“The one next to you is Blinkie. The other one is General Tso.” The names come to her then and there.
“You named them without me?” Ben actually sounds hurt.
“Well, if anything happens and we break up, they’d be my dogs.” Shelby doesn’t realize how cold this sounds until she sees Ben’s expression.
“Is that your plan?” Ben puts down his plate, not noticing when Blinkie snags a piece of tofu. His sight is good enough to steal food.
“Ben.” Shelby throws up her hands. “I don’t have a plan. Isn’t that obvious?”
She surprises him that night in bed when she embraces him. She’s never the one to initiate sex, but she moves on top of him and begins to kiss him, so deeply it seems she loves him, and maybe she does, although what does love matter in a world where it’s so easy to hurt someone?
All through the summer Shelby walks the dogs along the riverside before work. Since Ben asked her if she had a plan, she can’t stop thinking about the fact that she’s an aimless nothing. On the street people stay away from her because she still shaves her head and she wears her hoodie even when it’s ninety degrees. Clearly, she looks like someone who’s about to snap. But she’d already done that and all she got out of it was a stay in the hospital, where they told her to squeeze frozen oranges to bring her back to reality when she was having a panic attack. As if reality was what she wanted.
Shelby writes to colleges, but she’s so conflicted she throws the catalogs into the trash as soon as they arrive. And then one day she leaves the dogs at home and walks up to Hunter College and signs up for two classes, Latin, because she figures then she’ll know what Ben is talking about, and Principles of Biology. Maybe a science class will help her make sense of the world. She tells Ben that she’ll be out on Tuesday and Thursday nights.
“You do have a plan,” he says. “Does it include me?”
Shelby feels bad for him and goes to sit on his lap.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Ben says.
She kisses him as though her life depended on it, even though she knows it doesn’t. It depends on equal parts probability and luck. That’s why she keeps throwing the fortune cookies into the glass bowl. No one can predict what will happen. On the night of the accident Shelby fastened her seat belt, something she did only three times out of ten. Helene was perched on the edge of her seat, too excited over their rock--throwing adventure to bother with her seat belt, which she fastened nine times out of ten. Whenever anyone says that people get what they deserve, Shelby turns away. If that were true, she knows where she’d be right now, asleep and far away, cold to the touch, a dreamer who will never wake or rise from bed or kiss her beloved or lie to him and say, Yes, it’s true, the future is ours.
Shelby wonders if when you make one choice that’s out of the ordinary, all the rest of your life will change, an emotional domino effect. A few weeks after classes begin she’s called into the office at work. Ellen Grimes has recently been fired; there have been rumors of embezzlement and a trio of accountants has spent the last two weeks in the office, behind closed doors. Shelby assumes she’s also about to be fired as part of the downsizing. Clean out the waste before it cleans you out. Frankly, if she were in charge, she would fire herself. She’s been at the pet store for four months, time enough for people to see that she’s a black hole and a malcontent. She smokes weed in the storeroom with Juan. She wears her smock inside out. She gives herself a fifty percent discount rather than the usual twenty when she’s buying kibble for the General and Blinkie, and she does the same for any customer she senses has fallen on hard times. Shelby is the perfect person to get rid of, so she throws a couple of squeaky dog toys in her backpack before the meeting, thinking it’s the last freebie she’ll ever get from this place.
The general manager of the entire chain is waiting for her, a man in a suit and tie who stands when Shelby enters, as if she’s someone worthy of his good manners. Shelby sits down. She’s ready, willing, and able to be fired, and her mouth falls open when she’s told that she’s the new manager of the store. The company likes her integrity and her dedication. They’re impressed that she’s gone back to school.