Leftovers

by Heather Waldorf

  “No. Seriously, Sullivan. Go ahead without me,” I insist, nudging him back toward the door. Stealing a glance out the screen door, I see the photographer attach an elaborate flash to his camera and screw the whole works onto a tripod.

  Sullivan swallows. “Come on, Sarah,” he chides, brushing brownie crumbs off his shorts.

  “Can’t.” I gesture to Judy sprawled on the kitchen floor like a bear rug, one sleepy eye closed after an afternoon of taste testing and trying to stay out of trouble, the other eye wide open, still keen to what’s going on around her. “She’s...resting.”

  Sullivan wipes brownie crumbs off his mouth with his shirtsleeve. “So leave her where she is.”

  I take off the yellow gloves and set them by the sink. I feel ridiculous arguing with them on, like I’m starring in a dish-liquid commercial. “She’ll break the table if I leave her. It’s not very sturdy. And she’ll eat all the leftover cinnamon rolls. They’re for breakfast tomorrow.”

  “So lock her in the bathroom upstairs.”

  “Sarah! Sullivan!” Victoria shouts from the porch. “Come on out. Everyone’s waiting.”

  “Let’s go,” Sullivan says, stuffing another brownie in his mouth. (Ick. To think I let that mouth kiss me yesterday.)

  “You go alone, Sullivan. I’m serious. I don’t look good.”

  This is absolutely true. I have flour and cornmeal in my hair, and god-only-knows-what dripped and splashed all over my shirt like a Jackson Pollock painting.

  While a million imaginary red ants crawl around my rib cage, biting into my flesh, Sullivan chews his brownie and scrutinizes the multicolored blobs on my shirt. He laughs. “You look...scrumptious. Now, come on.” He holds his hand out for me.

  I whack it away. “No! I’m not going out there.”

  But it’s no use. Sullivan’s eyes twinkle like he just came up with a spectacular idea.

  Oh no.

  NONONONONONONO! I scream in my head. Except that Judy must have understood me, because she leaps to her feet, whimpering.

  “Sullivan, I mean it!” I plead. “I—”

  Sullivan lunges at me, laughing demonically. He grabs me around the waist, hoists me over his shoulder like a fifty-kilo bag of kibble and carries me kicking and screaming out the kitchen door, down the porch steps and out onto the field where everyone is assembled. They’re all laughing as if they think Sullivan and I are having a gas, starring in some orchestrated stunt for everyone’s amusement.

  What happens next is all over in ten seconds, but it will play over and over in my nightmares for decades, I’m sure.

  Maybe forever.

  Somehow my thrashing legs knock over the photographer’s tripod. He catches it mere seconds before his expensive camera crashes to the ground.

  I puke down Sullivan’s back, all the way to his redand-white-striped high-tops. Picture it. I’d recently eaten my fill of leftover potato salad and sliced watermelon.

  Sullivan drops me.

  “I’m so-ho-ho-ho-ho so-ho-ho-ho sorry,” he whispers, kneeling down to where I’m sprawled on the grass. Except he’s not. He’s laughing so hard he can barely talk.

  “Fuck you, Sullivan!” I intend to scream, but only a garbled gasp escapes my mouth, punctuated by a final dribble of puke that slides off my chin onto the ground.

  Around me, people are still laughing. The photographer has reassembled his camera and tripod. A powerful flash lights up the dusky field like a nuclear blast.

  “Are you okay?” Sullivan asks. Suddenly, he’s not laughing anymore.

  I have no time to answer, because there’s a loud crash in the kitchen, followed by Judy bursting through the screen door, one table leg dragging behind her. She races down the porch stairs, meeting the tripod and camera like a line-backer. The photographic equipment and the photographer go flying into the air. Judy gallops past the crowd at full speed down to the dock. Without a moment’s hesitation or a backward glance, even when the table leg snags on a rock and the leash breaks, she bounds off the wharf and splashes into the St. Lawrence River.

  TWENTY - TWO

  I jump up and run after Judy, wiping hot tears of humiliation away with my hands so I can see where I’m going. Already Judy is more than fifty feet from shore; at this speed she’ll be shaking herself off on the mainland in less than twenty minutes. I race to the boathouse and toss a paddle and a life vest into the canoe.

  “Sarah! Wait!” Sullivan is at my heels. “Let’s take the motorboat.”

  I jump into the canoe and push off, picking up the paddle, only barely resisting the urge to smash Sullivan over the head with it.

  “Sarah. Please.” Sullivan kicks off his high-tops and takes off his shirt, using it to hastily wipe puke off the back of his shorts and legs.

  “LEAVE ME ALONE!”

  Sullivan dashes into the boathouse for a second paddle and life vest. With a running start, ignoring Victoria’s shouts to stop right there, he jumps off the wharf and into the bow of the canoe before I can work up enough momentum to drown him in my wake.

  “Sarah, I’m sorry!” Sullivan calls to me over his shoulder. “Don’t be mad! I’ll make it up to you! I’ll—”

  “Just shut the hell up and paddle!” I yell at his bony back.

  “I shouldn’t have picked you up right after you’d eaten!”

  “You shouldn’t have picked me up at all!”

  “Oh, come on! I was just having a bit of fun,” he laughs. “I bet you didn’t think a scrawny guy like me could carry you, did you?”

  “I told you I didn’t want to get my picture taken!”

  “Nobody likes to get their picture taken—except maybe Johanna. But Dr. Fred needs publicity if he wants donations. And he needs donations to keep this place operating.”

  “I don’t care!” Except that, as pissed off as I am, I do care. And now I’ve wrecked everything for Dr. Fred, after he was so nice to me today.

  “Every time you go into a store or use a bank machine you’re being photographed,” Sullivan says.

  “Don’t remind me!”

  “And someday you’ll have your own cooking show on TV.”

  “THE HELL I WILL!”

  Judy whips her head over her shoulder, sees the canoe gaining on her and figures out that she’s being chased. Good. My arms are getting tired. Maybe she’ll just lead us back to shore the way she does after her usual evening swim.

  But instead she bolts ahead, hanging a left and starting upriver, toward Kingston and the Great Lakes. At this pace, she’ll be docking in Chicago sometime next week.

  Sullivan and I put our shouting match on hold for a moment to focus on our paddling, and we manage to maneuver around Judy. The goal is to get her turned back toward Moose Island. But Judy shoots to the right again.

  “JUDY!” I call, reaching into the front pocket of my shorts for one of the several lint-covered dog biscuits I keep there, the canine equivalent of spare change. I hold the biscuit out over the side of the canoe as Sullivan tries to steer us up and around to block Judy’s progress.

  “Judy, come!” I repeat.

  But Judy does not come. Judy shoots me another look, one of fear now, and tries to bolt again, but she doesn’t seem to know where to go.

  “JUDY!” I scream. “COME!”

  But Judy just whimpers and starts to thrash around.

  Then, oh my god, she begins to sink, her gigantic black head slipping farther below the dark river with each small wave. In seconds, her eyes go wild with fear. Then they close. They open again a second later, full of resignation. Her head slips under the water and stays under. She bobs there, motionless, just under the water.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, my heart pounding, my breath coming in a series of gasps, I kick off my sneakers, pull off the long T-shirt and denim shorts that will weigh me down, and dive out of the canoe into the river.

  “Throw me a life jacket!” I yell up at Sullivan when I surface.

  “Uh...Sarah, should you be—”


  “NOW!”

  Summoning every ounce of my upper-body strength, I push the jacket down under the water and pull Judy’s front paws through the armholes. I am relieved to see the foam neck rest lift her head out of the water. I blow hard on her face, and the big dog rears back and coughs out what seems like a bucket of water. She begins thrashing again. A paw hits my face. Her nails scratch my cheek.

  “Toss me the other jacket too!” I yell at Sullivan.

  I push the second life jacket down under Judy’s rear end until her hind legs are poking through the armholes and her butt is floating.

  “Now throw me the rope!”

  Sullivan unties the long rope from the front of the canoe and tosses it out to me. With Judy still floundering on top of the life jackets, I manage to tread water and fasten one end around her body like a crude harness.

  Flipping onto my back, I tie the other end of the rope around my waist.

  “Calm down. Relax. That’s a good girl,” I whisper to Judy, who slowly begins to melt into her life-jacket bed as if it’s an air mattress.

  Glancing around at my options, I decide not to back-stroke toward Camp Dog Gone Fun right away. There’s a tiny island another hundred feet upriver, no more than two small pine trees poking up between three huge boulders. Too small to support a doghouse, let alone a real house. But all I want is a landing spot to let Judy rest, so it’ll do.

  Arriving at dry land, Judy doesn’t need coaxing to shed the life jackets and scramble up onto the rocks. She shakes about fifty gallons of river water out of her fur and then sits stoically atop the biggest of the three boulders, her tongue lolling out the side of her mouth, her chest heaving as she catches her breath.

  A few minutes later, Sullivan pulls the canoe up alongside the rocks. I think about it a minute, deciding that even if we let her rest for an hour, I don’t trust Judy to dog-paddle back to Camp Dog Gone Fun. The sun is down now, the sky will be black soon, and if she were to bolt again, the river would be too dark and dangerous to track her. And while the current is small potatoes this close to the mainland, if she were to panic and find her way out to the shipping lanes, there’s no way two scrawny-armed teenagers in a canoe could do anything to help.

  “Judy, get in the boat!” I command the big dog.

  She balks.

  I have no more patience. I only pulled the Judy-raft the length of two swimming pools, but my heart is pounding in my ears. Hands on my knees, I suck air into my lungs.

  “JUDY! GET IN!” I scream. Grabbing the big dog by the scruff of her neck, I yell, “MOVE IT!” With me pushing and Sullivan pulling, and nearly capsizing twice, we manage to get all Judy’s dog-bulk settled into the bottom of the canoe. “DOWN!” I tell her. With the rope we short-leash Judy to the middle thwart in case she gets any bright ideas about jumping out.

  “Go ahead and sulk all you like,” I tell her as she yawns and sets her head down on the bottom of the canoe, her forehead lowered and her mouth drooping in a frown.

  Sullivan’s jaw is down to his knees. “Man, can you swim! Sarah, where did you learn to—”

  “Toss me my clothes!” I demand, my voice raspy from all the yelling. I can’t believe I’m standing on a boulder in the middle of the St. Lawrence River in my wet underwear. Sure it’s dusk, but there’s still enough light to see that I might as well be naked.

  Balancing on the slippery rock, I quickly pull my dry T-shirt and shorts over my wet underwear.

  “This is all your fault,” I mumble to Judy as I take my place in the canoe’s stern.

  No, I correct myself. It’s Sullivan’s fault.

  Slowly and silently, I steer us back in the direction of Moose Island.

  My mother would tell me that it’s my own stupid fault. If I’d just gone out and had my damn picture taken, then—

  It’s my father’s fault. As usual.

  Isn’t blaming your father for everything getting old, Sarah? the voice in my head whispers.

  Shut the hell up, I think.

  “Seriously, Sarah, where’d you learn to swim like that?” Sullivan asks, swiveling in his bow seat until he’s facing me. He knows that Riverwood has no town pool. There’s no swimming elective in gym class. I’ve never mentioned my family having a lake house—which we don’t. Or admitted to spending previous summers at sleepaway camp—which I hadn’t.

  Good question, I tell myself. “Watching Little Mermaid videos?” I reply, gesturing for him to turn around and get paddling. Canoeing after dark is dangerous. Canoeing after dark when Victoria is your bow-paddler’s mother could prove fatal.

  But Sullivan can’t take a hint. “Where did you take swimming lessons? I wanted to take—”

  “I’ve never been swimming in my life.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “You know how lots of people joke around that they’d rather be dead than be seen in a bathing suit?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m the one who really means it.”

  “But out there? In the water? How did you know what to do?”

  “I don’t know. I was high on adrenaline. Haven’t you heard stories about old ladies lifting cars off trapped kittens? Judy’s okay. That’s all that matters to me. Sullivan?”

  “Yeah?”

  I point my paddle over his shoulder. “Watch out for that piece of driftwood.”

  Lucky for us, the current is taking us back in the general direction of Moose Island without much effort. Which is good, because Sullivan is totallyADD when it comes to paddling.

  So, Sarah,” he yaps, “if Mom doesn’t kill me for ruining the party tonight, are we still—”

  “You didn’t ruin the party. I did.”

  “Nah. It was totally my fault. Mom’s big on ‘No Means No.’ You definitely said no.”

  “That just refers to sex.”

  “Are you kidding? It refers to everything—except chores and basic hygiene, I guess. Anyway, are we still on for the puzzle and the concert? You aren’t going to try to dump me again are you? I swear, I was just joking around tonight. I didn’t know how strongly you felt about—”

  I put my hand up, palm out. “Sullivan. It’s okay. We’re cool.” I haven’t got the strength to argue with him any more today.

  “Thanks, Sarah!” He does a little happy dance in his seat; then he swivels around to resume paddling.

  Sullivan is like Judy in some ways. Obnoxious at times, often infuriating, but too goofy and good-natured to stay mad at for long. Something about him makes me want to scratch his belly and ruffle his ears. Or the human equivalent anyway.

  I look down at Judy. “We’re cool too,” I tell her, realizing it’s true. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  Too tired to lift her head, she sticks out her neck and licks my big toe.

  The mayor’s boat is just pulling away as Sullivan and I approach the dock. The mayor laughs and waves to us from the deck of his cabin cruiser, like everything’s just peachy.

  Sullivan swings around in his seat again and raises an Is this too good to be true? eyebrow at me.

  I shrug, distracted by the need to inspect the skin on my arms. No itching or explosive green pustules yet. Maybe the St. Lawrence isn’t as polluted as everyone says.

  “Go take a shower if you want,” Sullivan says a few minutes later as we’re hanging our life-jackets and paddles in the dark boathouse, doing our best to avoid Victoria.

  “No time. I have to settle Judy in the barn and then finish scrubbing the chili pot. And I need to find the damn table leg. And figure out how to reattach it. No rest for the wicked, as my mom likes to say.”

  Sullivan nuzzles my river-slime-scented neck. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll do Judy and the pot.”

  “And the table?”

  “My pleasure.”

  What’s that saying? Never kiss a gift horse on the mouth? “Do a good job,” I say, dashing into the night.

  “Hey, Sarah!” Sullivan calls after me.

  I turn.

  “Joan of Arc
was left-handed!”

  I laugh. “So is Bart Simpson.”

  TWENTY - THREE

  The next morning I’m in my cabin, changing out of my grease-spattered breakfast-cooking clothes, when someone comes knocking.

  “Anyone home?” a singsong voice calls. Victoria. I’d slip out the back door if there was one.

  “Hang on a second!” I shout, frantically pulling on my standard baggy shorts and T-shirt.

  A few seconds later, I open the door and a red-faced, post-run Victoria pokes her head into the cabin, her forehead dripping sweat on the linoleum.

  “Can I use your shower?” she asks. “The one in the lodge is backed up.” Bundled in Victoria’s arms are shampoo, conditioner, a towel and clean clothes.

  I step out of the way, holding the door open so Victoria can enter, even though my first instinct is to push her out and wedge the door closed with a chair—except I don’t have a chair. No locks. No chairs. No back doors.

  No fun at all.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Victoria begins stripping off her sweaty workout clothes.

  I cringe at her lack of self-consciousness. “I’ll just be...uh...going,” I tell her, waving over my shoulder and opening the door just wide enough to dart through.

  “Sarah, could you wait?” Victoria calls to me. “I’ll only be a few minutes in the shower. I want to talk to you about something.”

  I don’t think I can handle being reamed out about what happened last night. But then, I don’t think Victoria cares much about my comfort zones. From the set of her jaw, I can tell she has what we here at Camp Dog Gone Fun call a bone to pick.

  With me.

  As promised, not three minutes later she bounds out of the shower stall and proceeds to dry herself off and pull on Lycra gym shorts, a matching tank top and hot pink flipflops. With great agility, Victoria vaults herself up onto my loft bed as I continue to distract myself from her presence by rushing around the small space, dusting cobwebs from corners and shoveling my scattered laundry items into a basket. She tips her head up to read the graffiti previous “volunteers” have etched into the wooden rafters: Kelli was here, July 2001. Darrell loves Paris Hilton! Mikalah sucks dogs.