“Ruthie, they’re here!” he called. We could still hear barking from the back rooms.
“Uh — how many dogs do you have?” Mom asked.
“Seven at the moment,” Milton said. “Three of our own and four that we’re fostering until they find good homes. We just can’t resist their little faces, and since our kids moved out, it sure keeps us busy.” He grinned as his wife came into the room. She had silver hair pinned into a loose bun and a pink tracksuit that matched his sweater vest.
She was carrying the most handsome dog I’d ever seen.
“Oh!” Aidan cried, pressing his hands to his chest dramatically.
The dachshund had floppy brown ears and a long brown body with short fur and little stubby legs. His black eyes were shining and alert, darting from my mom to me to Aidan and back again.
“We’ve been calling him Chutzpah,” Milton said. The way he said it sounded like “Hoots-pah.” “Ruthie says it’s very appropriate for such a bold, nosy little dog!”
I looked at Mom and she laughed politely, although I don’t think she completely understood the joke either. It didn’t matter, though; I would definitely be changing his name — just as soon as I thought of one that was perfect for him.
“Which of you is Charlie?” Ruth asked, smiling at us.
I waved, and she beckoned me over. We both knelt on the floor and she set the dog down between us. I held out my hand and he sniffed it really thoroughly with his long nose, starting at my fingertips and going down to my wrist and then back up my thumb.
“Here,” Ruth whispered, passing me a dog treat. “These are his favorites.”
I held out the treat and his tail swooshed up and started wagging. He looked up into my face and opened his mouth a bit like he was smiling.
“Sit,” I said. I’d been watching The Dog Whisperer and It’s Me or the Dog nonstop for a week, so I knew you were supposed to make the dog do something to earn its treat each time.
But the dog just kept looking at me, and Ruth and Milton both laughed. “Good luck with that!” Milton said. “We’ve been trying for a month and it’s pretty much impossible to teach him anything.”
“Impossible?” Mom said in a worried voice.
“Oh, but he’s house-trained!” Ruth reassured her. “We figured that was the most important thing.”
“Sure,” Mom said. “Yes. True.” She tucked a strand of red hair behind her ear and studied the dog.
The dachshund’s tail was still wagging. His sharp black eyes were fixed on the treat now. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just gave him the treat. His ears flapped as he chomped it down and then licked my fingers.
“Dachshunds are like that,” Milton added. “Stubborn, but very cute.”
“And very loyal,” Ruth said. I liked the sound of that. I wanted my dog to be loyal to me more than anything.
The dachshund suddenly took a step forward and planted his front paws on my knees. He leaned up toward my face with his tail wagging.
“Wow,” Milton said. “He likes you!”
“He’s usually much more nervous around strangers,” Ruth said admiringly.
I grinned at the dog. Slowly, so I wouldn’t startle him, I reached out and stroked his smooth head and back. His tail wagged even harder. His fur was short and a little oily under my fingers. I felt like I could sit there and pet him forever.
“This looks like a match to me!” Ruth proclaimed.
Milton started talking to my mom about the paperwork while Ruthie went to get a bag of things for the dog. I scratched behind the dachshund’s long, shiny ears. He pulled himself all the way into my lap and sat down.
“Can I say hi?” Aidan asked suddenly from behind me, and the dog and I both jumped. Without waiting for an answer, Aidan was already reaching for the dog’s face. “Hi dog! Can I hug him, please, can I?”
“I don’t think he’d like that,” I said, trying to shift away from Aidan’s grasping hands.
“I just want to hold him,” Aidan said. He leaned around me and reached for the dog again.
Suddenly the dachshund went “RARF! RARF!” very loudly right in Aidan’s face.
Startled, Aidan jumped back and fell over on his butt. The dog wriggled around in my arms, licked my neck, and looked back at Aidan like, Yeah, and stay out!
I was afraid Aidan would start crying, but I guess he was too surprised to cry. I mean, pretty much no one ever yells at him, and usually animals love him. I felt a little bad about the bewildered look on Aidan’s face, but I also felt a terrific explosion of happiness inside me. The dog had chosen me over sweet, adorable Aidan. That never happened.
“Everything OK here?” Mom asked, coming back over to us.
“Yup,” I said, rubbing the dog’s head. “Everything’s perfect.”
I had no idea how wrong I was.
There were a couple of warning signs. As we left the house with me holding the dog on a short red leash, Ruth said, “Oh, I forgot to ask. You don’t have any other pets, do you?”
Mom hesitated, like she was afraid they’d take the dog back if she told the truth, but of course she’s Mom, so she did anyway. “We do, actually,” she said. “A dog and a cat.”
“Oh,” Ruth said, chewing on her bottom lip. “Well, you might want to keep them apart as much as possible. We’ve been keeping Chutzpah in my sewing room by himself most of the time. He’s … not particularly fond of other animals. But I’m sure he’ll warm up to yours eventually!”
“Call us if you have any problems,” Milton said. “If anything goes wrong, we’d rather take him back than have you give him to a shelter.”
“Nothing will go wrong,” I said. The dog had buried his nose in a clump of purple flowers by the door and was pawing at the dirt curiously.
“Thanks very much,” Mom said. “We’ll keep you posted.” Milton and Ruth waved as we walked back to the car.
Aidan had been really quiet since the dog barked at him. He didn’t even ask if he could sit in the front seat on the way home. The dog stood on my lap with his front paws up on the door and peered out the window for the whole drive. I rubbed his back and sometimes he’d turn and look at me like he was checking that it was still me patting him.
We could hear loud music thumping from David’s room when we opened the front door to our house. The dachshund twitched his ears and looked around in this cute, confused way.
“David!” my mom shouted up the stairs, but of course he couldn’t hear her. “Aidan, go get your brother while I make lunch,” she said.
Aidan bounded up the stairs and I followed Mom through the living room to the kitchen. The dachshund trotted at my heels, his ears flapping as he whipped his head in every direction, trying to sniff everything at once.
“What would you like for lunch?” Mom asked. I knew that was her way of saying she still felt bad about making the wrong thing for breakfast.
“Grilled ham and cheese?” I suggested.
“Excellent choice,” she said with a smile. She got out the bread and started slicing cheese while I put down food and water for the dog on the far side of the refrigerator. I was pretty proud of the new dog dishes we’d bought for him: red, with little white dog bones on them. They looked very cool next to his shiny brown coat and red collar.
But the dog couldn’t have been less interested in them. The dachshund sniffed his food, gave me a dubious look, and then trotted across the kitchen to the mat where Bowser’s empty metal food dish sat next to his water bowl. I’d given him the same food Bowser gets, but he spent ten minutes sniffing Bowser’s dish anyway, as if he suspected there was something better hidden in there somewhere.
Finally he licked it clean, then lifted his head, sniffed, and followed his nose around the kitchen table to the corner where Meowser’s food and water were set out in these little matching fish-shaped ceramic containers.
There was still food left in Meowser’s dish — she’s kind of a fussy eater. So I hurried over and picked it up before the
dog could eat any of it.
“Uh-uh, no,” I said. “No cat food for you. Gross. Yuck. No.”
The dog gave me a look like, You dare deny ME something I want? If he’d had eyebrows, one of them would have been raised skeptically. But when I wouldn’t put the dish back down, he turned and strolled back to his own food again. I loved the way he held up his head proudly, as if he was surveying his kingdom while he walked.
“What are you going to name him?” Mom asked.
“Something noble,” I said. “Like Sheriff or Duke or Prince or Rajah.”
Unfortunately, David came into the kitchen just in time to hear me say that. He laughed in his smirky, unfriendly way. “Rajah?” he echoed. “Sheriff! Those are the dumbest —”
“Rarf! Rarf! Rarf!” the dachshund suddenly yapped, noticing David for the first time. “RARF!” His bark was a lot louder and deeper than I would have expected from such a little guy. He looked at me as if making sure he had backup, then whipped his head back around to David. “RARF! RARF!”
“Uh, someone is loud,” David observed snidely, crossing his arms.
I heard nails skidding on the living room floor and realized that Bowser was running after David to find out what all the barking was about. I tried to grab the dachshund, but he bounced out of my reach just as Bowser burst into the kitchen.
“RARF RARF RARF RARF RARF!” the dachshund hollered angrily. He wasn’t at all afraid to get in Bowser’s face, although Bowser was at least four times his size.
Bowser growled, showing his teeth. His paws were planted squarely on the kitchen tile, and his small eyes shifted from the dachshund to me to his food dish. He stepped forward menacingly, placing himself between my dog and David.
The minute he moved, the dachshund went berserk. “RARF RARF RARF RARF RARF RARF RARF RARF RARF!” he yelled, running at Bowser and then darting back at the last second and then running at him again.
Behind David, Aidan was watching the dogs with wide brown eyes and his hands over his ears.
“What is wrong with this dog?” David shouted over the barking. “He’s seriously demented or something!”
“He’s not!” I shouted back. “Bowser is making him nervous!”
“Ha!” David said. “Bowser’s not even doing anything! Your dog is a spaz. Forget Duke; you should call him Mr. Meanie-Weenie.”
Aidan started laughing. “Mr. Meanie-Weenie!” he cried. “That’s so funny!”
“It’s not funny!” I said. “Shut up!” I was talking to David and Aidan, but part of me was talking to my dog, too. He would not stop barking at Bowser. I grabbed the dachshund and picked him up out of Bowser’s way. That made him stop for a second, but when he looked down and saw that Bowser was still glaring at him, he rarfed a few more times.
“Charlie, honey, why don’t you take him upstairs for a little while?” my mom suggested. She looked like she wanted to cover her ears, too.
“Fine,” I said, although it wasn’t fine at all because if you asked me, Bowser was the one being a big scary jerk, and my dog was just defending me. I knew how he felt. I wished I was brave enough to yell at David like that.
I stomped out of the kitchen carrying the dachshund.
“Can I come with you?” Aidan immediately asked, trailing behind us.
“No,” I said. “I’m taking him to the attic.”
“Oh,” Aidan said. He stopped in the middle of the living room and watched me head upstairs with the dog. I wondered where Meowser was. She often hid when strangers came over, so I guess it made sense for her to hide from a new barking dog.
The attic is my place. A few years ago I asked my mom if I could go up there whenever I needed to get away from everyone else in the house. David has his own room, but I have to share with Aidan, so it only seemed fair. And Aidan was too little back then to climb the attic stairs by himself. He’s big enough now, but he knows that he’s not supposed to bother me when I’m in the attic. It’s the one place I can go to get away from his questions and his constant poking about in my stuff.
Holding the dachshund under one arm, I pulled on the string that unfolds the attic stairs from the ceiling. It’s pretty cool that I’m tall enough to reach it now; when I first started going up to the attic, I had to climb on a stool to do that. The trapdoor opened downward with a lot of creaking and moaning, and I pulled the stairs out the rest of the way.
Our house is really old, so it creaks and moans everywhere. All the wooden floors are warped in funny ways, so there are big gaps under some of the doors. When we first moved in, apparently there was fuzzy peach velvet wallpaper with glittery paisley patterns on it on all the walls. I don’t remember that, but Mom kept a sample so I’ve seen it. It was pretty hideous. She and Dad spent several weekends stripping it all off.
She talks about doing other stuff to the house sometime, like renovating the bathrooms, but she’s too busy, and we all think it’s fine the way it is.
The attic has always been my favorite room. It’s as big as a whole floor of the house, crammed with stuff, and it’s exactly the kind of place you would expect to go through to get to Narnia. There’s piles of old furniture up there, all dark wood and engraved bronze handles and funny lion’s-claw feet. There’s a huge old mirror with thick glossy copper vines woven around the outside. After I read the first Harry Potter book, I decided it was the Mirror of Erised and stared into it for hours, trying to make my strongest desire appear (although at the time I think my strongest desire was probably ice-cream sundaes, so it wouldn’t have been very exciting).
The deal is that Mom lets me use the attic if I dust it and sweep it once a month for her. I know that sounds like it would be hard because there’s so much stuff up there, but actually it’s really fun because I’m always finding something weird that I’ve never seen before. All my grandparents’ stuff on my dad’s side ended up in our attic when they moved to Florida, so there are trunks of really old clothes and faded black-and-white photos and goofy old board games and mysterious devices which I guess did old-fashioned things that are now done by computers.
In the back corner, next to the big round window and under one of the skylights, I’ve cleared a space for my stuff. There’s a large squishy denim beanbag, a pile of dark blue and green blankets, a small lamp, a portable electric heater, and a wooden crate full of my favorite books. I’m going to put my telescope here as soon as I’ve saved enough to afford one. Then I can sit here at night and look at Mars and think about how I’m going to go there one day.
It is by far the best spot in the house, mainly because no one can come up here but me, and only Mom sometimes sticks her head through the trapdoor opening to call me down for dinner. (She used to come up every time to check that I’d turned off the heater, too, but since I was really good about it, she trusts me to remember it myself now.)
I flung myself down on the beanbag and set the dog on the wooden floor. He’d calmed down a lot as we were climbing the stairs, and now it was like he’d totally forgotten about David and Bowser. His eyes were bright and curious as he started sniffing around. His tail went up and his nose went down and he set off into the attic like he was on a mission of exploration.
“Just don’t fall down the stairs!” I called after him.
He wagged his tail at me and kept sniffing.
“I have to pick a name for you,” I said. “What do you think? Duke?”
He didn’t look up from his sniffing.
“Prince?” I tried. “Come here, Prince!”
The dog stuck his nose in the small space under a wardrobe and pawed at one of the dust bunnies. He was so low to the ground that he could practically crawl underneath it.
“Emperor!” I said. “Who’s a good boy, Emperor?”
The dachshund didn’t even look back at me. Plus “Emperor” felt really silly to say out loud.
I looked at my crate of books and thought for a moment. The Oz books were on the top, but “Wizard” seemed like a weird name, too. I pulled out The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and flipped through it to the part about ruling Narnia.
“Of course!” I said. “I’m an idiot. Your name should be King! Because you’re the king of any room you walk into, right?”
“Rarf!” the dachshund yelped. For a moment I thought he was agreeing with me, but when I looked up I realized he was barking at his reflection in the giant mirror. “Rrrrrrr!” King growled. “Rarf!”
“Oh, stop,” I said, getting up and going over to him. “That’s just you, dopey.”
“Rarf!” King said again. I didn’t know if he really liked the name, but I liked it, so I figured I’d try it for a while.
“Come on, King,” I said. “Come back over here.” I tried to turn him around toward the beanbag, but he wriggled out of my hands and ran back at the mirror.
“Rarf rarf!” he yapped. “Rarf rarf rarf!” It seemed to make him pretty mad that the dachshund in the mirror wasn’t intimidated by him at all.
Luckily I knew the attic pretty well, so it didn’t take me long to find an old sheet in a nearby trunk. I threw the sheet over the mirror and King blinked several times, as if that was an extremely baffling development. He looked up at me for a moment in confusion, and then shook himself and strutted back to the beanbag like, That’s right, I took care of THAT little problem. Out of my way, peons!
I sat back down on the beanbag and took one of the treats Ruth had given me out of my pocket. “Here you go, King,” I said. “Come here.”
He took the treat delicately from my fingers, wolfed it down, and went over to investigate the pile of blankets. It wasn’t really cold enough for the heater or the blankets yet, so they were still folded neatly … but not for long. King grabbed the top one between his teeth and dragged it to the floor, growling and shaking it.
“King!” I said, digging out another treat. “King, come!”
He shook the blanket a few more times for good measure and then dropped it on the floor and started dig-dig-digging at it with his front paws. He managed to pile it up into a little mountain, and then he dove at it and burrowed underneath. His butt and tail waved madly at me as he rooted around under the folds of green fabric.