tuesday

When I open my eyes again it's 7:16 AM. Rude.

I roll out of bed, take a piss, brush my teeth, put on deodorant, and then go upstairs. Once there, I eat a banana and grab my speech from the printer before heading out the door.

The walk to school is brisk and uneventful, but better than the time I would have had making small talk with my parents and Julia.

When I reach the building, my snowy boots squeak all the way to homeroom.

Blake is in my seat talking to Garrett but he skitters away when he sees me. He's afraid of me. Hahaha, good. I drop my backpack onto my desk and rummage through it for my math textbook. It's my first class of the day, which is taught by my bitch of a homeroom teacher, Mrs. Cox. I have her for Biology, too. It's unfortunate. She looks like a sun-bleached witch and speaks in the most monotonous voice known to man. I doubt she could teach finger painting to kindergarteners.

The day drags on. Garrett leaves and Alyson takes the empty chair at my side. They're interchangeable; neither of them talk to me. There's a quiz in math.

15 − 6j = –4j − 13 so what is j? Big deal. Linear equations I can do.

Mrs. Cox makes us mark each other's shit and I'm stuck grading Megan M's. She's a moron. She only gets 2 out of 6 questions right. She probably doesn't even know that means she got ⅔'s wrong. I'm tempted to write an F on her paper, but I don't. I don't feel like having to listen to her whine.

The rest of the lesson goes in one ear and out the other for me. I look out the window. It's snowing again.

In Art, Mr. Savoie starts us off with some blind contour drawing. I get stuck having to draw Colin, the dude who sits across from me. He looks like a blob, so I can't really fuck it up.

The rest of the class is spent working on the collages we were supposed to start yesterday. Mr. Savoie lets us listen to our own music in class, so I pop on my headphones, press play on my discman, and get to work.

It's tough pulling any interesting content from the already very picked over magazines. But in no time I've caught up to the rest of the idiots at my table. I start to draw over the page with a permanent marker and gel pen.

Next thing I know, it's morning break. I'm having such a good time in Art that I stay there til the new class starts milling in. Then I shove my collage into my portfolio and leave.

It's time to go back upstairs for Language Arts to see Mr. Barnhart and the rest of the miserable fucks in Period 3. I wish I could listen to my own music here instead of the awful speeches. Ugh, stupid speech after speech after speech. We have to clap when they're finished, too. In typical high school fashion, nobody addresses anything remotely interesting. Amanda G talks about fucking Grey's Anatomy. I think she used TV guide synopses to write the damn thing.

I have to blink wildly to keep my eyes open and resist falling asleep, but I still rest my chin in my palm and zone out.

"Tamara, you're next." Says Mr. Barnhart in his weird high-pitched voice.

I am very surprised that my name is called. I see no rhyme or reason to me being selected aside from the fact that he is a sadist.

I take my sheet of paper, get up, and read from it. Weak applause follows.

"Interesting. But you were supposed to use cue cards." He tells me when I'm finished.

I shrug, toss my speech on his desk, and then sit back down.

I feel oddly enraged. I don't listen to anything else anyone else says.

Biology is my next class, which means I have to go back to Mrs. Cox's room. I take a seat at my usual spot, by the window, and mentally check out again. I absently flip to the appropriate textbook pages until Mrs. Cox makes an announcement. She wants us to partner up for a project.

I freeze as the room breaks out into chaos. Virtually everyone in the class is trying to buddy up with their friends. I have no friends. What the fuck am I supposed to do‽

I slide lower in my chair as my desk-mate Jasmine abandons me. I wonder what absolute loser I'll end up stuck with. Probably one of the Under the Stairs kids, the pariahs of the entire school. If they were fish they'd be plecos.

"You wanna work together?"

I look up to see Mike. He isn't in any of my other classes, because he's actually in the twelfth grade. He just had to retake Bio. He's wearing cargo pants and a big plaid jacket. He has reddish hair, brown eyes, and some stubble on his chin. He smells like sweat and Axe body spray. It's heavenly. I wish I could snort it.

But I just look at him like he has five heads.

"Uh." I say. "Sure."

He sits down next to me. "You're Tamara, right? I'm Mike."

"Yeah." Someone says. I guess it's me.

"Tamara's kinda long. Do you go by anything else?"

"TB." I say. "Like tuberculosis."

He gives me a very strange look. "Really?"

"No." I don't know why I said that.

He doesn't seem fazed. "You like Slipknot a lot, huh?"

"Oh. Yeah." I look down at my hoodie. "I guess."

"The Subliminal Verses were pretty good," he says.

"CLASS! CLASS! PAY ATTENTION!" Mrs. Cox barks, ruining any further attempts at conversation with the project outlines. She dims the lights and breaks out the projector to lay down some ground rules.

Mike takes a pen out of his jacket pocket and jots down the info. His writing is messy. His hands are nice though, he doesn't even have any hangnails. I am briefly overcome with a sinister urge to touch him. So I cram my own hands underneath my ass and sit on them until I lose circulation.

Our project has to be on microbes. That's fine. I like microbiology. It's the Kreb's cycle and photosynthesis and all that boring shit I can't stand.

"Okay," I tell Mike when Mrs. Cox finally shuts her trap. "We can do it on the Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

"What?" He furrows his brow. "How would that work?"

"Conquest can be a fungus, war can be bacteria — like biowarfare or whatever — famine can be parasites, and death can be a virus. Just do a write up on each of them and give examples. Boom, pow, done."

"That'd be pretty cool," he agrees. "And then we can just put it on bristol board or whatever. Have pictures and shit." Jasmine comes back to stand by the desks as he finishes speaking.

"And if she doesn't like it," I say, nodding towards Mrs. Cox. "She can go fuck herself."

Jasmine's eyes widen and she looks away from us.

"Here," Mike scribbles something onto the corner of his notebook, and then tears it off and hands it to me. "Add me." He leaves so Jasmine can sit back down.

There is an email address on that scrap of paper. I can barely read it, but I think it says midoBT@hotmail.com. I can feel Jasmine looking at me, so I shove it into my pocket.

When the bell finally rings I busy myself with slamming books around at my desk, convinced Mike will come back to talk to me some more. But when I finally look up he's gone, just like the rest of the class.

Mrs. Cox is frowning at me.

"I'm going home." I tell her. "Got a headache."

She starts to protest but I leave the room, and head down the stairs and down to the lockers.

I drop my bag off, and then go to the cafeteria where I burst through the doors to go outside.

I walk to the MiniMart and buy a Monster before making the descent down Prospect Street. When I get down to the Dobies, I go off my usual route on Mitchell and head down Hanson.

As I'm walking something occurs to me which stops me in my tracks. Mike might just want to be my partner cause he thinks I'll do all the work in the project. Maybe he mistook my silence in class for some sort of studiousness. Well, if he thinks he's going to get a good mark from my work ethic alone, he has another thing coming!

I crunch the can of Monster in my hand and then throw it onto the lawn of the house I'm passing. Fuck the environment, I think to myself. Fuck everything. I am about to put my headphones on to drown out the world when I'm greeted by a familiar sound.

"Wuff!"

I look across the street and see Suzie the dog in someone's backyard. At least, I think it's Suzie.

I wave at her for some stupid reason and then cross the street to get a better look. She strains on a lead of some kind, jumping up and wagging her tail frantically at me. "Wuff! Wuff wuff!"

The house has boarded up windows in its sunporch. There's no car in the driveway, but the garage is open, and there are fresh tire marks in the snow, like someone's just left. It's ghetto as shit, and looks bad even for the Dobies.

"Hmm." I go, and walk into the backyard. The snow crunches loudly under my feet. If anyone from inside the house yells at me, I'll plead ignorance. I just wanted to pat the nice doggy, alright!

As I get closer I see Suzie is shivering. I don't know if it's from excitement or the cold. And she's covered in muck, like she's got a hazmat suit on now, instead of just muddy boots. She's a pretty short-haired dog to be left chained outside in January. Her owner might be handsome but he's stupid as fuck.

I pet her and reach into my pocket, which still has lamb samosa in it from yesterday. I take a big bite out of it, and then toss her the rest. She gobbles it up.

I look up at the house. Even more windows are boarded up in the back. It looks like a drug den. If Suzie's supposed to be their guard dog, she isn't very intimidating. Without much thought, I reach out and unhook the lead from her collar. That's what you get for being a dumbass owner, Mr. Hot Dude.

Suzie runs in a circle around me, clearly excited by her newfound freedom.

"Good girl," I pat her on the head again and then leave the scene of the crime. To my surprise, she follows me.

"I don't have any more samosas." I tell her, emptying my pockets. "Sorry."

This doesn't seem to bother her. She follows me all the way down the hill.

"Put your dog on a leash!" A woman walking by with a baby strapped to her chest tells me.

I give her the finger and keep going. It's not my dog, I think to myself.

Eventually Suzie stops to take a shit in someone's yard and I think I've lost her. But she gallops back up to me soon after, all smiles and waggy tails.

We make it all the way back to my subdivision. So I guess I have a dog now.

"Well," I tell her. "I'm not calling you Suzie, that's for sure." I can't think of anything better though.

Everyone in my parent's neighborhood leaves their doors unlocked. It's not like the Dobies. You don't have to have your propane tanks chained to your deck in the summer. The neighbors are real narcs, though, which is annoying, so I don't linger in the front yard. Instead I unlatch the fence door and go into the backyard, where I let myself and Suzie into the morgue.

She shakes herself and the moisture from her snowy fur hits me and everything else in the room. My parents would be livid if they knew I was bringing a dog into their perfect household.

It dawns on me that I have none of the necessities for taking care of such an animal. "Well." I say, taking my jacket off. "I guess I have to go to the dollar store. But first you gotta have a bath."

She cocks her head and pulls her tongue back in her mouth.

"You know that word?" I ask her. "Bath?"

She looks at me like I'm stupid.

"Okay, let's go." I say, and head towards the bathroom. She doesn't follow me there. I fill the tub up a third of the way with lukewarm water and throw some of the fancy dish soap we keep under the sink into it. "C'mere!" I call. Suzie does not come.

I turn off the tap and go back into the morgue. Suzie is laying on Bed Fort. She yawns and wags her tail when she sees me.

"C'mon," I say, and move towards her. She gets up and waddles over to me. "You're filthy!" I remind her, and I gently grab her collar and guide her to the bathroom. "I even did that wrist test, like they do for babies."

She sniffs the air. She can probably smell the soap and wants nothing to do with it.

"It'll all be over soon," I promise her and lead her right up beside the tub. "Now hop in. C'mon. Get up."

To my shock she puts her paws over the sides and then reluctantly climbs in.

"Good girl!" I tell her as she looks up at me with misery. Her eyes are sky blue. It is then that I bestow her new name upon her. "Sky!" Yeah, yeah, so it's a dumb name, too, but it's not as bad as Suzie. Okay, maybe it's worse, but I don't care.

I dip one of my mom's good 'guest' face cloths into the water and begin scrubbing away at the grime in Sky's fur. It lifts easily enough with the soap.

Soon she is a mass of white suds. She doesn't seem to like that, but she does enjoy the accompanying massage. She gets a content look on her face and squints her eyes.

"Okay, time to rinse off." I grab the shower head nozzle from its holder and then put it down in the water so it doesn't startle her when I turn it on. I make sure the temperature is okay and then slowly lift it out to hose her off.

In no time she looks pristine, while the water around her looks like a vat of coffee.

"Alright, you can get out now." She hops out immediately and I can tell the urge to shake all the cleanliness off is overwhelming for her. I have a stash of towels waiting and immediately begin to swaddle her.

It takes three towels to do the job but soon she is relatively dry. As soon as I open the bathroom door she zooms down the hall. Once she's in the morgue, she begins rolling on the carpet, probably trying to get some dirt and smells back on herself.

I leave her to it and go upstairs to see what there is to eat. Digging through the cupboards I find a can of beef Chunky soup, which has probably been there for ten years. It looks remarkably like dog food. "Hmm." I grab the can opener, cut the soup open, and then let its entire contents go PLOP! into a metal mixing bowl. Wow, it smells like dog food, too! I thunder back down the stairs and offer it to her. She accepts.

While she eats I get rid of the evidence in the bathroom. I throw all the used linens into the washer, dump detergent on it, spray Febreeze all over the basement, and then take a quick shower myself to get rid of the wet dog smell.

When I come back out I take the now empty bowl from Sky, rinse it out in the sink, and then fill it with cold water. She's not impressed when I present this to her, but she gives it a dutiful lick anyway, like, 'Wow, thanks.'

"Okay, you ate, you took a shit, you have water. You should be good for a while." I flop onto Bed Fort. She peers up at me from over the mattress. I can see that she is wagging her tail hopefully. "C'mon up."

She jumps up with me and towers over me for a minute. For the first time I am aware of the absurdity of the fact that I stole a stranger's dog, and a cold wave of fear sweeps over me. I know nothing about this animal; what if she attacks me? What about her owner? What if he calls the cops? What if they catch me?

But then Sky paws at me, and I pat her, and things seem totally normal. Natural. Like this is the way shit's supposed to be.

She lays down beside me and I play some Resident Evil. It's nice to have company when you're blowing zombies' heads off. At some point I remember Mike and his email address. I take a moment to go upstairs and sign into MSN Messenger, where I try to add him as a contact. It doesn't accept the email midoBT@hotmail.com, so I try mido87, which makes more sense anyway (if he's a year older than me like he's supposed to be, he was born in '87). This time it goes through.

"Whoop-dee-doo," I mumble to myself.

I go back downstairs with Sky. We don't do much until later, when I hear the front door open. Sky pricks her floppy ears, and I'm filled with dread that she'll bark. But instead she just wuffs quietly to herself and raises her hackles.

I check my clock and see it's 3:33. Julia must be home. Big deal. She never comes down here, or so I thought. But I hear someone coming down the stairs anyway. I panic and throw one of my blankets over Sky just as Julia pokes her head around the den door.

"Someone's talking to you," She tells me.

"Yeah, you." I say, hoping to God that Sky won't make a peep.

Julia frowns. "I mean on MSN."

"MSN?" I say. "Whatever, just sign me out."

"I think it's Mike Doherty. I heard he was hanging out with you at school today."

"Yeah, he wants to do a project together or something," I say nonchalantly.

"Well, I hope you said yes!" Julia tells me eagerly. "He's pretty hot! Nat has a huge crush on him, and she's been such a bitch lately. It would be really funny if you got with him! You know he has a motorcycle and everything?"

"Thrilling," I say, and honestly, I am pretty intrigued by this conversation. But I don't want Julia to find out that I have a dog in the house! "I'll come up in a minute."

Julia fucks off so I uncover Sky. "Be cool," I whisper to her, and then leave the room, making sure to shut the door tightly behind me.

My heart is beating fast. Is it because I was almost caught with a stolen dog or because a boy is talking to me on the internet? I'm not sure.

Julia watches expectantly as I slide into the chair in front of the PC. Before I even look at the convo, I glare over at her. "A little privacy‽" I say, and she wanders off, rolling her eyes.

this tamara? Asks someone called 'go with the flow'. I can see that it is indeed Mike from the email address.

Yeah. I respond.

ok cool. He replies.

I twiddle my thumbs waiting for him to say something else.

But there's nothing.

Just so you know, I find myself typing into the chat, I'm not going to do this whole project myself. I'm not some dork that lives for science.

But before I can press Enter, he says: do u have any ideas 4 what germ is what

Of course I have ideas, I think to myself. I erase my mission statement and then write: Yeah. Conquest can be that fungus that turns ants into zombies. War can be anthrax. Famine can be a tapeworm. Death can be ebola or something.

theres a fungus that dose that?? He asks.

Well, I have to google it. I don't know the name of it off-hand. I'm not some savant. I open up Firefox, search 'zombie fungus', and then send him the name: Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.

damn. He says.

I click my tongue and hold my chin in my hand. If Julia and her friends think I'm having some kind of steamy conversation with this guy, they'll be in for a disappointment. He really just wants to talk about the stupid bio project!

You can cover two and I'll cover two. I type out to him. And then, because I'm feeling generous, I add: You pick.

He chooses: virus & fungus.

Glorious. I say, and then log off. I've had more interesting conversations with the mirror.

"What did he say?" Julia wants to know.

"Not much," I tell her, shrugging my shoulders before I go back downstairs. I feel oddly disappointed, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

When I get back to the morgue, Sky is standing by the sliding glass door. "You want out?" I ask, and let her go. I wonder if she wants to head back home. Maybe she's had enough of me, like everyone else does after spending more than ten minutes in my company.

But no; she simply pees and then comes running back up to me. We get up onto Bed Fort again. I don't really feel like playing video games anymore. Sky lays in a ball next to me, so that her back is pressed up against my stomach. I hug her and she lets me. I don't remember the last time someone did that.

Time passes slowly in the morgue, but it's pleasant with company.

Sky and I are almost asleep by the time I hear my mom come home. I decide to surface to see what's for dinner. Stuffed peppers, apparently. Rice is on the stove and chicken's in the oven. Mom's hollowing out the peppers. Upon seeing me, she asks me to grate some cheese. I pull a block out of the fridge and get to work.

"How was school?" Mom asks.

"Alright," I say with a shrug.

"A boy wanted to do a project with her!" Julia says, popping into the kitchen. God, I wish I was grating her.

"A boy? What boy?" Mom looks alarmed.

"Just some guy in bio." I mumble.

"He's a senior!" Julia giggles as she leans over the island.

Mom frowns. "Why is there a senior in your class?"

"'Cause he failed." I say, pocketing a chunk of cheese for Sky.

"Oh dear. Well, I hope you told him you wanted a different partner. You don't need someone like that dragging you down."

"It's fine." I say. "Who cares."

"More like HE'S fine," Julia titters. "Natalie's in love with him."

"Natalie should date someone her own age." Mom says, the voice of reason that no one cares about.

Case in point, Julia says: "Oooh, let me see if I can find a picture of him!" She leaves the kitchen.

A minute and several mouse clicks later, she's brought up photos on Myspace. "See!"

Both Mom and I emerge to look at the evidence. He's sweaty in the picture, wearing a backwards hat and giving a thumbs up to the camera. He has his arm around some hideous guy that's standing next to him. I feel like alcohol must have been involved but there's no actual evidence of it in the image.

"He's not allowed at the house." My mom announces after one look at him.

"I wasn't going to invite him over." I say, not that anyone is listening. Once Mom returns to the kitchen, Julia clicks through more tagged photos of Mike. These ones have booze and bongs in the frame. It's pretty dumb to put them up on the internet where anyone can see them. Still, I'm transfixed.

"Who's that?" I find myself asking upon seeing a series of him with a blond bitch in his lap.

"Whitney Hughes." Julia answers automatically.

"She looks stupid." I say.

Julia starts laughing. "Omigawd! Are you jealous?"

"No." I say quickly.

"Omigawd! You are!"

I frown. I don't know. Maybe I am.

"There's nothing to be ashamed of." Julia reassures me. "I mean, at least now we know you actually like guys. Everyone at school thinks you're a big lesbo, you know."

"Do they?" I say tonelessly. "I guess that's better than everyone knowing you're a whore."

Julia gives me the side eye but shuts up.

I go back to the kitchen to finish grating the cheese. Mom tries to ask me more about school, but I'm done talking.

I head down to the morgue, where I give Sky the pilfered cheese.

When the time comes to eat dinner, I say I'm not hungry. While everyone else is eating, I go on the computer and print off some articles so I can do my half of the stupid project. I just want to get it over with if Mike is going to be so annoying about it all.

I dig out the ancient family bible and then take the printed pages downstairs with me. I pop the new Deftones CD into my PS2 and get to work. Sky is laying beside me and I pet her occasionally as I piece together the information.

I cite Revelation 6:3-4. I compare the red of the horse representing war to the dried blood of the eschar in anthrax. I talk about how anthrax has been used in biowarfare from 1916 up 'til the 70s. And then say its spores were recently used for bioterrorism in the United States. I add some little bit explaining what bacteria is in general because I know that's all stupid Mrs. Cox will care about anyway.

I try to do the same thing for famine. Write in Revelation 6:8, compare a leech to the black horse and focus on the hunger angle of parasites. I yak about internal and external ones and give examples. Do a bit about tapeworms and how they used to be used as a substitute for diets.

I put my pencil down. I could do this whole fucking project myself. I'd rather do it myself. It'd be easier than trying to make something seem cohesive when two different people are working on it. I mean, I know nothing about Mike except that the guy doesn't believe in capitalizing. Maybe I should have been paired with an Under the Stair-er instead. They're normally pretty book smart, even if they're socially stupid as fuck.

I let Sky out again. She doesn't seem interested in going home. I wonder what her owner is thinking. He must know she's gone by now.

I should probably feel bad but I don't even care.

When the time comes, I sleep just fine knowing I've stolen someone's dog.