Oh No, Newf!, Page 4

  “Your principal called to tell me you had detention, but I didn’t understand what she was saying at all,” my mom said. “Something about a fight in the hallway? That didn’t sound like — HEIDI ABIGAIL TYLER!”

  I jumped. Mom had straightened up and was staring at me with her hand pressed to her open mouth.

  “Heidi! What did you do to yourself?”

  I stood on tiptoe to peek into the mirror in the hallway. My hair was a wild snarly mess, which is pretty normal because I can’t ever find my brush in the morning. It doesn’t usually have quite so many bits of tree stuck in it, though. My face was smeared with dirt, and my peach-colored long-sleeved shirt had a little rip in the shoulder and my jeans were dripping wet mud all over Mom’s clean floor.

  “Oops,” I said, trying to comb out the tangles in my hair with my fingers. “Sorry, Mom.” I hopped onto the welcome mat at the back door and tried to wipe off my muddy sneakers.

  Mom seemed at a loss for words. She kept starting sentences and then not being able to finish them. It was like she’d been expecting a silky cocker spaniel to walk through the door but she got a wildebeest instead.

  Mom looks like an actress from an old movie. She has dark brown hair that’s straight until it flips up perfectly at the ends, and she wears a lot of pretty patterned skirts and dresses with plaids or polka dots or flowers, which I could never do because I’d match them with the wrong color shoes or a too-wide belt or something, but on her they always look perfect. She’s definitely the prettiest mom I know, and she’s probably the smartest, too. She has a PhD in art history and everything, plus she’s always using words like “mystifying” and “flabbergasted” and “irreparable damage.”

  Finally she said, “I don’t know whether to ask you what happened or send you right upstairs to get cleaned up. Does your appearance have anything to do with your detention? Did you really get in a fight?”

  “No!” I said quickly. “I was trying to stop a fight; that’s why I got detention. This — um — I fell off my bike.” Well, that was true. That explained part of it anyway. I carefully left out how that had been in the morning, so she’d think it had just happened.

  “Into a swamp?” my mom asked drily, whisking open a drawer and pulling out an old towel. “Here, take off your shoes and towel off your feet so at least you won’t track mud all through the house. And while you’re doing that, tell me about the fight.”

  I stuffed my mismatched socks — Mom raised her eyebrows at those — into my damp sneakers and rubbed my feet and jeans with the towel while I told Mom all about Avery and Rory and the lunch money and how it wasn’t really Avery’s fault and how Cameron was probably just confused and about Mr. Taney being all mad so even Principal Hansberry couldn’t get us out of detention although it sure seemed like she understood what had happened.

  Mom was nodding as I finished the story. “I got the impression she felt you were being unfairly punished,” she said. “Do you want me to talk to Mr. Taney?”

  “No, that’s OK,” I said. “It’ll only make him madder and he’ll get me for something else. Anyway, I should stick with Avery and Rory.”

  Mom patted my head with a smile. “You’re a good kid, Heidi.” Then her gaze went to my jeans and she frowned. “Is that —” She reached down and poked the tiny glimpse of knee that was peeking out through my jeans. “Heidi! Did you tear your new jeans?”

  “I’m sorry!” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean to! I fell off my bike! It was an accident, I swear, and I’m really sorry.”

  Mom sighed and closed her eyes like she couldn’t bear to look at what I’d done to yet another pair of perfectly innocent jeans. “Oh, Heidi. You need to be more careful. It absolutely befuddles me how — well, never mind. Go wash up for dinner.”

  I fled upstairs, knowing I’d gotten off pretty easy, especially compared to poor Avery.

  Maybe I should tell you a bit more about our house. I mean, it’s a normal house, but it’s full of really not-normal stuff. My dad runs an art auction website, and my mom is the curator of the local art museum, so they both love fancy, expensive, horribly breakable things. Plus, my grandpa is always traveling for his newspaper work, so he keeps bringing us crazy presents like glass bowls from Venice and kangaroo rugs from Australia. My friends say our house is like a museum — everything is exotic or fragile and nothing can be touched. There should be those glass boxes around everything, I swear, and maybe alarms to go off when I get too close, which I do all the time.

  Because of me, my parents keep all the nicest things in the room they call the “sala,” which is a fancy word for “parlor.” They keep that door closed and I’m not allowed to go in there. I usually stay out of Mom and Dad’s office, too. And I try to be really, really careful in the living room and the den and the kitchen and pretty much everywhere, although being careful is not something I’m good at.

  Basically, the only room where I feel safe is my own bedroom. When I knock things over in there, I don’t get in nearly as much trouble. There’s a fluffy dark blue carpet so things are less likely to break when I drop them, and the dark color helps to hide the grape juice stains and melted crayons. Mom says I can have a new carpet one day when I’m less clumsy, but I kind of like not having to worry about it.

  My walls are light blue like the color of cotton candy (you know, when it’s blue instead of pink) and at the top there’s a border of dogs playing all the way around. My grandpa and I put that up a couple of years ago, although my mom made lots of big sighing noises about it. I love it so much.

  Sometimes I lie on the carpet and just look at all the dogs running and jumping and play-wrestling. I’ve memorized all the different breeds in the pictures — there are Dalmatians and dachshunds, bulldogs and beagles, Labradors and Lhasa Apsos, Saint Bernards and schnauzers, wheatens and Weimaraners, Pomeranians and pugs and pit bulls and poodles. They always look happy. That’s what I want to be like.

  There’s a blue-and-white-and-green star-pattern quilt on my bed that my aunt Jennifer made for me after the pink poodle blanket disappeared. Of course, it’s hard to see the quilt most days because the bed is covered in clothes. I can’t ever find anything in the morning, especially whatever it is I want to wear, so I always have to drag out half my closet before I can get dressed.

  Really it would be a lot easier if I could just leave it all out there, but Mom wants my room to at least look neat every night, so every afternoon I spend, like, half an hour stuffing everything back into drawers or the closet or the giant trunk at the bottom of my bed, knowing it’ll all have to come out again the next day.

  Oh, I know. I try to get organized. Every summer my mom comes through and shows me how to fold everything and arrange it by color and hang my shoes in the racks on the back of the closet door, but I can’t keep it like that! I don’t have time! People who can do that are the ones who are “mystifying,” if you ask me. Don’t they have homework and books to read and soccer practice and other people’s dogs to hang out with?

  I dropped my backpack beside the door and dug through the clothes on my bed until I found a pair of old black pants and a dark green shirt to change into. Then I scooped up a pile of clothes in my arms and stuffed them all into the first open drawer. The ones that didn’t fit in there went into the trunk, which is this enormous old chest we found up in my other grandparents’ attic. It was supposed to be a place I could dump all my toys and puzzles and games to get them off the floor, but it kind of turned into a trunk full of everything that didn’t have somewhere else to go. I crammed my clothes on top and sat on the trunk so it would close.

  A car door slammed outside. Dad was home!

  “WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!”

  I froze. Somebody was barking very close by … and it wasn’t hard to guess who.

  I hurtled out of my room and raced down the stairs. My feet slipped on the fancy silk Persian carpet in the den and I stumbled forward into the kitchen, trying not to fall but, of course, my feet went one way and I went
the other and I basically nearly catapulted myself into the salad Mom was making, but luckily Dad caught me just in the nick of time.

  “Heidi bear!” he said, giving me a big bear hug as if I had just thrown myself into his arms on purpose. Mom wasn’t fooled, but she rolled her eyes and didn’t say anything.

  “Hi Daddy!” I said, talking fast and loud to drown out the barking outside. “How was your day? Was it great? I bet it was great and you sold lots of famous old stuff hey you know what’s on TV tonight that really funny sitcom with the cool lady with the glasses did you remember to record it I bet you didn’t you’d better go check don’t you think?”

  “Heidi, good gracious, let him take off his coat,” Mom said. “And use your inside voice, please.”

  “Calm down,” Dad said, patting my head. “Who hit fast-forward on the Heidi remote?”

  A big, furry, very loud dog named Yeti, I thought.

  Mom tilted her head. Uh-oh. “Do you hear barking?” she asked.

  “NO!” I shouted. They both gave me a funny look. “I mean, that’d be cool, if you did, but I don’t, oh well, too bad,” I said, trying to fiddle with things on the counter so I looked all casual. My mom carefully moved her cell phone and a crystal fruit bowl out of my reach.

  “I heard it, too,” Dad said, “as I got out of the car. Do you think one of the neighbors got a dog?”

  “Oh, that must be it,” I said fervently. Please please just believe that. But Mom had a little thinking wrinkle in the middle of her forehead.

  “Who?” she asked. “The Bae girls are allergic to dogs, the Drakes are planning to get kittens, and Ashley and Karen always said they work too much to have a pet.”

  “There are lots of people on this block, Mom,” I said. “It could be anyone.”

  “Call me crazy,” Dad said, “but I kind of thought it was coming from the Lafittes’.”

  “CRAZY!” I yelled, panicking and flapping my hands around. My mom grabbed the salad dressing out of the way before I knocked it onto the floor, but the pile of mail for Dad scattered everywhere. “Oops,” I said. “Sorry.” I knelt down to pick it all up.

  “What has gotten into you tonight?” Mom said to me.

  “Tonight?” I said, still a little too loudly. “Ha-ha! I’m always like this! Ha-ha-ha!”

  Mom frowned at me, but Dad laughed. “That’s kind of true,” he agreed.

  “Hmm,” Mom said. She knows me way too well, no matter how “befuddling” she says I am. “Well, our lunatic daughter is right about one thing — I doubt Kelly would ever get another dog, after what happened with Snort.”

  “Stitch,” I corrected her, and then cracked up a little at the idea of a dog named Snort.

  “Well, it’s stopped now,” Dad said with a shrug. “I’ll go change and be right down.”

  “Heidi, set the table,” Mom said. “If you think you can do that without shouting or flinging any forks out the window.” Which was kind of unfair, if you ask me, since the only thing I’ve ever thrown through a window was a serving spoon and that was because Avery grabbed the back of my chair while I was reaching for the caprese salad and it startled me and I threw up my hands for balance and it just went flying and anyway the window was open and it was totally an accident plus not my fault.

  When it’s just the three of us, my family eats dinner in the kitchen instead of the dining room. I like the kitchen much better because the dining room carpet is terrifyingly white and the chairs are all covered in this pale damask that is just begging for me to drop spaghetti sauce on it. Although I haven’t done that yet, I did manage to get a little spot of vinaigrette on the lavender paisley curtains once (don’t ask, I have magical destructive powers), and you don’t even want to know what a huge disaster that apparently was.

  Plus, our kitchen nook has my favorite piece of art in the house (apart from my dog border) on the wall above the table. It’s also the least expensive piece of art in the house, but it’s one we can all agree on, because it’s a map of the world.

  My parents love to travel. They always do one big vacation every year. When I was a baby we mostly went to cool places in the U.S. and Canada (like Disney World and the Grand Canyon and the Berkshires). But when I was six we went overseas for the first time, to England, and because I was really well behaved, ever since then I’ve been allowed to help them plan our trips. So there are pushpins all over the map for where we’ve been and where we want to go.

  The red pushpins are the places my dad has been by himself. The blue ones are where Mom has been, and the purple ones are the places they’ve been together but without me. Then there are green pushpins for the places we’ve been all three together, and my favorite, yellow pushpins for the places we really want to go. Plus, my mom let me have some white ones for places I want to go that they’ve already been, so it kind of looks like there’s a purple-white pushpin war going on in Costa Rica and Japan and Iceland.

  My parents are totally different people when they’re traveling. If we’re in another country, they don’t care if I spill gelato all over myself or fall off ancient Incan walls or accidentally let all the sheep out of the paddock on a New Zealand sheep farm. They think everything I do is hilarious when we’re on vacation. There’s nothing expensive for me to break (although I have to admit the Sistine Chapel got off lucky), and we only pack things that we don’t mind losing anyway. It’s my favorite part of the year.

  I set out the knives and forks and water glasses, thinking about Yeti. Was he cold out there in the shed? It was only October second, and it wasn’t too cold outside, plus he had that ridiculous fur coat. But I worried about him anyway. Was he lonely? Did he think I’d abandoned him? Was he super-hungry? Poor dog.

  I couldn’t really concentrate on what my parents were saying during dinner, because I was thinking about him the whole time.

  “Sounds great to me. What do you think, Heidi?” my dad asked.

  “What?” I said.

  “Space cadet,” he said with a smile. “Your mom was saying maybe we should go to India next.”

  “India!” I said, finally snapping back into the conversation. “Wow! You mean, like, the Taj Mahal and elephants and … and … Indian food … what else do they have in India?”

  “Lots of incredible things,” Mom said. I glanced up at the map and saw that India had a blue pin in it, so Mom had been there, but Dad hadn’t. “You’ll love it. We’ll definitely ride an elephant. And there are lots of great books set in India. I read one called Homeless Bird that was amazing, and I saw another called The Conch Bearer that I bet we’d like.”

  Mom loves to find books we can read together for our trips, set in the place we’re going to. We read The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke while we were in Venice and Under the Mountain by Maurice Gee while we were in New Zealand, which was really cool.

  “And I’ll learn to make chicken tikka masala and samosas,” Dad said, getting excited.

  “You should ask Pradesh’s mom for advice,” I told him. “She’s Ella’s piano teacher, and Ella says she makes the best Indian food in the world.”

  “Great idea,” Dad said.

  “So we’ll do some research and think about it,” Mom said. “I just wanted to put the idea out there, since we’d been talking about Asia next.”

  A couple years ago I said it was unfair that Mom and Dad had been to all the continents (except Antarctica) and I hadn’t, so we were fixing that. So far we’d done Peru for South America, Italy and England for Europe, Egypt for Africa, and New Zealand, which we decided counted for Australia. So now if we went to India, that would be all of them (except Antarctica), which I figured would make me pretty much the coolest kid in sixth grade.

  After dinner, I finished my homework, and then I went on the Internet in our computer room to see if I could find any postings about a lost black-and-white Newfoundland. I didn’t really know where to look, so it’s not surprising that I didn’t find anything. Plus, I kept having to close the window really fast every t
ime Mom walked past the door, which she did a lot, probably because she was worried that I’d trip and fall into the computer monitor or accidentally yank the mouse out of its socket or something.

  I also double-checked my favorite dog websites to make sure I didn’t take Yeti any food that was bad for dogs. I mean, everyone knows that chocolate is really bad for dogs, but did you know that raisins and grapes are totally dangerous for them, too? And there are bad things in onions and garlic as well. I was memorizing the list when my dad knocked on the door and said it was time for bed.

  I had to wait forever for my parents to go to sleep. I had no idea they stayed up so much longer than me. I could hear them doing the dishes together, and then watching TV and laughing about some online art history course they’re both taking. I was really afraid that I’d fall asleep, but I guess I was way too excited and nervous about sneaking out to see Yeti. Plus, it was too weird to fall asleep in regular clothes, which I was still wearing under the covers.

  I stared into the dark, trying to name as many different dog breeds as I could, but I lost count after I got to thirty. Then I tried to match all my friends with dogs in my head, like “If Rory were a dog, what kind would she be?” I think she’d be a Labrador, all action and playing and roughhousing and fun. Kristal would be something graceful and sweet-natured, like a Cavalier King Charles spaniel or a West Highland white terrier, maybe.

  Avery would definitely be a Rottweiler. They’re big, stocky dogs who look a lot scarier than they really are. I met this really sweet one, Bruno, down the block from Grandpa’s house, and he was just a big goofy doofus who wanted to have his belly scratched all day long.

  Finally … finally … I heard my parents’ footsteps come upstairs. Their bedroom door closed. I was so ready to leap out of bed and run downstairs, but I made myself wait another half hour, until I was pretty sure they were asleep. By then it was nearly midnight. Good grief, Mom and Dad!

  I tiptoed downstairs and went straight to the refrigerator. I found an empty Tupperware container and filled it with sliced ham and a couple of string cheese sticks and some leftover chicken, although I was really careful to make sure there weren’t any bones because chicken bones can break and hurt a dog if he tries to eat them. That didn’t seem like enough food, so I added the peanut butter sandwich that I was supposed to have for lunch the next day and some leftover brown rice from this experimental healthy dinner my dad had made on Monday.