by Karen Rivers
It looked like a ritual.
So much of being onstage was tied to luck and superstition. She knew that. She’d been practically raised in the theater.
“Again please,” said the voice.
“Testing testing testing,” Clem said. And then she added, “Woof, woof, woof.” because she couldn’t help it, because it was a show about dogs, after all. “Woof” was obviously dog for “testing.” She half-smiled.
There was a buzz and crackle from the speaker, and then someone shouted, “DARN IT!”
“Hang on, kid,” the voice said. “Off again.”
“Hanging,” she said, turning the microphone off. She leaned her head back and felt the lights on her face. They were warm, like the sun.
I belong here, she thought. Then she blushed. What if she’d said it out loud, by mistake? She snuck a glance at the dogs, but they showed no sign of having heard her. She exhaled.
Jim Jones, the leader of Jonestown, had loved the stage, too. She could tell by the way he had puffed up and looked larger than life once he was in front of a microphone. She watched a clip on YouTube of one of his famous speeches. It was a good, powerful speech but at the same time, she could totally tell he was bananas. Why hadn’t her grandfather been able to see that there was something wrong with Jim Jones?
“You want me to be a father figure, I’ll be your father figure,” Jim Jones had bellowed into the microphone. “You want me to be your God? I. Will. Be. Your. God!”
The audience had gone wild, singing “hallelujah” and clapping, and, watching, Clem had felt a tug of that same something that was making them whoop.
It was a good feeling. She wasn’t sure what she believed in, but she knew she believed in that feeling, the feeling of being part of a group of people who were all on the same page.
“I get it,” she whispered, and for a second, she truly did, but it was a slippery feeling and then it was gone again. If Beau had known it was just a feeling, a feeling he could have got from, say, watching Hamilton or listening to a huge choir, then maybe he could have joined the theater instead of a doomed suicide cult.
“Hey, sorry,” said the voice. “Can we try again?”
Clem dropped the microphone with a clatter and then bent and picked it up. “Yes?” But the microphone was off. “Sorry!”
“Turn it on and say something, please,” the voice requested.
She turned it on. “Something,” she repeated, her voice cracking. She cleared her throat and tried again. “SOMETHING.”
“A little more, please. I mean, more words, not more volume.”
Clem couldn’t think of anything. She froze.
“Whenever you’re ready.”
“If you want me to be your father, I’ll be your father. IF YOU WANT ME TO BE YOUR GOD, I WILL BE YOUR GOD!” She shouted the last part. There was a silence where her words seemed to echo around the theater, then another rush of static from the speaker.
“Okay,” the voice went on, as though she hadn’t just yelled something incredibly weird. “Can you sing? Do you know a song?”
“Yes.” Clem thought about all the songs that she knew. What songs did she actually know the words to?
Kit had a portable orange record player that she had found for free on the sidewalk. She had that kind of luck, stumbling on perfect stuff like that, out of the blue. The record player didn’t just play records, it was actually a really old-fashioned karaoke machine, with a microphone and everything. They only had one record to play on it, and that was kit’s mom’s record and they could only play it when kit’s mom wasn’t home because she said listening to it made her want to crawl out of her own skin.
After listening to it a million times, Clem had for sure learned the one main song. The song was called “Girls With Wings.”
“I can sing something, I guess.” She sounded more sure than she felt.
“Now’s good,” said the man, so Clem opened her mouth and started to sing.
At first her voice came out rough and wispy. Her legs started shaking, which was strange, and the shaking was coming through in the song. She pulled more air into her lungs and pushed out the words harder, from deeper inside her, until the strength and volume of her voice drowned out the quiver.
As her voice got louder, she understood that she could do it, that she could sing. Really sing.
She felt like a giant. She felt enormous.
She sang louder still.
She was glad Jorge wasn’t there, because without him there, seeing her, she could be anyone. She could be someone who sang, someone who felt at home onstage, singing like she’d been born to do it, like she’d been made specifically to sing this song.
She felt free.
It felt right.
It was the rightest feeling she had ever had.
She felt one hundred percent happy.
When it was over, the three dogs who weren’t really dogs stared at her, and then they slowly started to clap.
“Oh my good golly, girl,” one of them called out. “You have some pipes.”
“Chills! You gave me chills!” said another.
Clem smiled. “Um, thanks.” She made a gesture that was sort of like a cross between a bow and a curtsy and the person did it back.
She felt like she could do anything in that moment, literally anything in the world.
She smiled.
It was the first true, big, honest, open smile she’d smiled in months. It made her face ache.
I can’t wait to tell kit about this, she thought.
Then: I can’t tell kit about this.
“Wow.” Jorge walked toward her with a huge bag of food. The bag was almost as big as he was. “That was totally amazing.”
“Oh, whatever.” Clem put down the microphone and stomped off the stage, even though that wasn’t anything like what she’d wanted to say at all.
“You could help with the bag!” Jorge yelled after her, but she didn’t turn around, just kept walking until she couldn’t hear him anymore.
kit
When kit arrived at the shelter, she had a very strange feeling inside her. It wasn’t a bad feeling. Kind of the opposite. It was going to feel good to tell someone what happened. The idea of sharing it, even with Chandra, gave kit a powerful feeling, a feeling that made her think of supernovas, something impossibly bright and quiet.
But kit didn’t tell Chandra about Jackson’s letter or about Clem or about the thing that happened because before she was even all the way through the front door, Chandra was already talking.
Yelling, really.
“They’re going to do it, kit,” she yelled, throwing her phone down so hard that kit was surprised it didn’t break. “Those morons. They suck. They are terrible people. They’re doing it and there’s nothing we can do about it and life is not fair, that’s the truth.”
She pounded her fist on the counter. It made a hammer-nail sound because of all her rings, which were big, lumpy skulls.
“They.” Bang.
“Are.” Bang.
“Monsters.” Bang.
A second later, Max—a giant black dog with a sad brown face—was standing next to her, his front paws on the counter, like he worked there. Kit imagined a talking bubble above his head saying, “Can I help you?” Dogs weren’t supposed to be in the reception area in case customers were allergic or afraid. Kit didn’t know why someone allergic to or afraid of dogs would be at an animal shelter in the first place but obviously she wasn’t in any position to question the management. She didn’t even know exactly who the management were. The only person she ever saw at the shelter was Chandra, and sometimes the vet, who they called Dr. Big Smile, because he was always grinning too widely.
“Who?” kit said. “What? Hi Max, Max, Max.” If her own name was all lower-case because she was too small for capital lette
rs, then Max, who was huge even for a rottweiler, should have been all-caps. “MAX,” she said. She couldn’t see his stubby tail, but she could tell that it was wagging. “MAXIMUM MAX.”
She had seen a whole photo series online: dogs’ faces before and after you asked them if they were a good dog. It was the best thing that had ever been on the internet, in her opinion. “Who’s a good boy?” she said.
Max smiled.
“You’re the good boy,” said kit. “You are.”
Chandra glared at kit. “Them. And him,” she nodded at Max. She put her hands over his ears. “They’re putting him down,” she hissed.
“Putting him down” meant killing him. Everyone knew that. But still, for a second, kit tried hearing it a different way. She wanted it to mean something else. “Putting him down” could mean just that they insulted him. Maybe.
“Why are you just staring?” said Chandra. “Say something.”
Kit grimaced.
“Are you smiling? There is literally no way you can be smiling right now. I’m so mad, I feel like I could spit nails,” Chandra said. “Or something bigger than nails. What’s bigger than a nail?”
“I’m not smiling. A rail tie?”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“Oh.” Kit didn’t know how she knew what they were, but she did. “They’re big spikes used to nail down train tracks.”
“Well then, yes, I could spit a rail tie. Don’t you get it? They are going to murder Max.”
“I get it.” Kit put her hand on Max’s back and felt her knees go soft. She slumped against the counter. “We have to stop them,” she whispered.
“No kidding,” Chandra said. “That’s what I’ve been saying. We have to adopt him out ASAP. Like, today.”
Kit scratched Max’s spot, which was behind his left ear. When you scratched him there, his leg thumped.
“Why are we called a shelter if we just kill the dogs? The world is horrible. Even do-gooder places like this are basically just tools of the evil oppressors.”
“The evil oppressors,” kit echoed. She liked how that sounded Star Wars-ish. She imagined them all jumping into some kind of triangular spaceship and jetting off into space, but Star Wars also made her think of Jackson, which made her feel annoyed. Again. “That sucks.”
“Everything sucks,” said Chandra.
“I read about this guy once—a window washer – he fell off a forty-seven-story building and he didn’t die.”
“What? When?”
“I don’t know, a long time ago. Not, like, yesterday. I found it when I was looking up stuff after Clem’s accident. I wanted to see what people could survive.”
“Well, I don’t know what that has to do with Max,” Chandra said, scathingly.
The world sometimes catches you gently in its hand, was what kit wanted to say, but couldn’t because that wasn’t how normal kids talked.
But that’s what she’d meant.
But then she wondered if it was even true because sometimes the world was looking away when you fell, and BAM.
“The sky is falling, the sky is falling,” kit said.
“True fact,” said Chandra. “The sky is always falling. And there is nothing we can do to get out of the way.” She slapped the counter to punctuate her metaphor. She was angry about everything, like Clem. Maybe angry was the phase everyone went through and Clem was early to it and Chandra was late. Kit tried to imagine herself being that way, but she couldn’t. Not really.
Max got down, his claws scraping smoothly along the surface of the counter. He was alive. That was the important thing. He wasn’t dead yet. It was hard to imagine that he could be. He put his giant head against kit’s leg, like he understood she needed help staying up.
“I’m going to put pics of him on Pictasnap,” said Chandra. “Maybe he’ll go viral. People are a sucker for a sad story. I’m going to say that he saved a baby from a fire. More than one baby. A bunch of babies. And kittens. Every idiot in the world loves kittens.”
“Did he save any kittens? Or babies?”
“Duh, no. Obviously not. But who knows what his story was before he came here? It’s not impossible that he saved a cat. Or a kid.”
Kit thought about this. “It just seems like a lot. People might Google it and then find out right away that you made it up. Maybe say that he stopped a man from breaking into someone’s apartment and robbing it.” She thought about this. “A man wearing a Batman mask!”
“A Batman mask? That’s oddly specific.”
“It’s the kind of detail that makes it seem real.” Kit wondered if the Batman guy had stolen a TV yet and if he’d scared anyone to death in the process.
“Fine,” said Chandra. “A Batman mask. Whatever. Move over so I can take a good pic of him.”
Kit moved. She took off her glasses and polished them on her T-shirt and watched Max posing blurrily. Without her glasses on, everything in the room looked as soft and harmless as cotton balls. She took Jackson’s stupid purple-inked note out of her pocket. When she was little, she would only do her schoolwork with purple pen because she thought the black ink was too sharp at the edges. Jackson is the only one she told. That used to be how it was, she would tell him all her weird stuff and he would make her feel less weird about it. Sharp black versus soft purple was their inside joke for ages and ages.
But now she hated him for thinking their in-joke was still something they shared. It wasn’t. He lost all his rights to their in-jokes when he did what he did.
She hesitated, still holding on to the musty folded paper, but then Chandra started talking again.
“I wish we could make him look less snarly. He looks like Cujo. That was a dog in a horror movie which I’m sure you haven’t seen, kiddo. At least, I hope not. It was cheesy but also super scary.” She contemplated Max. “I’m going to take a profile so his messed up lip doesn’t wreck his chances.” She scratched him behind the ear and then kissed his head. “We’ll save you, buddy.”
Kit swallowed. She didn’t want to cry.
“You’re not supposed to be behind the counter,” Chandra said, sitting back down.
“I know. Unofficial, remember?” Kit planned to officially volunteer as soon as she turned thirteen. That would be in five months and eighteen days. It seemed like both a long time and not a long enough time to stay twelve, to be a kid.
“Well, stay low if anyone comes in.” Chandra sighed. She took a pen out of the mug on the counter and poked it through her ear stretcher, balancing it there.
“I could try asking Mom if we could take him.”
Even as kit said it, she knew it was impossible but it felt important to say it.
Chandra snorted. “Is she still afraid to go to a movie?”
“We watch movies at home.”
“Seriously, when was the last time she went out?”
Kit frowned. “She went down to get Diet Coke yesterday from the bodega.”
“But that building is attached to your building! It’s not even technically leaving the building! Your mom is going to get scurvy or whichever thing you get when you don’t get any sun.”
“Rickets,” said kit. She’d looked it up. “Max would be good for her. She’d have to take him for walks, right? And he could protect her from . . . ” She stopped herself. She almost said “men wearing Batman masks.”
“Forget it,” Chandra said. “She wouldn’t be able to walk him and then he’d get fat.”
“I could walk him.”
“She wouldn’t say yes. She’s like my stepmom, except different. But both of them are not pet people.” She paused, then added, “Freaks.”
“Hey,” said kit. “My mom isn’t a freak. She’s just . . . ” She searched for the word. “Delicate.” She pictured the Argentinosaurus constellation of fears, marching slowly down the street, bowling pe
destrians and cars out of its way. There was nothing delicate about titanosaurs.
There was nothing delicate about Max either, which is why he’d be a good match for everything her mom was afraid of.
The sun was pooling in on the waiting room floor and making a rainbow on the linoleum. Max lay his giant head on kit’s leg and groaned, as if this photo session was more than he could take on top of his impending death. Kit could feel his hot breath through her jeans.
“Life is brutal to the ugly,” Chandra went on, uploading the photo on her phone. “I hope one day, the uglies take over the world. I’m including you and me in that. You know what I mean.”
Kit did know what Chandra meant and also she was the only person in the world who would say right to kit’s face “You’re ugly!” and somehow make it sound like that was preferable to being gorgeous. Chandra wasn’t ugly at all. She was beautiful but she didn’t think she was because she had a big birthmark that covered exactly half her face. She said it looked like clown makeup but she was wrong. Her iridescent pale blue hair was what people noticed first. Kit didn’t love hair, in general, but she loved Chandra’s.
“So,” she said, but Chandra wasn’t listening. She was pacing around the waiting room. Kit turned her “so” into a cough. Chandra was pretty much for sure the wrong person to share things with, she already knew that. Everything kit told her would just make her angrier and probably wouldn’t help. She tucked the letter back in her pocket.
Chandra sat down right in the rainbow reflection in one smooth motion, like a ballerina. The rainbow shone on her jeans, making them look iridescent. Max went over and nudged her with his nose. “He’s saving me! Good boy,” she said. “There, we have evidence that he’s a saver. I’m posting this.”
“Good,” said kit.
“This is a life lesson, kit. A good person doesn’t always come in and save the day. Most days suck and most people are bad and the good people are, like, busy stopping other people from jumping off bridges and they don’t have the time or energy to adopt black rotty mixes.”
“I know that. I get it. I hear you.” She paused. “How many good people are saving people from jumping off bridges right now?”