“How is she?” I cover the speaker on my phone so she won’t hear me sniffling.
“They got her set up in a rehab place. She’s busted up real good, but she’s gonna be okay. Even took a few steps yesterday.”
“I’m glad.”
“Yeah, me too. It was good to be with her, but I’m sure happy to be back home.” There’s a pause like she’s inhaling a cigarette. “What happened with the dog? I got the idea from Doc that you have her.”
“I do. For the next few minutes, anyway. Mom’s gonna . . .” I choke up again. “Bring me back. To the. To the vet office. To . . .”
“Ah, criminy.” Tina exhales long. “You’ve had her all this time?”
“I hid her in a tent.”
Tina lets a beat go by. “Bet you fell in love, huh?”
“Yeah.” I press my mouth so she won’t hear me crying.
“Look, if you can hang tight a few minutes . . . when I realized yesterday she might be alive, I reached out to a lady who runs a medical rescue. I can’t take Chewbarka right now, I’m sure Doc would find out and have both our heads on a platter. But my rescue friend said she could maybe help us.”
“R-really?”
“She was gonna ask around about a foster home. It was yesterday that we talked, so maybe she’s lined something up by now.” I hear the cigarette sound again. “Sure wish you woulda called sooner, kid. You not get my voice mails till just now?”
“I did, I just—I thought it was hopeless.”
“It’s never hopeless. Even when real bad crap happens. You gotta use your grief or your anger or whatever to make things better. Got me?”
“O-k-kay.”
“I’ll call you back real soon.” She hangs up.
I smear my face. Chewbarka cocks her head at me. I hear Mom’s car pull into the driveway.
“What am I doing?” I say. “What am I actually freaking doing?” My heart is pounding so hard. If I disappear now with Chewbarka and whatever Tina’s doing falls through, I’m toast. Chewbarka will die. Mom will never forgive me. Doc Snyder will probably sue us and put some kind of flag on my name or something so I can never work at a vet or with animals. Everything, everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Mom’s car door slams. Her footsteps come toward the house.
I scoop Chewbarka into my arms, slip out the patio door, and close it behind me. There’s no time to grab Vlad the Rapid. I’ll have to hoof it.
I can’t go to the tent. That’s the first place Mom will look. There’s nowhere to go. I have to keep moving around until Tina calls back. Which could be in five minutes or an hour or—
My phone pings with a message as I’m hurrying away. The foster spot got filled this afternoon. Working on finding another. Hang in there.
Thank you, I text Tina back. Do you know how long it might take?
Not sure. Rescue org is making calls now.
There’s nothing else to say or ask. I’m at the mercy of forces I can’t control.
I don’t know why I open my messages with Ash. Everything’s messed up with us, and it’s mostly my fault. But I still feel like he should know what’s happening. I tap out a quick message as I speed-walk away from my house:
Maybe there’s still a chance.
27
Halfway Through the Crossfade
Ash
Is Daniel talking about Chewbarka? Us? Something else? What do you mean? I text.
He doesn’t answer. I keep my phone in my hand while I walk Booper around the complex. My eyes are so glued to the screen that I trip three times before I pay attention to where I’m going.
Daniel keeps not answering. I smash down the urge to text him again.
Back upstairs, I curl up on Mom’s bed under her ceiling fan. The faint sound of metal scraping plastic is calming. I close my eyes and steady my breathing, letting the soothing static fill my brain.
I don’t need to freak out. His text could mean anything. I just have to wait for him to answer.
I open one eye and check my phone. Still nothing.
I sit up fast. I haven’t gone on a single run since we moved here. Time to fix that.
I change clothes and jam my feet into my cross-country shoes. They’ve gotten too small. Or I guess my feet have gotten bigger. But it won’t kill me. I grab some headphones and leave.
Running feels amazing. I fly along the sidewalks of our complex all pumped up on the music, pouring all my stress about Daniel and Chewbarka and Bella and everything else into my working muscles and pounding feet. It isn’t long before I’m winded. I’m way out of practice.
I go for longer than feels reasonable anyway, needing to tire my body out so my brain will chill. Then I walk back home, checking my phone every two seconds.
In my room, I open my laptop and set my phone on the desk so I’ll know the moment Daniel responds. I look over the song I wrote for Zoey’s band. I’m so freaking mad that I cut out all the good stuff so a no-talent buttclown like her could play it. My gender is really all she saw when she looked at me? Come on. There are a million more facets to me, to everyone, than that.
Bummer that a huge facet of the shiny diamond of Zoey had to be “narrow-minded dipwad.” Maybe I should rewrite the lyrics to say Roses are red, I’m not a girl, I’ve got five fingers and the middle one’s for her.
Bleh. Stewing’s satisfying, but it gets me nowhere. And sometimes I am a girl anyway.
I add in everything I took out of the song, then go through it a gajillion times, changing the lyrics to words that matter to me. All the stuff Mom’s been telling me about gender being a whole big colorful spectrum instead of a one-or-the-other binary finally
