Less than ten yards...the dog is closing on her heels. “Watch out!” the boy shouts, and again, it’s words that seem to spur the girl into action. She accelerates and jumps—legs bent at the knees, arms at her sides like butterfly wings. The boy feels himself toppling. The dog also jumps, its growl thunderous, its gaping jaws open for the kill.
That’s when the girl pivots and swings the boot with a backhanded flick of her wrist; the three-inch galvanized rubber heel smacks the dog squarely on its brown muzzle. It chomps on air, centimeters from one of her thighs, and continues full speed into a fence post. The entire fence rattles as the girl clears it, almost sideways, and lands in the grass, legs still bent. The boy sees her—eyes adrenalin-laced, hair like a black waterfall--wincing in pain.
Physics, the boy thinks, blinking rapidly. The dog was faster, the fence easily a foot higher than the four-foot hurdles in 110m, but she defied both. How? In all the meets he’s been to, he’s never seen a long jump like this before, from anyone. Changing directions in mid-air, wielding the boot like a club--he could never do it. He keeps blinking, to clear his field of vision. Nothing is certain anymore.
“I’m OK,” the girl says, brushing herself off when he approaches. She bends her lead leg gingerly as she gets up. There’s a dark oval of sweat on the back of her purple shirt and a trickle of blood on her arm from a mosiac of scratches.
The man in the bathrobe approaches the fence. The dog lays on its side, a victim of momentum, wimpering, legs flailing. “Cupcake,” the man cries in distress, hunched over the dog. For the first time, the boy hears a foreign accent. The man is elderly, with a broad, unshaven face and thin clumps of gray hair that look weeds attached to his scalp. He looks up from the dog with enraged eyes and shouts: “Soup!”
The girl glances at the boy as if to say, see what I mean? But the boy understands. The man’s accent is Slavic, Czech or Albanian, like the boy’s grandparents. He is not offering “soup,” the boy explains. He is saying “sue,” as in, “I’m going to sue you.”
The man shakes his fist at them and says, “You will get soup!”
The girl challenges him, angry now. “My dad is a lawyer, and if anyone is going to get souped, it’s you and your fucking dog.”
“Cupcake!” The man gestures wildly at writhing animal. He says the name over and over, as if it’s the only thing he’s certain about in English. The boy sees blood rushing out of one of the dog’s nostrils.
“We should get it to a vet,” the boy says, grasping the fence, worried. “He doesn’t know what to do.”
The girl picks up her boot and starts limping to the car. “We’re leaving,” she says, without looking back.
The boy looks at the man and and his injured pet. He shrugs helplessly. He knows the girl is wrong. “I’m sorry,” he offers, unsure whether the man understands him. Tears form in the man’s bloodshot eyes. The boy feels spikes of guilt in his chest as he backs away. He watches the man and dog all the way to the car. Just before getting in, the dog’s legs stop moving. And it’s then that he sees the handwritten sign that has been there all along, visible but unseen at the far end of the fence: Beware Of Dog.
He puts on his glasses and pulls into the street. The girl pushes her knees against the dashboard, as if trying to stretch them. She’s so focused on her body, on relieving her pain, that she doesn’t seem to realize he’s there.
He comes to a stop sign and turns the corner, headed for her house. The boot sits in her lap. He notices for the first time how mangled it is--edges shredded, chunks of leather gone near the top. It looks like a severed limb. What a mistake, he thinks, driving along. What a complete waste.
He makes a sharp, sudden U-turn, throwing the girl against the passenger door. She cries out in protest.
“We’re taking Cupcake to the animal hospital,” he tells her. “It’s only three blocks away.”
“Are you insane? It’s not even your dog.”
“It’s going to die,” the boy says, racing down the street.
He skids to a stop in front of the house. The man is still there, standing over the dog. “Vet,” the boy yells at the man, who looks terrified. “Vet!” The boy tries the only Albanian phrase he knows, a common idiom he remembers his grandfather saying to his father from when he was a child: Let me help.
The man’s
eyes widen. The boy is still not sure if he understands, but together
they pick up the dog and place it in the back seat of the car. The girl
stays in front, frozen in place. The boy can only guess at what she’s
thinking, at the depths of her anger. But for the first time in what
feels like forever, he understands that some things are more important.
Zero days until the end of the world.
The girl knows about the boy’s way of marking time. He told her on the phone months ago, when they were talking about the future. In turn she told him about her calendar, about how she started it the day her father left and not before, though she and her sisters knew for months about what was coming. A countdown didn’t really make sense, she said. They never do, because the world doesn’t end. You just have to start over.
He comes to say goodbye while she’s standing in the driveway, cramming clothes and bedding and small appliances into her mother’s SUV. Her father is actually here, she tells him, in the kitchen with her mother and her sisters. They’re all going to drive her down to school later, if they can fit.
The boy stands awkwardly in the noon sun, shifting from foot to foot, hands darting in and out of his ripped pockets. The girl notices that he’s wearing his glasses, and that his hair is longer, which makes his ears fit better with his head. She wonders what he thinks of her newly shortened hair, the stylish bob she’s taking with her to college. The glasses make him look smart, she decides, his jaw slightly less slack. He still wears a faded t-shirt for a band she’s never heard of and fatigue pants with no knees. His posture reminds her of that walk they took a few months ago after the last home meet, just before the incident. They have seen each other rarely since then, going their separate ways. His phone calls have become infrequent. And when they do talk, the conversations are strained and full of long silences.
In a way, the girl is glad it happened. It made her re-think giving up track, especially after seeing what she could do when it mattered. And it cleared up her ambivalence about the boy, about whether there was any possibility of reciprocating his feelings. Since then she has pushed him away, the way her mother did with her father, but she knows it’s the right decision. The boy’s mad drive with the strange man and his dog to the animal hospital was too much. She regrets leaving, which she did when they got there, but she wanted no part of saving her tormentor. She still doesn’t know what happened to the dog, because they haven’t talked about it since that night.
None of it matters, anyway, she decides, because there’s a new person in her life, a sophomore she met while visiting campus for track tryouts last month. He’s majoring in political science, and he runs track, too. They’re aren’t exactly a couple, but she thinks they’ll become one, and soon after she gets there. She’s been calling him on his cell phone lately, before going to sleep, and it’s different than with the boy. The soft music of his voice relaxes her, and has made her insomnia a thing of the past. Plus there’s an almost electrical charge to their conversations, a feeling of excitement, of anticipation at finally getting to be alone. It’s unlike anything she’s ever experienced.
She asks the boy what he’s been up to do. He shrugs. “A lot of physics,” he says, “a lot of reading.” That’s why he needs the glasses. He’s taking AP exams for physics and calculus in October. His father is thrilled.
She remembers her boot, one of the last items in her closet that still needs to be packed. She’s taking it with her to college, even though it’s not wearable. Its meaning has changed for her over the summer. It’s become a kind of trophy, and a talisman for the future. As bad as that night was, she’s glad she got it back.
“Good luck with those tests,” the girl says, feeling the space between them widen, even as they stand here. He helped her that night, she knows, maybe even saved her from something serious. But he also had to make a choice, and he chose to abandon her. Nothing can ever be the same between them.
“We’ll see how it goes,” the boy replies, “not that it really matters.” Though the girl is certain, looking at his face, at his bruised and hidden thoughts, that it does.
“Well,” the girl says, “I have to finish packing.” She thinks about inviting him in but decides against it, fearing he might accept. She remembers how close they were once and wonders: What did I see in him? What made him special? That was high school though, and she’s beyond that now, an official graduate, college bound. The boy is still there, still has a year left in the tethered bubble of high school. They might as well be standing on opposite sides of a fence.
The boy says he has to getting back. They hug lightly, barely brushing shoulders, something that feels like an accidental touch, with no feeling or meaning behind it. “Maybe I’ll see you at Christmas,” he says.
“Yeah,” the girl answers, “keep in touch,” knowing that she hasn’t given him her new e-mail address or cell phone number.
She watches him shuffle slowly out of the driveway, his frayed pant cuffs dragging along the blacktop. From a distance he seems taller, his shoulders less stooped, his demeanor less forlorn. Goodbye, she thinks, feeling a nugget of something hard in her chest. A nugget that, suddenly, for no apparent reason, turns into a boulder, and then an avalanche.
“Hey,” she calls out. “What happened to that dog? Cupcake?”
The boy stops and looks back at her. And for the first time in months, perhaps ever, the girl sees his face, his entire disheveled persona, beaming. That’s it, she thinks, watching him, as his lovely mouth opens to answer.