Leftovers Page 13

  Johanna sashays in just then through the porch door, wearing a shimmery halter and low-cut shorts so short that they must show off a good two inches of butt crack every time she bends to pick up poo. Nicholas and Brant trail her to the table, fighting over which of them she’ll let rub sunblock onto her back today.

  Taylor and I raise our eyebrows at each other. Neither of us would ever rather be Johanna.

  “Hey, Hobbit,” Brant calls out over our shoulders. “If you’re just going to stand there by the fridge looking dopey, can you bring over the juice?”

  “Hobbit” is what Brant calls Sullivan.

  I slowly turn my head toward the refrigerator.

  It’s Sullivan all right, frozen in place. He must have gone upstairs for a shower after feeding the dogs and come in through the rec room. His hair is wet and his face is set in a scowl that I’m pretty sure indicates he’s been standing there for a while.

  I’m also pretty sure he’s pissed off.

  At me.

  “Never mind, kid,” Brant says when Sullivan ignores his juice request. “I’d rather have a beer anyway.”

  THIRTY

  That ancient Montreal Expos pennant tacked to Sullivan’s bedroom door drops off when he slams the door in my face. The gold tack lands by my foot. I wonder if I could hurt any worse than I already do if I slipped a sneaker off and stomped on the tack with my bare foot. I decide not to risk it. Running up here after him was stupid enough.

  Down the hall, I hear the bathroom taps running full blast. I know Dr. Fred is still at the barn tending to a Yorkie’s sore paw, and maybe, if I’m lucky, Victoria has her head under the tap, oblivious to the BANG! that just shook the lodge.

  I rap on Sullivan’s door.

  Nothing.

  My shaking hand grabs the knob and cracks open the door. Sullivan is sprawled out on his bottom bunk.

  “What do you want?” he asks, staring straight up at his top bunk.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  Sullivan sits up, his eyes shooting arrows through me. “You could have talked to me earlier.”

  “I didn’t want to talk to anybody earlier.”

  Sullivan’s wearing the black high-tops with yellow happy faces again, except the yellow grins seem to be leering at me this morning. “I asked you what happened with your mom, and you wouldn’t tell me,” he says. “But you go and tell Taylor a half hour later?”

  “I didn’t tell Taylor. She overheard my mom and me talking last night. I had to...clarify.”

  I’m not sure if Sullivan’s even listening. His eyes are looking past me, as bright blue as ever, but angry as a hurricane. “You told her all that stuff about your past,” he says. “About your dad. Is it even true?”

  “I didn’t tell her. She guessed most of it. I told you, I was just...clarifying.”

  “So it is true.”

  “Why the hell would I lie about something like that?” I say through clenched teeth.

  “Why didn’t you want me to know?” Sullivan demands.

  “Why would I want anyone to know?” I shoot back.

  “You just said Taylor knew.”

  “You’re not listening!” I shout, sliding my back down Sullivan’s door frame until I’m sitting cross-legged on his carpet. I push my hair out of my face and watch the wild storm raging in his eyes. “I said she guessed. And so did your mother, by the way. Victoria tried talking to me the day after the Dog Daze fiasco, but I kept quiet. If it were up to me, Sullivan, no one would ever have found out.” My voice breaks. “Except now, thanks to my mom and her stupid library fundraiser, the whole town of Riverwood probably knows. Are we broken up now?” I ask. Might as well get it over with now.

  “Do you want to break up? Is that what you want?”

  Be straight with him, that voice in my head asserts.

  “Right now I...don’t know what I want,” I tell Sullivan. “At first I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be with you—with anyone—because I knew that someday my...issues would cause problems.” I laugh, a dark creepy laugh that tastes cold and sour in my mouth. “I just didn’t realize how many problems. Or how soon they would happen. Or how much I’d really come to...”

  Sullivan unties his high-tops and begins lacing them up again. “Your dad was...messing with you?”

  I’m so tired of explaining. “Taking pictures. Naked photographs, Sullivan. Kiddie porn. For as long as I can remember. Until he died.”

  Sullivan looks like he’s swallowed a bug. “And you couldn’t stop him?”

  My lips tremble, but I’m not going to start blubbering. “I didn’t have a choice. It’s not what you think. I—”

  “Sometimes I just don’t get you, Sarah.”

  Anger explodes like fireworks in my head. “You’re right, Sullivan! You don’t get me! You don’t get that I didn’t let my father take the pictures! He forced me! He threatened to kill my dog! You don’t get how every click of my father’s camera shutter felt like a bullet to my chest. You don’t get that I know having pictures taken for school or the newspaper isn’t the same thing. You don’t get that I realize that the Dog Daze photographer meant no harm. You don’t get that I understand why sometimes photographs are necessary. And you don’t get that, despite all this knowing and understanding, that every click of any shutter—or even just having someone staring at me like you’re doing now—even just blinking at me—still feels like...like...”

  Taylor was right, I realize. My father was a rapist too. He raped me with his eyes.

  Sullivan throws himself back on his bed.

  With nothing left to lose, I continue to rant. “Before my mom turned up last night, I was going to ditch you at the concert next weekend and go looking for the Polaroids at the restaurant.”

  “Nice,” Sullivan mumbles.

  I take a deep breath. “But my mom found the pictures yesterday.”

  Silence from Sullivan.

  “I burned them at the beach last night.”

  “That must be a relief.”

  “It’s not, Sullivan! The pictures are gone, and that’s a relief, for sure. But the shame and the guilt and the memories are still with me, just like a big, stinking, moldy pot of...leftovers.”

  And you aren’t helping matters by copping an attitude with me, I think, blinking back hot tears.

  He rises up on an elbow and stares me down again. “What are you going to do about them?”

  “About what?”

  “The leftovers.”

  “What everyone does with leftovers, Sullivan. Shove them to the back of the fridge and hopefully forget they exist.”

  “For how long?”

  “Forever.”

  After a long silence, I dare to rise from the floor and plunk myself down next to Sullivan on the bottom bunk.

  Another long silence.

  “Are we still on for the concert?” I ask.

  Sullivan ignores my question. He grinds his teeth and stares down at his knuckles.

  I put my hand on his arm. He doesn’t pull away, but he flinches, so I let go.

  “Last night,” he starts, his voice husky, “I thought I had a girlfriend. Not just a girlfriend, but a real friend-friend, you know? One who didn’t mind that I was too short, or that I talked too much, or that my mother’s a bit...over-involved...in my life. One who was so nice that she gave up all her spare time—for weeks—to help me out with the dog puzzle.”

  I sit there chewing on my thumb, feeling like a heel.

  “But it turns out that you were only using me so I’d take you to the city.” He pauses to wipe his nose on the back of his hand. “So you could ditch me.”

  “I would have helped you with the puzzle anyway.” I’d like to think that’s true, even though it’s too late now to know for sure. “And I never wanted to ditch you. I thought it was my only option. I thought finding and destroying those pictures would help me move on. I just thought it might make me not so...so weird...about stuff.”

  “I never minded that you
were weird.”

  “You would have eventually,” I retort.

  “You don’t know that!”

  “I’m sorry, Sullivan.” I get up to leave. I don’t know what else to say. I know I shouldn’t expect his forgiveness. I knew all along that using him was terrible. I knew all along that the story of Sarah and Sullivan would never end with fireworks and a Ferris-wheel kiss.

  So why does it feel that my heart has been ripped out by pit bulls?

  I’m halfway down the hall when I hear “Sarah?”

  I backtrack and pause by his door. The anger has drained from his face. Sullivan is pale now. Hurt. Sad.

  This truth takes about ten seconds to hit me. And when it does, it tramples me and pins me to the floor, not unlike Judy did that first day in the kitchen.

  Sullivan has leftovers too, and they aren’t just the big feet and the kidney and liver problems and that other stuff Victoria blabbed to me about that day in my cabin—the physical aftereffects of his cancer. Sullivan hasn’t once, all summer, talked about the future—where he wants to go to university or what career path he wants to pursue. He rushes from activity to activity at school, from crowd to crowd, like he wants to make sure he tries everything, and meets everyone, at least once. He goes along with his mother’s overzealous rules about rain gear and sunblock and bedtime.

  Sullivan’s leftovers are even worse than my leftovers. My father is dead. He’s never coming back. Sullivan’s cancer can come back anytime.

  I walk over to the bed and sit down next to Sullivan, half expecting that he’ll push me away. But he doesn’t. We just sit quietly for a few minutes, not saying anything, not doing anything.

  “Does this mean we’re still on for pizza before the concert?” he asks eventually.

  I lean back and raise an eyebrow at him. “It depends. Are you a black olive guy or a green olive guy? Because it matters.”

  Sullivan grabs my hand, intertwining his fingers in mine. “Sarah, I’m sorry. I said you could trust me and then I flip out just because Taylor found out first. I know you had your...reasons. I can imagine how hard it must—”

  “Hey! Focus! Black olives or green olives?”

  Sullivan leans forward. He kisses me long and hard, a kiss that feels different from all his previous kisses.

  I’d like to think it’s a kiss with a future.

  “Green. Definitely green, Sarah Greene,” he replies eventually, his voice garbled because his tongue is still in my mouth.

  “Then it’s a date,” I confirm.

  Sullivan sits back. He’s got spit on his lip. His or mine, who knows. “Sarah?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You don’t really like Ratgut, do you?”

  “Um...no. But I do really like the guy I’m going with.”

  THIRTY - ONE

  An hour later, I tap on the open door of Dr. Fred’s office.

  Johanna, Taylor, Brant, Nicholas and I are all being summoned, one at a time, for what he calls our “mid-summer evaluations.”

  “Sarah!” Dr. Fred exclaims. He flashes me a big toothy grin and waves me in as if he hasn’t seen me in months.

  I scan his desk for signs of report cards, ranking sheets, papers with check boxes ranging from poor to excellent— typical evaluation stuff—but there are none. The desk is bare, as bald and shiny as the top of Dr. Fred’s head.

  “Have a seat,” he says, gesturing me into a rusty lawn chair he’s set up across from his desk. Then he reaches into a desk drawer, pulls out a bag of red licorice twists and pushes it toward me. I shake my head; I’m so nervous I’d probably choke. Dr. Fred extracts a strand from the package and chomps down on it.

  “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.” Dr. Fred swallows and leans back in his chair. A red licorice blob is stuck between his bottom teeth. “I want you to know that you’re doing a spectacular job this summer. Just marvellous!”

  “Uh...thanks.”

  “I don’t think we’ve ever had a volunteer like you before. So eager. So dedicated to really making the very most of your time here. Your work with the dogs is fantastic. And that lasagna you served last night was the tastiest thing I’ve ever eaten.” He lowers his voice. “I dread going back to Victoria’s Thursday-night meatloaf in September.”

  “Um...thanks.” Am I in the running for some bizarre “Young Offender of the Year” award?

  “I wanted to ask you a serious question,” Dr. Fred continues. “Have you ever considered becoming a—”

  “A chef? I can’t say I’d rather clean toilets for a living, but—”

  “No, no—though you’d be a great one. And I do hope your biscuit recipes turn into the best-selling dog treats of all time. But what I was going to ask is, have you ever considered becoming a veterinarian?”

  “Wow...I...well...you really think I could do that?”

  “Absolutely!” He folds up the bag of licorice and tosses it back in the drawer. “How are you at science?”

  “Good enough, I guess.”

  Ha. I’m great at science. I’m not super smart, and I’ve never been especially driven to do well at school. But years of using homework as an excuse to avoid my father has left me with excellent study skills.

  “Wonderful!” Dr. Fred beams. “If you ever need anything, Sarah, just come to me. A reference for school. Advice on which courses to take. A student placement. Seriously, I’m happy to help any way I can. I guess you’ve already got, as we say here at Camp Dog Gone Fun, a leg up in a pet nutrition specialty. And with Judy—it’s like... you’ve got magic. I was so afraid that Judy would never be able to bond with anyone, to trust anyone again. You’ve made me think she might be adoptable after all.”

  Bond? Trust? I don’t like the sound of that. Until now, I’ve just pegged Judy as someone’s birthday or Christmas puppy. A cute and adorable puppy who quickly morphed into an obnoxious and overwhelming puppy. Too much of a good thing. The big hairy gift that kept on giving and giving and giving. I saw Judy’s owners getting exhausted and putting her out with the other party trash.

  “Why did Judy end up at the shelter?” I ask Dr. Fred.

  Dr. Fred points at the wall behind my left shoulder. I swivel in my chair. All I see is a calendar. A typical “puppy in a picnic basket” photo above the date squares. (Date squares? Maybe dessert on Saturday?) I’d seen the calendar many times before when I’d come into Dr. Fred’s office on quests for paper clips or pens, but it never clicked that the cute black puppy with the pink ribbon around its neck could actually be Judy. I’d even seen that same puppy photo on binders and journal covers.

  Was Judy really ever small enough to fit inside a picnic basket?

  “Judy was owned by the Redmores,” Dr. Fred says. “Of the CTA, Canine Talent Agency. They’re based not far from here, near Prescott.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “The Redmores also owned a golden retriever who starred in a series of heartworm medication commercials. And a trio of standard poodles. Bella, Stella and the Fella starred in that silly Happy Hot Dog movie. You’ve seen it?”

  I shake my head. “The Redmores wanted to turn Judy into a movie star?”

  Dr. Fred shrugs. “Judy loves to be the center of attention. They thought she’d be a natural at it. They might even have settled for print ads, calendars and greeting cards...but...”

  My stomach knows where this conversation is going before my brain does. Without warning, my breakfast cereal works its way up my throat. Fruit chunks threaten to fly out of my mouth. I swallow hard.

  “But you know Judy, Sarah,” Dr. Fred continues. “She won’t stay still. And that adorable twenty-pound puppy she was in that photograph quickly grew into a huge, athletic dog who needs more exercise every day than most dogs need in a month. She’s so high-spirited and impulsive and easily distracted that—you know this better than anyone— she’s very hard to train.”

  “She wouldn’t sit still for the camera,” I say slowly, unable to keep an angry quiver out of my voice. “She didn’t like
the ribbons and hats and...props.” I suck in my breath, not sure if I want to let it back out. “Did they beat her?” I ask finally.

  Dr. Fred sighs. “I suppose when the usual treats and praise wouldn’t keep her still, they began using some more...coercive techniques.”

  “And when that wouldn’t work?” In my mind, I’ve left Dr. Fred’s office; I’m back in my father’s restaurant’s storeroom, my face red with fury and humiliation, my eyes dark and hostile, goose bumps all over.

  It’s true that my father never laid a hand on me, ever. Instead he coerced me with threats. All so I would do his bidding. I hated him—and myself—a little more each time.

  Dr. Fred frowns. “Her constant whining and howling annoyed the neighbors, who, thank God, contacted the police, who contacted me. I respond to all animal abuse calls for the region.”

  Just hearing the words “animal abuse” makes my stomach feel like it’s being forced through a juicer. Then again, maybe it’s helping abused and hurt and sick animals that makes Dr. Fred so happy all the time.

  Dr. Fred continues. “My assistant and I traveled up to the Redmores’ in June, the weekend before Canada Day. We didn’t even have to gain entry to the house. There was poor Judy, shaking and howling, chained to a cement post in the garage-turned-photo-studio. Her face was covered in dried blood. Across the floor was an upended tripod. Mr. Redmore was so arrogant that he actually admitted he’d taken a swing at ‘that bloody stupid mutt’ with it. Thought it would ‘knock some sense into her.’”

  My eyes are on fire. Then they flood.

  Dr. Fred rushes around from the other side of his desk. Lays a hand on my shoulder. “Sarah, Sarah, don’t cry. We shut them down! The Redmores can’t own or work with animals ever again. And we took Judy into care. She healed— physically anyway—well ahead of schedule. At first I wasn’t sure about my decision to bring her over here to the island. I thought it might be too soon to integrate her into the general shelter population. But now I’m so glad I did. You’ve been wonderful with her!”

  My head snaps up. Suddenly, something makes perfect sense to me. I wipe my eyes on my shirtsleeve and look Dr. Fred right in the eye. “Judy’s not afraid of thunderstorms,” I gasp.