Rotten (9780545495899) Page 4

  “But you could get the vodka if you let him, right?” says Mars.

  Aaron wouldn’t take that kind of second-guessing from most people, but with Mars, he shrugs it off. “Not anymore,” he says.

  “Those things should be illegal,” says Rudy.

  The irony isn’t lost on any of us, except maybe Mars, but it’s true. More and more stores around here have these little digital cameras by the register, and they can snap pictures of your face when you buy liquor or cigarettes or whatever. It’s not even clear what they do with the pictures, but it’s kind of spooky, you know, having your picture taken like that. It’s like they’re getting the mug shot done in advance.

  “Time for Plan B,” says Mars.

  “You really gonna do that?” says Rudy.

  “Hellz yeah,” says Mars.

  “You are one crazy dude,” says Aaron, the smile returning to his face.

  “Never denied it,” says Mars, smiling back.

  Mars starts across the street. He has this idea that he’s sure will work. He says he has a cousin who tried it and scored a full case of booze.

  It’s pretty simple: Go into the store and ask to use the bathroom. Don’t do anything suspicious like wear a big jacket that you could stash something in. Just maybe buy a soda and say you really need to go. Then when they let you back there and turn around, look for a side or back door and unlock it. Or maybe wedge something in to keep it from closing all the way. Then you just flush the toilet, say thanks, leave — and head right around back.

  So that’s Plan B. How many of the one million things that could go wrong can you name? I’m up to around 999,996 when Mars comes back out the front door, carrying a can of Sunkist. He opens it and takes a sip while he’s waiting to cross the street. His expression is totally blank, which it probably would be either way.

  “Well?” says Aaron, once Mars reaches us.

  His face is still unreadable. He likes to do that when he has good news, and I think this is it: He’s going to tell us that he left a door open around back and we need to get a move on. My stomach sinks. He takes another sip of his Sunkist.

  “Guy’s a jerk,” he says.

  I think I do a pretty good job of hiding my relief. The others rag on him for his plan. Apparently, he’s been talking about it all summer. “It’ll totally work,” says Aaron, imitating Mars’s voice. There’s some talk of a Plan C, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

  “No harm, no foul,” I say after a while.

  “More like no booze, no beer,” says Mars. “Maybe we should try your girlfriend at the 7-Eleven.”

  That kind of pisses me off. I remember her standing there with her missing tooth and meth tics. But it’s true: 7-Eleven does sell beer. “Nah,” I say, “you’re probably on a most-wanted poster in there by now.”

  It’s a reference to the seventeen cents. He may have seen me talking to the girl through the glass, but there’s no way for him to know I covered that. He still thinks he got away with it, and the thought makes him smile: Brantley’s most wanted … “Oh yeah,” he says.

  I get up off the bench and Mars takes my place.

  “Those are amazingly fake,” says Rudy, nodding at Mars’s bright white sneakers.

  “No way, man,” he says, lifting one a few inches off the ground. “They’re real Air Jordans, totally old-school.”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure that school is accredited,” says Rudy.

  Aaron and I laugh, but Mars doesn’t know what that means.

  “They’re totally real,” he repeats. “Old-school.” He shifts around and turns his right sneaker over to show us the silhouette of Jordan on the bottom.

  “That Jordan looks white,” says Rudy, unconvinced.

  “Or Chinese,” says Aaron.

  It’s my turn to pile on, but I don’t. I don’t like making fun of people for what they don’t have. A few minutes later, we move on. Our heads are on a swivel, looking for something to do, some way to kill an hour or two before lunch. And that’s how the rest of the day goes, just looking for something new. Sometimes we find it, and sometimes we don’t. The hours tick by either way, and I get through it all without any real trouble. No harm, no foul.

  Aaron drops me off in front of my house around four thirty. I have maybe an hour until Mom gets home, and I sort of wonder if I’m going to spend some or all of that cleaning up after the dog. I go in through the kitchen: no dog and no crap there. I find him standing in the middle of the living room. His body is twisted in a C shape so that his back legs are sort of inching forward. His eyes are wide and looking right at me, and his little tail stump is trying to wag. The whole thing, the body language, the eyes, it doesn’t seem friendly so much as desperate.

  I scan the room. I don’t see anything on the floor in here, and just as important, I don’t smell anything. “Good boy,” I say. People are always saying that to dogs on TV, and I think it’s pretty standard.

  He gets even more excited as I start toward the back door. He follows me closely, still contorted like a scorpion. Sure enough, the screen door is open the same little sliver it was this morning. “Aw, Johnny,” I say. I’m pretty sure it’s the first time I’ve called him by his name, and it is 100 percent out of guilt. “All you had to do was push through.”

  I’m looking at him and a thought hits me so hard that I know it’s true. That’s how he wound up chained outside. One mistake, or maybe the guy left him alone for too long and JR couldn’t hold it. The kind of guy who’d do that to a dog isn’t the kind of guy who’d need much of an excuse. And years later, JR is holding it in again, trying to make up for it or just terrified of what will happen if he can’t.

  I throw the screen door wide open and hold it there. Johnny’s body straightens out and he comes charging toward me. For a moment, I kind of freak out. But he’s not coming after me. He just really needs to go. He launches himself out the door like a big black cannonball, clearing the back steps and landing a good three or four feet out into the little yard.

  I let the door close behind him and give him his privacy. Then I head to the bathroom to wash the Brantley off me. When I’m done, I go back and open the door. He comes trotting up the steps and into the house like nothing happened. Then I close both doors because it’s still really hot out.

  “Sorry about that, JR,” I say. Now that I’m calling him by name, I’m trying to figure out which version I like best. This one’s kind of cool because it’s like JD.

  I can’t quite tell if he’s holding a grudge against me or not, so I give him a biscuit. That’s got to be his third or fourth of the day. Afterward, he has this look on his face of pure canine contentment. Another thought hits me: He likes it here.

  Mom gets home a little later than usual and we have Boston Market microwave dinners, so I know it was a rough day. She’s reading the empty box as the microwave blasts away at hers. “These have a lot of salt,” she says, frowning.

  “Good,” I say, after taking a bite of Salisbury steak and swallowing it down with some Coke because it’s still pretty hot. I don’t mean that it’s good it has a lot of salt; I just mean that it’s good because I like it and I don’t want her to feel bad about dinner.

  She looks at my Coke. “And that has a lot of sugar.”

  “Good!” I say, smiling.

  She’s about to say something else, but the microwave beeps and cuts her off.

  “So what did you do today?” she says, sitting down.

  “Not much,” I say. I feel like that’s true — I feel like that’s always true — but I know it’s sort of a dodge, so I say, “Just hung out.”

  “With your friends?” she says.

  “Yeah,” I say. I want to tell her not to worry about it, that they’re not that bad and that I can take care of myself, but I feel like I shouldn’t bring that stuff up if she doesn’t. Instead, I take a huge bite of the Salisbury steak and work on that for a while. She sees me chewing and doesn’t ask me anything else, and I can feel the food burnin
g my mouth.

  After dinner, Mom says, “Why don’t you take Jon-Jon for a walk?”

  I’m like, “First of all, it’s Johnny, Johnny Rotten, or JR for short. Second, doesn’t he go in the backyard? ’Cause he definitely went there before you got home.”

  “I think the backyard could use a break,” says Mom. “And I think Johnny could use a walk.”

  “I’m not sure we’re really there yet, if you know what I mean,” I say. “I think he’s just, like, using me for food.”

  But she thinks it’s a good idea and hands me the leash.

  “Wait, I’m supposed to put this on him?” I say.

  “That’s how the whole walk thing works,” she says.

  “Then I definitely don’t think we’re there yet,” I say, but I guess I’m sort of curious. It’s not like I have far to go either, since he’s been hanging around the table the whole time, hoping for scraps and/or drops.

  I take the leash and stand up. He sees the leash, which he definitely recognizes, and he sees me, but he doesn’t seem happy about the combination of the two. He starts backing up as I approach. I back him into the corner, like he’s a sheep I need to make a sweater out of. The thing is, he’s a lot more wolf than sheep. As soon as his butt hits the cabinet, he knows he’s cornered, and just like that, some switch flips inside him. His gums come up and there are those big white teeth again: all of them, this time.

  He growls. It’s not loud, but there’s no missing it.

  “Whoa!” I say, sort of stumbling back.

  “Oh, careful,” says Mom.

  But it’s already over. As soon as I stepped back, he zipped through the gap. He’s already in the living room by the time Mom finishes her warning.

  “Whoa,” I repeat.

  “I think he just felt cornered,” says Mom. “He was just as scared as you.”

  She’s probably right, but I don’t feel like testing her theory any further. I hand the leash back to her and head for the front room. I think I’ve earned some TV.

  I look at the time in the corner of the computer screen: It’s half past very late, but I can’t seem to peel myself away. I’ve been putting it off, but I finally go to Janie’s profile. I tell myself I’m just looking, but I know that’s a serious understatement. I’ve got all night, and the plan is to pore through it: to scroll through all of the status updates and wall posts since I left; to click through her new pictures and the pictures of the people in them. I’m looking for signs of some other guy, some dude with his arm around her at a party or leaving messages for her or, well, any of the things that I used to do, basically. It’s a lot of work and maybe a little insane, but I haven’t been sleeping much anyway.

  It’s a very short trip. I’m sitting there waiting for her page to load, wondering what’s up with my connection, when I realize that it has loaded. I can only get the partial view, the “limited profile.” I didn’t see that coming. Did she cut me off? It’s the first thing I think. Someone must’ve told her I’m back, or she found out somehow, and she put up the deflector shields. It’s a total kick in the crotch, and for a while, I just sit there staring at the few things on the screen: the same profile pic she always uses; her hometown, same as mine; and her birthday with no year. Then I spend a few seconds confirming that nothing is clickable, even though I was already fairly sure of that.

  Finally, my pride kicks in and I start looking for other explanations. Maybe she got another message from the Creeper. There was this guy who started sending her weird messages and commenting on her pictures and stuff like that last winter. He’s really old, maybe even retired, and it sort of freaked her out. He lives a few states away, but I think she was a little worried that he would hop in his unmarked pervert van and make the trip. I was kind of worried, too, but I was also hoping for the chance to beat him into a little pile of creep dust.

  So maybe he’s back. Or maybe there’s another one. The world is full of creepy dudes, I tell myself — and then I realize that the only guy I know for sure is obsessing over Janie’s profile tonight is me.

  I click over to my page. I sort of feel like hiding it, too, just out of pride, but I realize that it would affect approximately no one. The page is a total ghost town. I haven’t posted anything in months.

  I’m not sure how this computer can make me feel any worse tonight, but I figure I’ll give it a try. I Google “rescue dogs.” That does the trick. I’m sort of looking for clues about why ours acts the way he does, but I have to click away after a few minutes. It’s the pictures — what they were rescued from. The dogs are filthy or beat-up, lying in mud or covered in ticks. One of them has a broken leg. It’s not, like, in a clean white cast; it’s bent, broken, and dirty. The caption says “Bonnie, lab. mix, approx. 1 year old.”

  I guess I hadn’t really thought about that part: how bad it has to be before a dog gets rescued. On the one hand, it makes me sad, but on the other hand — well, that hand is a fist. There’s a picture of this guy who was keeping pit bulls in his basement. It’s right after the dogs got taken away, and he’s smiling like it’s nothing, like a kid who broke a plate. I feel like I did when Janie told me about the Creeper: that same anger toward someone you don’t really know, but you also sort of do know.

  The computer screen is still on when I get up on Tuesday. The screen saver is dancing around and when I hit the space bar, a page about this year’s “NFL Impact Rookies” appears. I don’t even remember looking at that, and I feel really groggy. I was up so late that this morning just feels like more of the same day.

  I want to go back to sleep, but it’s already close to eleven and Rudy is coming over soon to see JR. That makes me think of the pictures from last night. It’s hard to think of him that way, beat-up and filthy. It makes me angry again, but I feel like I’ve been angry for months, and I need to chill out.

  Anyway, I head straight to the kitchen to get some cereal, because you can’t properly chill out on an empty stomach. Fifteen minutes later, I’m one bowl of Crunch Berries in and considering a shower when Rudy knocks on the door. I’m still half-asleep, so the first thing I say is really dumb: “Hey, man. I was about to take a shower.”

  He shakes his head and says, “Well, I’m not joining you, if that’s what you mean.”

  And then I’m just backpedaling and digging myself deeper. “No, no, I mean, I didn’t. I’m glad I didn’t. I hate it when you’re in the shower and, like, hear something, you know? Always freaks me out.”

  “O-o-o-kay then,” he says, stepping inside.

  “Sorry, man,” I say. “Up late.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Whole summer without porn. Must’ve been tough.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “It was going to be a cold shower.”

  And then he laughs and I do, too.

  “Whoa,” he says. “Is that him?”

  I look back over my shoulder. Johnny is standing by the doorway to the living room, hoping for a biscuit. “Nah,” I say. “That’s some other dog.”

  “Can I pet ’im?” says Rudy, but he takes a step forward and Johnny takes a step back, and that basically answers that question.

  “I don’t know, man. I think he had it pretty rough. My mom says he’s, like, not so down with men, ’cause his last owner was a dude. And a jerk.”

  “Was he having him fight and stuff?” says Rudy.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “Mom says he was just kept outside, chained to a tree. And maybe beaten.”

  “That all?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Geez, look at his head,” says Rudy. “It’s like a … I don’t even know. Look at his mouth!”

  Johnny is standing half on the kitchen tile and half off. I think he knows we’re talking about him. I turn back to Rudy. “Watch this,” I say, and head over to the biscuit jar.

  Johnny is all kinds of conflicted, torn between sheer love of biscuits and total distrust of dudes. He doesn’t come quite as close with both of us there, but that just makes the leaping cho
mp more impressive.

  “Awesome!” says Rudy. “It’s like those sharks.”

  “That’s what I thought!”

  As Air Jaws finishes gulping down the biscuit and vacuums the crumbs off the floor, I give him a close look. His fur is pretty much smooth and shiny — I know Mom has been giving him this special dry food — but there’s this one patch above his left hind leg. It’s on the border between his black hip and his brown leg, and the fur there is a little thinner and doesn’t really lie flat. I wonder how he got that: a scar, maybe, or ticks.

  “I’d sort of like to find the guy,” I say.

  “I think that’d be a bad idea,” says Rudy.

  “What do you think, namewise: Johnny or JR? I can’t call him Johnny Rotten all the time.”

  “I think maybe JR,” says Rudy. “Like JD.”

  “I thought that, too,” I say. Rudy’s been my friend for so long that we think alike sometimes. Or maybe that’s why we became friends. It works out the same either way.

  “Hey, JR,” he says.

  JR looks over, and he definitely knows that’s him. His ears perk up a little, and I’m pretty sure he’s thinking: Is this new person also a potential food source? He must decide he’s not, because he wheels around and heads for his spot in the corner of the living room. Mom moved his water dish there, so it’s officially his place now.

  “Cool,” says Rudy. “You see his ears move?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “It’s kind of a downer to see a big dog like that so freaked out.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m sort of thinking maybe he won’t always be.”

  “Well, let me know,” he says. “Because that dog would be a chick magnet.”

  “You think?” I say. The thought had definitely crossed my mind. “Don’t they like the little dogs? Like purse sized and rat looking?”

  “That’s just what they get for themselves,” he says. “Really, they like the big dogs.”

  “That’s awesome,” I say.

  “Big Dog!” Rudy calls out toward the living room, and maybe because he knows what it means or maybe because he still isn’t familiar with Rudy’s voice, we get one loud bark back.