Rotten (9780545495899) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part • I: From Bark to Bite

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part • II: In the Doghouse

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Part • III: Getting to Mars

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The bus heading down from upstate says PETER PAN on the side. It might as well say LOSERS. Everyone on here is some combination of bad adjectives: poor, old, sick, bloated, and worse. I’ve pegged one as homicidal and another as suicidal. Luckily, they’re not sitting next to each other. No one on here is getting the better of things. No one owns a car or can afford a train ticket. I fit right in, a sixteen-year-old being shipped across the state in the middle of the night with absolutely no say in the matter.

  I’m staring out the window at headlights, taillights, and streetlights, and I’ve got double stop signs up. My earbuds are in and the old-school punk music is at maximum volume, and I’ve got a book on my lap so I can pretend to read, if necessary. It’s not. The old guy next to me hasn’t said a word, and I think he might have wet himself.

  We finally pull into the station in Brantley. This is the last stop for me. I slide by the old dude, maintaining as much airspace as possible. The first word I say to him is “Sorry.” Then I stand in the aisle and wait as the line shuffles slowly toward the door. Most of these people are continuing on to an actual city. They just want to buy snacks, smoke, use a real bathroom, or get some air. I don’t mind the wait. I’m almost home. I’ve been counting the days for months, but now I feel more nervous than anything.

  The air is warmer out in the parking lot, and I start to come around a little. The compartment doors are open along the side of the bus, and I paw through the luggage until I find my bag. Just to be sure, I give it a quarter turn so I can see the JD in marker on the front. My name is Jimmer Dobbs, but I go by JD if I can help it.

  The bag is pretty heavy, but I lift it clear without too much trouble. I take a look around the parking lot, scanning for my mom’s Honda, but I don’t see it. I pull out my phone and check for a text or a call. There’s nothing, so I head inside the station.

  I claim one of the orange plastic bucket seats in the waiting area. I check my phone and look around. The station is too big for this dried-up town now. Most of the people here are either from the bus I came in on or they work here.

  I’m kind of hungry, but there’s a line at the vending machines. The people are looking over their shoulders, afraid the bus is going to leave them here. I check my phone again and wait. It’s not like I expected a parade or a party, but I thought my mom would at least be here. I called her once I saw the first exit sign to let her know. The trip in from Stanton is like twenty minutes.

  The people get their Snickers or Twix or barbecue potato chips and get back on the bus, and the bus does its part and leaves. Maybe I’ll call her again, just to check in. I want to go to the vending machines, but I’m not sure about leaving my bag here and it feels lame to take it with me.

  I take it anyway. I’m stranded in a bus station. Lameness is unavoidable, and if I didn’t want this stuff, I wouldn’t have carted it to the edge of the state and back. I hook the strap over my shoulder and start walking toward the machines. I hear one of the doors shoosh open when I’m halfway across the floor. I look over and it’s my mom. I change direction and head toward her.

  “Hey, baby bird,” she says. Mom calls me that sometimes. I wish she wouldn’t.

  “Hi, Mom,” I say, smiling for the first time in recent memory.

  We rarely hug, which guarantees that this one will be awkward, and it is.

  “Welcome back,” she says.

  “Whoop-de-doo,” I say, spinning my finger in a little circle around the dingy bus station.

  We’re mostly quiet on the drive home. I’ve been away all summer, and even though she visited a few times, there’s almost too much to catch up on. I don’t think either of us really knows where to start.

  “There’s a surprise for you at home,” she says at one point.

  She doesn’t say why she was late getting to the station, and I don’t ask, but this is better: a surprise. I think maybe it’s a cake or something. I’m kind of hungry because I never made it to the vending machines. Pretty soon, we pass the sign that says WELCOME TO STANTON! It’s only that one line, because there’s nothing impressive to add.

  Everything after that is the same as when I left: the pizza place, little bridge, so-called downtown, and town green, then the little dip in the road and our boxy white house coming up on the left.

  We pull into the driveway, and I brace myself for the pothole at just the right moment. Some things you don’t forget. The car comes to a stop and Mom turns it off and drops the keys in her purse. The engine keeps ticking afterward. That’s new. I see Mom listening to it, already calculating how much it will end up costing us.

  I bang through the side door with my bag, make the right, and head into the front room to drop my stuff. I know the room well, so I don’t bother to switch on the light. Sure enough, I slam my shin into something and go down in a heap.

  I realize midfall that it must be the coffee table. I realize post-fall that Mom must have moved it while I was away. I grab my shin and swear, but my voice is drowned out by the noise suddenly filling the room. It makes even less sense than the table being out of place. I still can’t see anything, so for a second I think maybe I’m imagining it or it’s coming from the TV. But the TV is off and the sound keeps coming: It’s a dog, barking its head off, barking at me. It makes no sense: We don’t have a dog. We never have.

  I look around the dark room, trying to figure out where it is. It sounds close, and I don’t want to get leg humped or mauled or rabies. I reach up and sort of cover my face, so that I’m looking out through my spread fingers. Just as my eyes are beginning to adjust to the dark, the light flips on and I see my mom standing at the edge of the room.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “He’s new.”

  It takes me a moment to realize she’s talking to the dog.

  I wake up early, like I’ve had to do all summer, and like I’ll have to do when school starts up a week from tomorrow. I turn over on my side and kick my leg out from under the sheet. There’s a nice breeze coming in through the window screen, and I start to drift back to sleep. But just as I’m going under, I hear something.

  It’s a quick beat of footsteps coming up the stairs. At first, I think
it must be Mom, but then I hear the dog’s nails on the wood. I turn over and face the door. I can hear the clicks getting closer as he heads down the little hallway.

  My door is open a crack and I watch the narrow gap as the sound gets closer and stops. The door isn’t open wide enough for the dog to get in, but from what I saw last night, it would be no problem for him to push it open. He’s built like a cement truck.

  After a few seconds, his nose appears in the gap. He pushes it in as far as he can without touching either the door or the frame. He sniffs twice and then pulls his nose back out of sight. More quiet.

  Man, I think, that dog definitely got the wrong impression. Normally, this room would be rank enough to repel anything with a functioning sense of smell, but this morning it’s all fresh air and clean laundry.

  I expect to hear his feet — or paws, I guess — padding back down the hallway, but there’s no sound at all. I’m starting to wonder if I dreamed the whole thing, and then: Bam! He jams his whole head through the door. It swings open at least a foot, giving him enough space to turn and look at me.

  Holy crap.

  His head is like a black-and-brown cinder block. The top is all black, except for two little brown dots, one over each eye. They sort of make it look like he’s thinking bad thoughts. The muzzle is all brown, except for a black stripe on top, which leads down to his black nose and black mouth. His jaws look insanely powerful, like Mom had adopted an alligator.

  I remind myself of how skittish he was last night, how he went and hid behind Mom. He’d been all big talk in the dark: Bark! Bark! Bark! But as soon as the lights came on, he ran out into the hall like a two-year-old, looking back at me from behind her legs, with his head held low. He was literally all bark and no bite.

  So I’m telling myself what my mom told me: that he’s just a dog, a rescue dog that’s still afraid of people. But looking at his face now, I can’t tell what he’s thinking. We’re just looking at each other. I watch the skin bunch up and shift around his eyes as he watches me — even his face has muscles.

  He swipes a thick pink tongue across the side of his upper jaw. It lifts the gummy black skin around his mouth, and for a split second, I see the flash of one extra-long white tooth. I guess that’s what they call a canine tooth. He pulls his head back out of the room and disappears. A moment later, I hear him heading down the hallway. He pauses at the landing, then avalanches down the stairs.

  I let out a long, slow breath. That was weird — and that was a big frickin’ tooth! There’s no way I’m getting back to sleep now. I throw the sheet off and get up. I open the top drawer of my dresser and look at row after row of clean socks and underwear. It looks like a picture in a catalog — and not a catalog I’d shop from.

  I pick out my outfit and get dressed. My jeans feel tight, like they always do after they’ve been washed. My black T-shirt feels so crisp, I wonder if it’s been replaced with a new one. It’s a clean start for my clothes — and maybe for that dog — but that’s about it. Today is the day I return to my regularly scheduled life, already in progress, not going so great.

  Sometimes I get my breakfast and take it to the front room, but it feels like I should eat it here with Mom this morning. It’s been a long time since we’ve done anything like that. I’m pretty sure she’s thinking the same thing, because she’s cooking, which she doesn’t usually do in the morning. Or maybe not cooking, exactly. She’s making toast. She is toasting, but that’s also rare.

  She watches the toast pop up and then plucks it out without waiting, making a funny hot-hot-hot expression. She brings my toast over on a little plate and it’s exactly how I like it: white bread, medium dark, with plenty of butter. As she puts two more pieces in the ancient toaster, I get up to get my cereal.

  I wonder if it’s going to be the same box from before I left, but it’s a new one. I pull hard on the plastic bag inside, and it bursts open, spilling cereal all over the counter. Meanwhile, my toast is getting cold and hers isn’t done yet. The timing feels off. We’re both trying too hard.

  Finally, we’re both sitting down at the small kitchen table with our breakfast in front of us. She has her coffee and I have my Coke and it seems like someone should say something.

  “So,” I start.

  “Bon appétit!” she says, making fun of her grand, toasted gesture.

  “It’s good,” I say, but my timing is off again, and I say it before taking a bite of the toast instead of after.

  We don’t say anything for a while after that. I wonder if she can hear me chewing my cereal or if that’s only loud inside my head.

  “I got you new cereal,” she says.

  “I saw that,” I say. “I don’t think that stuff goes bad, like, ever.”

  And that was the wrong thing to say again because it’s like I don’t appreciate it, and I know that cereal is expensive.

  “No sense risking it!” I add.

  She looks at me over her coffee mug, and then we both go back to eating. She’s just sort of nibbling at her toast, and I notice there’s no butter on it. Is she watching her cholesterol or something? Did she have a checkup? Was it bad news? She has some gray hairs now. I can see them in the bright light coming through the window.

  I’m trying to think of something to say when I hear that sound again. The dog comes in from the living room, and when he hits the linoleum, he click-clacks for a few steps. I think he must extend his nails for grip sometimes. I guess maybe he’s still getting used to the different rooms.

  He shoots past my side of the table, giving me a quick look. He doesn’t seem scary here, in bright daylight in the kitchen, and he’s the opposite of aggressive. If he had a tail instead of a little stump, it would be between his legs. But he straightens up and his head rises back to normal height as he reaches Mom.

  She stands up and he follows her over to the window. There’s a small glass jar there, and I can see now that it’s full of dog biscuits. They’re red and green and brown. When I came in, I just thought it was a decoration, but I see that they’re shaped like little cartoon bones.

  Mom pulls the top off, and the dog does this little hop on his back legs, like he’s dancing. His mouth is hanging open, and I can actually see the drool beginning to pool around the edges. Mom pulls out a green biscuit and looks over at me. “Do you want to give it to him?”

  I watch a fat drop of slobber drip from his mouth to the floor and say, “Nah, you go ahead.”

  “Are you sure?” she says.

  The dog does another little hop. He’s staring up at the biscuit and making this weird noise in the back of his throat, and it’s like, Just give him the biscuit already, you know? And she does: She drops it and he jumps up — not a hop this time, a real jump — and snatches it out of the air.

  It reminds me of a program called Air Jaws that I saw during Shark Week, about those great white sharks that shoot themselves out of the water to get the seals. By the time he lands, he’s already chewing. It’s pretty much the opposite of Mom’s nibbling. A few chomps later, the biscuit is gone and he’s mopping the tile with his tongue, retrieving the chunks and crumbs that escaped the initial assault.

  “Whoa!” I say.

  “Yeah,” says Mom. “He never had biscuits before.”

  It takes me a moment to process that last part and then it’s kind of a punch in the heart. I mean, that’s pretty sucky if you’re a dog. And if he never got biscuits, he probably never got petted or anything like that. But just as I’m thinking that, he gives me another sideways, head-low look, like: Screw you. It’s like he knows I’m feeling sorry for him and won’t have any of it.

  He looks back up at my mom to see if maybe there’s another biscuit in his future, but she’s already put the top back on the jar, so he just trots back out of the room. His footsteps disappear once he hits the rug, but a few seconds after that, I hear something fall over on the other side of the room.

  Mom sits down again, but now at least we have something new to talk about.<
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  “So what’s his name, again?” I say. “Jaws?”

  “No,” she says, laughing. “He just has a sweet tooth — like you!”

  I look down at my cereal. The Crunch Berries have turned the milk an unmanly shade of pinkish purple. Can’t argue with that.

  “His name is Jon-Jon,” she adds, remembering the question.

  “What?” I say. “Like the piper’s son?”

  “I think that’s Tom Tom,” she says. She may be right about that.

  “He doesn’t look like a Jon-Jon to me.”

  “Well, I suppose we could call him something else,” she says. “I don’t think he would miss that old name much.” The name or the memories, she means.

  “Whatever,” I say. “Your dog now.”

  “I kind of thought he’d be both of ours,” she says. “His last owner kept him chained to a tree outside. I don’t think he’d mind joint custody in a nice warm house.”

  I look at her. “Really?” I say. I’m talking half about the tree thing and half about the joint custody, but I can already tell she’s serious about both. I’ve never had part ownership of a dog before. I brought home a frog once when I was really little, but I didn’t know how to take care of it and it didn’t last three days. “What kind of dog is it anyway? Is he?”

  “He’s a Rottweiler,” she says.

  I’m done with my cereal and drinking the multicolored milk. “What is that,” I say, lowering my bowl, “German for weird-ass-looking dog?”