Rather than actually face my situation, I decided instead to let myself feel just how mad I was at Kat.
Like it was an instant replay in sports, I saw it playing out in my head—Kat grabbing my phone like she always did, not even asking first, me for once trying to take what was mine back from her, and Ophelia flying up into the air, my grab that wasn’t close enough—and then the phone crashing down on the tracks.
And then our fight.
We’d never had a fight like that before—so vicious, so raw. I couldn’t believe the things I’d said to her, the ones I wished I could take back. And the things she’d said to me. I closed my eyes for a second, like this could stop me remembering, because replaying it was making me feel like I was about to burst into tears, right there on the B train.
And even after all that, she hadn’t even followed me onto the train. She’d left me behind. I spent my whole life following three steps behind her, and the one time I went first, she couldn’t even do a small thing like follow me, just once in four years.
Then a thought hit me that was so awful it made me feel shaky—what if Kat had done this on purpose? Was she that upset about what I’d said to her? I couldn’t block out the way her face had looked when I’d told her she was a lot. She was—but usually it was a good thing, one of the reasons I loved her. I wished I could take it back. I’d hit below the belt—we both had—but had she been upset enough to leave me behind?
Or—and this thought slithered into my mind like an insidious snake—had she done this to solve her problem? Had she left me to take care of the dog, even though she knew I didn’t like them, so that she could go ahead and see Mr. Campbell’s play unencumbered?
No, I decided, shaking my head, even though it probably made me look crazy. Kat wouldn’t have done that. We’d just gotten separated accidentally.…
Brad whined and I looked down at him, my dog panic replacing friend and phone and general situation panic.
What was wrong with him? Why was he making that sound? Was I supposed to do something? What if he needed to go to the bathroom and had an accident on the train? How was I going to clean it up? What if everyone saw me with this dog—that I probably wasn’t even supposed to have on the subway in the first place—and he made a mess and everyone was looking at me and getting mad? I could practically see it playing out in front of me.
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO-DO-DO-DO-DO-DO?
I reached down warily to pat him on the head, wondering what he wanted and how anyone ever lived with a dog. Was your whole life just a long game of charades without ever getting an answer? A Lab had knocked me over when I was three, and it was one of my first memories. I’d never quite gotten over my fear of the unknown with dogs—that this was an animal that you couldn’t control, and at any moment they could jump up, or lunge, or bite you.
Brad rose up on his back legs and waved his paws again, which wasn’t any answer I could translate. He seemed to want something, so I picked him up, holding him away from my body, wondering what happened now. He’d stopped whimpering, though, which I counted as a positive. The train lurched suddenly, and for one heart-stopping moment I thought I was going to drop the dog. But I managed to pull him against my body and brace myself on the pole with my back, and when the train—and I—had achieved some equilibrium, I shifted him so that I was holding him with one arm against my chest, the other holding tightly to the pole.
I wasn’t exactly thrilled to have a dog this close to me. His nose was twitching as he looked around, making a little snuffling sound. I could feel his heart pounding hard through his fluff, and he was panting. I seemed to remember from some nature documentary (or more likely, Psychic Vet Tech: Off the Leash) that when dogs did this when it wasn’t hot out, it was because they were stressed. I suddenly realized that he might be scared. He didn’t know me or Kat, after all, and we’d taken him out of his home and brought him to a loud place he didn’t understand. He no doubt could sense that the person holding him didn’t know what to do with dogs, and didn’t particularly like them.
For whatever reason, knowing that the dog was possibly as freaked out as I was actually made me feel better—like I wasn’t in this entirely alone. “Okay,” I said quietly to him, rubbing my thumb over his fluff. We’d already stopped at one station, and I didn’t want another one to pass before I figured out what to do here. “Okay, let’s figure this out.”
I had to do this in bite-size chunks. If I thought about everything that was happening, it would be too much. I’d learned this from my dad, before I could even remember learning it. My favorite place to do my homework—even in kindergarten, when we really didn’t have any—had always been wherever my dad was working. I’d pull up a chair next to him at the kitchen table or sprawl on the floor under his desk in his office. I’d tell him about my book report/science project/social studies paper, and he’d discuss what he was working on too. He’d tell me about how you had to build a legal case piece by piece, and how everything had to be airtight or the whole thing fell apart.
When I was particularly stressed about whatever homework I had, he’d calm me down by talking about how you just had to take everything one step at a time. That if he thought about his entire case at once—how much was at stake, how much he had to correctly argue—he’d never get past the first motion.
So he just took it step by step, only trying to control what he could. “How do you eat a whale, pumpkin?” he’d ask me, looking over his glasses.
“One bite at a time,” I’d always reply.
“Atta girl,” he’d say, giving me a wink.
“One bite at a time,” I murmured to the dog, who panted at me. “Okay.” I glanced around, worried that someone had heard me talking to myself—then realized that Brad’s presence was probably insulating me from that. Because while muttering to yourself was a surefire way to have people not want to stand next to you on the train, it was perfectly acceptable to talk to a dog. Maybe this was why people had them.
The biggest problem was that I didn’t have a phone. I could barely remember the last time I’d been without one—not since I was a kid. I was in New York City, and I didn’t know how to get anywhere, or how I was going to get in touch with anyone—
It suddenly hit me—Kat didn’t have a phone either. So even if I could somehow get ahold of someone else’s, there was no way to contact her. Did I even know Kat’s number?
This was enough to startle me out of my panic.
Did I?
She’d been saved in my phone, first in my favorites, for the last four years, so I’d never had to actually punch in her numbers. But it was moot anyway, because even if I managed to remember her number, all it would do was ring on Teri’s coffee table.
It was now becoming clear to me that maybe I didn’t know anybody’s phone number. Maybe Beckett’s…
And he was in the city tonight. I remembered his text that I’d gotten on the train. But immediately after I thought about him, the shame that I felt whenever Beckett came up crashed over me once again. How I’d wrecked things with us, there in the dining room of the Boxcar Cantina. And then I hadn’t been brave enough, or honest enough, to tell Kat what had actually happened.…