Starting From Here

by Lisa Jenn Bigelow

  I considered walking all the way out to Scarlett to see if she’d follow, but instead I paused at the door. She wasn’t wearing a coat, and it was awfully cold outside. “All right, what the hell,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  Her face lit up. “Great! How about Saturday?”

  “Can’t, I’ve got work. Sunday?”

  “I’ve got a church thing. Sometime next week then. Monday?”

  “Work again.” This was getting ridiculous. “Tuesday?”

  She grinned. “Tuesday it is!”

  “But just so you know, I’ll have to pick up my dog from the vet’s first.”

  “Oh no! He isn’t—”

  Her concern surprised me. “He’s okay,” I said. “He just stays there while I’m at school. Long story.”

  “I could come with you,” Amelia said. “We could pick him up and then go to your place and talk. Actually, it would be better that way. I’ll bring my camera and get some shots of your dog, maybe the road where he got hit, too.” Her eyes were hopeful.

  I shrugged. “If that’s what you want. You know where my locker is.”

  Late that night, hours after Mo and I had come home from another training session at Robyn’s, the doorbell rang. At this time of night it could only be the police. The door was the only barrier between me and the news that my dad was dead, thrown through his windshield when his rig jackknifed on an icy road in Bumblefuck, Minnesota. Or he got held up at a truck stop and got shot in the chest while heroically trying to save his cargo of five thousand lawn gnomes. Or—

  The doorbell rang again, and over the noise of the basketball game on TV, I heard a muffled yell. “Col, open the door before Teddy and I get pneumonia!”

  I flung it open. “What are you doing here?”

  Van slid inside and plunked Teddy on the floor. Mo began washing the little guy’s face. Teddy laughed and stuck out his own tongue. Great. Danielle would love that my garbage-eating, butt-sniffing mutt was swapping spit with her son.

  Van shivered in his vest and blew on his fingers. Twenty degrees outside, a half-mile walk, and he wasn’t even wearing gloves out there. Idiot.

  “Just thought we’d surprise you is all.” He stooped to unzip Teddy’s coat.

  I shook my head and took the two steps into the kitchen to put on coffee—decaf; Van wouldn’t drink the good stuff. “Carrying your baby nephew down Harrington Road on a dark, freezing night? What were you thinking?”

  Van picked up Teddy again and wiped the dog slobber off with his shirttail. He sat at the table bouncing Teddy on his knee. I gave the kid my keys, which he inspected with great care before shaking and banging them on the table. Van finally answered the question: “Unexpected guests.”

  “Oh.” Van’s mom didn’t have a steady boyfriend, but she’d been known to bring someone home without much warning. She didn’t ask Van to make himself scarce, but the walls in his house were very, very thin. Still, “Why didn’t you ask her for a ride?”

  “I think they’d been at Happy Hour.”

  “Oh. Well. Next time, call me. I would’ve picked you up. Both of you.”

  “No car seat,” Van pointed out.

  “You could have become roadkill out there.”

  “We kept way to the side.” But Van looked chagrined. He knew damn well that dogs and deer weren’t the only casualties of Harrington Road.

  I poured our coffee, and Van set Teddy and the keys on the floor, back within reach of Mo’s tongue. Van wrapped his fingers around the mug—NUMBER ONE DAD!—to warm them.

  “So,” I said, “I got approached by a member of the press today.”

  “Ooo, let me guess! Is National Geographic doing a spread on the indigenous people of Trail’s End?”

  “No, it was Cosmo. They wanted celibacy tips and tricks. I gave them your number.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Seriously, it was someone from The Watchman. Amelia Something?”

  A smile spread across Van’s face. “Amelia Hoogendoorn?”

  “So you do know her. Yeah. She wants to do an article on Mo.”

  “Awesome!” Van leaned over and knuckled Mo’s mighty noggin. “This fella deserves to be famous.”

  “She said Michael asked her to do the article. How’s that for weird? Actually, she said he got the idea from Rachel, who got the idea from you. Where do you know her from, anyway?”

  “Oh, around. We have la classe de français together. Her French name is Amélie.”

  “Well, ooh la la. Do you know how chummy she is with Rachel and Michael? Because I don’t need any of their BFFs butting into my life.”

  “It’s not that big a school, Col. People know people. Not all of us are hermits.”

  “All right, all right. Forget it.”

  We moved to the couch, watching the end of the game as we waited for Danielle to swing by on her way home from work. Teddy fell asleep in Van’s arms. We put a couch cushion on the floor, and Van laid Teddy on it. Mo slumped on the floor beside him, on guard duty, until his own head got too heavy. Mo rested his snout on the cushion beside Teddy. Soon they were snoring in harmony.

  BY THE TIME I packed up my bag on Tuesday afternoon, Amelia was standing at my elbow. She wore an ankle-length denim skirt, and this time her hair was loose and spilled onto her burgundy coat. In my usual jeans and sweatshirt, I felt a bit scruffy. What would Amelia think of my tinfoil house, my crippled mutt, and my redneck truck?

  Out in the lot, I unlocked Scarlett’s passenger door. “This is it,” I said. I’d thrown out the trash that morning, but there was still white fur all over the place.

  “It’s so great you have your own car,” Amelia said, hopping in. I slammed the door shut, then went around to let myself in. “I’ll be lucky if my parents let me take driver’s ed this summer. They’ve read too many statistics about how terrible teen drivers are.”

  “Do they know you’re riding with a ‘teen driver’ today?”

  “I told them you’re very responsible and have never had an accident.”

  I snorted.

  “You haven’t, have you?”

  “Not so far. I can’t afford a hike in my insurance.”

  Amelia bombarded me with small talk all the way to the clinic. “Oh, I’ve seen this place,” she said as we pulled in. “My aunt takes her cats here.”

  “What about you? Do you have pets?”

  “Not really. Neil, my brother, has dwarf hamsters. I love animals, but our parents won’t let us have anything big.”

  “My dad was the same way.”

  “Really? How’d you get him to change his mind?”

  I grinned at her. “I didn’t give him much of a choice.”

  Robyn was busy with patients, so we went straight to the backyard. Mo galloped over and put his muddy paws all over my jeans and Amelia’s skirt. “Off!” I yelled, with zero success. The rest of the posse joined in, sniffing Amelia from all angles. “Sorry,” I told her, dragging the dogs away by their collars.

  “It’s okay.” She held out her hand for Mo to slurp. “Neil’s hamsters never care if I’m around. It’s nice to be greeted with so much—Aww, does the nice boy want his tummy rubbed? Oh yes, he does! Oh yes, he most certainly does!”

  I had to appreciate her good taste in dogs. “Come on,” I said to Amelia. “Let’s get that interview out of the way.” I’d pick up the poop tomorrow.

  Amelia stood, and Mo stared up at us from the ground. When we turned to leave, he rolled himself upright and hurried along behind us, not about to be abandoned.

  Amelia took Trail’s End in stride. As I got us Cokes from the fridge, she took a short stroll around the living room. I was glad I’d vacuumed the crumbs from the couch cushions and stashed all the Christmas stuff back in Dad’s closet. Mo followed her, waiting for more petting.

  She paused at the framed photo hanging by the TV. It wasn’t as if I ever forgot it was there, but most of the time I tried not to thin
k about it. The photo was of Dad, Mom, and me, taken one afternoon on the boardwalk in South Haven when I was twelve. Back then Dad looked as fit as a quarterback in his souvenir Bears jersey. It’s tough to stay in shape when you’re behind the wheel all day, but he’d made the effort. I was scrawny in my bikini, my nose bright red with sunburn. And Mom—well, Mom was beautiful, as always, her long, whiteblond hair sweeping over her tan shoulder.

  The most amazing thing was that we all looked so happy. Maybe because we were.

  “Is that your mom?” Amelia asked.

  I nodded. “My mom and dad.”

  “Wow. I can tell. You look just like her.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “No, really.” Amelia cocked her head, looking at me, then the picture, then me again. “It’s the color of your hair, of course, but it’s more than that. Your eyes, maybe, or your mouth?”

  “I don’t know.” Mom would always be taller, older, prettier. Well, not older. That was the awful thing—chances were that someday I’d be older than she was.

  “Well, I meant it in a good way. She’s beautiful.”

  “Was. She’s dead.” I remembered Rachel accusing me of never talking about Mom, so I added, “She had cancer.”

  “Oh, Colby.”

  I could see all the usual questions in her eyes: how long ago, was it sudden or slow, what kind of cancer—as if it mattered whether the tumors that killed you started in your gut or your brain or your boobs.

  It was her skin: melanoma. And it happened both too slow and too fast. Too slow, because she had time to waste down to a walking skeleton, for that whiteblond hair to fall out from chemo, for her legs to turn into a patchwork quilt of scars where she’d had tumors removed before she couldn’t fight it anymore. Too fast, because I still wasn’t ready to say good-bye.

  But Amelia didn’t ask any of those questions. She said, “I’m so sorry. You must miss her so much.”

  “Yeah.” I turned away from the picture, headed for the couch, and cracked open a Coke, gulping. My eyes teared up, not just from the sting of bubbles in my throat. “Let’s get started.”

  Amelia quietly sat at the opposite end of the couch and took a notebook and pen from her backpack. “Why don’t you start with the first time you saw Mo?”

  So I told her how Mo had barreled into my life. About the accident and the decision to adopt Mo that wasn’t really a decision at all. About training him to be halfway civilized. About Robyn, who’d been as much fairy godmother as veterinarian from the very beginning. It was nice to have a story with a happy ending.

  Mo insisted on sitting between us. He butted us whenever we weren’t paying him enough attention.

  “You know,” Amelia said, setting her notebook on the coffee table and scratching Mo between the ears, “I’ve heard that a rescued animal will always be grateful to the person who saved it. That you can see it in their eyes.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “Sounds like the kind of thing people say to feel better about themselves. What do you think?”

  “Let me check.” Amelia tipped her head toward Mo’s and got an enthusiastic tongue across the face.

  “Mo!” I scolded, but Amelia just laughed and took off her glasses, wiping the rest of her face with her sleeve.

  “Do you have something I can clean these off with?”

  I jumped up and retrieved a paper towel from the kitchen. “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s all right. Really. Congratulations, Mo, you’ve given me my first French kiss.” She rubbed at one lens, then the other. Her face looked even softer without her glasses, except for her eyes. They might not see twenty-twenty, but they seemed as sharp as ever. They flickered up at me, and I looked away, embarrassed to have been caught staring. Her first French kiss?

  Amelia put her glasses back on. “It’s obvious he loves you, anyway.”

  “Well, dogs are supposed to love unconditionally, right?” I said. “No matter how many times you screw up. Lucky for me, huh, Mo? Considering the first thing I did was get your leg whacked off.” I leaned over and kissed Mo on his cold, black nose. “Sorry about that.”

  Amelia took her camera out of her bag and snapped some shots of Mo sitting on the couch. I didn’t like the thought of the entire student body knowing just how unglamorous my living room was, but I was too embarrassed to say so.

  “Now some with you,” Amelia said.

  I put my hands up to my hair, my shabby sweatshirt. “I don’t think—”

  “You look fine,” she said.

  “Fine?” I repeated.

  “You look good,” she said quickly. “And I promise to use only flattering photos.”

  I still went to change my shirt and fix my hair.

  “Beautiful,” Amelia said when I returned.

  That word again. My stomach did a cartwheel. “Okay,” I said, pretending I hadn’t heard. “Where do you want me?”

  Amelia took some photos of me with my arm around Mo. Mo and me sprawled on the floor, wrestling. Mo and me playing tug-of-war with his rope toy.

  “You know,” Amelia said, setting her camera on the coffee table, “it’s funny.”

  I glanced up from the carpet where I was giving Mo a tummy rub. “What?”

  “Last week when I asked you for this interview? You were, um, not the most approachable person.”

  I focused on scratching Mo’s not-so-bony-anymore ribs, and he wriggled and mooed in pleasure. “Van says I do a very convincing cactus impression.”

  “That’s the thing … Right now? You’re totally different. You’re so sweet with Mo. So … um. I was surprised, I guess.”

  I slapped Mo on the rump. He jumped to his feet and attacked one of his chew toys. I sat back on the couch beside Amelia. “School’s not exactly the place for sweetness. That’s part of my secret identity.” I half smiled to let her know I was kidding—sort of.

  Amelia smiled back. She had dimples in her cheeks. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Good. Because there’ll be trouble if the truth gets out.”

  “Really? What kind of trouble?”

  “Big trouble.”

  “Like what?”

  I was about to open my mouth again, let the first stupid thing that came to mind spill out, but I stopped. Her smile, this teasing—she barely knew me, and I knew even less about her. Now that the interview was over, we’d go back to our separate corners of Westnedge High and never speak to each other again. She was just being nice. The last thing I needed was for my heart to get broken again by another girl who’d dump me the second the right guy made his move. I’d rather stick to my lonely-girl-and-her-dog existence.

  I kept my mouth shut.

  Amelia picked up her camera and fiddled with it. “I know what you mean. Feeling like a completely different person, depending on where you are, who you’re with. The whole double-life thing.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’ll bet you have some really deep secrets to hide.” I meant the words to be light, but they came out angry instead.

  Amelia glanced at her watch. “Um, well, I’d better call my dad. It’s almost six. Can I use your cell? One more thing my parents won’t let me have.”

  How could so much time have passed? But then my stomach growled, and I realized it was dark outside. “I’ll give you a ride,” I said. “If that’s okay with you.”

  “Of course it’s okay.”

  I gave Mo a treat and promised him a good, long walk when I returned. Then Amelia and I hopped in Scarlett and headed back toward town.

  Amelia’s neighborhood wasn’t as fancy as Rachel’s. It was all ranches and split-levels with one-car garages, but it was still a big step up from Trail’s End. When we pulled up to her house, she reached out and squeezed my arm, and I felt a gentle but unmistakable current pass between us. Stop, I told myself. Don’t even go there.

  “Thanks again for the interview,” she said. “I’ll see you at school, okay?”
>
  I stared after Amelia until she got safely inside, trying not to think about the last time I’d dropped off a girl. There was a lingering scent of peach in the cab. I knew I’d smell it on the couch, too, when I got home.

  WE HAD FINALS the rest of the week, two per day, and they were every bit as bad as I expected. Well, I did all right in English. History and Spanish weren’t great, but I’d pass. The same with algebra, thanks to a last-minute cram session with Van. And I’d get at least a B in phys ed; anyone who put in a drop of effort did. But I knew that even the world’s most generous curve wouldn’t bring me up to a D in chemistry.

  By Friday night I was desperate to get to Robyn’s just so I could stop imagining what method Dad would use to kill me when he saw my grades. Once again Mo and I climbed the stairs to Robyn’s place, and the door swung open before I could knock. She was wearing her Lions sweat suit again, too.

  “I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but the Lions sucked this season.”

  She laughed. “When don’t they? But you’ve got to root for the home team.”

  “I don’t. Go, Bears!”

  “Oh, come in, you traitor.”

  Robyn already had the kettle on. I sat at the island while Mo and the other dogs went through their sniffing ritual. Oscar, the fuzz ball, ran into the living room and returned with a rubber cat. He and Mo tussled, the cat squeaking feebly every time it changed jaws.

  “How’s school going?” Robyn asked as we sipped our tea.

  I shrugged. No way was I mentioning finals. “Not exactly my favorite pastime, but I’m dealing.”

  Robyn nodded. “I always liked school—the academic parts, I mean—but it was my friends who really made it all worthwhile.”

  I grimaced. My supply of friends had dwindled lately without soccer or the Alliance. When it came down to it, the only friend I could really count on was Van. And Mo. I stretched out a leg and stroked his back with my foot. He flicked his eyes up to mine, then closed them, sighing noisily.

  “I grew up around here, too,” Robyn said, “over by WMU. But I went to State for veterinary school. They have a great program. I was one of those kids who knew what they wanted to be in kindergarten. When I was six, I had a worm hospital.”