Strays

by Jennifer Caloyeras

  Before we could celebrate our plan, Oak’s fingers were once again racing across the keys like a professional pianist’s. The screen went black, and what looked like gibberish started scrolling across it in white lettering.

  “What’s that?”

  “Code…it’s giving me its language. I have to figure out how to communicate with the system in order to infiltrate.”

  I watched as letters and symbols flew across the screen at record speed. Oak was hardly blinking. This computer code was a completely new language to me, but Oak was fluent. Then the stream of letters and numbers stopped.

  “What happened?”

  “It wants a password.”

  “Let’s start guessing. What would a pound use as a password? Lassie, Benji…” I rattled off more names of famous dogs that I thought for sure a pound would use.

  “Hunt-and-peck isn’t going to work. I have a formula. I used it to break passwords all the time; it’s how I hacked into those people’s credit card accounts. We don’t get to see their actual password, but it creates a temporary one that should let us in.”

  The typing continued until the screen paused a second time.

  “It froze,” I said.

  “It’s thinking,” said Oak. “And we’re in!” He smacked his hand down on the desk. On the screen we could see the inner workings of the pound, from security cameras to each dog’s file. Oak navigated his way to Roman’s profile page.

  “There it is, day to be euthanized—August fourteenth.”

  I watched as the cursor moved backwards over the anticipated date and…

  “It disappeared!” I said.

  “Like magic.” Oak began typing again. “August seventeenth.”

  “That only gives us three extra days!”

  “I can’t make it too obvious. You heard the guard; dogs don’t last long in those places. If I make it two weeks from today, they’ll know something is up. I mean, I can, if that’s what you want.”

  I thought it over. “No, you’re right. I don’t want to run the risk of you getting in trouble again.” While I felt heaps better about Roman’s situation, I knew it was only a temporary relief because the problem had not been resolved, just prolonged.

  “Then that’s it. We just bought him three more days of life.” And with one last click of a button, Oak exited the screen, and his desktop returned to its photo of Oak and his dad camping in the Redwoods.

  “Thank you,” I said, grateful for Oak’s willingness to help.

  “Don’t thank me yet. Roman isn’t out of trouble. Far from it.”

  “No, thank you…for trying. For taking a chance on him. On me,” I stuttered. Speaking my true feelings embarrassed me, but the words had been said honestly, and that was the best I could do.

  Oak was leaning toward me, and I moved to reach him. When our lips touched I felt it everywhere, like fireworks were exploding all over my body. It had never been this way with Andy. We never had that sort of connection.

  “Iris Moody, will you be my girlfriend?”

  And, just like that, Roman had acquired three more days of life, and I had acquired a boyfriend.

  *

  After a make-out session that left my lips sore, we were lying on Oak’s bed, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark constellation stickers on his ceiling.

  “Those guys are nice,” I said, talking about our Ruff Rehabilitation team.

  “Yeah, they are. The only one I—” he stopped himself midsentence.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “Sometimes I should learn to keep my big mouth shut.”

  “Okay, now you have to tell me what you were going to say.”

  “The only one who kind of rubs me the wrong way is Talbot.”

  I had seen them bicker before, so I shouldn’t have been too shocked, but I just assumed it wasn’t so severe, since he knew she and I were becoming such good friends.

  “Well, what don’t you like about her?” I asked, wanting to understand his position.

  He thought for a moment. “I guess just the whole scandal thing.”

  This set me off. Here was a girl who clearly had been taken advantage of, and Oak was vilifying the victim. I thought about what Perry had said in English class regarding how women in fairy tales were represented either as princesses or witches. Perry called this “polarization,” and here was Oak, who seemed to be doing the exact same thing. The waters rose speedily as I grew defensive; Oak had become the voice of patriarchy that always blamed women.

  I sat up. “What her teacher did—I mean, he was the adult, Oak. She’s the kid. She was really in love with him, and it takes two to tango. Why would he be in jail right now if what he did wasn’t wrong?”

  “Whoa, calm down,” he said, sitting up.

  “Don’t tell me to calm down.” I jumped off his bed. Whatever closeness I had felt toward him minutes before disappeared.

  “She’s the only one you’ve heard about this from, right?” he asked.

  I nodded. “So? What’s your point?”

  “So did you ever think that maybe there might be more to this than what you’ve been told?”

  “What does this have to do with anything?” I asked.

  “What was the name of the guy, the teacher?”

  “Mr. Ettinger,” I said. Talbot still talked about him so much—how could I forget? I remembered our conversation in her room, where I’d listened intently as she told me the whole story.

  Oak was back at his computer and within seconds was clicking on the “faculty” tab on the Clark Academy website. Teachers’ profile photos filled the screen. Oak typed Mr. Ettinger’s name into the search window. Up popped the same photograph Talbot had shown me, framed and hidden in her room.

  “Yeah, that’s him. So what?”

  “So what? You’re not connecting the dots here. According to Talbot, they were caught hooking up and now he’s in jail for making advances on a minor, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, if he’s in jail, how come he’s currently on faculty at Clark?”

  I pondered this for a moment. “Maybe the site hasn’t been updated?”

  “You really think a school would be so negligent as to leave a convicted sex offender listed as current faculty?” asked Oak.

  He had a point.

  “I need more proof,” I said. I was a woman of science. What Oak had was merely a hypothesis. One piece of evidence did not a theory make.

  He clicked on Mr. Ettinger’s photo. A list of high school science classes came up, including one he supposedly was teaching this summer. Oak clicked on the link, which led to a page that included a summary of everything they had covered on Friday, including a homework assignment.

  Mr. Ettinger wasn’t in jail. He was in Santa Cruz teaching summer school.

  I sat back down on Oak’s bed. “I don’t get it.”

  “My buddy Ry goes to Clark. He told me a whole different story. In ninth grade Talbot became obsessed with a boy named Ben Platt. She called him all the time and got herself transferred into his classes. She joined the cheerleading squad to be close to him because he played football. She was stalking him, Iris. It got so bad that Ben’s parents pulled him out of the school. He goes to Harbor now. She did the same thing with Mr. Ettinger. She wouldn’t leave him alone. She told everyone they were dating, but it just wasn’t true. She tried to make a move on him, and he called campus security and then the administration intervened.”

  “But her parents had a restraining order put on him,” I said, still trying to process everything Oak had just told me.

  “It’s the other way around. She flipped out when she found out he had a fiancée. He’s got a restraining order on her.”

  I couldn’t believe that my new friend had lied to me. I felt completely betrayed.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, but you should know the truth. I just want you to know what kind of person you’re dealing with.”

&
nbsp; Like the fairy tales that morphed with each retelling, Talbot’s story had shifted. It seemed like everything around me was changing its trajectory, from Talbot’s story about Mr. Ettinger to Roman’s plight to my declining relationship with my dad.

  I wanted everyone and everything to freeze, just for a while, so I could find my bearings. The only absolute truth I could conclude was there was no such thing as an absolute truth.

  fourteen

  Aside from texting everyone to let them know that Roman had been spared for three more days, I avoided Talbot’s calls and texts all weekend until I could figure out how to deal with the situation.

  I could barely concentrate in Perry’s class on Monday morning. Between the butterflies in my stomach as I replayed kissing Oak and his official declaration of the two of us being together to my nervousness that with each passing second, the likelihood of finding Kite Boy and his dad were dwindling, I was totally unprepared for Perry’s pop quiz on Vladimir Propp’s formalist approach to a narrative structure. I thought it had been a shorter reading assignment that I could cram in that morning, but it was way long. The content just wasn’t sticking.

  I wasn’t the only one who was having an off day. Two guys in class, Todd and José, had been mouthing off the entire morning, even after Perry asked them to stop and then made them switch seats so they weren’t near each other. I could tell she was at her wit’s end when she finally lost her temper (it was the first time I’d seen that except for when she had defended me that first day) and made us read an essay on archetypes in our reader for the rest of the period while she graded our quizzes.

  Reading was the last thing I could focus on. Every time I came to the end of a sentence, I’d forget what I had just read about and have to start all over. There was just too much on my mind. Finally, after thirty minutes of staring at words that didn’t stick, the bell rang and everyone gathered their things.

  Perry rose from her desk. “Iris, a word with you, please.”

  This wasn’t going to be pretty. I knew I had done terribly on that quiz, but I thought I’d at least bought myself until the next class to be confronted about it.

  “What’s going on?” Perry asked once everyone had cleared the room.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said, looking down at the quiz, full of purple ink marks (Perry thought that red ink was the stigma of smarmy old-school teachers).

  “You can do so much better than this,” Perry said. “So tell me what’s going on.”

  I was disappointed in myself. “The truth?” I asked.

  Perry nodded. “Always, please.”

  “I forgot about the homework.”

  “That much is clear. The question I’m asking is why?”

  My instinct was to lie—make up a story about my dad or my bike or say that our house had been robbed and they stole the book, or I had been taking the book everywhere with me and I left it at the market and they finally found it this morning and they were holding it for me. But the last thing Perry was asking for was a fabrication.

  So I decided to go with the truth. “The dog, the one I’ve been working with at my community service—they took him away from me. They think he’s too aggressive, but he’s really not. It’s all just because he’s a pit bull and now he’s at the pound and he’s going to be killed tomorrow and I can’t stop it!” I couldn’t hold back the tears.

  “I’m so sorry, Iris.” She leaned in to hug me.

  I continued. “And there’s this guy and he’s so great and I think he really likes me and he has me so distracted I can’t think about anything else but him.”

  “You should have just stuck with the first excuse,” said Perry.

  I laughed. “I wanted to tell you the whole truth.”

  “I know. And I appreciate it. It sounds like you have a lot going on,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “But you need to find a way to make school a priority. There’s a lot riding on this class for you. It can open doors for you or close them. You’re an excellent English student. A great critical thinker. I don’t want this to be a class strictly about English but also about how to ‘read’ people’s situations. If you can learn to navigate and negotiate pages in a text—you’re set for life! You are doing so well! You don’t want to throw away all your hard work by ‘forgetting’ about assignments all of a sudden. You need to make this class more important—which means making yourself more important.”

  “I know. I will. I promise.” And I meant it.

  “Can I show you something?” she asked.

  She leaned down and retrieved her green canvas army bag, pulling out her wallet.

  “I want to show you Dante, my baby,” Perry said.

  I didn’t realize she had kids. She handed me a photo. It was a dog. I smiled.

  Finding a fellow dog lover had become a secret code of acknowledgment, like we all instantly understood the love capable between human and dog.

  “He’s so cute! How old is he?” I asked.

  Her face washed over with sadness.

  “It’s hard for me to talk about him in the past tense. He died last year. I had some friends staying with me. They left the gate open. Dante ran out in the street just as a car was coming.” She stopped talking. I could tell that it was still a difficult subject to broach.

  “Chihuahua mix?” I asked.

  “You got it! At the pound, they said the mom was a lab and the dad was a Chihuahua. I don’t buy it. Could you imagine the logistics?”

  I blushed and then handed the photo back to Perry.

  “He used to bring me the paper every morning. He had such a little mouth, yet he could still carry that bulky newspaper over to me.”

  Then I got an idea.

  “I know it might be too soon, but all the dogs we’re rehabilitating are up for adoption!” I said, hopeful.

  “Iris, I don’t know. There will never be another dog like Dante.”

  I fantasized about the possibility of Perry adopting Roman, but I had an awful nagging feeling that in a few days he wouldn’t even make it to graduation.

  “You’re probably right about that,” I said, “but there could be a completely different but equally wonderful dog. There’s my dog, Roman. He has three legs, but it doesn’t slow him down.”

  “I’m more of a small dog kinda gal, Iris.”

  “We have a Chihuahua,” I said. “Her name is Tinkerbelle. I’m sure you can change her name. She’s totally trained, potty trained, everything.”

  Perry looked off into the distance. It was time for the icing on the cake.

  “She even knows how to retrieve a paper,” I said.

  She looked back at me. “Really?”

  “Yup. And she’s amazingly good at it, too.” I wrote down the name of the Ruff Rehabilitation website so she could check it out later.

  “Thanks,” she said, putting the paper in her purse.

  “Thank you,” I said, grabbing my failed assignment off her desk. “I promise I’ll do better.”

  Perry nodded. “Don’t make that promise to me. Make it to yourself.”

  As I left, I thought about how I’d actually managed to not think about Oak for the last ten minutes.

  Then I thought about him the entire way to dog training.

  *

  Kevin had a new dog, a peppy dalmatian mix on a leash, and handed the leash to me when I got there. “This is Sid.”

  I hated Sid immediately, but only because he was a constant reminder that Roman wasn’t here. When it came down to it, Sid was a fine dog—young and sprightly and easy to train. Apparently, his owner was an alcoholic and regularly forgot to feed him. But he’d made a lot of progress and, as Kevin put it, wasn’t as “damaged” as some of the others. He’d be easy to adopt out, with his floppy ears and bouncy gait.

  Oak patted Sid on the head when he came over to hug me. His sweatshirt was off. I smiled.

  “Something about him is different,” said Talbot when he left to practice heeling with his dog.


  “No hood,” I said.

  “Oh, wow!” said Talbot. “What a difference a hood makes!”

  I still wasn’t sure how I wanted to handle the situation now that I knew the truth about her. I just knew I could no longer trust her.

  Everyone else was instructed to go through the entire repertoire with their dogs except for me. Since Sid was new to the program, he needed to catch up, so I was back to sit and stay. And, just as I finally got him to stay for the first time, his concentration was broken by Talbot, who was all the way across the grass, screaming her head off about something. I tried to ignore her dramatics.

  “Bite toy!” I thought I heard her shout, and I wondered when that sort of command would come in handy. Everyone was looking toward her, and when Sid and I moved closer to see what was going on, I deciphered what Talbot been screaming.

  “Kite Boy!” It finally came out clearly.

  I ran over to the group and saw the boy, Sebastian, with a new kite, and his father, now at the opposite end of the park—as far away from our dogs as possible.

  Without thinking I handed Sid’s leash over to Kevin and bolted in that direction. Everyone else did the same, and Kevin was left with all five dogs while we ran full speed toward the boy, who had just gotten his kite airborne.

  When Sebastian’s dad recognized us, he started frantically reeling in the kite, apparently thinking we were out for vengeance.

  “Wait!” I shouted as the father took his son by the hand and started heading toward the parking lot. “We want to talk to you!”

  “If this is about the dog, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Listen, you jerk!” said Talbot.

  I shot her a look that said, “Shut up!” and approached the boy’s dad.

  “Sir, I understand why Roman spooked you.” I spoke clearly, with confidence, so he’d take me seriously.

  “Thank you,” he said, sincerely appreciative of the acknowledgment.

  “I was scared, too, the first time I met him,” I admitted.

  “And the second time!” added Oak.

  “And the third,” said Randy.

  “It’s true,” I said. “I was totally afraid that he was going to rip my face off. That’s what I thought pit bulls did. But not Roman. He was abused for over seven years. They raised him to be a killer fighting dog, and he was a champion. They also left him tied to a chain for weeks on end and didn’t feed him or even give him water, and they left him in the blistering sun. What kind of caregiver does that?”