The Odd 1s Out--The First Sequel

by James Rallison

  Actually, let me explain how I scratched the car. I worked the closing shift at Sooubway a lot, and the policy was that when employees started the shift, they parked in back of the building. Then, just before closing, we would move our cars to the front parking lot so when we locked up, we would exit the Sooubway through the front door.

  One night when I went to move my car, a truck tried to pass me to go around to the back of the store. I moved my car over to the side to let him get by, and I saw that the truck was pulling a trailer full of horses. And it wasn’t just a couple of horses. This trailer was towing an entire herd. As you can imagine, this wasn’t typical traffic for the back of a Sooubway at nine thirty at night.

  I did what anyone in that situation would do: I gawked at the horses as I slowly drove by. And while my focus was on the eight eloquent equines, my car hit a Dumpster and started scraping against it. Even though I was going under five miles an hour, I got a massive scratch that spanned halfway along the side of the car.

  I’m still wondering what all those horses were doing in the back of a Sooubway. Maybe it’s best not to ask what the mystery meat was made from . . .

  Anyway, that’s how my car lost even more of its paint.

  I wish I could tell you some sentimental stories about the old Buick, but I don’t have any. The closest thing to a sentimental moment I had was the time when my mom told me, “Don’t plan on living a life of crime, because you’ll never be able to use that vehicle as a getaway car.” Thanks for always looking out for me, Mom.

  I didn’t miss the Buick one bit when it finally died. I was driving on a road trip and had just put in a brand-new battery to make sure the car would be able to safely transport me. Was it grateful? No. An hour and a half into the trip, as the Buick was going up an ever-so-slight incline . . .

  It couldn’t.

  So I was pretty happy with my slightly used, one-year-old Mazda because it had only nineteen thousand miles on it, the air-conditioning worked, and all the paint was on the vehicle and it was all the same color. At least it was until I accidentally hit my garage door and scraped some off.

  Then I heard more about responsible driving, yada yada. My parents couldn’t say that much, though, because I was the one who’d bought the car and the garage door wasn’t hurt (that much).

  After I moved to California and got to experience firsthand the worst traffic imaginable, I decided it was time to buy a car with a backup camera and side sensors to aid me on the battlefield. I bought a second car and gave my little sister the Mazda as a Christmas present. For the sake of this story, we’ll call the new car a Sooubaru. It was brand new, beautiful, and still had that new-car smell of whatever they do to cars in factories. We made out constantly.

  When my twin sister got married, she had a reception in Arizona a week before Phoenix Fan Fusion, a convention in Arizona I got invited to. I figured instead of having to find people to watch my dog, Floof, for two different occasions, it would be easier if I drove Floof to my parents’ house, flew back home after the wedding to get some work done, and then flew to Arizona for Phoenix Fan Fusion. After the conference, I would drive back home to California with Floof.

  Floof loves riding in cars, by the way. She thinks it’s her job to sit on my lap the entire time and make sure the passing cars don’t act suspiciously. She is vigilant about this responsibility.

  So my dog and my brand-new Sooubaru were at my parents’ house, and the first day I was gone, without mentioning it to me, my dad drove my car to work. (What’s wrong with your car, Dad?) My car was parked in the driveway behind his car and he figured he would take it to work and fill it up with gas. (Okay, granted, that’s a little nice.)

  My dad isn’t a man of many words—maybe because the rest of us talk so much it’s hard for him to get a word in edgewise—but he’s always been very good at doing those little tasks that need to be done, like remembering to take out the garbage, pay the bills, and fill up the cars with gas.

  Every time he went on long work trips, the rest of the family always forgot to put the garbage out because we’re irresponsible.

  Anyway, after a hard day’s work at an unnamed company, Dad was going to drive my car home, when he noticed a scratch on the side of the door. It looked like a white vehicle had sideswiped the Sooubaru. He remembered that a white truck had been parked next to him and figured he’d been a victim of a hit-and-run. Or really, a hit-and-drive-off, because obviously the person wasn’t running. They had a truck.

  He contacted building security to see if they had footage of the parking lot and could track down his clearly inconsiderate coworker. Security didn’t have that footage. My father works with a bunch of engineers and they’re not known for committing crimes in parking lots. My dad went home upset and wondered how he was going to tell me that my brand-new car had been damaged while under his care.

  The next day he wrote a strongly worded email to the people in the company about owning up to their actions.

  Then he walked around the parking lot searching for a white truck that had suspicious blue paint on it. No luck. Engineers are a wily bunch. During his lunch break, he drove the car to a collision repair place to see how much it would cost to have the door repainted.

  Keep in mind that it was just a few scratches that were a couple of inches long, not a gaping wound.

  The place told him that the car really needed a new door panel and, with labor and parts, it would come to a modest fee of $1,943.

  Knowing my dad and his views on responsible driving, he might have paid to have my car fixed and never told me about the incident except that the car place also informed him the repairs would take five days. Although I’m not always really observant, I probably would have noticed if the car had been missing altogether when I came back.

  So instead, my father had to come clean. He called me up and said, “James, I have some bad news for you.”

  I immediately thought that something horrible had happened to Floof, because my dog has no self-preservation instincts.

  Actual events that have happened in Floof’s life:

  Floof takes on a husky.

  Floof eats a black widow spider.

  Floof has no understanding of traffic.

  But instead of saying anything about Floof, Dad began telling me about the car damage.

  I said, “Oh, you mean those scratches I got when I accidentally sideswiped a pillar at a gas station? I thought I saw a horse and wasn’t paying attention.”

  Okay, I hadn’t actually seen a horse that time. I had no good reason for not paying attention. But at any rate, the scrape had happened not long after I got the car. It turns out that even with all the cameras and sensors, it’s still very possible to hit stationary objects.

  My dad just hadn’t seen the damage when he took the car to work. If he had paid the two grand for my car’s repairs, a year or so afterward I might have noticed the door and thought, “Oh, cool, those scratches finally buffed out. I guess they washed away in the rain.”

  As it was, I ended up being the one who felt bad that he’d been so worried about the damage.

  Dad was much happier after our conversation. And then he had to go explain to all his coworkers that none of them were irresponsible hit-and-drive-off jerks. He was just unobservant about the state of the vehicles he drove.

  Parenting books probably don’t warn people that these are the kinds of situations you sign up for when you decide to have children.

  My dad might not think I remember all his lectures on responsibility—and he’s right about that. But he’s always been a great example of what a responsible person should be like, and that’s even more important.

  Chapter 11

  How We Got Our Second Dog, Poppy

  A few months before my sister Faith and I graduated from high school, we noticed that Georgie seemed sadder than usual. She spent a lot of time just lying
around moping like this:

  Luke had already left home and we started to wonder if Georgie could sense—by that same canine superpower that let Lassie know when Timmy was in trouble—that we would be leaving soon too.

  Or maybe we’d all just become so busy with our lives that we weren’t paying enough attention to her. We could think of several reasons she might be despondent, and all of them made us feel guilty.

  My little sister, who lives by the motto “You can never have enough animals,” suggested that getting another pet would make Georgie happy.

  “She needs a dog friend to play with her,” she kept saying.

  The argument did hold some weight, because the one amazing ability Georgie had was that she somehow always knew when our neighbor’s dog, Coco, was at the park near our house. When Coco was out with her owners, Georgie would stand at the window barking hysterically until we finally caved, put her leash on, and took her outside. I’m not sure what our neighbors thought about this. They were probably expecting a quiet game of fetch with Coco, but we kept showing up with our overeager and lonely dog and forcing our neighbors to make small talk with us while our dogs sniffed each other’s butts.

  Sometimes Coco would race halfway across the park to retrieve a tennis ball, but Georgie had no inkling what the game fetch was about. She would usually just chase after Coco as though she thought Coco might have spotted a stray deer for them to attack (or a Chihuahua—her archnemesis).

  Coco didn’t mind Georgie dashing along after her, and we became good friends with Coco’s owners. But you can only force the neighbors’ dog to spend so much time with your dog before you become one of “Those People.” Our family was already dangerously close to falling into that category because we had so many cats living in our backyard that it seemed like we were hoarding them. We didn’t want to push our luck.

  Here’s a list of things that make you become one of “Those People”:

  You have a junky, paint-peeling car leaking oil on your driveway.

  You ask the neighbors if you can put some of your trash in their cans.

  You make the neighbors’ dog have playdates with your dog.

  We convinced my mom that Georgie needed to find companionship elsewhere. My little sister began perusing animal shelter websites and showing available dogs to my mom.

  And every single one of them was the most adorable thing on the planet.

  Finally, one day while my father was away on a business trip, my mother said we could go to a shelter “just to look” at the dogs.

  Fun fact: Three out of the four dogs our family has ever owned were acquired while my father was out of town. My dad likes dogs; he just doesn’t like the added responsibility.

  Anyway, we took Georgie with us because we figured that we would need to know how she got along with any potential candidates while we “just looked” at the available dogs. Georgie was very excited to go to the shelter because she’d never been stuck in dog jail herself and knew only that it was a place with a lot of very excited dogs behind bars.

  The first thing Georgie did to introduce herself to her new potential friends was to poop on the floor. I don’t recommend this technique when you meet people. It usually won’t have the results you desire, but who knows? Maybe give it a try. A lot of the dogs were large, and we didn’t think Georgie would like being knocked out of her alpha-wolf status. After a couple of minutes browsing, we noticed a small fluffy dog in a kennel among the big dogs. Now, I don’t mean to use the term “love at first sight” loosely, but it basically looked like this:

  Poppy has one talent: looking adorable. On that day, she employed her talent to its fullest.

  And it earned her a “Get Out of Dog Jail Free” card.

  Actually she was far from free. The shelter charged us almost three hundred dollars. And they say you can’t buy happiness.

  Georgie seemed to like Poppy well enough, or at least she didn’t dislike Poppy, so we thought they would make good friends.

  They were fine at the shelter.

  And they were fine on the walk to the car.

  And they were fine on the car ride home.

  But as soon as we brought Poppy inside, Georgie finally clued in that there was another dog in her territory and began barking vigorously at Poppy as though to alert us to her presence in the house.

  Again, we never claimed Georgie was a smart dog.

  Poppy assured Georgie of her love by repeatedly licking Georgie’s mouth, which is a dog pack hierarchy thing that I hadn’t known about until we got Poppy.

  Poppy was always sweet, loving, and gentle unless Georgie pushed her around too much. Then she would transform, Hulk-like, into this:

  This may be the reason why she was placed in the kennel with the big dogs.

  She also growled whenever anyone tried to pick her up. This caused problems when she wanted to get up on my bed, since she couldn’t make the jump. We actually bought pet stairs so that the dogs could just walk up onto my bed by themselves. Unfortunately, neither of the dogs was smart enough to figure out how to use them (even though we have stairs in our house) and we ended up returning them. (The stairs—not the dogs.)

  We’d asked the lady at the shelter if Poppy was house-trained. The lady said they didn’t know because Poppy was a stray. We soon learned that no, Poppy was definitely not.

  We made sure to take Poppy outside a lot, and every time she went to the bathroom, we rewarded her with a treat. To this day, every time she goes outside, she thinks we should give her some food. Sometimes she goes outside, sits on the patio for three seconds, and then turns around to come back inside and expects us to give her cheese.

  How hard is it for a dog to go to the bathroom? When we go for walks, Poppy apparently needs to relieve herself every five feet, but at home she will refuse to go to the bathroom for hours.

  While we were working on potty-training Poppy, we noticed that Georgie was going to the bathroom a lot. At first we thought she was being helpful and wanted to show Poppy how the whole using-the-lawn-as-a-bathroom worked. But nah, that’s not what it was. Georgie kept having to go more and more—and then we realized that some of the inside accidents were coming from Georgie, not Poppy.

  We took Georgie to the vet and found out that she had bladder stones and needed a $2,600 surgery. It turned out that earlier when she’d been lying around and acting despondent, she hadn’t been lonely or contemplating us leaving home. She’d just been sick.

  And so that’s how we spent a lot of money to remove Georgie’s bladder stones and also got stuck with another dog. But we love Poppy, and despite her anger issues, she and Georgie were great friends, so that worked out pretty well.

  After Georgie’s surgery, she went back to her normal, happy self. I’m not sure how sad she was when Faith and I left for college, but she and Poppy certainly were happy whenever we came back.

  Chapter 12

  Proof the World Is Flat

  In this chapter, I’ll give you definitive proof that the world is flat. After many diligent hours of research on the internet, I have finally found absolute proof that the world is not a globe. Pay attention to these next few pages, as I’ll go into great depth about how the government has lied to you.

  Listen, I know I’m basically saying that for this theory to be true, most of the population has to be wrong. But it wouldn’t be the first time. After all, people used to think that the Earth was the center of the universe, and they wore bell-bottom jeans. (Not at the same time, probably.) So, to prove that the Earth is flat, all you’ll need to do is get thirteen thousand

  and you’ll find the results as stunning as I have. Since this is a very important chapter, the Illuminati might try and hide this knowledge from you. You have to be careful of the Illuminati. They could be anyone from anywhere: your teachers, your dentist, or even your publisher! But I don’t think they’ll d
o any tampering with this book. I mean, all I did was give out a well-guarded government secret. What are they gonna do? Not print the pages? Pft.

  In the next chapter, I’ll give you proof that the moon landing was faked.

  Chapter 14

  The Missing Mattress

  Discussion questions for your book club (should you ever have a book club)

  While reading this chapter, think about the struggles the author had to go through to get his mattress back. Ask yourself if this is what being an adult is like.

  When is it appropriate to say, “Let me speak to your manager”?

  Have you ever misplaced someone’s mattress? If so, how?

  Generally, I’m not a “Let me speak to your manager” type of person. That’s because I realize that people wearing tacky fast-food uniforms have very little choice about working at their minimum-wage jobs. I don’t get mad when my food takes too long or when the ice-cream machine is broken.

  Not everyone is as understanding. Some people feel entitled because of propaganda like the phrase “The Customer Is Always Right.” In my experience, the customer is almost always wrong. How long have you been working here, customer? I’ve been here for over a year. I know what I’m doing.

  So I almost never get mad at employees.