Alpha Dog

by Jennifer Ziegler

  Seamus wobbled a little, lifted his right leg, and swiped his paw against Kinky’s outstretched hand.

  Everyone whooped and clapped. “Good boy!” I shouted. Seamus panted happily.

  “Man, I want to teach him how to drum!” Lyle exclaimed.

  I headed over to the gold armchair where Matt was sitting and perched on the armrest. “Did you witness this little miracle?” I asked. “Did he really teach him that?”

  “He really did,” he said, slipping his arm around my waist. In a quick movement he pulled me onto his lap and started kissing me. I laughed and put up some perfunctory resistance before blissfully giving in.

  “Aw, man! There they go again!” Lyle whined.

  Kinky shielded his eyes dramatically. “Dudes, get a corner or something.”

  “Right,” Robot said, rising to his feet. “I’m off to get a pack of smokes and some brew. Any of you blokes want to come?”

  “I’m there,” said Lyle, bouncing off the couch.

  “Me too,” Kinky chimed in, loping after Robot.

  “Hey, could you guys get Seamus some doggie snacks?” I asked, struggling to stand so I could grab my purse.

  Matt pulled me back down. “I’ll do it,” he murmured in my ear, sending little shivers down my back.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Besides, I’ll know what to get,” he added in a whisper. “Those guys would probably get Seamus a can of beer and some Twinkies.”

  “You’re right,” I said, laughing.

  Matt slid out from under me and headed toward the door, Seamus limping after him. “Hey, guys, hold up,” he called. “I need to grab some stuff too.”

  “You mean something besides Katie?” I heard Lyle ask before the door shut.

  Seamus looked back at me sadly, as if he had wanted to tag along too.

  “Come on, buddy.” I picked him up, mindful of his bandages, and carried him over to the patio. “Go see your pal.” Sure enough, as I pushed back the blinds, there was Mrs. B waiting on the balcony. Seamus’s tail started wagging rapidly.

  I carefully set him outside and watched through the glass as the two of them started sniffing each other all over. After a while, I headed back into the kitchen, where Christine had returned to her cheese grating.

  “Stop it,” she said when I rounded the corner.

  “What?”

  “Wipe that silly-ass smile off your face before I slap it off.”

  “Really? I’m smiling?” I said, patting my cheeks and mouth. I hadn’t even realized it.

  Christine groaned and rolled her eyes. “You’ve had one all week long—ever since you and Matt got together. You guys are so cute you make me want to puke.”

  “Come on!” I cried. “What about you and Robot?” I launched into a horrible, off-key rendition of “Fancy You.”

  I’d just reached the chorus when the phone started ringing.

  “Thank God!” Christine exclaimed. She set down the grater, scurried into the living room and snatched up the phone. “Hello?” she said, turning her back on me and my singing. Suddenly she spun back around, staring at me with wide eyes. “Oh, hello there, Mrs. McAllister!”

  I trotted up beside her, chewing four fingernails at once. This could be bad. I hadn’t spoken to Mom in over a week—since before Seamus got hurt. It wasn’t as if I’d been purposefully avoiding her; I’d just been so busy with school and nursing Seamus back to health. In the meantime she’d left one message after another, still yelling at me about staying out late and never calling Aaron.

  “Uh-huh,” Christine kept saying into the receiver while shooting me round-eyed looks of sympathy. “Yes, well . . . actually, Mrs. McAllister, I really don’t feel comfortable with this arrangement anymore. I think you should probably get information from Katie directly. In fact, she’s right here.” She held the phone out toward me.

  I shook my head no. While I appreciated her gesture of resigning as official go-between and informant, I was also a little miffed that Christine was putting me on the spot. Talking to Mom was like storming an enemy beach. You had to be mentally prepared and equipped with several carefully rehearsed responses.

  Christine mouthed the word yes and pressed the phone against me, stabbing my sternum with the antenna. Then she set it on the table and walked off toward the kitchen. No! I thought, glaring down at the receiver. Its antenna pointed toward me, wagging back and forth as if scolding me.

  Oh, what the hell. I have to face her sometime. I picked up the phone and raised it to my ear. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Katie, what on earth is going on? Why have you been avoiding me? Do you realize if I hadn’t gotten hold of you today I would have contacted the authorities?” Mom’s voice rose with each rapid-fire question. “I’ve been ready to call the police for three days now but your father made me wait. What’s gotten into you, young lady? Why haven’t you been returning my calls?”

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I’ve just been really swamped.”

  “That was very thoughtless of you! Do you realize I’ve barely slept for days?”

  “Sorry,” I said again.

  “Are you hiding something? Why have you been ignoring me?”

  “I haven’t. Really. It’s just that school’s been getting tougher and I keep forgetting to juice up the cell phone and I’ve had tons of errands to run this week.”

  “I see.” Mom’s voice was strangely subdued. “Would any of these errands include spending twelve hundred dollars at the North Austin Animal Hospital?”

  My face instantly grew hot, smarting all over as if severely sunburned. “Uh . . . yeah, that,” I said lamely. I’d thought I had more time. I had no idea she would get the bill so quickly. “That was for Seamus.”

  “Seamus? Who is Seamus?” she cried.

  I took a deep breath. It was time to rat myself out. “He’s my dog,” I said, pushing the words out of me. “I have a dog.” And there it was—just a simple declarative sentence. I’d expected to go all meek and trembly, but I didn’t. If anything, I felt relieved.

  “You have a . . . what?”

  “A dog, Mom. I adopted him the first week I got here.”

  There came a long pause, and I could almost hear a bomb ticking in the background. Finally Mom let out a long, staticky sigh. “Oh, no. You do not need a dog, Katherine Anne!”

  I heard a slight rustling noise and her voice grew muffled. “Shane, I told you I should have driven up there! Do you know what she’s done? She’s gotten herself a dog!”

  “Really?” Dad sounded somewhat interested. “What kind of dog?”

  Mom let out an irritated grunt and came back on the line. “Really, Katie. Why would you even do such a thing?”

  “Because the shelter was going to kill him,” I explained. “I wanted to save him.”

  “It’s the same as always. You are just too selfish and irresponsible to be left on your own!”

  “What?” I yelled. “How can you call me selfish for wanting to save him? You’re the one who’s always going on about how I should take a stand and be a good citizen. So I did. I took in a dog that needed a home.”

  “Without consulting me first!” she snapped. “And you know perfectly well that that credit card was for emergencies only.”

  “It was an emergency! He got hit by a car! If I hadn’t tried to help him, I would have never forgiven myself.” I closed my eyes and recovered my breath. “I’m sorry I had to use the credit card. I just had no choice.”

  “I see. So you adopt a dog and then let him run in the street? Katie, that is about the most irresponsible thing I’ve ever heard of! I should have never trusted you to be out on your own. I’m considering bringing you right home this instant!”

  “No!” I shouted so loud that Christine peeked around the corner from the kitchen. “I wasn’t being irresponsible and you can trust me! The accident was just an accident. I’m doing a great job with Seamus. I’m training him and taking good care of him and still keeping up with classes. I’m doing g
ood, Mom. You should be proud of me.”

  “I will not be made the bad guy in this matter!” she cried, raising her volume to my decibel level. “I’ve tried to be nice. I’ve tried to set you on the right path, but of course you won’t listen. As usual you had to do things your own way, no matter what. Do you think your father made it as far as he has by doing his own thing? Do you think I got to do whatever I felt like growing up?”

  Mom’s tone took on a reedy quality. She sounded almost resentful or jealous. Like maybe she would have liked to step out of her perfect facade once in a while and mingle among us mortals.

  “Why do you always have to make things so hard?” she went on. “Is it so difficult just to do what I ask? To do the right thing?”

  I braced myself for the usual torrent of guilt, the standard amount of whining and groveling on my part and the eventual shaky truce. But as I listened to Mom’s tirade, I realized . . . I was done. The guilt just wasn’t there. I couldn’t feel useless and irresponsible, because now I knew I wasn’t those things.

  “Sorry you don’t trust me, Mom,” I said. “But I don’t think that’s my problem. I’ve been doing my best for years and you’re never satisfied.”

  “How dare you talk to me that way!” Mom was shrieking like a hawk. I’d never heard her so upset before. “When I was your age I would have never talked back to my mother that way!”

  When I was your age . . . There it was, her usual catchphrase. I’d heard it thousands of times before, but this time it was different. As soon as she said it, a smoldering anger came spouting to the surface. “Maybe I don’t want to be you at my age!” I yelled. “Maybe I want to be me!”

  That did it. For a moment all I could hear was the white noise of her huffy breathing and a few disjointed vowel sounds as she started to reply and then stopped herself. It was unbelievable. For the second time in my life, my mom was speechless. Only this time, instead of letting a hunky Irish stranger do it, I was sticking up for myself.

  Listening to the silence emanating from the other end, I felt like I was somehow growing, doubling in strength and size.

  “I can handle it, Mom,” I said loud and clear, as if issuing a proclamation. “You don’t need to look out for me anymore.”

  “Shane, you won’t believe what our daughter is saying to me!” Mom’s voice grew distant again. “She suddenly thinks because she’s lived away for a while she can make her own decisions about everything.”

  “Well, land’s sake, Laura,” I heard my dad say. “She is seventeen.”

  I could hear Mom sputter and gulp for a moment, and then her voice came back on the line. “Forget it. I can see the both of you are determined to act impossible,” she said shakily. Then she hung up.

  I replaced the receiver on its base and stood there, staring at it.

  “Katie? Are you okay?” Christine said, rounding the corner of the kitchen nook. “That was awesome. I can’t believe you stood up to her like that.”

  “Neither can I,” I said truthfully.

  She slowly shook her head. “Girl, you are my hero. I mean, I’m always totally ragging on my dad and sneaking stuff behind his back, but I’ve never just told it like it was. How’d you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, breaking into a smile.

  Strange. When I first met Christine, I assumed she was so together. I thought if I studied her hard enough, I could figure out how to get a grip on my own life. Now she was calling me her hero?

  But maybe that was it. Somehow I’d stopped worrying so much about what other people thought about me. Instead of looking to others for strength, I found it inside me, where it had been all along, puny and neglected like a stray pup.

  Somehow I’d become my own Alpha Dog.

  Later that evening, I took Seamus to the park. I was careful to slow my pace so that he could heel without straining himself. I could tell it was getting easier for him. Dr. Skyler had said he should be completely better by September, but I was beginning to think it would be sooner than that. He was a tough one.

  We crossed the pea-gravel pit, circled the swimming pool and came to “our” picnic table beneath the live oak trees.

  “Here you go, buddy,” I said, lifting him to the tabletop. I sat down beside him and began stroking the dark wiry waves along his back.

  To our left the sun was setting, bleeding orange-red streaks into the sky. The wind was picking up, and our grassy surroundings were taking on the heavy bronze hue of evening.

  Seamus flopped down next me, resting his shoulder against my waist, and heaved a contented sigh.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, petting the soft fur behind his ears. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  Published by Delacorte Press

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Books

  a division of Random House, Inc.

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are

  the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any

  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead; events; or locales is

  entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Jennifer Ziegler

  All rights reserved.

  Delacorte Press and colophon are registered trademarks of

  Random House, Inc.

  www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at

  www.randomhouse.com/teachers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ziegler, Jennifer.

  Alpha dog : a novel / by Jennifer Ziegler.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Feeling humiliated after being dumped by both her boyfriend

  and the school’s popular crowd at the end of her junior year in high school,

  Katie endures more embarrassing moments while taking a summer class at

  the University of Texas in Austin, and living away from home in an

  apartment with an overly hip roommate and a psychotic dog.

  .5-point Apollo.

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-43308-4

  v3.0