Notes from the Dog

Sometimes having company is not all it’s cracked up to be.

I was sitting on the front steps of my house with Matthew and Dylan. Matthew was listening to his ear buds, eyes closed, half-humming, half-singing the good parts of the song like he always does, and Dylan was asleep on the ground, snoring and twitching. Matthew’s into his music and Dylan’s a dog so I didn’t pay much attention to either of them. I was trying to read.

Matthew’s the only true friend I’ve got.

He’s not my best friend. That’s Carl, because we’ve always got a lot of the same classes and spend the most time together in school. Matthew’s not even my oldest friend. That’s Jamie, because I’ve known her since we went to nursery school together. He’s definitely not my
most fun friend—that would have to be Christopher, who goes to a school for the gifted and always has some crazy story to tell about the supersmart people he knows.

Matthew lives right across the street and is always over at my house. That summer, he was actually living with us, because his parents were in the middle of a divorce. Their house was for sale and they’d each recently moved into nearby apartments. But Matthew had said he wasn’t going to learn how to do the shared custody thing on his summer vacation. Then he’d said he’d just stay with us until everything got settled. I was impressed that Matthew called the shots that way, but not surprised that his folks and my dad agreed; Matthew has a way of always making sense so people go along with him.

But that’s not what makes him my true friend. It’s because he’s the only person I know who doesn’t make me feel like he’s drifted off in his head when I’m talking. Anyone who listens to everything you have to say, even the bad stuff and the boring things that don’t interest them, is a true friend. Matthew’s always been the only person who’s easy for me to talk to. He’s a lot like Dylan when you think about it.

Matthew and I aren’t anything alike. I know, for instance, that it’s got to be easier to be Matthew than it is to be me. There’s something so … easy about the way he does everything. He gets better grades than me, even though he hardly ever studies. He’s on about a
million teams at school, and whatever he does in football, baseball, basketball, tennis or track, he looks confident in a way that I never do.

He has friends in every group at school: the brainy people, who, even in middle school, are starting to worry about the “com app” (that’s the universal college application form, but I only know that because I Googled the word after I heard them talking about it so much); the jocks, who carpool to their orthopedic doctor appointments together and brag about torn cartilage and bad sprains; the theater and band and orchestra members, who call themselves the arty geeks and then laugh, like it’s some big joke on everyone else; and, of course, the losers.

Like me.

Matthew would never call me a loser, not to my face and not behind my back, either, but we both know that I don’t fit in and that I’m just biding my time in middle school, waiting for high school and then college, after which I hope I can get a job where I’ll be able to work by myself.

It’s not that I don’t like people, but they make me uncomfortable. I feel like an alien dropped onto a strange planet and that I always have to be on the lookout for clues and cues on how to act and what to say. It’s exhausting to always feel like you don’t belong anywhere and then worry that you’re going to say the wrong thing all the time.

Real people seem so … mysterious and, I don’t
know, high-maintenance to me. People in books, though, I like them just fine. I read a lot, partly because when I was little and my dad couldn’t afford sitters, he’d drag me to the library for his study groups. He was in night school and he’s been there ever since. He’d sit me at a table near him and his classmates and give me a pile of books, a bag of pretzels and some juice boxes.

“I wish I had a dollar for every hour I’ve spent in the library,” he always says. I have to agree—we’d probably never have to worry about money again.

So now I don’t feel normal unless I’ve got a book in my hands, and I feel the most normal when I’m lost in a story and can ignore the complicated situations around me that never seem to work out as neatly as they do in books.

So, on that day, Matthew and Dylan and I were sitting in front of my house. It was a week after school let out for the summer.

A completely bald woman drove up, parked in front of the house next door and jumped out of her car.

I knew she’d moved in a couple of weeks ago to house-sit for our neighbors, professors on sabbatical. I’d seen her a few times from my kitchen window, but I hadn’t spoken to her. I hadn’t noticed she was bald, either, and that kind of detail didn’t seem like one I’d miss.

She was probably in her early twenties. She was wearing faded jeans that looked way too big for her and
purple cowboy boots. She carried a leather backpack and had one of those bumpy fisherman sweaters draped over her shoulders even though it was hot.

She saw me, waved and headed in our direction.

Dylan sat up as she got closer and looked at her with that teeth-baring border collie grin that scares people who don’t know that dogs can smile. I kicked Matthew. He opened his eyes and, when he saw that we had company, took his ear buds out. I sat up straight and sucked in my gut, trying to look tall and thin. A guy can dream.

The woman made a beeline for Dylan and shook his paw. “Hello, dog.” Only then did she speak to us, one hand on Dylan, who leaned against her thigh. “In this world, you either like dogs or you don’t, and I don’t under stand the ones who don’t, so I’m glad to finally meet the three of you.”

I felt guilty the way she said “finally.” Maybe I should have gone over and introduced myself. Do good neighbors bring cookies or something when new people move in? I wouldn’t know, everyone seems to have lived on my block forever, like prehistoric flies stuck in amber.

“Well, no … uh … we haven’t met, but I’ve … uh … seen you before … at least I think it was you,” I mumbled, trying not to glance at her head.

“Oh, right.” She dug in her backpack, pulled out a wad of red hair, shook it and smoothed it down. “I
usually wear my wig, but I took it off in the car to feel the fresh air on my head.”

“Have you always been bald?” Matthew asked like it was a perfectly normal question.

I would never have said anything about her being bald. One time Jamie cried for three straight hours when a “trim” turned out to be something she called “a five-inch hack” so I figure hair is a tricky subject with girls and not one you bring up if you can avoid it. My father says it’s good manners to avoid discussing sex, religion, politics and money in social situations. I think you should add hair to that list.

Actually, it’s a good idea to avoid discussing
anything
in social situations. A better idea is to avoid social situations in general.

“Oh, no,” she said to Matthew. “I lost my hair during chemo.”

We must have flinched. She said, more gently, “My name is Johanna Jackson and I’m a breast cancer survivor.” Up close I could see that she had green eyes and freckles all over her face. She never stopped smiling as she looked from me to Matthew to Dylan, who was now lying on his back, paws in the air, begging her to scratch his chest.

“I’m Matthew, this is Finn and that’s Dylan. How long have you been cured?” Matthew didn’t miss a beat.

“Well, I don’t know that you’re ever
cured.”
She
found the tickle spot on Dylan’s ribs that makes his back legs start pedaling with that doggy bliss thing that always makes me wonder what it would feel like. Just to lie there while somebody rubs your belly, with a back leg twitching …

“Then how can you call yourself a survivor?” All of a sudden, Matthew was an unlimited source of awkward questions.

“In my book, if you live one split second after hearing news like that, you’re a survivor.” Johanna finally looked away from Dylan and back up at us.

“Is your hair going to come back?” I couldn’t believe I was the one who asked that.

“The doctors say yes, and maybe even different than it was before. I’m hoping for straight blond hair the next time around. You know, give the California beach babe look a whirl.”