Dog Trouble!

by Galia Oz

  Effie didn’t say a word, so I asked her if she knew that my brother Max liked to sleep with a ratty old purple blanket.

  It seemed to me that she nodded yes, so I kept on, telling her about how when you put Max to sleep you had to make sure the blanket was all the way over his head or he got angry, so Mom always covered his head and gave him these “power pats”—pats on the back that were so strong they made his whole body move—and she laughed and told him that he was right, life was hard, but you had to know what to take to heart and what not to. And then he tried to fall asleep and he tossed and turned and the blanket fell off, and he got upset, and Mom came back and stroked him and explained that you could never win when you were battling a blanket, it was a lost cause, the baby hadn’t been born yet who could convince a blanket to do something it didn’t feel like doing.

  “Why are you telling her about that?” asked Brody, who had managed to catch up with us.

  “Because…,” I started to explain. “Because I just…”

  “I’ll tell you why,” he said. “It’s because Blue Dawn is like that blanket. You can never win when she’s around.”

  Effie almost smiled, almost, and I was so happy, I butted her shoulder with my head, but not too hard.

  In the afternoon, Effie came back from her shot put practice and refused to say a word about Donna Silver. She just ran round and round the building, trying to calm down. Brody and I sat on the steps and petted Shakshuka, and Brody said he’d like to know who brought Effie the balloons and the chocolate. We thought about lots of different kids, but we couldn’t guess who it might have been. For a minute I even suspected Brody, and just to annoy him I said, “But you aren’t nice enough to do something like that.”

  “Maybe it’s Adam?” Brody said. “Adam’s the kind of kid who’s always coming up with funny ideas.”

  “True,” I said, “but he can’t keep his mouth shut. If he had brought those balloons to school, we’d all have heard about it by now.”

  “I know!” Brody said. “It’s Donna Silver.”

  “You think Donna Silver would send Effie balloons that say ‘Effie’s the Champ!’?” I asked him. “You can be sure that she wants to be the champ herself.”

  The day before the race, Effie couldn’t concentrate on anything. Even on ordinary days, she has trouble concentrating, but now she couldn’t focus at all. In woodworking class, she sat on the floor in the corner playing with marbles, and I built a wall of chairs and schoolbags around her so the teacher wouldn’t see. The best thing was that I finally managed to build my musical toy. I used Dad’s hammer and nails, and I made sure that the points of the nails didn’t stick out anywhere because that would be very dangerous for babies.

  I kept shaking the cube, and the musical ball inside kept playing its silly music, and the kids shouted at me to stop because it really was an annoying sound, and in the end I put it away in my bag. But when class was over and I checked to see if it was there, I couldn’t find it, even after I turned my bag upside down and looked under all the desks to see if it had fallen out and rolled away. I asked some of the kids, but it was no use. The toy had vanished.

  Mom said that on a bad day the best thing to do was to crawl under the covers and go back to sleep and not come out again till morning. But there weren’t any beds at school. At recess, when I was walking into the classroom, Danny blocked my way and pushed me. I went flying and almost fell, and I really felt like throwing something at him, but when I got closer I saw that Duke and some other boys had stretched a string between two chairs at the entrance to the room, and I realized that Danny had pushed me to the side so I wouldn’t trip over it. I saw that he was untying the string himself, but I still told him that he was stupid.

  Before I had even managed to sit down, they told us that the next class was canceled, and that we should line up in pairs and go outside to the school yard quietly because the principal was going to give us one of her character-building lectures. Someone had probably hit someone, so we were going to have to listen to another speech about how instead of fighting, we should get up every morning and think about good deeds and just do them, simple as that. I stood next to Effie and Brody and I was hot and I thought about the toy I made that had just disappeared, simple as that.

  And then Effie took off her backpack and threw it on the ground. I didn’t understand why she had brought it with her. All the other kids left their schoolbags in the classrooms. But Space-Effie had lugged her bag outside, and suddenly it felt heavy, so she threw it down—and from inside it came the sound of the loud, corny music that I knew so well.

  Great! I thought. My toy! That’s where it got to.

  When Effie heard the music she panicked and stared straight at Blue Dawn. More than three hundred kids and teachers, and also Blue Dawn, who was in the middle of a sentence, fell silent.

  Effie quickly bent down and grabbed her bag, which was the same one I had, but the music kept on playing. Everyone heard the principal loud and clear through the speakers when she said, “I see that we’re still busy getting ready for the race.”

  Effie was too frightened to move or speak. She just stood there staring at the principal. She looked exactly the way Shakshuka does when Mom catches her sneaking cheese from the table.

  “This race,” said the principal, “is not compulsory. You don’t have to participate. Simple as that.”

  “It wasn’t her, it was me. I put it in her bag,” I said because I knew that this time it would be terrible if the principal punished Effie. And to make things crystal clear, I grabbed the bag, took out the wooden cube, and said in a loud voice, “It’s mine.”

  No kid liked the principal’s office. The principal’s office wasn’t always punishments and threats, but it was always a dangerous place, and there were always eyes in there that stared at kids, and it didn’t matter what kind of kids they were, those eyes made them feel as though they shouldn’t be in that room. All the kids I knew wouldn’t go near the principal’s office unless they didn’t have a choice. Danny spent a lot of time in there because whenever he hit someone, he and his parents received an invitation to the principal’s office. But Danny wasn’t a good example because he wasn’t afraid of anything.

  I wasn’t like Danny. I sat next to the window in the outer office near the principal’s room, waiting for my talk with Blue Dawn, and I wanted to disappear into one of the desk drawers, to flatten myself between the pages of the blue calendar on the table, to slip inside the copy machine that was busy spitting out work sheets, and more than anything I wanted to be at home, in bed, running my hand through Shakshuka’s fur.

  The window was open a crack, and I saw Adam’s blond hair as he was about to pass by outside. When he noticed me, I put a finger to my lips, and we started whispering. Adam told me he knew of a way to hypnotize the principal so she wouldn’t punish kids. All you had to do was take a pencil and move it slowly from side to side in front of her so that she would start to follow it with her eyes, and in a calm and quiet voice tell her exactly what you wanted her to do. For example, you could say that from today, recess would start at nine and end at noon.

  I asked Adam if he had any better ideas.

  “They’re mad at you,” he said.

  “Ah,” I said. I didn’t have the energy to say more than that.

  “B-B-Brody and Effie think you b-b-brought the b-b-b-balloons and…”

  “And the chocolate,” I said.

  Adam said, “And b-b-b-because of that, the p-p-p-principal is m-m…”

  “Mad. Because of me the principal is mad at Effie,” I said.

  Then Blue Dawn the principal arrived—Adam melted away the minute he saw her—and when we were both sitting in her office, she asked me if Effie was my cousin.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Why did you give her all those presents at school?” The principal came and sat next to me, and I could feel how my feet wanted to leave my shoes behind and run home. I tried to think of an answer that wo
uld keep Effie out of trouble.

  “She has to race tomorrow,” I said. “She has a good chance. No other girl can run like her, not even Donna Silver from Pine Way School. Effie can even beat my dog.”

  “And I think,” said Principal Blue Dawn in her most wise and solemn voice, “that maybe it’s not easy for you to watch your cousin winning trophies. Simple as that.”

  “No, of course not…,” I said, but then I stopped. Maybe I had hurt Effie in some way. After all, I wanted Shakshuka to beat her in that race.

  “Jealousy is a tough thing,” the principal said.

  Later, when I told Effie that I must have put the toy in her bag instead of mine by mistake, and that the chocolate and the balloons were not presents from me, and that I didn’t mean to get her into trouble with the principal, she didn’t say anything at all.

  Even whenever everything was okay, Effie hardly said anything, everybody knew that, but when Effie was mad she was quiet in a super-silent way. She kept quiet like keeping quiet was another sport she did really well.

  I told Brody, “You know it isn’t me. If it was me, you would’ve seen me carrying the balloons to school. You can’t hide balloons in your schoolbag.”

  “So how did your toy get into Effie’s bag?” he asked.

  Before I could answer, Danny started circling around me with his “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck…,” and I had to chase him away. And then it was the end of the day and that was it, everyone went home and talked about how it was really me who brought Effie the presents but wouldn’t admit it, and how it was my fault that the principal was after her, and everyone was sure that I had really gone too far.

  When I got home from school, I couldn’t sit still. I stared out the window at Effie’s building across the street and I knew that right then she was Jumping Rope While Walking Backward and Keeping Balance on a Tightrope Suspended Ten Feet in the Air, and straight from there she would go to Challenge Knitting with Barbed Wire. I’m not exaggerating! These were her afternoon classes. I knew that in the evening she would come home and run around our building five times really fast to make sure she was in shape for the race tomorrow, and I kept thinking about how she wasn’t talking to me and how annoying it was that everyone was always watching out for that Effie, that princess, so nothing bad would ever happen to her and her feelings wouldn’t get hurt. Of all the kids, she was the one they watched out for—with all her muscles and her strength. Max climbed up on me and pulled my hair really hard, the way he liked to, and it hurt but I barely noticed.

  After that Mom yelled at me because my room looked like a winter wonderland, covered with snow, with bits of torn white paper on every surface, and I yelled back that she should ask Monty what happened to the new notebook that he snatched from my desk that morning, and Mom brought a broom and cleaned up the mess but she still made a face, even though this time it wasn’t my fault.

  “You’re the one who’s always saying we have to know which things to take to heart,” I reminded her, but I could tell she was too tired to listen.

  At bedtime I told her that only little kids could ever be happy. Then they got a bit older and went to school and that was when the trouble started. Later they turned into adults like her and Dad and suddenly they had little kids of their own and then they got annoyed all the time. Mom was rocking Max in her arms to help him fall asleep and she said, “So what you’re really saying is that only babies are happy people.”

  “Yes,” I said angrily. “Only babies are happy people.” And then I thought of Effie.

  Mom didn’t try to convince me that everything was going to be okay. She didn’t say, “Of course grown-ups also know how to be happy.” She just looked at me and didn’t say a word. Then she hugged me real close and said I belonged to her and she belonged to me and that was the way it would always be, nothing would ever change that.

  When I fell asleep that night, I dreamed that I was floating high in the sky, holding on to the string of a balloon. All around me I saw the color blue, the ordinary blue of the sky, and below me was a white cloud, like the kind you see in a cartoon. I heard a dog barking, and I knew it was Shakshuka calling to me from inside the cloud, and I knew that if I let go of the string, I would fall into the cloud and it would be as soft and fluffy as a marshmallow. But even in my dream I knew that you couldn’t trust cartoons, and I was afraid to let go of the balloon. When I woke up, I started thinking about Adam, and about what a great storyteller he was. I wasn’t sure why. Crazy stories appeared to me only in my dreams, but Adam could come up with a hundred of them every day.

  I jumped out of bed, took a new box of colored chalk from Mom, and rushed to school. During recess I got everyone to make signs, and I asked Adam to draw a big spaceship on each one, and on every spaceship we wrote “Effie’s the Champ!” Effie saw what we were doing, of course, and she also heard how everyone was whispering about how she wasn’t talking to me. Even Effie couldn’t ignore stuff like that, but she still kept quiet. She hardly talked to anyone and just kept doing leg and arm stretches to warm up for the race, and the teacher didn’t tell her to stop, even after the bell rang.

  The time flew past so fast, as fast as a warrior princess could run, and soon we were on our way to the stadium. On the bus they told us to sit in pairs and they wouldn’t let us choose our friends, so it would be easier to keep things under control, and I ended up sitting next to Danny.

  “Why is Effie mad at you?” he asked, and he swung his foot as the bus swayed, giving my shoe little kicks.

  I didn’t feel like talking to him about it. “Because you’re stupid,” I told him.

  “Is that the only insult you know?”

  “No. But it’s the best one,” I said.

  Danny didn’t say anything, but for the whole ride his shoe kept bumping against mine with those little kicks. Luckily it was a short trip and no one saw.

  At the stadium we all sat high above the track and we held up our signs with the spaceships. I could just about tell which runner was Effie by the school shirt she was wearing. And then they blew the whistle and Effie ran.

  Obviously it wasn’t only Effie who ran. There were lots of girls there. Donna Silver shot out first and it looked as if it would be impossible to catch up with her. Everyone around me was screaming, but I heard only Effie’s silence. I mean it, I could hear it, I could hear how silently she ran, and how serious she was, strong and sealed off like a real spaceship, and on the second lap she slowly closed the gap between her and Donna Silver, and all the kids around me screamed even louder, and I decided I didn’t care if Effie didn’t speak to me for a whole year, if only she would win, and then I thought, no, better that she should make up with me, even if that meant she would lose the race, because what would I do if Effie didn’t talk to me for a whole year, and I didn’t get how you could want a thing and want the opposite of that thing at the exact same time.

  And then she won. Adam once said that thoughts could go from one head to another and change things, and I hoped that my good thoughts had defeated the mean ones and reached Effie and helped her to win. But when everyone hugged her I stayed on the side. A whole year without Effie! Oh boy.

  “Tell her that I say congratulations,” I said to Brody the next day at recess.

  Brody went to Effie and told her that Julie said congratulations. So she wouldn’t have to look at me, Effie climbed to the top of the monkey bars in the first-grade playground. “Yeah,” she said, but you could see that Effie didn’t have much experience staying mad.

  I asked, “What’s her problem, anyway? She loved the chocolate and the balloons. And besides, she won the race.”

  Brody went and told her what I said, and Effie was quiet for a bit, and then she told him, “She wanted me to lose the race.”

  “Effie!” I wailed, and I took a step toward her, but she quickly moved to the other side of the ladder and said to Brody, “Even that time when I raced against her ugly dog, she wanted me to lose.”

  B
rody came back to me and said, “You should have told Blue Dawn that it was you.”

  “But it wasn’t me,” I said. Effie held on to the bar with only one arm and swayed back and forth in the air.

  “Because of you she made Effie miss recess and she almost made her miss the race,” Brody said.

  “No. Not because of me.”

  “Then because of who?” Brody asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “And now go back and ask her about the notes she got, with the scribbles on them. What was written in the last note, the one she made into a paper airplane?”

  “Ask yourself,” Brody said. “You wrote them.”

  I ran past Brody until I reached the ladder that Effie was climbing.

  “Come down, Effie,” I said.

  Effie didn’t answer, and I saw that she wanted to keep on climbing but there was nowhere left to go. Above her there was only a tree, and when I looked up at her from below, her face looked black because of the branches and the shadows, and she said, “You’re just like Donna Silver. You think I’m a baby. And stupid.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being a baby. It’s not so bad at all,” I told her. “Come on, Effie. Come down. You’re not stupid.”

  But Effie said I should get out of her sight, so I walked away thinking that it might really take a whole year before Effie forgave me, but still I went and asked all the kids if they knew anything about the presents Effie got, and mostly about those scribbled notes, in handwriting you could barely read.

  The only one who was willing to discuss this with me was Adam. He didn’t know much about the scribbles, but he sure knew all about scrambled eggs, including the scientifically proven fact that if you ate too many scrambled eggs at one meal, you lost your hold on gravity and you might even begin to float away a little, but only if you were really high up. And that was why you often saw mountain climbers going up the Himalayas with cartons of eggs, because they wanted to get right to the summit and then rise up a little more. “And do you g-get what a g-g-g-great feeling that is? To f-f-float in the air in the highest place on earth?”