The next day—since he had that thing about cats—you’d have to put on his red leash (the one with gold stars all over) and he’d jump around your feet and wrap you up like a bug in a web, so you’d have to let him loose and he’d fly straight for your papa’s donut shop, scratching and slobbering all over the door, and wag his tail until your papa gave him a jelly donut with extra jelly.
Then you’d have to wash the windows because your dog made such a mess and your arms ached because dog drool takes such a long time to scrub off.
My dog loved corn on the cob, oatmeal cookies, and me. Sometimes now I dream I am tobogganing behind the donut shop and Augustus jumps on and of course he pushes up front so he can see everything first. I crash—because all I can see is his lumpy behind with his fat tail wagging—and I swallow snow and land in the bushes with my dog on top of me and I laugh because what can be more fun than this?
That’s when I wake up in this skinny apartment by the train tracks and see the true way of things: I live with Harry now and I’m half the girl I used to be.
The next morning Harry pulls me out of bed or else I would still be there.
“Get up.” He stomps over and throws the window up. I moan and burrow under my army blanket.
“You think I got time for this?” he asks. His voice is gravelly in the morning before he has his coffee. He smells like Listerine.
I shrug but he can’t see me under my papa’s old blanket. I tunnel deeper, to where the Old Spice smell sometimes hides. “There’s no school today,” I snap. “It’s summer.”
I wiggle my toes and feel them grin as they wake up. They have forgotten that Harry is making us work all summer. They still think they have all day—every day—to look for my Augustus. I roll over to give them more wiggling room.
“I want you up in two minutes—and dressed.” Harry stomps into the kitchen. The coffeepot gurgles.
I pull the fattest pillow over my face as the wind blows and my window rattles. It’s cold after all the rain, and the floor shivers. The train rumbles through town, clacking along the tracks, blowing its morning trumpet. I burrow into my blanket. Harry marches back. Even the furniture stands at attention. “You sick?”
I nod but he can’t see that. Sick for my Augustus. I push my head further under the pillow.
Harry yanks the pillow off. He feels my head. His hands are barnacles on a boat. He pulls the army blanket off and onto the floor. My toes frown. A whiff of Old Spice flits past my nose.
“Up.”
“No,” I snap, tunneling under my only other pillow, the flat one.
“Get dressed. Now.”
I have one plan for today and it is this: break into the toolshed, steal the Blackbird, which Harry locked up—and hunt for my dog.
“I want you in the truck in two minutes,” he growls.
It takes only a second for my toes to figure out what Harry is planning—and they shriek right along with me: “I am not going back to where my papa is. I already told you that I am never going again.” I search for safe harbor under the pillow.
My grandpa ignores me. “When we get back, you will help Mrs. Salvatore for the rest of the day.”
My head pounds. I need an ice cube.
“I won’t help her and I won’t play with that weird boy. I don’t want you to help me make friends.”
I can’t see Harry, but I can hear him—a bull, snorting mad. All he needs is a ring in his nose.
The wallpaper flinches. “You think I give two cents if you have friends or not?” he roars. “I get enough calls from that teacher saying you took a tailspin this year and how you did this and how you did that and now your grades are in the toilet and nobody likes you. Well, that’s your problem.”
I don’t point out that school was hardly a piece of cake for Harry, either. I roll out from under the pillow. “You can’t ground me from my dog.”
His chest heaves. I wonder if he will have a stroke. I wish it wasn’t my papa who had the stroke. Hornets whirl.
I call my grandpa a loathsome-toad and let him think about what it means, although I think he has a pretty good idea. I wrap myself up in my sheet so tight you can’t tell if I am a corpse or a girl. My toes hold their breath.
“I’m too old for this. Now get dressed. And I don’t know who your mother gave that dog to, so don’t ask me ever again. I’ve had it up to here!” He yanks the sheet and I unwrap like a jelly roll and flip on the floor.
“Owww.” I hold my wrist and check to see if the skin is hanging off.
“Too bad. Now get up.” Fire falls from his fingers.
“I can’t change with you watching me,” I snort.
When he goes, my toes tell me they would like to hear more cusswords, so I call him a swine-butt and about a thousand other things, I can tell you that.
Harry’s truck is the kind you don’t worry about much when you bounce over potholes.
Ruts can’t make the tailgate rattle any more than it already does. Plus, the windshield wipers are missing rubber, and the seats squeak like gerbils, and when you go over a bump, you tend to hit your head.
I do not want to do this, and I do not look at Harry. The window wants to touch my aching forehead, so I let it.
The lights are off on the JACK’S DONUTS sign, and a piece of cardboard taped to the window says CLOSED. Sam from the pizza shop and the milkman and about a dozen other customers wait on the sidewalk for Harry to open. My grandpa is never late, and he has never missed a day since he took over for my papa. Now he scowls and drives past, drumming his thumb on the steering wheel, and you can see the question mark on everyone’s face.
“I already told you I don’t think I should have to go.” I glower at him.
“Stop talking,” he growls.
—
After my papa had the stroke, I went with Harry to St. Camillus. He warned me about all the sounds—the beeping from the monitors and the pumping of oxygen and the nurses going in and out of the room all the time. And the smells—antiseptic cleaners, mostly, but also the sweet scent of the roses waving me in.
When I walked into my papa’s room, the floor sagged under all the sadness. My papa didn’t hug me and he didn’t read to me and he didn’t whisper in my ear the way he did every single night of my whole life when he tucked me in: I am right here and I will never leave you.
That was the day my heart jumped right out of my chest and whirling hornets took its place. Now I roar at Harry: “You can’t make me.”
He ignores me and speeds up. The truck bounces in a pothole and I grab the strap over the door.
“I won’t go in there.”
He rolls the window down and spits. “Did I say one single thing about going to St. Camillus?”
I erase the surprise off my face. “I thought you were going to make me visit my papa.”
“That’s for you to decide. This is for me to decide—and it’s something I should have done a long time ago.”
—
When Harry turns into the school driveway a few minutes later, he doesn’t use his blinker. He pulls right into the principal’s spot. The sign frowns.
“What are we doing here?” I can’t keep the babyish screech from flying out of my mouth.
I call Harry a rotten-cabbage-head under my breath. My knees hold their ears when I shout, “I am not going in. It’s summer!”
Harry’s eyes pop. “Do you think I want to be here any more than you? I never asked for this. Not any of it. Now put a sock in it and get out.”
I push my hands in my pockets. Threads snap.
He stomps around and whips open my door. “Now!” he bellows.
—
Harry ignores secretaries. This one is digging through filing cabinets and doesn’t look up. Papers and folders shoot for the ceiling, anxious to get out for the summer.
The custodian is here, the one who passes out old candy corn all year long. All the classrooms are dark—chairs on the tables, crates of books on the desks, shades closed. �
�Isn’t there anyone in this whole forsaken place?” Harry grumbles, stopping at one classroom and then the next.
“It’s summer,” I snort.
“Well, in my day teachers were here all the time.”
I let him mutter on. God’s bones.
Harry holds my report card out like it is a dirty fish.
“I don’t want you to show anybody that,” I whine, grabbing for it, but Harry holds it a hundred feet in front of him and marches straight for Mr. Peterson’s class at the end of the hall, the only room with any life in it.
Mr. Peterson is the sixth-grade teacher everybody wants. I shove my fists into my pockets and twist. More threads snap.
Opera pours out of his room, and when we step inside, everything glints in the sun. The concrete-block walls are still the color that all the classrooms were when my papa came to read to everyone in first grade: spring-daffodil yellow. Mr. Peterson has pulled off all the blinds and you can see the bird feeders hanging from the cherry tree outside and also the tomato stakes lined up like wooden soldiers in the classroom vegetable patch.
Mr. Peterson is hunched over his desk, writing in a notebook, his pen flying faster than a train rushes in, and he leaves long ribboning tra-la-la trails across the page. Words burst in front of him, and for a few long moments, he doesn’t notice us. It’s like joy jumps off his hand, flowers bloom. I am hypnotized.
This doesn’t happen when I write.
The opera is very loud. Harry’s ears twitch.
Once my papa took me to the circus and we held our breath while a tightrope walker inched across the sky. She wobbled quite a bit and fell. That’s what opera sounds like—all that wobbling. My head pounds. I scratch the back of my leg with the toe of my sneaker, watching tra-la-las explode like fireworks across Mr. Peterson’s notebook.
It’s too much for Harry. He marches over and slaps my report card on the desk. Mr. Peterson jumps, and the pen goes quiet.
“She didn’t do a darn thing all year!” Harry roars above the opera. “In my day we kept kids back who didn’t do anything.”
The earth tilts; I grab the desk. I had no idea Harry was even thinking about making me stay back. Grizzlies gnaw at the soft spot behind my eyes.
I make a beeline for the door. Harry grabs my arm. He’s got that bull ring in his nose.
Mr. Peterson taps his pen. He pushes his chair back to make more room for his Santa belly.
“Mr. Gillespie, have a seat. Rosalita, how are you?”
“It’s Rosie.”
Harry stays where he is, snapping his suspenders. Smoke rings circle his ears.
Mr. Peterson flips my report card from one side to the other, concentrating on the spot where Miss Holloway wrote about my terrible year. After a while, he says, “We do not repeat grades in this school, Mr. Gillespie, except in extreme cases, and that’s not the situation here.” The grizzlies in my head begin to relax.
He turns to me. “Rosie, your language arts grades are particularly low. You don’t like to read?”
I do. I love to read—especially my World Book—and I really really love being read to, as long as it’s my papa doing the reading. If I stacked all the books my papa read to me, they would fill this room—and Miss Holloway’s, too.
This is how I turned out to be a kid who loves reading.
My mum left for California to make something of herself before I even had my first birthday. She hated all the sand and grit that clung to our town like sugar. She also hated snow.
My papa was heartbroke. Harry had to yell at him in that gruff Marines voice that makes even the kitchen table stand straighter, and after a while my papa pulled himself together and opened the donut shop.
He learned to be mama/papa and bought me oodles of books and read them to me in my bedroom under the eaves. We had reading celebrations with donuts and frappes when we finished a book and we baked a six-layer chocolate cake (with raspberry filling) when I read my first fat chapter book.
I was the youngest kid in the history of our town ever to get a library card—or so my papa bragged to everyone at the donut shop. We kept pages and pages of lists of all the books we read, and when we discovered The World Book, we started making up cusswords.
I may hate to do math sheets and write prompts for Miss Holloway, and I may hate everything she had to say all year long, but I love everything about our town library—the smell and the computers all lined up and turned on and Mrs. Moore behind the counter ready to point out a book on some North Pole explorer you never heard of and the hopeful feeling you have in your heart when you open a book for the first time and the plastic cover crackles in your hands.
My papa loved it all, too, and we measured our stacks to see whose was taller. (Usually mine.)
One day a big, lumpy, unwashed, unwanted, unloved bear-dog ran up the library steps and jumped on me as I was walking down. I tumbled, my books flew, and I landed on my ankle the wrong way and saw stars.
The dog licked my nose and I yelled at him awful bad, but then I noticed a gloaty grin on his face like he was about to get the best life of any dog ever, and of course I had to hug him because he was right.
Harry does not believe in feelings or in beating around the bush.
“In my day we’d say she didn’t have the sense of a chicken,” my grandpa roars. Mr. Peterson’s desk stands straighter. “If you won’t keep her back, I want a tutor, then—make her do the work she didn’t do all year long.”
Harry pauses to look at all the bookshelves that sag under the weight of too many books, and also at all the stacks that pop up all over the floor like anthills. I see him make up his mind, and then he tells Mr. Peterson: “You can tutor her.”
Blood pounds in my ears. My belly sinks as it realizes what this will mean for my plan of getting my dog back before my mum sticks her nose in my future. My papa would never make me have a teacher all summer long. “I don’t need a tutor,” I snort.
Harry glares. All the books around the room consider restacking themselves. I need an ice cube.
Mr. Peterson clicks his pen. “I don’t have time to tutor anyone, Mr. Gillespie. I have six children of my own. This is summer vacation.”
“Look, I’m just asking you to knock some sense into that thick skull of hers. I don’t care how you do it. A few times over the summer—at the donut shop, where I can keep an eye on her.” Harry nods to the pictures of Mr. Peterson’s children. “With all those mouths to feed, no doubt you could use the cash.”
Mr. Peterson hems and haws. I humph. If Harry has so much money, why doesn’t he buy me snacks that I like or new towels without holes or maybe an air conditioner? I open my mouth to say this, but Mr. Peterson asks, “Do you have a journal?”
I don’t believe in journals, especially not ones like Miss Holloway gave us: embarrassing little notebooks with pink daisies and smiley faces and litters of purring kittens crawling all over. I ball my fists into cement mixers and twist them deep in my pockets.
Mr. Peterson reaches into his drawer and pulls out a black-and-white-speckled notebook. “Never mind, we’ll use this.” He picks up his pen, and before I can tell him what I really think about keeping a journal, he tra-la-las all over this one, too. Then he says, “This is how I’ll tutor you, with a notebook. And if you give it a chance, I will talk to the principal about transferring you into my class.”
I open the cover a sliver.
“Not here, not here. I want you to think about it when you get home. You need to be alone to jump into an idea like this. You need to sink under the waves, swim around for a while, let the idea seep in your skin, see what it has to say to you.”
Harry grunts. He holds out his hand for Mr. Peterson to shake. It better be strong, because Harry doesn’t believe in wet trout. Then my grandpa steers me out the door. “What kind of nonsense is going on in this school, anyway?”
Prune-faced idiot, I say to myself as I walk toward his truck.
Dunce-head.
Surly-cow.
&n
bsp; I open my window, wedge myself through the skinny space, and climb onto the fire escape. I bring the black-and-white-speckled notebook with me.
My Gloaty Gus never knew this place. He would have loved how you can perch yourself two stories up on an iron ladder that sways like straw when the wind gusts down from the sandpits. Especially, Augustus would have loved how you can get away from Harry out here.
I open the notebook.
There is a loud crash in Mrs. Salvatore’s apartment. Paulie yells at Francesca for hiding his turtle and then Francesca is howling and Sarah, the oldest, is screaming will everybody be quiet so she can just read her book and then Mrs. Salvatore is banging something, probably a pot, against the kitchen table and yelling: “You stop that, Francesca, you hear?” And then when Paulie starts wailing, Mrs. Salvatore bellows, “Night and day you two are going to be the death of me. What did I do to the good God in heaven to deserve this?”
I pull my springy curls back, take a deep breath, and wonder how do you dive into a notebook and swim around for a while? All of a sudden I very much want to feel Mr. Peterson’s tra-la-las.
I flip to the first page. If Augustus could write, it would look like Mr. Peterson’s writing—big, bold, sloppy letters that have no manners and could use an obedience class.
Fill these pages with your story, Rosie, and if you do, I will share mine.
P.S. I hope my story won’t make you ill. There’s going to be a lot of throwing up—enough to fill a sand truck.
P.P.S. (I will read your story only if you want me to.)
I slam the notebook shut and squeeze myself back through the chipped window frame and tumble into my skinny bedroom, where my army blanket forgets how to smell like Old Spice. There’s enough grit on my dresser to write my name on the top.
Chasing Augustus Page 3