Buster Read online

  Tonio was breathing fast, with just the top part of his lungs. He was almost panting, like I do after a long run. His voice was different—it was moving up higher, and quicker. Not slow and quiet like he’d sounded before.

  “My nose feels weird,” he said, then paused to gasp a few times. “I think it’s … because of the dog. I can’t breathe.”

  “Try to slowly take a deep breath.” I could tell Mr. Pulaski was reciting advice he’d heard before, something he’d said a bunch of times. “We’ve been here for a while—if you had a severe allergy, it would have acted up sooner.”

  “Maybe not! Maybe—maybe—maybe it’s because I held the leash for the first time. I touched him, and I’m allergic, and you already paid for him, and now—” His voice broke. He was crying.

  That’s when I realized he was having a panic attack. Jocelyn had pretended to have them so I’d know what they looked like, but I’d never witnessed a real one before. Because of his anxiety, Tonio was worrying more about his sneeze than most people would. He thought something was wrong with him, and that was making him scared. The fear made him panic—and when someone panics, it’s harder to breathe. Then when it got harder to breathe, he thought it was because of the sneeze. That convinced him the allergy must be really bad, which scared him more, which made his breathing even worse. A bad circle.

  I tried to decide what a Good Dog would do. My training was to help when he was having a panic attack, but I was only supposed to respond to what I saw, not what I heard from another room.

  But he was hurting. And if I could just go out there and distract him, maybe I could help. I could pretend I really did have to go out: The trainer would open the door, I could distract Tonio, and that would break the bad circle.

  Then I thought about the fire. I thought about the trouble I’d already gotten into.

  I couldn’t risk it.

  I’ll help you next time, I thought. I laid down on the ground and tried not to hear him crying. I promise.

  His parents seemed too flustered to help much. They kept asking if he was okay every few seconds, and if he needed to leave. He didn’t, or couldn’t, answer. I felt terrible. Jocelyn and I waited another five minutes, and I listened to his crying stop, his breath slow.

  “I’m sorry,” Tonio mumbled. “We can go back inside.”

  “You don’t have to apologize, sweetheart. If this is already bothering you, then it’s probably a bad idea. We should stop.”

  Tonio gave in. “If you think so. Yeah. We can just go home.”

  I looked up at Jocelyn. She couldn’t hear anything. She was just sitting there tapping on her phone while my new family walked away! I couldn’t stand it anymore! I pawed at my trainer’s ankle and whined. I tucked my tail down low. I’m not pretending! Well, I am pretending, but I’m pretending to not be pretending! Listen to me!

  The trainer finally understood. “I guess it’s time to check on them, anyway. Let’s go.” She grabbed my leash and opened the door. Perfect.

  Tonio and his parents were getting ready to go.

  “Heading out already?” Jocelyn asked.

  Tonio’s mom sighed. “I don’t think this is going to work out.”

  “Are you sure?” Jocelyn gave them a concerned look. “What happened?”

  I tugged my way over to Tonio and bumped up against his hand. I licked the back of his palm, and after a moment, he scratched the top of my head. I rubbed my face all over his hand while the adults talked and tried to hold his attention. I was betting that he wasn’t really allergic, and hoped with all my heart I was right.

  I stepped back just a little and shook my body again, like I was wet. He shook his hair, and some of the last few drops sprinkled down. Good! Yes! Now pay attention. Watch me. I lifted my paw up and rubbed it along my nose.

  He must have thought I was rubbing at the water drops or something, because he didn’t do anything. I rubbed my nose, bumped the hand he had petted me with, then rubbed my nose again.

  Tonio watched me, then looked at his hand. He tilted his head like a puppy again, took a deep breath, lifted his hand up to his face, and rubbed it all the way down, from his forehead to his chin.

  I wagged my tail. Good. Yes. I touched my nose to his knee and took a looooooong sniff. He held his hand in front of his nose and took a deeeeeeep breath.

  “I didn’t sneeze,” Tonio mumbled. “I’m not allergic.”

  “What’s that, honey?” Tonio’s mom looked down at him. He was grinning.

  “I didn’t sneeze! I touched him all over with my hand, and then I touched my face, and I’m not even itching. I don’t think I’m allergic, Mom!”

  “Maybe not, but I still think we pushed you into this too quick. We should go home, talk about it.”

  Tonio shook his head. “I want to try. I want to take Buster home.”

  I wagged my tail. Yeah, you do!

  “Ready if you are,” Jocelyn said. She held the leash out.

  Mr. Pulaski asked Tonio, “Are you sure?”

  The boy watched me closely. I wagged my tail and sniffed around like I wasn’t listening. Like I was just a Good Dog.

  Tonio reached out and took the leash.

  Pronto was rolling his eyes before Buster finished the sentence. “Your Honor, the accused has already broken Dog Law twice, and he’s barely even started his story! This wet-hair-allergy pantomime is direct communication. They were talking. Case closed.”

  The judge tilted her head to Buster. “He makes a good point. Your argument so far is built on the necessity of your crime. This boy’s need. But here, you show yourself ready to break our Law immediately.”

  Lasagna pulled a paper from his briefcase. “At this point, Buster has done nothing outside of what humans expect from a Good Dog. Especially a service dog. Even the Lassie Regulations say that service dogs may communicate as long as they are responding to a solid, visible, and known piece of information. Good Dogs understand wetness, so long as they see water.”

  “So if I see rain outside,” Pronto argued, “I’m allowed to check the weather app on my owner’s phone?”

  “Either way, Your Honor, we know Buster pushed the boundaries—that’s why we’re here. But he does not deserve a life on The Farm just because he cared about a human!”

  “He does if he’s putting that human before the rest of Dogkind!” Pronto sat back and leaned against the side of the car.

  The judge’s face remained still and gave away nothing about her opinion. “Please continue, Buster. I’ll reserve my judgment until the end.”

  Imagine the most fun place you possibly can. First, obviously, mud everywhere. Then good toys, the ones you can chew on and they don’t break. There’s so many of them that even if you bury one in the mud, you’ve got a hundred more within mouth’s reach. There’s … a giant Apatosaurus skeleton! It’s from a museum, except no one cares if you chew on it. The walls are lined with tennis balls and your tail chases itself. Imagine paradise.

  Now imagine all that paradise was behind a glass wall. That is what Tonio’s house was like. The Pulaski family had collected dozens of action figures, records, books, and collectibles that were scrunched up on high shelves, leaving lower shelves bare because they didn’t want me to get to them.

  We’d spent two days training together, and then another few days learning all the things you have to learn when you get new roommates: when they go to the bathroom, what times they eat, and which of your personal objects you can’t leave out because they’ll chew on them. It was almost a whole week before I started to feel settled and Tonio’s parents felt comfortable leaving us alone.

  The house looked out over Bellville Square and was actually made up of the two stories above his dad’s store, Tomorrow Grocery. On the third floor, behind a door covered in marker doodles, was Tonio’s room. His space was considerably tidier than the rest of the house, but one of the walls was covered in tall piles of shoeboxes, neatly stacked on top of one another in rows.

  “I draw a
lot.” He mumbled like it was an apology, and gestured to the wall of drawings I was sniffing around. “Most of the stuff on that wall is stuff I can see from the window. I don’t draw new stuff, really. Just whatever I can see.”

  He made it sound like it was a bad thing, but I am here to tell you that his drawings were amazing. I’m not an artist myself, so I’m no expert—but the squirrels he’d drawn were so realistic that I almost believed I could scare them away with a bark. He’d drawn the famous bell in the center of Bellville Square, and almost every storefront on all four sides. “I love drawing stuff I can see, because when I start, I always think I know what it looks like. And then when I start drawing, there’s so much more than I thought. There’s always a bunch of stuff I didn’t notice. It’s like the same thing I’ve looked at over and over is really different from what I thought.”

  This Tonio was totally different from the Tonio I’d met at the training center. Suddenly, alone in his room, he looked comfortable.

  “You can sit on my bed, if you want. I bet the floor is cold.”

  That sounded nice. I turned toward the bed and then caught myself. I’m a dog, I thought. I don’t know what he’s saying. I pretended I was distracted by something on the floor and sniffed at the ground.

  And it was good that I did. Tonio was staring at me very closely. After a moment, he stood and walked over to the bed. “Up!” he called, and patted the mattress. I jumped up and settled down on the edge. He sat beside me and scratched behind my ears.

  And then he said—and I’m saying this because I’m going to tell the whole truth—“I guess you are just a normal dog. At the center, I thought …” I tried very hard not to move at all. He didn’t finish. “Never mind. That’s stupid.”

  Careful, Buster! I closed my eyes and pretended to rest, but my heart was pounding like I really had chased the sketch squirrels. You just started a new job and you almost messed up already. Be a Good Dog.

  Apparently convinced I’d gone to sleep, Tonio got up and moved over to his desk by the window. I cracked open my eyes to keep watching while he pulled the highest shoebox off the stack and opened it. The shoebox was stuffed full of small rectangles of thick paper—he pulled out the one closest to him and set it on his desk, twisting the neck of his bendy lamp to get a better look.

  He clicked on a computer monitor and typed something into the keyboard—a few seconds later, he was looking at a picture of a trading card on a website for something called Beamblade. He picked a pencil out of the cup on his desk and started drawing on the little rectangle, checking the image on the computer in between lines.

  More curious than tired, I slid off the bed and went over to look at the box. Each of the little rectangles in the box was a hand-drawn version of a Beamblade card, with all the information printed on the bottom in Tonio’s neat handwriting, and pictures of mechanical dragons and cyborg wizards at the top.

  “I always wanted a pet.” I nearly jumped—I didn’t know he’d even noticed me come over. Tonio’s pencil scratched against the paper. “I wanted a cat, really. But I also said I’d be okay with a dog. Just not as much. Sorry.” I resisted a shiver.

  Apology accepted, I thought. But let’s not talk about cats.

  “And my parents always said no.” He pushed his curls away from his eyes—and they immediately fell back into place. “Oh, yikes. I need to start over.” He crumpled up the card he was working on—Klakzon the Noisemage, DJ of the future—and threw it into a trash can. His pencil quickly started flying across a new blank card he pulled from the box. I moved to the window so he wouldn’t think I was paying too close attention for a Good Dog.

  “I think Mom and Dad only said yes to having a pet because I had a panic attack at the science fair. And again while I was helping at Dad’s store. And then I threw up during yearbook signing.” Tonio’s eyes popped up to watch me for a second, then went back to drawing. “And now I have you, because they think you’ll make me better. This one’s bad, too.” He ripped the card in half and threw it out, but didn’t start again right away. He stared at the page and told me, “Everyone at school saw me throw up, which means everyone in Bellville saw me. I couldn’t think of what to write in Devon Wilcrest’s yearbook, which isn’t even a big deal, and I should have just written Have a great summer or something, but I was thinking about how the only thing I knew about him was that Miles and Parker always made fun of him when he wasn’t in the room because he was the new kid.” He picked up his pencil and started drawing again. “I had never even actually talked to Devon before, but now, when I had the chance to write something I knew he would read, I thought that if I didn’t say something nice to him, or at least tell him what they were doing, then I was just as bad as Miles and Parker. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I couldn’t write anything, and my stomach was flipping, and I couldn’t breathe, and I threw up on his yearbook. And on him.”

  Tonio looked exhausted—once he started remembering, his mind must have been looping through the feelings all over again. It fell out of him like he wasn’t telling it on purpose—it was more like he had to get it out of his body.

  “I said I didn’t want to go back to school after this summer, and Dr. Jake said to try getting you first, and that over time I might change my mind.” He paused again to look at me, then erased a line of his sketch. “I can always tell that Mom and Dad are embarrassed when I start feeling bad in front of people, and Dr. Jake pretends like I’m doing fine, but I know he wishes I was better.” Tonio’s scribbling slowed down.

  “I don’t want to disappoint you, too. I need to take care of you.” He held up the picture and showed the beginning sketch of Klakzon to me. (His Time-Traveling Turntables looked great.) I sniffed at the drawing to get a close look, and Tonio laughed. “You like it? Good boy.”

  “TO-NI-OOOO!” his father’s voice boomed from downstairs. He didn’t just yell Tonio’s name, he sang it like an opera singer would. Tonio gave me a look.

  “My dad’s a dork.”

  “IT IS TIIIIIME FOR YOUR APP-OOOOINT-A-MENT!”

  Tonio set down his pencil and jumped up. “I forgot it was Wednesday!” He grabbed my blue harness, labeled Service Dog, and I stepped into it. “You get to meet Dr. Jake!”

  I loved Dr. Jake. Dr. Jake was the best … and I’m not just saying that because he had a jar full of treats ready when we showed up for Tonio’s therapy appointment.

  Okay, all right, you caught me, I am saying that exactly because he had a jar of treats ready when we showed up for Tonio’s therapy appointment. First impressions are important!

  Dr. Jake was tall and thin, like he was made out of good throwing sticks. He shot us a big, kind smile and asked permission as soon as we walked through the door to give me some very good scratches. We sat in two beanbag chairs—a big blue one for Tonio and a small red one for me—and he folded onto a short stool. While he spoke to Tonio, he tossed me a chewy ball to gnaw on. I liked having something to do while I listened.

  “Tonio! Ring, ring! I see everything worked out at the center—how are you and Buster getting along?”

  “Ring, ring, Dr. Jake. Really good!” Tonio glanced over at me. I chewed on the ball. “He’s a good dog, and really smart. Sometimes it even feels like he’s a person. Like he’s listening.” No, c’mon! I’m just a dog! A frown flashed across his face. “Maybe that’s a dumb thing to say, though.” You also aren’t dumb! I felt bad for pretending, but I shouldn’t have acted the way I did when we first met, either. I was conflicted.

  Dr. Jake watched Tonio seriously. “I don’t think that’s dumb. One of the best parts of having a dog around—even one who isn’t trained like Buster—is that feeling of having a friend. You shouldn’t feel embarrassed talking to him. I bet he’s a good listener.”

  “Yeah! That makes sense. I think I like it, but we only just got to take him home this morning, so I don’t really know yet.” There was something different in the way Tonio talked to Dr. Jake from the way he talked to me. I tried
to listen closer and figure out what it was.

  “Could you tell me what you hope Buster will help you with?”

  “Sure. Um, I think having Buster with me will make me feel a little safer walking around town on my own. I’m usually scared I’ll have a panic attack when I’m by myself, and if I do, I might do something stupid like fall and hurt myself or not realize where I am and walk out into the street.”

  What is it? I wondered. Something in the way Tonio smells, in the rhythm of his voice. Why does this feel different?

  “Buster’s trained to learn how to lead me back home and to move people away from me so I can have space during a panic attack. With Buster, I bet I’ll be able to go everywhere and not feel scared!”

  “That’s a good, big goal.” Now Dr. Jake’s sound had changed. He could tell there was something different in Tonio’s voice, too. “Anything else?”

  “Uh …”

  There, I thought. A flicker in his eyes, like he’s searching for the right thing to say.

  “Sometimes I don’t talk to people, because I might say something stupid, or I might get anxious while I’m talking to them, and then they’ll know something’s wrong with me. Other kids …” He trailed off and didn’t finish the thought. “Buster has a trick where he can help me leave a conversation if I give him a little signal. Plus, I guess people like to talk about dogs. So I can talk about him if I don’t have anything else to say, and maybe I’ll make some friends.”

  “All of that sounds really great, and I hope you do try some new things with Buster at your side. Speaking of which … have you considered speaking to that boy? Devon?”

  Tonio’s face twisted in fear. He recovered quickly, but I saw it. “Oh, uh … what about?”

  “You’ve talked about feeling guilty, and about your fear of returning to school when summer’s over. I believe talking things through with him—apologizing, maybe—could help you feel more comfortable. Our mistakes are almost never as huge as we make them in our heads.”