When Friendship Followed Me Home Read online

  And boy, was she one. She stopped to check a text. Here I am, holding the freaking door for her, and the whole time she’s texting back. And then she brushed right past me without even tossing me a thanks.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. No I didn’t. I just left.

  It was five thirty. Mom liked me home by six to help with dinner. The tide was coming in. The salt smell was strong enough to make you cough. Papers blew around the street. I had a feeling I was being followed.

  I turned around. Mermaid Avenue was packed with everybody coming home from work, but nobody seemed interested in me. I headed up to Neptune, which was a little less crowded, and now I was sure somebody was stalking me. I spun around, and there he was.

  4

  THE STALKER

  That little dog from the alley stopped maybe fifty feet away and sat and watched me.

  “C’mere then,” I said, but he wouldn’t. I walked toward him and he ran off. I shrugged and went on. I looked over my shoulder, and he was following me again.

  I went into the supermarket to where the lady in the hairnet was always trying to push the free cheese samples on you. “Can I have some?” I said.

  “What else am I here for?” she said.

  I scooped four fistfuls into my pockets.

  “At least tell your mom the cheese was good,” the lady said. “You know, so maybe she buys some next time?”

  “Oh, I will.”

  “Right,” she said. I felt bad for her. Selling fancy cheese in a mediocre supermarket is a hard job.

  When I came back out, the dog was waiting for me. He was closer now, and boy was he shaking. I put a piece of cheese on the sidewalk and stepped back twenty feet. He approached real slow, and then he gobbled it. I put another one down and stepped back ten feet this time, and it was the same thing. Then five feet, then he was eating out of my hand. I swear he wolfed down a quarter pound of cheddar. He let out a burp louder than any I ever made. His breath was not particularly fantastic. Then he leaned into my leg and shook so hard he shook me.

  I scooped him up and took a quiet side street home. No way was I getting caught carrying around a girly little dog like that. It would have been worse than being caught with a book.

  5

  MOM

  “The answer is yes,” my mother said. I didn’t even get a chance to ask her. She just saw the little varmint in my arms and said okay. “Now let’s get this dog into the tub.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” I’d wanted a dog for as long as I could remember, but we were going to wait until we got to Florida. Luckily, Mom liked to go with the flow.

  “He picked you for a reason,” she said.

  “Right, I’m the first sucker who fed him.”

  She messed up my hair. “Life’s a journey, Traveler.”

  “And we’re all in for one heck of a ride.”

  “Hiking uphill is the best part of the trip, never forget,” she said.

  “How could I when you remind me twice a day?”

  She was sixty-seven years old. She didn’t dye her hair, which she kept short, no fuss, no muss. You might be doing the math, her age minus mine, a seventh grader’s. She’d have to be in her mid-fifties when she had me, right? Except she didn’t. I was ten when she took me in.

  “Get the towel,” Mom said.

  We dried him off, and wouldn’t you know that little mutt was sort of cute. His coat was spiky. With the gunk gone his eyes were gold brown. I tucked his tongue into his mouth, but it fell out.

  “Let’s fatten him up,” Mom said.

  Her saying yes to the dog so quick got me thinking. “Mom, all those kids in the group home. You could have adopted any of them. I’ve always been afraid to ask, but why me?”

  “Why were you afraid to ask?” She started frying up some hamburger.

  “Sometimes I think if I talk about it, it’ll disappear. Living here, in the apartment. My own room. Dinner while we watch TV. You and me.”

  “Traveler?” she said. “You and I will never disappear. We’re forever. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re a terrible liar, son.”

  “How do you know I’m lying?”

  “Because you do this adorable little thing with your eyes. They open a bit too wide, and you look off to the right. Ben? It’s like this: When Laura died so suddenly I was at a crossroads. We’d always talked about becoming foster caregivers, and I thought, well, if I find the right kid, the one who really needs me, I’m going to do it.” She stopped cooking to look at me full on. “I just knew you were meant to be my son.”

  “How’d you know, though?”

  “Magic.” She wasn’t talking to me now. She looked past me, at the picture on the wall above the kitchen table. Mom’s partner Laura watched over us every night as we ate. She had a true smile, like she wasn’t forcing it for the picture. She got cancer, the kind that hijacks your blood. “She would have loved you,” Mom said. Then she snapped out of it and got back to cooking. “There’s not much here. You’ll be hungry. You’d better go pick up some Chinese food.” Now she was lying. There was plenty of hamburger, even with the dog there, but I saw she wanted to be alone for a bit. She didn’t like to be sad in front of me.

  “Mom? They have this new cheddar at the supermarket. It’s really terrific.”

  “Good to know. Hey, our new friend here, what are you going to call him?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  “You’ll know when you hear it.”

  I made a leash from my bathrobe belt, but I didn’t need it. That little dog trotted right alongside me, all the way to the Palace of Enchantment and back, and he never once took his eyes off me. Even when he was eating he wouldn’t stop staring at me. After dinner when we watched Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, it was the same way, eyes on me the whole time. He had a thing about him that was hard to describe. Like this very golden stillness. His name had to show that.

  “Why are you smiling?” Mom said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, but I knew. It was so perfect, just plain old hanging out, Mom, me and the dog. It was so safe. “Maybe we could call him Woody.”

  “As in Woody Coffin?”

  “Right, scratch that.”

  “Coffin’s a tricky name,” she said.

  “It’s awesome. Remember how you said I could stay a Smith if I thought Coffin was too creepy?” There were lots of Smiths in the foster homes, and Joneses and Washingtons. “That was the best, the day you let me share your name.”

  “That was a beautiful day. Yes, it was.”

  “I just felt different, like finally I was getting a little closer to becoming the person I was supposed to be, even if I didn’t know exactly who that person was yet.”

  “I like that you tell me these things. Oh, don’t be embarrassed now. Ben, your friend is trying to get your attention.”

  The little guy had slid out of my lap and trotted to the door. He put up his paw and yipped, just once. I took him out and he peed right at the curb. When bedtime came he wriggled under my shirt, into my armpit. I woke up to check on him, and his head was resting on my chest. He was looking at me with those gold-brown eyes. It occurred to me that I hadn’t taken a breath from my inhaler since the library, and I was breathing fine. I ran my fingers through his coat, back and forth, and like no hair came off him. My lungs were cool around dogs who didn’t shed a lot. “You’re awesome,” I said. He dove at my mouth and licked my lips. “Except for that breath. Whoa.”

  When I woke up the next morning he was checking out the Chewbacca poster I’d tacked up by my bookcase. It was life-size—seven feet of Wookie staring right at you. The little mutt cocked his head, like, Dude, you are the weirdest dog I’ve ever seen.

  6

  THE MICROCHIP

  “His teeth are in decent shape, which means he was well cared
for,” the veterinarian said.

  “Then how’d he end up on the street?” I said.

  The vet shrugged. “Maybe he was a companion animal for an elderly person. She dies, the family drops him at a shelter. From there, let’s say he’s adopted by people who had good intentions but no time to care for him. The dog gets dumped again. Or . . .”

  “Or?”

  “Maybe he’s just lost. He has a microchip embedded in his skin. Look.” The doctor passed a scanner over the dog’s shoulder. A phone number came up on the iPad screen. “That’s his owner. There’s an email address too.”

  “Maybe he ran away,” I said. “She was probably treating him really rotten.”

  “Traveler?” Mom said. “Think how you would feel if you lost your dog. Think about the dog most of all. It’s in your power to reunite him with the person who cared for him all these years.”

  My power, huh? I wasn’t feeling very powerful. I was feeling like I wanted to barf all over the vet’s office.

  • • •

  We plunked down on the bench outside the veterinarian’s and waited for Mom’s sister, Jeanie. We were hitching a ride with her to the Bay Ridge mall. The website said you could bring your dog inside the pet supply store, except he wasn’t really my dog now. I took out my phone, hit speaker and dialed.

  Mom chucked her arm over my shoulder. “I’m proud of you,” she said.

  The dog was snoring in my lap. Then came the voice. The number you are trying to reach has been disconnected.

  Mom nudged me. “We’re halfway home. There’s still that email address, Traveler.”

  “Mom—”

  “Send it off, and we have a clear conscience we did everything we could.”

  I tapped the email into my phone with a message to call our home number. I forced myself to hit send right as Aunt Jeanie pulled up. Her boyfriend Leo leaned out the window. “First a kid and now a dog, huh Tess? Better you than me.” He laughed like it was the best joke ever. He got out with Aunt Jeanie to help Mom into the car. She had a touch of the arthritis. “I’m fine,” she said. “You’re such a gent, Leo, but I’m not an invalid—yet.”

  “You’ll outlast all of us, sweetheart,” Leo said.

  “I certainly hope not. Ben, give your aunt a hug.”

  Jeanie was nice and all, but when she hugged you, she pushed you away the slightest bit, like you’d better not mess up her makeup. She worked as a manager at Macy’s, and she got a huge discount at the cosmetics counter. She was younger than Mom but looked older. The skin around her eyes wrinkled out like spiderwebs, probably because she was always squinting and scrunching up her forehead the way you do when you get worried. She came over to the apartment now and then. “Tell me about school, are you doing any sports, are boys really wearing their hair that long now?” She wasn’t nasty or anything. More like she was just, I don’t know, a little nervous being around me. Leo I didn’t know so well. I’d see him holidays, for dinner or whatever. He was a little overfriendly, like he’d shake your hand all exaggerated and slap your shoulder and practically yell, “Hey, how the heck are ya?” Except he didn’t wait for you to answer, and then he was running back to the TV to watch the game. I’d watch with him and I swear he’d say it fifty times, “Have some chips, champ. Put a little meat on those bones.” I always wanted to tell him that chips weren’t made of meat. They were made of freaking kale, if Aunt Jeanie had her way. She was kind of a health food freak. I don’t know. Leo was okay, I guess.

  We got into the backseat of Aunt Jeanie’s Mercedes. There was a sheet over it. “Will he stay back there, the dog?” Jeanie said. “I can’t have all that fur everywhere, Tess.”

  “And good morning to you on this gorgeous Saturday, sister darling,” Mom said. She kissed Jeanie’s cheek, then Leo’s.

  “Sorry,” Jeanie said. “It’s just that I had the car vacuumed yesterday.”

  “Babe, relax,” Leo said. He winked at me. “Right champ?”

  The dog nudged my hand and put up his paw.

  “He wants you to give him a high five,” Mom said.

  I gave him a knuckle bump and he dove at my face and licked my lips.

  “Whoever had him before trained him well,” Mom said.

  “Totally. I really hope she’s dead,” I said.

  “Well, Traveler, I’m not particularly thrilled by that sentiment.”

  • • •

  At the mall we picked out a leash and collar and this pet carrier backpack so you could take him with you on the train. It was like that diva girl’s mesh backpack except sturdy. The little guy didn’t mind the pack at all. The cashier dropped a chew stick in there and the dog hopped right in after it. The pack was half off, but it was still expensive. “Should we wait until we’re sure he’s ours?” I said.

  “We’ll give it to his owner, if it comes to that,” Mom said. “And if she doesn’t want it, we’ll have it for when we get another dog.”

  “Another dog,” I said. “Sure.”

  7

  THE MOLD HORDE

  “He’s totally part Ewok,” Mold said.

  “Teebo, right?” I said.

  “More like Wicket. That’s what you should call him.”

  “How about Spidey?” I said. “Flash?”

  “Wicket’s cooler. Or Gandalf.”

  “No way.”

  “Potter?”

  “No magicians,” I said.

  “Dude, chill, no need to be racist about it. C’mere, little guy. Coffin, he is awesome. My sisters are going to flip.”

  We climbed the stairs to his porch. I’d never been to his house but knew it from half a block away by the bent light saber in the driveway and the kiddie pool filled with green-brown water. The peekaboo window alongside the front door was patched with cardboard from a Dr Pepper box. Inside, barefoot kids ran all over the place.

  “Mom, this is Coffin,” Chucky said. “He’s my friend, sort of.”

  “Hello Coffin.” She hugged me. She smelled like cookies, and she was a good hugger all right. I couldn’t breathe.

  “I love him,” this like four-year-old girl said. She had a peanut butter beard and jelly splotches on her nightgown. The dog went straight to licking the peanut butter off her lips. A horde of other girls in nightgowns joined in. Not in licking off the peanut butter. In cuddling the dog, I mean. One of them was crawling around with a loaded diaper. The dog found that terrifically interesting.

  An old golden retriever limped into the swarm. The dogs sniffed each other’s butts. The retriever lay down, and my dog—maybe—settled in next to her. Their tails beat the dust from the carpet. All of a sudden my dog jumped and begged me to pick him up.

  A scrawny old cat came into the room, sat and licked its butt hole in front of everybody. Now I knew why I was having trouble breathing. The cat hair was all over Mrs. Mold’s nightgown and everyone else’s. Only certain kinds of dogs made my throat itch, but cats got me wheezing every time. And why was everybody in nightgowns at three in the afternoon?

  “Ginger loves dogs,” Mrs. Mold said. “Ears, GinGin. Ears.”

  The cat licked the wax out of the retriever’s ears and the dog sighed happily.

  “Ginger can clean Fuzzball’s ears too, if you want,” Mrs. Mold said.

  “I think his ears are totally okay,” I said. I left out the part about wasn’t the cat’s tongue just up its butt? Mrs. Mold took the dog out of my arms. The cat went straight at my dog’s ear with her slimy tongue, and my dog stopped shivering and started thumping.

  “That means he loves it,” one of the littler kids said. “The other way you know they’re happy is they hump you.”

  “It’s true,” Chucky said.

  “Stay for pizza, Coffin,” Mrs. Mold said.

  “Do we have enough?” Chucky said.

  “Yes, Charles, we only have about a billio
n boxes in the cellar freezer.”

  “Sorry, bud,” Chucky said, “it’s just that living around here, I have resource allocation concerns. I acknowledge that I have a problem, and I’m dealing with it.”

  I couldn’t breathe but I was famished. Air or food?

  We had burnt frozen pizza, and it was awesome.

  8

  THE UNDERWEAR THIEF

  Monday morning I took the dog with me on my coupon delivery route. A lady in a housedress came out of nowhere and hit me with a broom when I left a pennysaver at her door in front of a sign that said DO NOT LEAVE SALES MATERIALS OF ANY KIND. My boss told me to ignore those signs especially. “Sorry ma’am, just following orders,” I said.

  “See if you can follow them after I beat your brains in.” She swung the broom at my rear end.

  That little dog rolled over at the lady’s feet and wagged his crooked tail. The lady forgot about me and scratched the dog’s belly. She was a whole different person now, like actually nice. She invited us in for a bagel, but I had to get to Health and Safety class, where Rayburn nailed me with spitballs. Avoiding him the rest of the day was no problem because, well, let’s just put it this way: He wasn’t in Honors. I ate lunch under the stairs.

  After school I ran home. I’d set up my phone with the camera on time lapse to see what the dog got up to. Here’s what he did all day after Mom went to work: Nothing, except he got into my laundry basket and grabbed hold of my underpants. He made a pillow of them in the hallway and sighed, eyes on the door the whole time, until—and this was crazy—he went insane scratching at the door five minutes before I even put the key in, like he had ESP that I was on my way home.

  I checked my email. Still no word from the dog’s previous owner. She was dead for sure. I was feeling really, really terrific about everything.