Buster, Caleb Huett [great novels .TXT] 📗

we’re taught how to fake when we’re puppies. I figured it was safe to answer this one correctly, and quickly. I knocked over the center cup and ate the treat.

“Good boy!” That’s what Tonio wanted: a fast response. Proof that I might be as smart as he was imagining. Next he threw a towel over my head, and I shook it off immediately. (There were two other options, each dumber than the one before: Wait a while before shaking it off, or never take it off and whine until a human did.)

The internet is full of all sorts of tests like this, and I know how to handle them. Getting a slightly above-average score would make sense, since service dogs should be smart—but I needed to stop far short of perfect.

We went downstairs. He kicked a treat under the coffee table, where I’d have to get it with my paws. “Get it, Buster!”

This was one I needed to fail. I sniffed at the edge of the table—the treat’s smell mixed in with years of tiny flecks of food and dust created a big mishmash of feelings in my nose, which delivered them extra blurry since I was so close. I made a big show of trying to stick my nose under the table, then pulled it out and looked at Tonio to whine.

His face shifted, just a little, into disappointment. I’m sorry, Tonio, I thought. But I have to be a dog. Even now—and I want to stress this for the Court—I didn’t plan on doing anything.

“Try this. Look.” Tonio leaned over and used his hand to grab the treat. He showed it to me, then put it back under the table. “Now you go.”

This one was tougher. I probably could get away with having learned this just now, from him, and suggest that I’m an especially smart dog. But if I didn’t, if I failed again even now, that would probably put everything to rest in Tonio’s mind. He’d believe I was just a dog.

So I failed. I leaned my nose down again, sniffed, and whined some more. I even patted the ground with my paws for good measure. “Yeah, those! Come on!” Tonio patted the ground with his hands, too, and pushed his hand under the table. “You can do it!”

I can’t do it, I thought. Let it go.

“Come on.” He grabbed the treat and showed it to me again, more urgently this time. His voice sounded strained. “You can do it. Good boy. Get the treat.” I poked at the table with my nose once more, then sat down and looked at him with the most confused expression I could muster. He bit his lip.

“Okay. So not that one. Let’s try this.” He wasn’t even writing my scores down. He grabbed a couple cardboard boxes with the Tomorrow Grocery rocket ship on them from the recycling pile and carried them upstairs. He cut out one big cardboard wall, cut a hole in the middle, and wedged it between the other two boxes. “Come here. Sit.” I followed his hand and sat in front of the box.

“Now look at me.” I watched him through the hole in the box. “Good.” He placed the treat down on the other side of the cardboard, then stepped back. “Now get the treat!”

I was impressed he’d taken the time to build the whole thing, but this was another test I’d seen before. The best score would be to walk around the box right away, and the worst would be to plow into the cardboard and push it to the treat. I opted for a middle ground: I stared at the treat through the hole, tried to stick my nose through again, and when that didn’t work, I sniffed around the bottom of the box until I found the edge by “accident” and trotted over to the treat.

Tonio watched me eat the peanut butter rolled up in crunchy something with a look of horror on his face. “I thought …” He pushed his bandanna up higher on his head, tugging the curls back. “At the training center, you listened! You knew I was worried about allergies and you talked me out of it. And you were on the computer, and—”

His voice caught, and I heard the breath shift that marked the beginning of a panic attack. Oh no, I thought. After everything with his dad, and then Mia, this is what does it?

Tonio’s finger pointed at me accusatorily. My tail tucked between my legs. “You pretended to eat chocolate, and then you used the toilet, and I’m pretty sure you were going to bark at the mail until you saw there was a little kid, and—” He coughed, like he was trying to get something out of his throat, then clenched and unclenched his fists so tight his nails left marks in his palm. The more he spoke, the more my adrenaline surged. He’d noticed everything.

“Nobody else sees, but you are always watching the face of whoever is talking in a room, which is not a normal dog thing.” I didn’t even realize I had been doing that, but he was right. His voice rose, angry. “And when you’re around other dogs, you barely do any normal dog stuff, you just bark and wiggle at each other like …” Tonio swallowed. “Like you’re …”

His mouth twisted and his eyes narrowed to fight off tears, but they started flowing anyway. “I’m crazy. This whole time—” His chest heaved. “This whole time, I was making it up.” He stood up and walked around, gulping down air as hard as he could. “Like you’re talking? I’m so stupid!”

When he yelled the word stupid, something in my brain clicked.

What do I do?

On the one paw, dogs. We’d kept our secret for thousands of years, mostly, and I didn’t want to be the one to decide that should change. Everyone has their own ideas about whether we should reveal ourselves to humans, or stay hidden forever, or some