“This can be your desk,” she says. “Just make yourself at home. You can even leave books or whatever you’re working on right here. I won’t let anyone mess with your stuff.”
I put my coat on the back of the chair. I can tell immediately that Ms. Klee and I are going to get along.
“You’re doing your project on dogs, right?” she says.
“Not just dogs,” I say. “Seeing-eye dogs.”
“Cool,” she says. “Let’s go look in the card catalog.”
Before you know it, she’s got me set up in my carrel with a fresh pad of paper and a couple of books. She says that ought to get me rolling. Meanwhile she’ll have a look online. Maybe there are a couple of Web sites on the subject.
I open up one of the books and begin reading.
Here’s what I learn, just from the first ten pages.
They’re not called seeing-eye dogs anymore. Blind people prefer “guide dog” or “assistance dog” because, for them, getting around isn’t about, you know, seeing. Three breeds of canine are usually trained to be guide dogs. German shepherds are the most popular by far. But golden retrievers and Labs are also trained to guide. These particular breeds are chosen because of their intelligence, willingness, and temperament.
I mark my page by putting my finger in the book. I stare out the window and watch people passing by on the street below. People I don’t know. People I’ll never meet, hurrying to unknown places. I touch the side of the carrel. Mine—mine only. Suddenly I don’t care if I’m hosed with Timmy Burns. It’s so quiet here. You can really think in a library. You can really get a lot of thinking done.
pack my knapsack and straighten up my new carrel. I say good-bye to Ms. Klee and head for the main lobby. All in all, a very productive afternoon of digging for clues. Turns out guide dogs start their training when they’re just eight-week-old puppies. They’re in school for about a year and a half. Someone called a puppy raiser teaches them all the basics, like obedience and manners. (That could be anybody, by the way: you and me—convicts, even—anyone who likes dogs.) When the dogs are old enough, though, a professional trainer at an actual guide-dog school takes over to teach them how to judge distances and avoid obstacles. This can take up to six months. Finally the blind master works with both the trainer and the dog for another month to learn all the commands. The whole process can cost thirty thousand dollars a dog. Luckily the blind master never has to pay a penny. Training schools usually get companies, or sometimes movie stars, to sponsor dogs.
Oh great.
Timmy Burns is waiting for me outside the school’s front gates. Not just him, but Johnny Hedges and Chris McDuff and some other Townie kid who isn’t even in our homeroom. I pretend I don’t notice them. I fish around in my knapsack as if I’m looking for my keys. I try to walk past. Yeah, right. They form a circle around me, like the Heat around Dr. Ice in nearly every episode.
“What?” I say. I stick my hands in my pockets, just in case they start shaking. According to Marky, you’re totally done for the second a bully sees you’re afraid. Funny. I just learned in the library that dogs can literally smell emotions like fear and anger and danger. Their keen sense of smell picks up these little molecules of scent you give off called pheromones. That’s why dogs make such good guides—they can anticipate trouble for their masters. They can smell it.
Boy do I wish Reggie was here right now, to let off one of his Townie warning growls.
“Well, if it isn’t Brownie the class genius,” Timmy Burns says.
“The name’s Nicky,” I say. “And I’m not that smart.”
“So how come you’re Gilmore’s crack monitor then?”
Bullies will never stop messing with you if they think you’re afraid, Marky told me. And he knows. He’s had to deal with the likes of Timmy Burns every time his dad moved army bases. Marky’s advice: The best defense is offense.
I decide to go for it.
“I can’t help it if this school is full of idiots,” I say. That surprises Timmy. Good.
“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a wise guy,” he says to his posse. But it’s a pretty lame comeback, and he knows it.
Never act scared at any cost. Marky’s dad taught him that. His dad looks really mean—he has a crew cut and is super-fit from doing hundreds of push-ups a day—but he’s actually pretty nice. He just doesn’t want his troops to know that, because he needs to keep the upper hand.
“Look,” I say, “if you’re going to beat me up, let’s just get it over with. You guys can obviously take me. It’s, like, four against one.”
“I’ve got your back, Brownie!”
Rita leaps out from behind a parked VW. I watch in horror as she comes flying up over the back bumper and lands between me and the Townie posse in what looks like a karate stance.
“Have no fear, Rita’s here,” she says.
“My name isn’t Brownie,” I say.
“If it isn’t your girlfriend, Ladybug,” Timmy says.
“She isn’t my girlfriend,” I say.
“Put up or shut up, pendejo!” Rita says to Timmy.
“I don’t fight girls,” Timmy says. “Townie rules.”
“But four against one is OK, I guess, as long as it’s a guy?” Rita says. “Your Townie rules suck, carrot top!” She does a roundhouse kick that knocks the Red Sox cap off Timmy’s head.
Timmy’s posse bursts into laughter.
Timmy bends down. He picks up his cap. He jams it back onto his head. His face is as red as the B on the front.
“I can definitely take you myself,” he says to me. “And I’ll prove it at lunchtime tomorrow, right here on this playground, right in front of the whole school.” He starts to walk away. “Come on, guys,” he says. “It stinks like brownnose around here.”
I stare after them.
Rita turns to me, smiling.
“That was SO not helpful,” I say. I stride off in the direction of Eden Street.
Rita falls into step beside me. “So what is your real name, if it isn’t Brownie?”
I whirl on her, furious. “Just leave me alone, OK?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of a quick game of Ultimate,” she says. She starts pulling a Frisbee out of her knapsack.
“You’re that really weird girl in every school,” I say. “The one everybody hates, who ambushes all the new kids and tries to make friends with them before they figure out nobody normal will actually talk to you.”
Rita stops following. She shoves the Frisbee back in her bag. “Wow, that was really harsh,” she says.
“I don’t want to play Frisbee with you,” I say. “I don’t want to eat lunch with you. I don’t want to hang out with you. I wish you would just go away and stop bothering me.”
Rita throws up her hands and backs off. “Lo siento mucho,” she says. “I just thought you were, you know, different from the other boneheads around here.” She strides off in the opposite direction, but then turns back. “P.S.,” she says. “That really weird girl you’re talking about? Lulu McFadden. She eats dirt.”
I watch Rita disappear around the corner.
Thing is, I don’t want to be different. I can’t even tell you how tired I am of sticking out, of feeling weird—of people pointing when they think I’m not looking and whispering behind my back: See him? That’s the kid who . . .
It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. Belonging to the right group is totally a matter of survival.
al hands me a get-well-soon card. He says it’s for Old Alf from the three of them—him and Floyd and Mickey. I tuck it into my back pocket and promise to give it to Grandpa as soon as I get home. Floyd asks for an update on how things are going. I say whatever comes to mind: what we had for dinner last night (veal cutlets), who won at Monopoly (him, even though I could have pulled a few fast ones as banker), what TV shows we watched (Who Wants to Be a Genius? and Cops on the Beat), and what I read to him before bed (some of a book on how guide dogs are trained). The old guys hang on e
very word. I guess they don’t have nearly as much fun with their own grandkids.
“So what’s the story with his broken ankle?” Sal says.
“It’s definitely healing,” I say. “But the doctor still doesn’t know how long it will be before he’s back on his feet.”
“Hard to believe he fell right outside his own house,” Floyd says. “He’s lived there his whole life.”
“Yeah,” Mickey says. “Something fishy about that.”
I look down at Reggie, who’s lying at my feet. Do I tell them what Mrs. Strazzulo said?
“Muggers,” I say. “On bikes with ski masks. Supposedly the next-door neighbor witnessed the whole thing. Grandpa was coming out of his house with Reggie when a gang of roving Townies on BMX bikes came swooping around the corner and sideswiped him for his wallet. Reggie tried to chase after them, but they were way too fast. So Reggie set off to find help. He brought the mailman back from Hanover Street, who, when he saw Grandpa lying on the sidewalk, called 911 from his cell phone.”
They all give the dog pats on the back and scratches behind the ears.
“Golly,” Sal says. “Reggie did that?”
“Surprised we haven’t seen it in the papers,” Floyd says.
“How come you didn’t tell us any of this before now?” Mickey says.
“You know how Grandpa is about broadcasting family business,” I say.
I know I’m going to get caught, just in case you’re wondering. It’s only a matter of time before Alf Santorello comes strolling into Monument Square with his new guide dog. The jig will totally be up then. Then there’ll be hell to pay. Meantime I can’t seem to stop myself from making up these stories. It’s not just about being undercover anymore. It’s more like that feeling you get of needing to eat an entire bag of corn chips without stopping, even though you’ve already had enough after the first couple of handfuls and your mouth hurts from all the salt.
“Forward!” I say, before I make things any worse. Reggie heads for Monument Ave. He pretty much does exactly what I say, now that I’ve learned some of the basic guide-dog commands doing my independent study in the library. When you want your dog to go straight ahead, for instance, you just say Forward! and not Come on, boy! or Let’s go! Turns out, I was already using some of the commands and didn’t even know it. Reggie always stopped dead in his tracks whenever I said Stop! He turned right if I said Right! and left if I said Left! Well, most of the time. Anyway, I never actually needed to yank on his leash. I just needed to use the right language. Guide dogs can learn foreign languages, too, no problem, if they’re in training for a master who lives in Italy, say, or Sweden. The blind master is always the one who’s in control when he knows what to say. The guide dog never makes a decision about where to go, just how to get there.
Just before we walk into the butcher shop, I spy a mailman through the front window, handing Mrs. Strazzulo a bundle of letters over the counter. Reggie still wants to go in, of course. But I make him stop and turn back up Hanover Street. When we get to the corner of Prince, I make him take a right. I’m hoping we can sneak down the next street over and circle around to Parmenter without getting noticed. Frankly, I have no desire to meet Mrs. Strazzulo’s mailman at the moment.
We end up at a place called North Square after about a block. Suddenly we’re standing in front of this really old wooden building. I know where I am, even before I read the bronze plaque telling me it’s Paul Revere’s House. I was here a couple of years ago, when Dad and I were doing the Freedom Trail. Supposedly Paul Revere, who was a famous silversmith, looked up from making a teapot one night and saw there were two lamps burning in the steeple of the Old North Church, which was the secret signal that the redcoats were planning to invade by sea. So he climbed on his trusty steed and rode across the city, waking up all the neighbors by screaming, The British are coming! The British are coming! and they believed him, even though it was kind of a crazy thing to do.
I point out the red-brick line laid into the sidewalk to Reggie. “That’s the actual Freedom Trail,” I say. “It goes all over Boston connecting the dots between one historic sight, like this place, and the next. If I remember right, the next stop is the Old North Church. Then it eventually goes across the Charlestown Bridge to Old Ironsides. We ought to follow it sometime, just as soon as we wrap up this case.” He cocks his head, like he’s trying to understand why we would ever do such a thing.
We take North Street out of the square and come to Richmond Street, where we take a right. We practically tiptoe across Hanover below the butcher shop, and suddenly we’re on Parmenter—back in familiar territory. Jenny’s out in front of her town house, as usual. She’s touching up the iron fence along the sidewalk with black paint. This time she reaches down and pets Reggie without even asking. She asks me if I want to grab a paintbrush and help her for a few minutes. I sort of do, actually, but don’t want to risk being MIA when Mom gets home from the Ambulance Chasers. I tell her another time. Good, she says. Her little yard isn’t very big, but it could use all the help it can get. She’s right. It’s not much bigger than our apartment’s bathroom, but it’s totally overgrown with bushes. I tell her I’m no stranger to gardening, since my mom had this really big one back home in . . . um . . . California.
Maybe I won’t get caught. Maybe Alf Santorello just moved away after the accident and didn’t feel like telling the whole world about it—like me and Mom. Maybe he went to live with his daughter in California. Maybe that’s why Reggie ended up at the pound, because his daughter is super-allergic to dogs or something, and she couldn’t have him in the house.
Reggie and I head over the bridge after our usual do-si-do around the spooky house in Noyes Place. I stop. I take the get-well-soon card out of my back pocket. I toss it into the nearest trash can.
Maybe, just maybe, Mom will come to her senses and make up with Dad before the paperwork goes through at the Ambulance Chasers. Maybe we’ll get our security deposit back from the landlord here in Charlestown and Dad’ll give up his new apartment in Littleton and we’ll all move back to our old house and things really will be back to normal by the time the old guys and Mrs. Strazzulo and Jenny put two and two together.
Yeah, right. And maybe Reggie will suddenly learn how to fly.
r. Gilmore dismisses us from social studies, and everyone heads for their lockers—except me. I hang back at my desk. I glance around for Timmy Burns. I don’t see him, but Johnny Hedges and Chris McDuff both punch my arm as they pass, whispering they’ll be waiting for me right outside—it’s showtime.
As if.
I take my note up to Mr. Gilmore’s desk. “Dentist appointment,” I say. “I forgot to show it to you in homeroom, on account of I was a little late.”
He looks it over.
“You sure your mom typed this?” he says.
“She’s a secretary,” I say. “At a law firm.”
“She misspelled excuse,” he says.
“They keep her pretty busy.”
He hands me back the note.
“How’s your independent study coming?” he says.
“Fine,” I say.
“Ms. Klee says you’re a hard worker.” I shrug.
“How’s everything else going?” he says.
“Fine,” I say. What does he mean, everything else? “My mom’s probably waiting for me out front,” I say.
“Tell her I said hi.”
Okeydokey.
I sneak out of the school by the side exit to avoid the Townies on the playground. I’m hoping if Timmy Burns doesn’t get to beat me up at lunch recess today, he’ll get wrapped up in kickball or picking on some other new kid. So far so good this morning. Apart from the occasional spitball on the back of the neck, I’ve managed to avoid any direct contact with him during homeroom, math, science, and social studies. Anyway, there wasn’t much he could do to me with Gilmore standing right there. I’ll be MIA all lunch recess, and afternoons are easy. I take Spanish with Señorita Alvarez, while
Timmy takes French with Mademoiselle Colbert. He takes art and I take music. And now I go to the library instead of English.
Plan B for lunch recess: Chase up a few clues in the whole Alf Santorello case.
I sneak down to Medford Street, then hail the first free cab. I tell the driver to take me over to the Back Bay. I should have plenty of money. Before Mom left for work this morning, I told her I needed twenty dollars for an upcoming field trip to the Museum of Science. At first she had a cow—Twenty dollars? What for? Don’t school groups get into museums for free?—so I had to make up some story about how there was a special buffet lunch of space food at the IMAX theater. Luckily she was running late, so she just handed over the money with a big sigh.
The cab lets me off in front of the dog pound in the South End. Well, they don’t call it a pound anymore. They call it a rescue shelter. (I looked up the address in the phone book last night. I also looked up Alf Santorello’s phone number—just in case you think I’m a total idiot. There weren’t any A. Santorellos listed, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility he’s got an unlisted number.) Not that you would ever need to know the actual street number of the pound, by the way, to guess which building it is. You’d have to be totally deaf not to hear all that barking. Plus you can smell the place a half a block away. It’s even worse inside—dog pee and pine cleaner do not mix, let me tell you—and it’s hard not to make a face as I mosey all casual-like over to the receptionist at the front desk. “We just got a dog from here,” I tell her, “a big shepherd named Reggie.”
“The ex-guide dog?”
“That’s him,” I say. “I was in the neighborhood and was wondering if you could give me the address and phone number of his former blind master.”
“Sorry,” she says. “I can’t.”
“I already know his name,” I say. “It’s Alf Santorello. He’s an old Italian guy from the North End. I need to ask him a few dog-related questions.”
“I really can’t,” she says. “I don’t know anything about Reggie’s life as a guide dog. The family who brought him here said they adopted him from some agency for the blind after he was already retired.”
How I Got a Life and a Dog Page 7