Then came a pair of Chihuahuas, yipping up a storm, one white and one black. Fol owing them was a caramel-colored Pomeranian that looked like it was wearing a large-col ared fur coat. Then a Weimaraner, al smooth and gray. And in the rear, an overenthusiastic doodle of some sort that was trying to sniff seven things at once. It looked a lot like my Griffin, only with black fur instead of apricot.
The Pomeranian’s person, a middle-aged lady I’d seen before, wearing red librarian glasses, waved toward me. I waved back, hoping she’d keep walking. Nothing to see here. I just wanted Griffin to do his business so I could go home and actively avoid distance-learning by playing Design Home on my phone. Griffin is sort of indifferent to other dogs, sort of like me with people.
I scanned them quickly. They were masked and appropriately distanced, and it reminded me of the one good thing about this pandemic: having a reason to steer clear of people. It can be hard to tel with masks, but the first four were clearly adults, and the one in back looked like a teenager, just about my age. One of their kids, maybe? He was skinny with blond hair and a long, thin face, and he was attempting to rodeo-wrangle the overenthusiastic doodle.
The guy in the front stopped and cupped his hands over his mask, and warily I put my hand to my ear. He lowered his mask to his chin, entirely negating the purpose of the mask in the first place. He had a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache.
“Your dog safe?” he yel ed.
Safe? Like from the coronavirus? I was confused. I cupped my mask-covered mouth and yel ed “What?”
“Does your dog play wel with others?”
“Oh, um. Yeah, I guess. He’s…safe.”
I got that churning in my stomach that comes with the proximity of people. Maybe it’s my body’s reaction to danger. Fight or flight, I guess they cal it. I tried to slow my breathing as the bunch of them strol ed over until they were about ten feet away. They simultaneously unleashed their dogs, and Griffin went charging up to each of them to say hel o. He sniffed the teen
boy’s dog’s butt. He did that weird circle dance with the Pomeranian, where both dogs tried to get to the other’s behind.
It’s always weird, that moment where your dog starts sniffing another dog’s butt, and you’re standing there with their human, and suddenly you’re uncomfortably aware of both of your butts, and it’s like, Hi there, other person with a but ! Fortunately, the older guy’s husky reared back in that let’s play position, and Griffin took off across the park.
When he’s in the mood, the boy loves to be chased.
I avoided conversation by turning my head to watch. As they ran in a large circle at the perimeter of the park, Griffin looked like a big pile of apricot-colored fur blowing in the wind.
“Your dog is adorable,” the woman said.
“Um, yours too,” I said, having no idea where her Pomeranian even was at the moment.
And then it was quiet, which is the worst. Silence can be so awkward, but talking to strangers has never been in my skil set.
So the silence stayed, and it was Satan incarnate. Sometimes when I’d go to a party and wind up smal -talking with someone, and they’d be droning on about how it was so hot in the summer—duh—or they hated doing homework, or something similarly banal, I would tune out, watch their facial muscles expand and contract, and I’d wonder what would happen if I just opened my mouth and started screaming.
Probably not get invited back. Which would be okay, I guess.
I glanced over at the guy my age, who was tal er and better built than me.
I looked away, afraid he’d see me looking. He was clearly a “Normal.” It was obvious, from his red board shorts and yel ow tank top and sandals, that he was one of those people who effortlessly fit in.
Normals are tricky. They had made my life a living hel , for two years, ever since eighth grade. You had to be careful around Normals, because sometimes they shape-shifted, like with Nimo back in February. My first. We were hanging out, and they drew me in by revealing their own supposed not-normalness. And then you let your guard down, and I guess maybe they get tired of whatever they were doing with you, and now they know al your darkest, most painful stuff. And they revert back to Normal without tel ing
you, and they never talk to you again, and take your two best friends with them.
Yes, you had to be very careful around Normals.
Griffin came running back over, a wide grin across his face, panting. He trotted up to the boy al friendly, turned ninety degrees, lifted up his leg, and he peed.
“Wha!” was al I could say.
“Whoa,” the boy finished for me, jumping back.
There was that split second before everyone started laughing where I actual y thought: Run! Just run, never look back, never see those people again.
But then they did laugh, and I was stuck, and al the attention was on me, and I hated my life so hard.
“Oh my god. I’m so sorry. Um.”
Everyone was laughing, including the boy, but I was dying inside. “I’m so, um. He’s never, ever, ever done that before. Never ever ever. Sorry. Sorry.
Sorry.”
The boy shrugged, shaking his leg. The bottom of his red shorts and his leg seemed to take the hit. “I didn’t like these shorts anyway.”
“He owns you!” the older guy was yel ing. “He peed on you, now he owns you!”
And I was like, No, please stop talking.
—
I avoided the park the next morning, for obvious reasons. Instead I headed down to Pinchot, which is pronounced Pin-Chot rather than Pin-Cho, because America. Pinchot is the best street in al of Phoenix for walking a dog. Back in the day it was part of the New Deal. They subdivided land into one-acre properties and encouraged industrial workers to farm part time. Apparently, Eleanor Roosevelt planted some trees on it. That was like the 1930s version of Beyoncé planting trees today, so it was kind of a big deal. And now, nearly a hundred years later, there’s this incredible canopy of eighty-foot-tal Aleppo
pines and Washington palms on Pinchot between 26th and 27th Streets. The whole street smel s like pine and fresh-cut grass.
We lived a block north, where things smel ed decidedly less lovely and trees were sparse and mostly smal palms. Which was why I always walked on Pinchot.
And as if the world were punking me, there they were, the same dog-walking brigade, or at least three of them, heading toward me. The woman and the man were up front and about five feet apart, and when I craned my head, I saw Griffin’s pee victim and his black doodle.
I thought about running, and this time I almost did, but then the woman waved to me again, and I sighed and realized running away would make it worse. So I kept walking, like a man toward his executioners. And while I walked, I thought about funny things I could say about the fact that yesterday Griffin had used the boy like a fence post. I came up with, I’ve stopped al owing Griffin to drink water, so you should be safe.
But when I approached them and opened my mouth, it burst out as
“Drinking water, I’ve stopped…,” which didn’t make any sense at al .
“Hydration is important,” the woman with the librarian glasses said, nodding, as if what I’d said was somehow a normal greeting to near strangers.
I thought about fixing it, but the moment was gone, so instead I just stood there and held Griffin’s leash tightly, lest he do it again. Maybe the kid was some sort of pee magnet? Who was to say?