Notes From a Liar and Her Dog (2 page)

“What about your dad?” Just Carol persists. “Is he your real father?”

“No,” I say, speaking to the floor. “I have a whole other family. Only Pistachio is real. He’s my real dog. When my real parents come, he’s going with me.”

My mother sighs. “I think we’re giving her too much attention for this. It sends the wrong signal—”

“Bear with me a minute, Mrs. MacPherson,” Just Carol says, motioning her hands like my mom should stop.

“Is this some new kind of teaching method?” my mother whispers to Mr. Borgdorf. Her foot is swinging back and forth.

“Miss Samberson.” Mr. Borgdorf says her name like it is a complete sentence. “Step outside for a minute. I want to have a word with you.” He shoots an embarrassed little smile in my mom’s direction.

Great. The last thing I want is to be cooped up in a hot room with my mother. I scoot my chair away from her.

“Antonia, I just don’t understand you. Do you want to humiliate me? Is that your purpose here?”

I look up. What would happen if I poked a hole in the paper where the ceiling panel is missing? What would come out?

“You weren’t adopted.”

I shrug. “That’s what you always say.”

“Because it’s the truth,” my mother says, taking a
tissue out of her sleeve and dabbing at her face. Her makeup is melting off. I can see a square patch on her forehead where her Kleenex has wiped it clean. “You know, I just don’t understand you. I never have had a moment’s worry with Elizabeth or Kate, either. But you, you’re like some kind of…some kind of …”

“See,” I whisper as Just Carol and the assistant principal come back, “you don’t think I’m your real daughter, either.”

Mr. Borgdorf’s wide lips are pressed together. A sweat bead drops off his nose.

Just Carol sucks her cheeks in and organizes her jangly bracelets so the fronts are all going the same way.

“Now,” the assistant principal says, “I think this has been a productive discussion for everyone. And I’m sure this is a situation you can work out at home, Mrs. MacPherson. And as for you, young lady…do you know the story of the boy who cried wolf?”

I nod.

“I think it would be instructive for you to relay that story to all of us here.”

I run my tongue over my teeth. “Some kid pretended he saw a wolf a bunch of times, and everyone came to help him. Then when he really saw the wolf, they all thought he was kidding and they didn’t come, and the wolf ate him.”

“That’s right. And what do you think the boy learned?” Mr. Borgdorf asks.

“He didn’t learn anything. He’s dead.”

Mr. Borgdorf’s eyes flash angry. His lips roll in.
“Fair enough. But why? What was the mistake he made?”

I blow my hair off my forehead and consider this question. “He was stupid. He shouldn’t have expected anyone to help in the first place. He should have handled the wolf by himself. That’s what I would have done.”

W
hen the bus drops me and Harrison off, my little sister, Kate, is waiting for us. Kate looks like the kind of kid they show eating chocolate pudding on TV. She is small, even for a third grader, and she has blond curly hair and lots of freckles. She looks like my mom and my older sister, Your Highness Elizabeth. “Three peas in a pod,” my father always says. “And one brown acorn.” That’s me. I have thick, straight dark hair and skin the color of a brown paper grocery bag. I don’t look like anybody, except for my real parents, of course. I look exactly like them.

“Boy, are you in trouble,” Kate says.

I stand on the curb looking back at the bus, wondering if it is too late for Harrison and me to get back on. The bus driver’s big hand reaches for the silver door handle. The door slaps closed and the bus pulls back on the road, blowing stinky black smoke out the tailpipe.

“This is news?” I ask, cocking my head toward Harrison.

When Your Highness Elizabeth isn’t around, Kate
spends her time watching me so she can report back to my mother. Sometimes she takes notes so she won’t forget one single thing. I think Kate is going to be a bill collector when she grows up. She doesn’t look like one, though, which is why she’ll be so good at it.

“She lost a whole half-day at Barbara and Barbara’s and she called Dad
at work
,” Kate says. We are walking now, and I hear coins jingle in her shoe. Kate always keeps change in there. She says it’s the only safe place, because no one will ever think of stealing money from your shoe. The only problem is it sounds so loud when she walks that if someone did want to steal her money, they’d know right where to look.

“Big deal,” I say, although this
is
a big deal. My mother works part-time as a bookkeeper for two interior designers named Barbara and she doesn’t like to miss. And my father HATES to be called at work. I don’t know why he hates this so much. It’s not like he’s a surgeon who will forget to put somebody’s organs back if he gets a call in the middle of an operation. He works for an insurance company. What’s so important about that?

“Life insurance is essential,” Kate says. She half skips to keep up with us. “I’m thinking of buying some. You can make a lot of money with life insurance,” she tells Harrison.

“Only problem is you got to die first,” I say, kicking a dirt clod, which dissolves into a pile of dirt.

“You do not,” she says.

“Yes, you do,” I say.

“That doesn’t make any sense at all, Antonia. Why would anyone want it then?” Kate says, her hands on her hips. Her chin poked out.

“Antonia Jane MacPherson, you’re grounded! You come in here right this minute!” My mother’s head bobs out the front door.

“Oh, man! She’s home
already
?”

Kate nods. Her small face is very serious.

“I better go home,” Harrison says. He scratches his neck under the collar of his T-shirt and takes a giant step backward. His arm is swinging back and forth, back and forth. He doesn’t like being around my mom when she’s mad at me, which is most of the time.

“Wait,” I say to Harrison, grabbing his bony arm.

“Kate, will you walk Pistachio?” I ask.

“How much?”

I reach in my pocket to see what I have. “Eleven cents.”

“Five dollars,” Kate says.

“Are you nuts?” I sigh and look at Harrison, then I pull my ear twice. This is our secret sign. It means go around the back way. Harrison looks uncomfortable, as if he wishes I hadn’t done that.

“Antonia,” my mother yells. “I said right now. Harrison, you’ll have to go home.”

“Rats, Harrison!” I say, loud enough for my mom to hear. “You have to go home.”

“Okay, I guess I’ll go home now,” Harrison says in a really fake voice. This is one problem with Harrison. He is a lousy liar.

Once I get to my room, Harrison will climb the
trellis in the backyard and come in the second-floor hall window. Harrison is good at getting in places. That’s because his dad is always locking them out and sending Harrison in through the window to unlock the door.

“Bye, Harrison,” Kate says. Kate kind of likes Harrison, though she would never admit it because Your Highness Elizabeth thinks Harrison is gross. He smells like a salami sandwich, Elizabeth always says.

Harrison smiles. Harrison likes everybody, whether they like him or not. He is even nice to people who make fun of him. This makes me sick. I think it’s a basic rule of life never to be nice to people who make fun of you.

“Pistachio puked in your room,” Kate says after Harrison disappears behind the Deetermans’ garage. “It’s yellow and it stinks worse than you know what.”

“Better watch out, I’ll tell Mom you said a nasty,” I whisper.

“I did not! But even if I did, she’d never believe you, anyway. She never believes anything you say,” Kate says. She seems proud of this.

I snort.

“Get a move on, Antonia,” my mother bellows from the front door. “You go right up to your room and you stay there. You are not to leave this house, even to walk Pistachio.”

“You always do that. It’s not fair. Why should he get punished? What did he do?”

“Don’t start with me, young lady. I have had it up to here with you.” She touches her forehead, as if the
floodwater has reached that high. “I don’t want to hear one more word out of you,” she says, then she goes back inside.

“$4.75 to walk him and that’s my final offer,” Kate whispers. Kate gets all her cash off me. She can never squeeze money out of Elizabeth because Elizabeth never gets in trouble. Maybe Kate will be a bail bondsman when she grows up. She would be good at that, too.

“I don’t have $4.75.”

“Yes, you do,” Kate says. “It’s in your bottom drawer.”

“God, do you search my room, too?” I shove her out of the way so I can shortcut through the kitchen and score a handful of cookies without her telling my mother. It works. She stops to record my bad behavior in her spiral notebook. I make off with an entire package of Oreos and hurry up the stairs to my room.

My room is tiny. It was supposed to be the laundry room, but Elizabeth convinced my mom she’d get head lice from rooming with me, so they put the washer and dryer in the garage and I got my own room. The only problem is my room doesn’t have a window, but it has a sink and that’s almost as good.

“Hey, Tashi, hey, little guy,” I say to my brown scruffy-haired dog, who is curled up asleep in my pajamas. Pistachio is tiny. He looks like a pointy-eared guinea pig who had a bad hair day, but he is a dog. He is old and he smells ripe.

Pistachio gets up when he sees me and twists his little body back and forth. He used to wait for me
downstairs, then leap up and paw wildly at the air when I came home. But now, it’s hard for him to stand up. He walks as if his legs don’t bend, and his fur used to be white around his face, but now it’s yellow. No matter how hard I scrub, I can’t get it clean.

He makes my room stink, too. Especially if he has puked. Today I smell the nasty stink of food that’s come back up. I look for puke puddles. There are two on my bedspread and one on the rug. Yuck. I carry Pistachio to the laundry basket and get him settled in a nest of dirty socks. Then I strip my bed and go downstairs for new sheets and rug cleaner. My mother is in the kitchen, but I know she won’t yell at me for this. As far as she is concerned, even mass murderers should be allowed to clean their rooms.

I go straight for the cleaning cupboard so she’ll know what I am doing, and I keep quiet. My mom and I get along fine when I keep my mouth shut, but the second I say so much as “Hello” I get in trouble. If I were a mute, it would be much better.

“I’m going to pick up Elizabeth at ballet class. If Kate tells me you’ve been out of this house”—my mother drums her fingers on the counter—“Pistachio will sleep outside.”

I look down at my mom’s ankle. If I were a dog, I’d bite her. I smile to myself, thinking about this.

By the time I get back to my room, Harrison is there, balancing an Oreo on his nose. We listen while the garage door goes up,
tchinka-tchinka-tchinka squeareak.
It sounds as if it won’t make it up or down again, which is the way this whole house is. It’s
painted this weird color on the outside—like when you mess up in art class and your paints run together in one greenish brownish mess. And nothing inside the house works very well. The washing machine overflows, the cupboard doors are always falling off, and the garbage disposal sounds like it’s grinding up body parts.

This is a temporary house. “A rental,” my mom calls it. The garage is filled with boxes my mother won’t unpack until we “get a place of our own.” My parents have never bought a house, but that is always the plan once we get settled. The thing is we never do get settled. We always just move again. I have moved thirteen times in my life. This is actually the longest we’ve ever lived anywhere. We’ve been in the house just off the road Sarah’s Road in the town of Sarah’s Road for two years. I plan on staying here forever, too, because I like Sarah’s Road, even if it is a silly name for a city. And because this is where Harrison lives.

I look at Harrison scooping the white center out of the Oreo with his crooked front teeth and I feel happy. Before Harrison, I had people I called friends, but they were just kids to eat lunch with. That’s way different.

Harrison shakes his head and looks up at me through his wild hair. “Your dad home?”

I shake my head. “Friday.”

“How come he’s gone so much, anyway?”

“He’s in charge of a bunch of sales offices and he has to visit them. And sometimes he opens new ones and hires people and trains them and stuff.”

Harrison scratches his head all over, like he’s shampooing his hair. “I don’t want a job like that. Think I could find a job drawing chickens?”

“Maybe, you know, the ones on the packages in the grocery store.”

“Yuck.” Harrison’s face scrunches up. “Those are dead chickens. I don’t want to draw dead chickens!” He shakes his head and looks at me as if I’ve just licked dirt.

“I’m sorry.” I hand him the package of Oreos. He takes three. “I know what we can do. I’ll get a job and then I’ll buy all your chicken drawings. Every single one of them.”

Harrison smiles. “Okay,” he says. He carves the white out of another cookie. “That reminds me, are we going to do that report card thing again this semester?”

Last year Harrison and I switched report cards. Harrison cut the names off the top with a razor blade and a ruler. Then, I took home his report card, which was full of C’s and D’s and one A+ in art. And he took home my report card, which had all A’s and B’s except for one D- in Citizenship—up from an F in the fall.

“I dunno. You want to?” I ask.

“I still can’t believe no one figured it out. Ours were a half inch shorter than everyone else’s.” He measures out a half inch with his thumb and forefinger and stares at it.

“I know, plus the signatures were wrong.” I shake my head. “No one writes clearer than my mom. How could Cave Man have missed my mom’s signature on
your
report card?”

“Do you think they’ll be that stupid again?” Harrison is looking down now, picking the nubs off my blanket and putting them in a pile.