Buster by Caleb Huett (ebook reader library txt) 📕

even started his story! This wet-hair-allergy pantomime is direct communication. They were talking. Case closed.”

The judge tilted her head to Buster. “He makes a good point. Your argument so far is built on the necessity of your crime. This boy’s need. But here, you show yourself ready to break our Law immediately.”

Lasagna pulled a paper from his briefcase. “At this point, Buster has done nothing outside of what humans expect from a Good Dog. Especially a service dog. Even the Lassie Regulations say that service dogs may communicate as long as they are responding to a solid, visible, and known piece of information. Good Dogs understand wetness, so long as they see water.”

“So if I see rain outside,” Pronto argued, “I’m allowed to check the weather app on my owner’s phone?”

“Either way, Your Honor, we know Buster pushed the boundaries—that’s why we’re here. But he does not deserve a life on The Farm just because he cared about a human!”

“He does if he’s putting that human before the rest of Dogkind!” Pronto sat back and leaned against the side of the car.

The judge’s face remained still and gave away nothing about her opinion. “Please continue, Buster. I’ll reserve my judgment until the end.”

Imagine the most fun place you possibly can. First, obviously, mud everywhere. Then good toys, the ones you can chew on and they don’t break. There’s so many of them that even if you bury one in the mud, you’ve got a hundred more within mouth’s reach. There’s … a giant Apatosaurus skeleton! It’s from a museum, except no one cares if you chew on it. The walls are lined with tennis balls and your tail chases itself. Imagine paradise.

Now imagine all that paradise was behind a glass wall. That is what Tonio’s house was like. The Pulaski family had collected dozens of action figures, records, books, and collectibles that were scrunched up on high shelves, leaving lower shelves bare because they didn’t want me to get to them.

We’d spent two days training together, and then another few days learning all the things you have to learn when you get new roommates: when they go to the bathroom, what times they eat, and which of your personal objects you can’t leave out because they’ll chew on them. It was almost a whole week before I started to feel settled and Tonio’s parents felt comfortable leaving us alone.

The house looked out over Bellville Square and was actually made up of the two stories above his dad’s store, Tomorrow Grocery. On the third floor, behind a door covered in marker doodles, was Tonio’s room. His space was considerably tidier than the rest of the house, but one of the walls was covered in tall piles of shoeboxes, neatly stacked on top of one another in rows.

“I draw a lot.” He mumbled like it was an apology, and gestured to the wall of drawings I was sniffing around. “Most of the stuff on that wall is stuff I can see from the window. I don’t draw new stuff, really. Just whatever I can see.”

He made it sound like it was a bad thing, but I am here to tell you that his drawings were amazing. I’m not an artist myself, so I’m no expert—but the squirrels he’d drawn were so realistic that I almost believed I could scare them away with a bark. He’d drawn the famous bell in the center of Bellville Square, and almost every storefront on all four sides. “I love drawing stuff I can see, because when I start, I always think I know what it looks like. And then when I start drawing, there’s so much more than I thought. There’s always a bunch of stuff I didn’t notice. It’s like the same thing I’ve looked at over and over is really different from what I thought.”

This Tonio was totally different from the Tonio I’d met at the training center. Suddenly, alone in his room, he looked comfortable.

“You can sit on my bed, if you want. I bet the floor is cold.”

That sounded nice. I turned toward the bed and then caught myself. I’m a dog, I thought. I don’t know what he’s saying. I pretended I was distracted by something on the floor and sniffed at the ground.

And it was good that I did. Tonio was staring at me very closely. After a moment, he stood and walked over to the bed. “Up!” he called, and patted the mattress. I jumped up and settled down on the edge. He sat beside me and scratched behind my ears.

And then he said—and I’m saying this because I’m going to tell the whole truth—“I guess you are just a normal dog. At the center, I thought …” I tried very hard not to move at all. He didn’t finish. “Never mind. That’s stupid.”

Careful, Buster! I closed my eyes and pretended to rest, but my heart was pounding like I really had chased the sketch squirrels. You just started a new job and you almost messed up already. Be a Good Dog.

Apparently convinced I’d gone to sleep, Tonio got up and moved over to his desk by the window. I cracked open my eyes to keep watching while he pulled the highest shoebox off the stack and opened it. The shoebox was stuffed full of small rectangles of thick paper—he pulled out the one closest to him and set it on his desk, twisting the neck of his bendy lamp to get a better look.

He clicked on a computer monitor and typed something into the keyboard—a few seconds later, he was looking at a picture of a trading card on a website for something called Beamblade. He picked a pencil out of the cup on his desk and started drawing on the little rectangle, checking the image on the computer in between lines.

More curious than tired, I slid off the bed and went over to look at the box.