She’s the kind of dog who makes Q-tips totally unnecessary. If I just lie there in my waterbed and let her put her head on my chest, once in a while she’ll lift up her face, zone in on her target, and zap my ear with her sandpaper tongue. I’d say she’s gotten a good two inches up into my ear canal, which I’m sure is totally sanitary given the fact that her favorite hobby is sniffing other dog’s buttholes, but oh well.
We are luxuriating and undulating in my (water)bed on a Friday afternoon. We’re here because Max and I took another day off from the truck and made an awesome, amazing, epic plan, starting tomorrow, to achieve food truck world domination. I am not 100 percent sure it will work — not even 30 percent, really — but we definitely have a better shot than we did a couple days ago, when we were plan-free.
Dorcas laps my nose with her seemingly endless tongue. It’s amazing that she can rest her chin on my stomach and still reach my face.
I’m thinking about Max. Who is, apparently, gay. This is new information. I had him stereotyped as a basic dude bro. He is a dude bro, I think, but not a basic one. Nope. He showed me a very nonbasic dude bro video of football players losing their shorts, and I was like, Oh. Okay. Wow.
The tragic thing about this is that it was easier when I had nothing in common with him. Now that we did a truck exorcism together and I figured out he’s actually kinda cool, and now that I know he’s also gay, I have to contend with the mean practical joke of the universe. Which is to say: Now I have if not a gay friend at least a gay acquaintance. There are LGBTQ kids at school, but I am not exactly the most social person. So now I have a gay … something, and he is so far out of my league that we may as well live on different planets.
Yep. I’m pretty sure that’s worse. I focus on the Andy Gibb poster on my wall and ask: Andy, is this worse?
Yes, he says. Clearly worse, darling.
Dorcas turns her snout until she is facing me head-on, and she gets a little too up into my nostrils. I push her snout away, prop my head up on a satin pillow, and text Pam and Kayla.
Me: Whatcha up to
Kayla: Pretty Little Liars
Me: There are other shows out there. U should try watching one sometime
Pam: Nope
Me: Are u together?
Kayla: Yup
Me: Without me. Nice
Pam: Figured you were working?
Me: Not today long story. Dorcas wants to see you. Come over?
Kayla: Only if Lydia is there
Me: Nah no idea where shes been all day
Kayla: Fine well come anyway
Me: Yay
Thank God for Pam and Kayla. My life was so boring before them. We became friends spring semester of freshman year, when we were in the musical Birds of Paradise together. I played Homer, the talented, nerdy actor hopelessly in love with Julia, played by Kayla. Pam played Hope, who was in love with Homer. The love triangle was awkward as fuck for a while. I thought they were mean girls who hated me. Then they came over one day, ostensibly to practice lines, and they did a gay intervention.
“You’re gay, you know,” Kayla said. She was standing in our living room, her arms crossed, Pam right at her side.
I don’t know what they expected. Tears? Me to be like, Oh my God! You’re right! How did I not realize this?
“Duh,” I said.
Pam and Kayla locked eyes.
“Oh,” Pam said. “So you know that already.”
I repeated, “Duh.”
“We thought you were a hopeless closet case. We were, like, going to help you come out.”
“I’m hopeless. Just not a closet case.”
This made them laugh, and we all loosened up, and suddenly the play got way better. Or I should say, the play was still awful because I am not a great singer, and Pam is also not a great singer, but we had a total blast and I was let into the club. We’ve been inseparable ever since. Kayla is still all about theater. Pam and I have never done another show. Pam moved on to volleyball and I moved on to lying in my waterbed with Dorcas, doing nothing.
I jump off the bed and Dorcas leaps off too, wagging her tail at me. Poor thing. Summers suck for Dorcas. Any time after about nine in the morning, the sidewalk is too hot for her. So is the tile next to the pool. She can go out the doggie door to do her business on the shaded side of the house, but that’s about all the fun she has. I normally take her for a morning walk, but now that I’m working starting at five, she’s not getting that either. I know my mom isn’t picking up the slack, so she’s getting basically no exercise. Poor girl.
I get an idea I love.
I pat the side of my leg, which means follow me. Dorcas walks at my side to my mom’s bedroom, which is at DEFCON 3. Her treadmill-hamper is covered with clothing from the past two weeks, I’m guessing, and there are empty soda cans and four half-full glasses with various rotting liquids on her night table. I roll my eyes. I don’t feel like cleaning up right now, but I go to her treadmill and carry her dirty clothes to the actual hamper in the corner. Dorcas follows me every step, which is part of why I need to teach her how to exercise inside. Mom used to at least hang with her all day, but I think Mom’s forgotten about Dorcas, pretty much.
We got Dorcas a year after my dad died. Mom was in this short-lived religious phase — hence the biblical name.
We went to the pet shop at Arizona Mills. It was called Puppies ’N Love, which is a little too cute a name, and the place smelled like sweet aerosol spray, which was clearly just covering up the odor of dog crap. I saw this bichon frise. She was so sweet, with black eyes like tiny marbles and the softest white fur. Even though Mom wanted a bigger dog, she allowed me to sit in the tiny, glass-enclosed visiting room with the dog.
Oh my God, did I love that bichon. She just sat on my lap like she belonged there, and I stroked the top of her bed and she stuck her tongue out in that contented way that says, Keep doing that forever, please.
I was set. I had already named her Snowball. But Mom had questions.
“So are you a chain?” she asked the flummoxed, barely adult salesgirl who was working with us.
“We have another store up at Paradise Valley,” she said.
My mom raised an eyebrow. “Oh! At the mall there? That’s so expensive!”
“We’re like the discount center I guess,” the girl said.
“So, what?” my mom said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Are the dogs cheaper here?”
The girl said, “We sort of get the ones that don’t sell right away.”
My mom’s eyes opened real wide. “You mean these are OUTLET DOGS?”
The girl didn’t know what to do with my mom. Few people ever do. She just shrugged, and my mom said to me, “Say good-bye to the dog.”
“No!” I said.
But she insisted, and she grabbed my elbow and hauled me out of there, and there I was, sobbing in a mall, while my mom told me there are more fish in the sea, or dogs in the yard, or whatever.
“You don’t buy the first dog you see. You comparison shop,” she said.
She didn’t understand me. She didn’t get it. That of course if it were up to me, I’d get the first dog I fell in love with. Because I loved it. And what more is there than that? How do you comparison shop love?
And then she sweetened up, and she promised me an even better dog, as well as an ice-cream sandwich from Slickables, and I was pretty much over Snowball.
We wound up going to the pound when my mom decided that it was a waste of money to spend $1,800 on an animal. Dorcas was a gray-black goldendoodle. She had only been at the pound a day. When she saw us, she wagged her tail so hard that her whole butt wagged, and that made us laugh. The guy there was like, “You don’t find a dog like this at the pound too often,” and I wasn’t so sure he wasn’t being like a used car salesman, but my mom was charmed. And I had to admit I was too. The way Dorcas stared directly at me with her mouth open in seeming wonder made me feel like someone liked me. And I know that’s pathetic but it’s true.
I look at Dorcas now as she stands at the foot of the treadmill.
“You need exercise,” I say, and she just looks at me like, Bitch, you are aware I don’t speak English, right?