My puppy,
Shakshuka, disappeared. It happened when my dad was away on a business trip and
my mom was in one of her worst moods ever because Max and Monty had both just
had their vaccinations and they both had reactions and they didn’t sleep all
night. Max and Monty—I called them the Munchkins for short— were babies and
twins and also my brothers, and every one knew that if there were two babies
in the house, no one was going to pay any attention to a dog, even if she was
only a baby herself.
At night, I
lay awake in bed and I was cold, and I remembered that once on TV I saw
pictures of a hun-gry dog that was really skinny whose family went on
a vacation
and left him tied to a tree. And they said that the SPCA couldn’t take care of
all the dogs that were abandoned by their families. And I thought about
Shakshuka, who was gone and might be tied to a tree at that very minute, hungry
and missing me.
The next
morning in class, Brody told me there was no way that Shakshuka had been
stolen. “No way, Julie!” he said. “Why would anyone bother? You could get five
dogs like her, with spots and stripes, for less than ten dollars.” Or maybe he
said you could get ten dogs like her for less than five dollars. Brody said
things like that sometimes, but most of the time he was okay. When Max and
Monty were born, he said that was it, no one at home would ever pay attention
to me again, and when I cut my hair short, he said it was ugly.
I turned my
back on Brody and pretended to listen to Adam. He sat at the desk next to mine
and spent his whole life telling these crazy stories.
Adam said,
“My father won f‑f-fifty thousand, do you get it? In the lottery. He’s g‑going
to buy me an i‑P‑P . . .” People didn’t always listen to Adam because he
stuttered, and they didn’t always have the patience to
wait until he
got the word out. This time Brody tried to help him finish his sentence.
“An iPod?”
“N‑not an i‑P-Pod,
you idiot. An i‑P-Pad.”
Brody called
Adam “Ad-d-d-dam” because of his stutter, and because he liked to be
annoying. But he was still my friend, and that was just how it was, and anyway,
there were lots of kids worse than he was.
I cried about
Shakshuka during morning recess and Danny laughed at me because that was Danny,
that was just the way he was, and Duke also laughed, obvi-ously, because
Duke was Danny’s number two. But at the time I didn’t know that they had
anything to do with Shakshuka’s disappearance and kept telling my-self that
maybe they were just being mean, as usual.
That Danny,
everyone was afraid of him. And they’d have been nuts not to be. It was bad
enough that he was the kind of kid who would smear your seat with glue and
laugh at you when you sat down; that he and his friends would come up and offer
you what looked like the tastiest muffin you’d ever seen, and when you opened
your mouth to take a bite you discovered it was really a sponge. But none of
that was important. The problem was, he remembered everything that anyone had
ever done to him, and he made sure to get back at them. The day before
Shakshuka disappeared, Mrs.
Brown asked
us what a potter did, and Danny jumped up and said that a potter was a person
who put plants in pots, but Mrs. Brown said that was not what a potter did. And
then I raised my hand and said that a potter was a person who worked with clay
and made pottery.
Danny, who
sat right behind me, leaned forward and smacked my head, and I said, “Ow.” It
wasn’t too bad, but the teacher saw him and she wrote a note he had to take
home to his parents. That shouldn’t have been so bad either, but later, when
school got out, he grabbed me in the yard and kicked me in the leg. I went
flying and crashed into the seesaw, where I banged my other leg as well.
Danny said,
“If you hadn’t said ‘Ow’ before in class, the teacher wouldn’t have given me a
note. Now because of you I’m suspended. That was my third note.”
Our school
had this system that every time a kid hit another kid, he got a note he had to
take home to his parents, and if it happened three times his par-ents had to
come to school and the kid got sent home. My mother said it was mainly a
punishment for the parents, who had to miss a day of work and come to school.
I could have
told on him for kicking me in the yard as well. My bag flew off my shoulder and
landed right
in the middle
of a puddle, and Mom was really angry at me when I got home because we had to
take out all the books and leave them out to dry and we had to wash the bag. I
really could have told on him, but there wouldn’t have been any point. It would
just have meant another note for him, another kick for me.
Thanks but no
thanks.
In the
evening, when the Munchkins went to sleep, Mom took one look at me and burst
out laughing and said she wished that you could buy a doll that looked just
like me, with scratches on her right knee, black dirt under her fingernails,
and a mosquito bite on her cheek.
“It’s not a
bite, it’s a bruise,” I told her. “And any-way, who would buy a doll like
that?”
“I would,”
said Mom. “But what happened to you? Take a look at your legs—how on earth
. . .”
“Ow! Don’t
touch.”
“You look as
if you were in a fight with a tiger.” That was so close to the truth that I
blurted out the whole story about what happened with Danny. And I was really
sorry I did that because that was the reason Shakshuka disappeared. Mom spoke
to Mrs. Brown and she must have told her I was black-and-blue after Danny
pushed me because the next day at school Mrs. Brown took me aside and told me
that I had to let her know whenever something like that happened because
otherwise Danny would just keep on hitting me, and other kids too, and we had
to put a stop to it. Mrs. Brown meant well, but I knew that when it came to
Danny, I was on my own.
Later, at the
end of the day, Danny caught me again, this time when I was right by the gate.
Maybe someone saw me talking to the teacher and told him. Suddenly I was lying
on the ground with my face in the dirt. I must have shouted because Danny told
me to keep quiet.
Then he said,
“Tell me what you told Mrs. Brown!” “Let me get up!” I yelled.
“First tell
me what you told her.”
“Let me get
up!” My neck was all twisted, but somehow I managed to turn to the side and I
saw two first graders walking out of the building toward the gate.
Danny must
have seen them too because he let me go, and when I stood up he looked at me and
started
laughing,
probably because of the dirt on my face, and I decided I’d had enough of this
jerk. I saw red, no matter where I looked I saw red, and without think-ing
about what grown-ups always taught us—that we shouldn’t hit back because
whoever hit back would be punished just like the one who started it—I threw a
plant at him.
At the
entrance to our school there was this huge plant. The nature teacher once told
us that it grew so big because it always got water from this pipe that dripped
down into it, and also because it was in a pro-tected corner.
It was a
shame about the plant, it really was. And it didn’t even hit him. It crashed to
the ground halfway between us. Then Mrs. Brown came. And without even thinking
I told her that Danny knocked me down and then threw the plant at me.
“But it
didn’t hit me,” I said, and I looked Danny straight in the eye to see what he’d
say.
Danny said I
was a liar, but Mrs. Brown took one look at my dirty clothes and she believed
me. And be-cause of me he got into serious trouble. They didn’t only make his
parents come to school and suspend him for a day—after the incident with the
plant they also told him he’d have to start seeing this really horrible
counselor every Wednesday. The kids who knew him said his office stunk of
cigarettes and he was a real bore.
That was why
Danny found a way to get back at me. He said, “Just you wait.” That was exactly
what he said: “Just you wait.” And I did wait because I knew him. But Shakshuka
didn’t wait and she couldn’t have known how to wait for what ended up happening
to her.
