

  “Michelle, breathe,” said my mom. But she was smiling.

  “As it so happens,” my dad said, “we’ve been thinking the same thing.”

  We went straight out to the animal shelter that afternoon. I was so excited all the way there. I nearly pulled my scarf out of my hair four times because I was fidgeting with it so much.

  This was going to change everything. Now I would have a dog and Rosie would have a dog and Pippa would just have her big, lazy cat. Rosie and I could take our dogs to the park together. She’d call me so our dogs could play with each other, and this time she’d forget to call Pippa instead. I’d have my best friend back.

  Plus a dog! I didn’t even care what kind we got. A dog is a dog, right? They run and play and lick your face and sleep on the couch while you watch TV. Easy and fun. That’s what I figured.

  If Dad had known what I was thinking, I bet I would have gotten an earful about unreasonable expectations and confronting reality. But I didn’t need a lecture — because although I didn’t know it yet, reality was going to confront me really hard in just a couple of hours.

  “We’re getting a dog!” I said, poking Deandre’s shoulder.

  “Ow,” he said. “And yeah, I know. My ears do work, you realize.”

  “I had a corgi when I was your age, Michelle,” Mom said to me. “Isolde — she was a sweetheart.”

  “We always had mutts,” Dad said. “Loulou was the first purebred dog I ever owned.”

  Loulou was a retired racing greyhound Mom and Dad adopted soon after they got married. There are photos of me with her when I was two and Deandre was six, but I don’t remember her. She was a really pretty dog, all long legs and a long elegant snout.

  “Maybe we’ll get another greyhound,” Deandre said. I’ve seen photos of him and Loulou sleeping outside in the sun all curled up together like a pile of puppies.

  “We’ll see what’s available,” Mom said as we pulled into the Wags to Whiskers parking lot. “It’ll probably be mostly mutts here, but that’s OK. Your father and I think it’s very important to adopt a dog from a shelter.”

  “So we can give it a good home!” I said. “Poor abandoned dog!” I loved the idea of saving a lonely dog and making it finally feel wanted.

  The woman at the front desk was thrilled to meet us. Her name was Miss Hameed, and she had long dark hair coiled up in a thick bun on the back of her head. Her shirt was the same bright green as my hair scarf and she typed really, really fast.

  She clapped her hands together as my parents talked to her. “Oh, we have some wonderful dogs here at the moment!” Her voice had a pretty accent where all the o’s sounded more musical than usual. “I hope you find one that’s right for you. We do our best to make them comfortable, but they could all use a great family to love them.”

  I grinned at Deandre. I was sure we would be a great family for any dog!

  Miss Hameed led us through a door into a long concrete hallway. On either side of us were big, roomy cages, each with only one dog inside plus a bowl of water, a couple of toys, and a giant pillow or dog bed in the corner. It was a lot nicer than the shelters in the sad commercials on TV. But it still wasn’t as nice as living in a real home with a family to take care of them.

  Most of the dogs rushed to the front of their cages when they heard us come in, and a lot of them started barking. I put my hands over my ears, although that made it hard to hear Miss Hameed as she told my parents about the dogs.

  In the first cage on my left, a German shepherd was lying on his pillow in the back corner. He just blinked at us sadly, like he was too used to disappointment to have any hope anymore. It made my chest hurt looking at his mournful face.

  “Maybe we should take him,” I said, tugging on my dad’s sleeve.

  “Miss Hameed says he’s quite old,” Dad said sympathetically. “He wouldn’t be able to play with you very much. But we’ll keep him in mind — don’t set your heart on the first dog you see, honey.”

  A scruffy terrier mix was leaping up and down in the next cage, yipping frantically. Her brown eyes were wild with excitement and tufts of blond-brown fur stuck out all around her face.

  “Oh!” I said. “Look how cute she is! And she really wants to come out and play!”

  Mom and Dad exchanged glances. “That one might be a bit too high-energy for us,” Mom suggested.

  The third cage held a rotund pit bull mix, who just stood at the door panting at us with her long pink tongue hanging out. Her short fur was a pale whitish-blond with patches of dark brown, and her tail started to wag slowly when she saw us.

  “Aww, she looks like she’s smiling,” I said, smiling back at her. She wagged her tail even more.

  “Her owners gave her up because she wasn’t aggressive enough,” Miss Hameed said. “Can you imagine? Poor girl. She’s a big teddy bear, but nobody wants her because she looks like a pit bull, and they have a terrible reputation.”

  “I want her!” I said.

  Dad laughed. “We can’t take all of them, Michelle.”

  “She’s on a very strict diet right now,” Miss Hameed said. “She’s dangerously overweight because her owners never exercised her and they let her eat whatever she wanted.” She started telling my parents about the diet, but I stopped listening because I saw the dog in the next cage.

  He was up on his hind legs with his front paws hooked on the wire mesh. His squashy, square face was pressed against the front of the cage like he was trying desperately to see us. When he spotted me, his whole butt started wagging so hard he knocked himself to all fours, and then he started bouncing his front paws up and down on the floor. He kept making these sweet whimper-yelp noises like, Let me out! Please save me! I want to love you SO MUCH!

  “Oh, wow,” I said, crouching so our eyes were level with each other. “Hello, dog.”

  “Ooooorrrrrrrooo,” he whimpered, squirming happily.

  “That’s a boxer,” Deandre said from behind me.

  “I know,” I said, although I’d only been guessing. He was a warm brown color all over except for a swath of white down his chest and a little stripe of white between his eyes. He had long, slender legs and a sturdy solid body with really short fur. His ears were floppy and his nose was a bit squashed and he had the most enormous sweet brown eyes. There were adorable wrinkles on his forehead, as if he was tremendously worried that I wouldn’t like him.

  He wasn’t small and fluffy like Rosie’s dog. He was practically ten times the size of her poodle puppy, Buttons. But I’d seen Buttons with other dogs; she had no idea how small she was, and I was sure she would play with anyone.

  Plus, this dog’s whole face radiated how much he wanted to be loved. I was good at loving things. I was sure I could make him happy.

  Behind him in the cage was a strange mess. Bits of white fluff were scattered from one wall to the other next to the remains of disemboweled toys. His dog bed looked like it had been nibbled around the edges. His metal water bowl was upside down in a puddle in the middle of the floor.

  Of course, I didn’t recognize the warning signs at the time. I didn’t even think about them until later. All I noticed right then were the dog’s big, hopeful brown eyes.

  “He’s pretty cool,” Deandre said. “I mean … that’d be OK with me. If you like him.”

  The boxer pressed his face against the mesh again, gazing out at me. Please please please please PLEASE love me, said his eyes.

  “I don’t just like him,” I said. “I love him.”

  The dog’s butt started wagging frantically again, as if he’d understood me. I knew my parents would want me to look at all the other dogs in the shelter before I made up my mind. But it wouldn’t make any difference.

  I’d found my dog.

  I wished we could have taken all the shelter dogs home. There were so many sad, hopeful faces in there. But Mom and Dad loved the boxer, too, and Miss Ha
meed said he needed a home where people would play with him a lot and exercise him every day. That sounded like us to me! We love to go hiking and we have a huge backyard for running around in. Plus, I was already planning the playdates with Buttons in my head.

  “He’s less than a year old,” Miss Hameed said, opening the cage door and clipping a leash onto the dog’s collar. “His first family got him as a puppy, but they didn’t realize how big he would get. They left him here a few weeks ago … they said they just couldn’t handle him anymore, especially since they’re about to have a new baby.”

  “That’s so sad,” I said. I held out my hand so the boxer could sniff it. He immediately dragged his huge pink tongue over my fingers and I giggled, which made his butt wag happily again.

  “They called him Ali,” Miss Hameed said. “Get it? Because he’s a boxer?”

  Deandre laughed. “Sure,” he said. “He doesn’t look much like Muhammad Ali to me, though.”

  “You can change his name,” Miss Hameed said with a smile.

  “Can we call him Tombo?” I asked Mom and Dad. “Like the boy in Kiki’s Delivery Service?” That’s one of my favorite movies. I love Japanese cartoons and anime, especially all the movies by the director Miyazaki like Spirited Away and Castle in the Sky and Ponyo. I like how they feel like dreams and there are all these weird creatures in them and they’re funny and surprising.

  Rosie doesn’t get those movies at all — she says they’re too slow and too weird and that we’re too old for cartoons, which is silly because even grown-ups like those movies and they’re much cooler than the cartoons you see on TV.

  “I looked it up once,” I said to Deandre. “ ‘Tombo’ means ‘dragonfly’ in Japanese.”

  Deandre pointed at the big brown wriggly dog. “He doesn’t look much like a dragonfly either!”

  “I kind of like it,” Mom said. “Tombo. It’s cute.”

  Dad nodded, and Deandre shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “It’s fine with me. Hey, Tombo!”

  The dog immediately whipped his head around to look at Deandre. His ears flopped forward and his whole wrinkly face went alert, making his jowls wobble.