“Thanks, Hitch,” Uncle Walt says. “Your mom has some old-fashioned ideas about obligation—how much people owe each other. I admire her, I really do, but I’m not that way. And maybe that’s selfish or maybe it’s just self-protective. Or maybe it’s the same thing. Hey, I never said I was perfect.”
He kisses the top of my head and leaves the room, but I can’t stop thinking about what he just said. I guess I did think Uncle Walt was perfect, or as perfect as a person could be, and I don’t like knowing he’s not. And if I want to be just like Uncle Walt, does that mean I’m selfish too?
Cy is waiting for me after school on Friday. I can see his big grin from halfway down the hallway.
“Let’s get going,” he says. “Gary’s bringing his dog over so we can see if he’s right for the movie.”
“The dog’s a she,” I correct him. “Buffy.”
His grin disappears. “I thought it was Buffalo—that sounds like a boy. How do you know, anyway?”
“We talked about it the other day. It’s Buffy for short.”
He grunts. “I guess you guys talked about a lot of stuff the other day.”
“Not really,” I say. It’s funny Cyrus is so bothered about me talking to Gary Hackett. I thought he wanted me to like the guy. Not that I like him all that much, of course.
Cy’s mom is waiting for us in the car and starts asking the usual mother questions: How was your day? How was the test? Do you have much homework? The kinds of questions that stop you talking about anything important.
When we get to Cy’s, I run home and grab my camera, then join him on his front porch steps while we wait for Gary.
“So, what else did the two of you talk about?” Cyrus asks, pouting a little bit.
“Nothing! I told you already—my grandma and his dog.” I’m looking at Cy’s front yard through the camera, trying to see what might make an interesting background and where the best light is at this time of the day.
“I didn’t even know you were hanging out now. I mean, I thought you didn’t like him.”
I put the camera down. “You’re the one who told me to be nice to him! You said it was a compliment that he liked me, and I should stop being mean to him.”
Cyrus stares between his shoes at the sidewalk. “I know. I just didn’t think the two of you would suddenly be best buddies. Or whatever you are.”
“We’re not anything! We’re just…people who talk to each other. Why are you being so weird? I thought you wanted me to like him.”
“I did. I do. Just…”
“Just what?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know.”
And then I get it. Cyrus feels left out, like Gary is my new BFF or something. “Just because I talk to Gary once in a while doesn’t mean anything is different between you and me,” I tell him. “There’s nobody I like more than you, Cy. I mean, you know, not like like.”
He smiles a little and bumps his shoulder into mine. “Yeah, I know. You’re right. Sorry I’m being weird.”
“I’m used to it,” I say, bumping him back.
Right about then a station wagon pulls up to the curb, and Gary Hackett gets out. Thank goodness he’s wearing jeans today. There’s a huge brown-and-white dog in the back of the car, slurping the window with a gigantic pink tongue.
Gary’s mom gets out too. “Let me help you,” she says. “Buffy gets really excited when she’s been in the car, but she’ll settle down in a minute.”
Gary opens the hatch, and his mother grabs the leash just as Buffy leaps out of the car. The dog pulls her halfway across Cyrus’s lawn before she gets enough leverage to yank her to a stop. I’ve never been afraid of dogs, but I wouldn’t want to be run over by one this size.
“Sit, Buffy!” she yells. Buffy jumps up and puts her big paws on my shoulders, panting right in my face. Her doggy breath smells like the food you find in the back of the refrigerator that’s been there so long you can’t tell what it is anymore. I almost gag.
“Down, Buffy, down!” Mrs. Hackett says. “Just push her off you, dear.”
It takes all my strength to get Buffy’s feet back on the ground. Gary takes her leash and says, “Stay!” in a stern voice. Finally Buffy sits and stays, looking up expectantly. Gary pulls a treat from a bag he’s wearing on his belt, and Buffy grabs it before he gets it anywhere near her mouth. She swallows it without even chewing.
“Now that she sees I’ve got the treats, she’ll listen to me,” Gary says.
“I hope so.” His mother doesn’t seem convinced. “My appointment should take about an hour. Then I’ll come back for her,” she says. “You’ll be okay that long?”
“Of course,” Gary says.
“Just don’t let go of the leash,” his mother warns him.
As she drives off, I start to realize how hard this is going to be. Arnold is a talking dog who has run away from home. He can’t be wearing a leash in the movie, especially a leash with Gary Hackett attached to it.
“So when do we start making the movie?” Gary turns in circles to keep Buffy away from the treat bag.
“I think we need to practice a few scenes with Buffy before we shoot anything,” I say. “Do you think I could hold the leash?”
Gary looks uncertain. “I don’t know. My mom said I should keep hold of it.”
“I know, but in the movie the dog runs away with Fawn, with me. There can’t be some guy along holding on to the leash.”
“I’m not even in it,” Cy says. “It’s just a girl and a dog.”
“Stop complaining,” I tell him. “You’re the dog’s voice.”
“Can I be in it?” Gary wants to know. “I could be a guy who also wants to run away. Then I could hold the leash.”
Cy sticks his hands on his hips. “If Gary gets to be in it, so do I.”
“I’d have to rewrite it completely!”
“You told me you didn’t finish it yet. Come on! Let me and Cy be in it too,” Gary begs. His eyes get all twinkly, as if he knows that will change my mind.
What can I do? If I’m going to have Buffy in the movie, it’s pretty obvious I’ll have to have Gary in it too. And I can’t have Gary in it and not Cyrus, especially since he’s been feeling left out lately.
“Maybe,” I say. “Let me think about it.”
“Yes!” Gary says. Apparently he’s paying too much attention to me and not enough to Buffy. She grabs the treat bag right off his belt and chews up the whole thing in about two seconds. He tries to pull the bag out of her mouth, but all that’s left are a few pieces of cloth.
“My mom’s gonna kill me,” Gary says, groaning. And then, while he’s staring in horror at what’s left of the bag, Buffy manages to jerk the leash out of his hands and starts galloping down the sidewalk.
“Buffalo!” he screams. “Catch her!”
Who would have thought that enormous fluffy cow could run so fast? She’s headed right toward a little kid on a tricycle down the block, and he abandons his wheels and runs into his house, screaming. He probably thinks there’s an actual buffalo on the loose.
The three of us chase after Buffy, but she’s got a head start. Gary keeps yelling her name, which just seems to make her run faster. She gallops through Mr. Meyer’s carefully tended peony garden, and pink petals float in the air like butterflies, then spin to the ground. Mr. Meyer is not going to be pleased.
Gary and I are neck and neck when all of a sudden Cyrus comes pounding around us with some kind of superhuman speed I didn’t know he had. Just as he’s catching up to her, Buffy veers off toward the street. Cy lunges at her and lands on top of her like a rodeo cowboy who’s roped a calf. The two of them roll off the curb together.
“Grab the leash!” Cy yells, his fingers plunged deep into the giant fur ball’s coat. He’s got peony petals in his hair, and Buffy’s got one on her nose.
Gary gets the leash and wraps it around his hand twice. “Got it! Wow, thanks, Cy. She could have gotten hit by a car!”
“When did you beco
me a sprinter?” I ask Cyrus as I help him up.
Cy dusts off his pants and shrugs. He seems a little embarrassed by his accomplishment. “I don’t know. It was an emergency, so I ran fast.”
Buffy trots happily down the sidewalk. Apparently she’s already forgotten about her race for freedom. When we get back to Cy’s front yard, she scarfs down the last few treats that fell onto the grass.
Cyrus plops down next to Buffy, and she slurps his face with her gigantic tongue. “Pew! What do you feed this dog? Garbage and skunks? Maisie, why did you have to write a story about a dog, anyway?”
“You’re just mad she has a bigger part than you do,” I say.
“Yeah, I am! If I’m gonna spend the summer making this movie, I at least want to be in it.”
“Come on, Maisie,” Gary says. “Let’s rewrite it so there are parts for all of us. We’ll do it together.” I give up and sit down next to Cy. I can’t make a movie by myself. I can’t make a movie with a dog in it if I don’t have a dog. Sometimes you can’t make the exact movie you have in your mind, so you make the movie you can make. I’m sure some famous filmmaker said that sometime.
Buffy throws up and then falls fast asleep on the lawn.
Cy brings his mother’s laptop outside and types away as we come up with ideas. We decide to go back to the ghost idea, so okay, there will be three ghost kids and one ghost dog. That could be funny, right? And maybe a little scary too.
“So, are we brothers and sisters or what?” Gary asks. “I mean, we don’t look much alike.”
“How about cousins,” I say. “Cousins don’t have to look alike. And Uncle Walt can be our uncle.”
Cyrus nods. “Yeah, he’s too good-looking to be believable as the father of one of us.”
Gary gives Cy an elbow in the ribs, but he laughs too. “Speak for yourself, dork.”
Cy’s face turns red.
“He could be Maisie’s father,” Gary says, looking across Cy and down toward me. “You both have dark hair and…stuff.”
“We’re getting off track,” I say, to change the subject from my “stuff.” “We have to decide who can see the ghosts. Just Uncle Walt, or whatever we’re going to call him? Or can other people see us too?”
“It would be funnier if other people could see us too,” Cyrus says. “We could scare them.”
“But not everybody,” Gary says. “Just some people.”
“So, why can some people see us and others can’t?” I ask.
We think about that for a minute, and then it comes to me. “The people who were kind to us when we were alive can see us, but mean people can’t. That way we can pull tricks on them, and they won’t know who did it.”
“Yeah, but if the nice people can see us, they’re the ones getting scared,” Cy says.
“Just at the beginning,” I say, “but then they figure out we’re not going to hurt them. It’ll be funny.”
“Yeah, Maisie’s right,” Gary says, smiling at me.
The three of us manage to figure out a plot pretty quickly. I don’t mind so much that Gary Hackett is part of our group now, which might be because of how he agrees with pretty much everything I say. If Cy and I are arguing about something, Gary is always on my side. “We could make up our faces to look all bloody and weird,” Cy says, excited. There’s nothing he likes more than face paint, which you can tell from every Halloween picture his mother has ever taken.
“Cyrus, we’re supposed to be ghosts, not zombies!” I say. Gary cracks up laughing like I’m Tina Fey or Melissa McCarthy. It’s a little embarrassing, but it’s also pretty cool that he thinks I’m funny.
It’s strange having somebody like me so much. It makes me feel a little bit…powerful. Like I’m making it happen. I’m sitting here with two boys, and suddenly I feel almost like a different person. I mean, I feel like such a girl. I never felt like this when it was just me and Cy.
Cyrus doesn’t laugh—he just looks at the computer. “Okay,” he says, “we need to scare somebody. Oh, you know what would be funny? Maybe Buffy scares some other dogs!”
I do think that would be funny, but I’ve already got another idea, so I say, “How about this? Let’s scare Mr. Kane! We won’t even tell him he’s in a movie!” Mr. Kane is the vice-principal at our school. He’s always staring at kids in the hall and poking two fingers at his own eyes and then at yours. He’s creepy.
“That’s awesome, Maisie!” Gary yells. “It would be so hilarious to scare Mr. Kane!”
Cyrus smacks the laptop shut and jumps up. “You think everything Maisie says is so great, Gary! You don’t even listen to what I say! My ideas are just as good as hers!”
Whoa. Cyrus doesn’t get mad very often, which makes it so much worse when he does. He looks like he’s trying really hard not to cry, and I don’t know what to say. Why is he getting so upset about everything these days?
Gary is surprised too. “I didn’t mean your ideas weren’t good, Cy.”
“I liked your dog idea,” I say. “I just thought of that Mr. Kane thing—”
But Cy isn’t looking at or listening to me. His eyes are locked on Gary’s, and his face is on fire. “I guess you two would rather do this without me,” he says. “I’m just getting in your way. I’m just the dogcatcher.”
“I didn’t say that—” Gary says. “You guys are the moviemakers. I just—”
But Cyrus is heading for his front door, fast.
“Cy, come on!” I yell. “What’s the matter? We want to do this with you!”
I’m pretty sure there are tears spurting from his eyes by now, and there’s no chance he’ll turn around and let us see that. He slams the door behind him.
Gary stares at me in shock. “What just happened? Why is he so mad?”
I shrug like I don’t know either, but I do know, and I feel bad about it. I liked the way Gary thought everything I said was hilarious, and I wasn’t really paying much attention to Cyrus’s ideas. It was almost like Gary and I were in a little circle that Cy was locked out of. I never meant to hurt Cyrus’s feelings. Maybe he thinks I don’t want to be his best friend anymore. I’ll explain it to him. We’ll make up. We always do.
Gary is pulling up chunks of grass from the lawn. “If Cyrus doesn’t want to make the movie anymore, I guess we’ll have to do it ourselves. I mean, the two of us, together.” He looks up at me shyly.
What? No, no, no. I mean, Gary’s okay. I even kind of like him now, but there is no “two of us, together.” No way.
“I’ll talk to Cyrus,” I say. “I’ll make him change his mind.”
“Well, if he doesn’t want to—”
“He wants to,” I say. “Cyrus and I always want to make movies together. Maybe the three of us wasn’t such a good idea.”
Gary’s tentative smile crumbles, which makes me feel kind of lousy. I like Gary now, but I need Cyrus to be part of this too. Cy is my best friend, always and forever. And Gary doesn’t want to be my best friend—he wants something else, something I don’t even want to think about. We sit in silence for a few more minutes, ripping bald patches in Cy’s parents’ lawn until Mrs. Hackett pulls up in the station wagon and the big pillow we’ve been leaning on leaps up, barking, and runs to greet her.
“Everything good with Buffy?” Mrs. Hackett asks.
Gary nods.
“She was perfect,” I say.
Mrs. Hackett laughs. “That’s a first.”
Gary gets up and heads to the car. “See you, Maisie,” he says sadly.
“Okay,” I yell after him. “See you!” I try to sound enthusiastic, but he doesn’t turn around.
While his mom loads Buffy into the back, Gary gets into the front seat and slams the door.
I turn around and look at Cyrus’s front door, also slammed. An hour ago we were having a great time, and now everybody’s mad at everybody. I hate being twelve.
“Hurry up, Maisie,” Mom calls. “I want to have time to explain everything to Grandma before the caretaker gets there
.”
Mom is already outside, waiting by the car, when I shuffle out. “Why do I have to go with you? Why can’t Uncle Walt?” The Saturday matinee is Dracula, the 1931 version with Bela Lugosi, and I know Cyrus wants to go. It might have been an easy way to patch up the weird argument we had yesterday, but I didn’t call him since I had to go to Grandma’s today, and he didn’t call me either.
Mom doesn’t answer my question right away. We’re a block or two down the street before she says, “I don’t really want your uncle Walt along. And anyway, he didn’t want to come.”
I can understand why he didn’t want to come; explaining to my grandmother that her memory is so bad that she has to have a total stranger stay with her isn’t high on my list of favorite ways to spend the afternoon either.
“Why don’t you want Uncle Walt along? Grandma’s crazy about him.”
“Exactly. And it turns us both into our worst selves. When Grandma starts in on how fabulous Walter is, he becomes a preening prima donna and I turn into a resentful, fire-spewing dragon.”
“I guess you get jealous.”
“I do, Maisie, and I’m not proud of it. Anyway, today isn’t about me or your uncle Walt. It’s about getting your grandmother to accept something she’s not going to like. I want to concentrate on that problem and not my own.”
I can see why Mom gets jealous. Grandma does act like Uncle Walt is her favorite child, but I always figured that was just because he’s not around much. She misses him, plus he’s not here to argue with her like Mom is.
“So how come I have to go?” I ask.
“Because Grandma adores you too, and I’m hoping that will make this easier. It won’t be just me, the bad guy, delivering the news. You’ll help soften the blow.”
“But you’re not jealous of me?”
She laughs. “Of course not, Maisie. You’re my daughter!”
I don’t know why that makes a difference, but I let it go.
“It’s just that I really wanted to go to the movies today.”
Mom sighs. “Maisie, you go to the movies every Saturday. It won’t kill you to miss a week.”