Good Boy - Jennifer Finney Boylan Page 0,24

the kitchen table, a piece of furniture that had giant claws for feet. The house was lousy with teenagers tripping on LSD, although neither my sister nor I was partaking. Cars were parked at crazy angles out on the street. Moey had dropped a boulder through the windshield of Lisa Boyer’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle.

My parents were in New Orleans. They had decided that my sister and I, at sixteen and fifteen, were old enough to trust for a few days without having a babysitter.

A girl walked through the room with a collection of butter pats arranged on a tray like cheese. “Butter pats?” said the girl, whose spaghetti-strap top suggested a phrase from Scripture: Her cups runneth over. Her breasts were an absolute wonder—proof, just as Benjamin Franklin had once remarked about the provenance of beer, that there is a God and that he wants us to be happy. “Who would like some pats of butter?”

My sister came down the back stairs. “Red alert in your room,” she said.

“Roger,” I said.

I left the room of breathing walls and ascended the long, creaking stairs. After a couple of years, I reached my bedroom door, which was closed. Dim light shone through the transom.

“Rrrrr,” came a growling voice.

“Hello?” I said. My door was locked. “Who’s in there?”

Someone barked in reply.

Downstairs, Moey was fighting with my friend Lemonshit. “You don’t want to do this,” suggested my friend Link, observing the melee. “We know you’re good people.”

“Fuck you,” said Moey, taking another swing at Lemonshit. Blood ran from Lemonshit’s nose. In the dining room, Oliver Brown’s girlfriend sat down on the arm of one of the dining room chairs, but it wasn’t the kind of arm you should sit on, as she came to understand when it snapped in two beneath her.

“Uh-oh,” said she.

“You’re not the kind of person who does this,” Link explained to Moey. Moey lived in a place called Garrote Hill. He was the size of a vending machine.

“Yeah?” said Moey. “Watch.”

In the garish living room—its walls painted black—a girl named Onion was playing the Moonlight Sonata.

The week before, Onion had been to an abortion clinic, and the receptionist had looked up at her and said, by way of greeting, You again.

“Can you open the door, please?” I said to whoever was in my room.

But the reply came only in the form of barking. Whoever it was that was in my room was apparently holding Penny hostage. Or vice versa.

There were four rooms on the third floor, plus the bathroom. My room was the only one that was used for anything. The others were a storeroom, and a guest room, and an empty room with some broken furniture. Sometimes my friends and I painted the walls in the empty room with tempera paints. I had drawn the silhouette of a cunicular shape against a horizon, along with the caption THE ENORMOUS RABBIT SEEN FROM A DISTANCE.

The people who lived in the house before us used to keep a monkey in the bathroom. The monkey’s name was Jesus. Because when people opened the bathroom door and beheld the monkey, they would shout, Jesus! One time, Jesus gave birth to a baby monkey in the sink. It didn’t make it.

“Hello?” I said. It felt sad to knock on my own bedroom door. “Who’s there?”

Then there was a growl and a bark. Poor Penny. Then there was another growl, like a human imitating a dog. “Lily, is that you?”

Her little sister, Starr, had died of cystic fibrosis a year before. Lily had driven me out to the St. David’s churchyard and visited the grave. We made a daisy chain together as we sat around the grave.

“Hey,” I said. “Can you open the door?” From downstairs, three stories below, came the sound of glass shattering. Moey and Lemonshit were still working things out.

“Rrrrrr,” she said, and at this moment, from the other side of the door, Lily’s voice was indistinguishable from that of my dog, a bloated creature who did not know where she was.

* * *

At Whispering Winds I had found Penny sleeping under a pee-stained sheet of The Philadelphia Inquirer. She looked at me with soft, weary eyes.

It’s been said before that in any relationship, the person who cares least is the person with all the power. In my relationship, that person was a dog.

I brought her treats. I invited her into the Gemini capsule I had built in the corner of my room—I’d converted it from a Polaris submarine I’d bought from