A SIMPLE CASE
OF ANGELS
* * *
CAROLINE ADDERSON
Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press
Toronto Berkeley
This book is for Mickey.
Thank you to Shelley, Sheila and Jackie — the three angels who helped this book come to be.
Copyright © 2014 by Caroline Adderson
Published in Canada and the USA in 2014 by Groundwood Books
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.
Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801, Toronto, Ontario M5V 2K4
or c/o Publishers Group West
1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Ontario Arts Council.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Adderson, Caroline, author
A simple case of angels / by Caroline Adderson.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55498-428-2 (bound).—ISBN 978-1-55498-429-9 (pbk.).—
ISBN 978-1-55498-430-5 (html)
1. Dogs—Juvenile fiction. I. Title.
PS8551.D3267S54 2014 jC813’.54 C2014-900972-0
C2014-900973-9
Cover illustration by Nina Cuneo
Design by Michael Solomon
1
—
What must have happened was this. Sometime during summer holidays, the ground the school stood on, the playground surrounding it, and the soccer field, too —
Not a lot. Just enough that the queen’s picture in the front entrance of Queen Elizabeth Elementary School hung crookedly, the crown askew on Her Majesty’s head. Just enough, too, that in September, when most of last year’s grade fours were moving to their new grade-five classroom, someone dropped a water bottle and it rolled the entire unscuffed summer-polished length of the hall.
Nicola Bream’s friend Mackenzie Stewart changed classes. Nicola hadn’t seen her for two months because the Stewarts spent every summer at their cottage.
“See you at recess!” Mackenzie called to Nicola.
“I got something!” Nicola called back. “You’ll be really surprised! I can’t wait to show you!”
Nicola stayed in her old desk in her old classroom with her old teacher, Ms. Phibbs, and a half-dozen other kids from last year. Mostly boys, some of them awful, like Gavin Heinrichs. Soon the new grade fives joined them, kids who had changed schools.
Then, to Nicola’s dismay, the rest of the desks filled up with little children. Last year’s grade threes.
A split class!
At recess Nicola couldn’t find Mackenzie. When she couldn’t find her at lunch, she sat alone at a picnic table drawing pictures of her dog, June Bug.
June Bug was the surprise she’d mentioned to Mackenzie.
Every time Nicola set down a pencil crayon — white, black, white — it rolled off the end of the picnic table and onto the ground.
Because the picnic table, like the picture of the queen and the school named after the queen, had tilted.
* * *
Something else was different that fall. There were hardly any birds. Though it was too early for them to migrate south for the winter, they seemed to be gone already, taking with them their cheerful songs. The few times Nicola spotted a lone sparrow sitting tongue-tied in a bush with its feathers all puffed up, it always looked in a very bad mood.
After just a week of grade five, Nicola could say the same about Ms. Phibbs. Last year she’d been so nice, but this year she was short-tempered and counted spelling.
And her brothers — awful! Nicola fought with them more and more, mostly over June Bug. Between Mackenzie acting like she didn’t even know Nicola now, and Ms. Phibbs taking off so many marks because Nicola could never sort out there from their and they’re, and her brothers being so mean, life would have been unbearable. If not for June Bug.
June Bug was still a puppy, but so smart. She understood words and did tricks and even made up her own games. Like grabbing hold of the end of the toilet-paper roll and running through the house unspooling it. When the Breams moved the toilet paper onto the windowsill, out of reach, June Bug invented a new game. She figured out how to step on the little pedal on the bathroom wastebasket to make the lid flip up. Then she would dig inside and throw the garbage around. All kinds of awful, embarrassing stuff ended up all over the floor, like snotty tissues and cotton swabs all yellow with earwax.
After that the Breams kept the bathroom door closed.
The second week of school, Nicola’s big brother did something he’d never done before. Jared brought home a girl. Her name was Julie Walters-Chen, and she smelled of shampoo and wore ironed jeans.
Clothes-and-hair girls were not interesting to Nicola. Every morning she put on whatever she found in her dresser. Her hair hung in a messy braid down her back. Her mother, Mina, complained it looked like an old rope that had been enthusiastically chewed. Which it had.
But Jared was interested in Julie Walters-Chen. Nicola could tell by the way he twitched around her, like his arms and legs were attached to strings. Also he blushed a lot, which masked his pimples.
Jared and Julie went straight to his room to listen to music.
“Leave the door open,” Mina called. She was working from home that day.
To Nicola, Mina said, “I don’t want Jared closing himself in there with a girl.”
“Right,” Nicola said.
She checked Jared’s door, then tiptoed back to the den to report to her mother that it was hardly even open, only a crack.
June Bug, meanwhile, had pulled one of Nicola’s mother’s bras out of the laundry hamper and was trotting down the hall with it. The little dog wanted someone to chase her.
Hearing voices in Jared’s room, June Bug burst in.
As soon as she saw Julie, June Bug jumped up on the bed and tried to kiss her. Which was when Jared, his back to Julie, turned on the music.
Whenever June Bug heard Jared’s rap, she went berserk. She barked at the vacuum the same way, and the hairdryer. When anything electric made a noise, June Bug had to make a louder noise.
One moment Julie Walters-Chen was sitting on the edge of Jared’s bed smoothing her long, perfect hair. The next, a dirty bra lay in her lap and a strange dog was licking her face. Then came the crazy barking.
It was too much. Shrieking and flapping her hands in fright, Julie bolted from Jared’s bedroom and right out of the house.
“Julie!” Jared called after her. “Come back!”
She didn’t.
Jared swung around to face Nicola. “Either that dog goes or I do!” He pointed at little June Bug wagging at his feet.
And right then, right as he shouted that? June Bug peed on the floor.
Nicola thought that showed how smart her dog was.
Jared said go, so she went.
2
&
nbsp; —
Other strange things happened, too. During the first few weeks of school not one but several kids fell off the playground equipment at Queen Elizabeth Elementary. Nicola, stuck inside during recess correcting her spelling, happened to see some of these falls.
Nicola didn’t mind staying in. There was nothing to do at recess now anyway.
Last year Nicola and Mackenzie Stewart had made up games, like ABC Gum World. They saved their Already Been Chewed gum and brought it to school in baggies. At recess and lunch they snuck away to a private corner of the schoolyard behind a smooth-barked tree. There they rechewed the gum to soften it, then shaped it into animals and people. They stuck their creations on the tree — a whole pink and purple Already Been Chewed Gum World they invented stories about.
Nicola remembered this while gazing out the classroom window and not correcting her spelling. The window looked over the playground. Lost in thought, she barely noticed from the corner of her eye what fell. A kid in a green jacket. He’d climbed all the way to the top of the jungle gym, then tried to stand. Arms windmilling, he plunged.
A playground monitor rushed over to check on the fallen boy. At just that moment, a kid at the top of the slide lost his balance, too, and fell. Then another.
It was so strange, children dropping like apples out of a tree. Nicola almost laughed.
The next day the school board sent out an inspector who wound every fun thing in the playground with yellow tape. The principal, Mrs. Dicky, announced over the intercom that there had been some seismic activity in the area.
“What’s that?” asked Lindsay Feeler, a new girl with short brown hair and pink-framed glasses who sat next to Nicola this year instead of Mackenzie.
Ms. Phibbs shushed her. Last year Ms. Phibbs had welcomed questions that deepened their understanding of the world. This year she said they talked too much.
Mrs. Dicky declared the playground closed until further notice.
* * *
Jared, of course, blamed June Bug for driving away Julie Walters-Chen. He hated June Bug for it. But when he came in the door, June Bug still rushed to greet him and wag all around him.
“Go to hell,” Jared told the little dog.
“You swore,” Nicola said.
“It’s not a swear. It’s a place. And that’s where that dog is going.”
Her little brother, Jackson, who was in kindergarten, imitated everything Jared said and did. He would chant, “Go to hell! Go to hell!” to the poor little dog, who wagged excitedly, not realizing he was saying something mean.
When their father, Terence, heard Jackson say, “Go to hell,” and found out that Jared had taught him, he lost his temper, which didn’t happen very often.
“You watch your language, young man!” he yelled at Jared, who stormed off to his room and slammed the door. Jackson got a time-out, too, for saying a bad word.
“June Bug should get a time-out!” he wailed. “She ate my Ferrari!”
“She ate it?”
“The wheels!” He ran and got it, another disabled Matchbox car.
Terence said, “Time out, June Bug! Nicola, put her in your room. You, too, Jackson! Go to your room!”
Nicola went with June Bug. Together they lay on the bed. June Bug chewed Nicola’s long braid, while Jackson tantrummed through the wall. He was still bawling when their mother came home from work.
Over Jackson’s wails, Nicola heard Mina ask Terence what had happened.
She heard her father’s reply. His exact words. They froze her blood.
“It’s not working out with that dog.”
3
—
At the picnic table, under the trees empty of birds, Nicola sat drawing. Lindsay Feeler joined her. She didn’t ask if Nicola minded. Maybe she thought that since their desks were side by side, she could sit with her whenever she wanted.
“I like drawing, too,” Lindsay said, pushing up her pink-framed glasses.
She opened a huge case of gel pens — 100, the label read — and spread her drawings around. Nicola couldn’t help seeing them, though she kept her eyes on her own paper.
Lindsay’s drawings were of girls in long white dresses standing against flowery backgrounds. The way Lindsay arranged them on the picnic table made Nicola feel surrounded by the same kind of girls that Mackenzie Stewart now spent every recess and lunch with, trading jewelry and hair thingies on the front steps of the school.
Lindsay Feeler and Nicola Bream drew in silence. Every time Nicola set down her pencil crayon, it rolled off the table and onto the ground. Every time, Lindsay bent to retrieve it, then placed it beside her huge gel pen case so it wouldn’t roll away again.
Finally, Lindsay spoke. “That’s a really cute dog.”
“She’s my dog and she’s in so much trouble,” Nicola said.
“What trouble?”
“It would take me a week to explain. Now they’re talking about getting rid of her. And not only that. I’m afraid she’ll go to hell!”
Nicola felt the sting of tears. She blotted her eyes on her sleeve.
Somehow these two things got mixed together in Nicola’s mind — the fear of losing her dog and her fears for her dog. Because if June Bug was sent away, if she didn’t have Nicola to help her behave, she would become a force of destruction. She really would.
Without Nicola, she’d end up in a time-out for the rest of her life.
Wouldn’t that be the same as hell?
* * *
That night, when Mina came into her room to ask why she was so quiet at dinner, Nicola hid her face in her pillow.
“You must be pretty disappointed not to be in the same class as Mackenzie this year,” Mina said.
“I don’t care.”
“At least you have Ms. Phibbs again.”
Nicola let out a loud, watery sniff.
“Well, please tell me if I can help,” Mina said.
Nicola lifted her face out of the pillow and said goodnight.
After Mina left, Nicola cried herself to sleep.
4
—
“You should take your dog to church,” Lindsay Feeler whispered to Nicola during gym when they were both dead.
First Nicola got killed because she hated Murder Ball so much. While everyone was running amok, she stood with her eyes squeezed shut, waiting for the death blow. Then she could sit down on the floor and forget about getting hit.
Last year they never played Murder Ball. They did proper things in gym class, like basketball and gymnastics. Things that didn’t hurt.
As soon as Nicola got murdered, Lindsay came and stood beside her. Anyone not moving was doomed.
Smack! The ball struck her between the shoulder blades. She grunted and sank down next to Nicola.
“Confess for your dog,” she whispered. “Then she won’t go to hell.”
“Really?” Nicola asked.
“I think so,” Lindsay said. “When you confess, it’s like erasing every bad thing you’ve done.”
All around them, their classmates were stampeding from one corner of the gym to the other, screaming and yelling. Ms. Phibbs seemed to have left.
“Do you go to church?” Nicola asked.
“No,” said Lindsay, “but I know a bit about it from the manager in my apartment building. He works in a church near where I live. I’ll take you there. You can confess for June Bug.”
“When?” Nicola asked.
Lindsay took a paper out of her back pocket and unfolded it. On it were dates and times in a kid’s printing.
“Oh, look,” she said. “You could go this Saturday.”
* * *
“It’s nice that you’ve made a new friend,” Mina told Nicola on Saturday morning as she was straightening the pictures on the living-room walls. She straightened them ev
ery few days, but they always ended up crooked again.
“She’s not a friend,” Nicola said. “She’s the girl I sit beside.”
Lindsay Feeler was hurrying up the walk now. June Bug, standing on the back of the couch watching out the window, started beating her stubby tail at the sight of a visitor.
“Oh,” Lindsay cried when Nicola opened the door. “Is that June Bug? She looks exactly like your drawing!”
Lindsay crouched to pat the wagging dog.
“I just want to call your mother,” Mina said. “To make sure that Nicola is invited.”
“My mom isn’t home. She works on Saturday. She’s a florist.”
Mina glanced at Nicola. “I’m afraid I’m not comfortable with you girls being without adult supervision.”
“Oh, I’m without it all the time. The apartment manager keeps an eye on me. And my mom’s shop is nearby. She’s the cutest dog I’ve ever seen!”
June Bug seemed to like Lindsay, so much that Nicola should have warned her. If June Bug really, really liked someone, she would —
“Ouch!” Lindsay straightened with her hand over her nose.
“No, June Bug!” Mina and Nicola scolded.
“Anyway, we’re not going to my house,” Lindsay said, dabbing at her nose to see if it was bleeding. “Didn’t Nicola tell you? We’re going to a wedding.”
“We are?” Nicola said.
“Yes, and we’d better hurry because it starts at eleven. I want to get there before the bride.”
Somehow Lindsay managed to convince Mina. The church was just five blocks away. There would be plenty of adults at the wedding. Mina knew the church, didn’t she? Our Lady of Perpetual Help?
“You can come, too,” Lindsay told Mina.
“Do you know the people getting married?” Mina asked.
“No. I just stand outside.”
Mina laughed. She said Nicola could go if she took the phone. “I might drop by if I get everything done.” She sighed. She was a lawyer, which meant more homework than even Ms. Phibbs could assign.
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