Fetching Read Free

different shapes, and pretending that I’m some kind of origami artist and not just a humiliated middle schooler riding home in a loaner pair of elastic-waist pants. Every time the bus stops and one of them gets off, it feels a little less like a big fat lie.
    After about a million years, the bus wheezes to a stop in front of the old farmhouse where I live with my grandmother, spits me out, and groans away. It’s not a pretty house—it’s supposed to be white, but it’s gone kind of gray and flaky where paint is peeling off—but today I’m incredibly happy to see it.
    Oomlot races toward me like a bolt of yellow-white lightning. I must reek of humiliation, because Oomlot licks my wrist so much that I have to dry it off on The Pants.
    This is one of the things I’ve really learned to love about dogs—they are the exact opposite of middle schoolers. You can do everything you’re supposed to do in school—smile at people, use deodorant, join clubs—and still most people will look at you like you’ve just pooped in the middle of the School Rules! Welcome Back assembly. And dogs, well, you could actually poop in the middle of a back-to-school assembly, and they’d probably love you even more because of it.
    Ferrill, a Great Dane of gargantuan proportions, lumbers down the porch steps toward me and nuzzles my hand. The screen door squeaks open and Queso, our tiniest dog, follows Ferrill off the porch, yapping, until Corny slaps her hands together, meaning “stop” in their language. Then she waves at me from inside the screen door. I squat down to pet Queso. I am surrounded by dogs. Oomlot pushes in closer and leans against me, placing his front paw on my foot. I squeeze him into a hug. Even though his main ingredient is yellow Labrador retriever, it’s whatever secret ingredients he has that make him especially cute. His coat is surprisingly soft and thick, and he’s got a little white patch of fur over each eye, like those Swedish punctuation marks—that’s why Corny named him Oomlot. After she got his dog tags made up, she found out it’s supposed to be spelled umlaut , but she stuck with her version. With his big round eyes, the O’s really suit him.
    Corny walks out onto the porch, followed by our most polite and proper dog, Tess. Tess is a greyhound. She’s smart and fast, but not fast enough. She was a race dog that never won any races, so now she’s ours.
    â€œWill you just look at this?” Corny says from the porch. “I keep saying I should take a picture.”
    â€œWell, take one if it makes you so happy,” I say, revealing how incredibly cranky I am.
    She gives me her little closed-mouth smile. That’s one of the funny things about her. She’s never liked her teeth—they’re crooked and kind of gray. She says she was always teased about them when she was my age, and I guess that was before they had braces and white strips. You’d think by the time you’re old and people stop expecting you to be pretty, you wouldn’t care anymore. But I guess the things that happen to you in middle school stay with you basically forever. So I can just imagine what I have to look forward to.
    â€œYou know, I can’t believe how scared you were of these dogs when you first moved here,” she says now.
    â€œThey seemed so huge!” I say in my defense. Besides, that was a whole year ago. Yeah, I was afraid of them—okay, like deathly afraid. But at the time they seemed like a pack of hairy, salivating, fanged, bloodthirsty creatures. But that was all before . Before Corny sprained her ankle and I had to get over my fears just to help keep her business going. Before Oomlot claimed me as his favorite human. Before I got to cuddle a freshly born puppy.
    â€œYeah, that Queso is a monster,” she says, with fake seriousness. Queso’s a full-blooded Chihuahua who was given away because