I make him wait a few beats before I reply—K.
And then I remember what Mr. Whitbey’s lecture about magical ice reminds me of. It’s the statue—the first one my mother and I visited in Rome when I was fourteen. The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.
???
A couple of days later, Thursday after school, I drive straight to the shelter. When I was ordered to find a place to volunteer (can one be ordered to volunteer? Is it still volunteering, then?), I knew immediately that I’d rather work at an animal shelter than an old folks’ home or a food bank, but then I had to choose between the shelter closest to our house—the one that’s taken care of by retirees and widows with nothing better to do with their time than give blowouts to bichon frisés and teach labradoodles how to play fetch, where the shelter’s “holding areas” are built in a crescent around a central lawn, a fountain in the middle, donated by some rich cat lady who died a dozen years ago—or the one in Santa Ana.
It used to be that my mother had to drive me, which she resented terribly. “It’s bad enough that you did such a stupid thing to that poor girl,” she said, “but I don’t see why I should be punished for it, too.” I never responded. I just stared out my window as we left the groomed, curved streets of Irvine, as we looped onto the freeway, as other cars with other people slid silently by, each car a separate pod of life, each person distinct and someone I would never know.
Since getting my own license and my own car—my mom’s hand-me-down Prius, really a gift from my mother to herself, as she didn’t have to drive me anymore—I take myself to the shelter. It takes me thirty minutes to get to Santa Ana. I could be there in twenty, but like usual, I stay off the freeway. Here, the shelter is housed in the basement of a concrete-block building in the middle of downtown. Here, the cars don’t sparkle, and they’re more likely to have bumpers and headlights duct-taped into place than they are to have valid registration stickers. In this town, there are bigger problems than pets in need of “rehoming.”
Just a few blocks away from the shelter is Santa Ana’s newly rehabilitated Arts District. There, young, tattooed artists and writers sip cappuccinos and craft beers at sidewalk cafes; there, local bands unload their equipment on the weekend and set up for gigs in restaurants and art galleries. I know that part of Santa Ana exists, because I’ve driven up and down its streets. But this building—the shelter—is the only reason I leave Irvine.
I press the lock button on my keychain fob a few extra times for good measure before heading inside.
The sound of barking and the stench of urine hit me at the same time as I pull open the glass door that leads into the reception area. They go together, that sound and that smell.
“Hey, Neen,” says Bekah from behind the counter. She barely looks up from her phone.
“Hey,” I say. Bekah’s wearing the purple polyester vest that marks her as a small-animal volunteer, which reminds me to pull my own ugly vest—green for dogs—out of my backpack and shrug into it. When I first started working at the shelter, Bekah was the person to show me around. She never asked me why I had become a volunteer, which I appreciated, but it meant that I never asked her, either, and I still have no idea what she’s doing here. She doesn’t look like the kind of person who would want to spend her time in a loud, stinky underground animal jail. I guess I don’t either, but she looks interesting and fun, and like someone who must have better things to do. Still, here she is.
“Who’s on duty?”
“Ruth,” she answers. Ruth is the meanest and the best supervisor at the shelter. She’s about sixty-five, built like a pit bull, short and muscly with close-cropped dull gray hair, and as far as any of us can tell she doesn’t give a shit about any human being, living or dead. She’s all animals, all the time.
“Okay,” I say. “See you.” I stash my backpack in one of the volunteer lockers and sign in on the computer, reaching over Bekah to get to the keyboard. She’s texting a row of hearts and bows and arrows to her boyfriend Jayson.
Right above her text is a picture. There’s skin, and hair, and a silver metal ring with a ball on it. Bekah looks up and catches me staring at the picture. I try to shift my gaze away like I wasn’t being a creep, but she just laughs.
“Sorry,” I begin, and I start to say more, about not meaning to snoop, but then the door swings open again and there’s a young couple with a white-and-black pit bull. The dog’s wide mouth is open, his tongue hanging out, and it looks like he’s smiling. The couple, though, is not. The girl—twenty, maybe, white with dark purple hair—has the hood of her sweatshirt up, and her face is blotchy and swollen from crying. The guy she’s with looks maybe five years older; he’s Hispanic and really handsome, and he’s the one holding the leash. He’s not crying, but he doesn’t look happy.
Bekah stashes her phone in the top drawer of the desk. “Did you find a stray?” Her voice is all perky and innocent, even though she totally knows they didn’t find a stray. They’re here to surrender their pet.
The girl’s tears, which were in check, are full-on waterworks now.
“Um, no,” says her boyfriend. “We’ve gotta move, and the new place doesn’t take pets.”
“Huh,” says Bekah. “But this is your pet, right?”
“Yeah,” he says, scratching the back of his neck. “That’s why we’re here.”
Bekah drops the pretense. “Yellow form,” she says, pointing to the plastic rack on the far wall, papered by a rainbow of forms—yellow for voluntary surrender, pink for stray, green for lost pet. Orange for adoption.
The dog flops down and scratches behind its ear—short, pinned ears, sticking straight up, a common pit bull mutilation meant to make them look more menacing, making them practically unadoptable. I look over at the form the guy is filling out. The dog’s name is Bronx. Of course it is.
The girl drops to her knees next to the animal and throws her arms around his neck, sobbing into the top of his head. Her boyfriend says, “It’s okay, Baby, Bronx is a great dog. He’ll definitely get a new home.”
He definitely won’t get a new home. He’ll get a couple of weeks to a couple of months in a cage. If he’s lucky, a pit bull rescue will pick him up and put him in a foster-home situation for a while, but odds are that he’ll be scared and lonely for a few weeks in a cage, getting out for fifteen minutes a day—on walks around the hard-dirt yard with volunteers like me—and then he’ll get a needle in his vein and he’ll get to be dead.