Now Mr. Healy passed Peter a section of the newspaper, and the two of them sat reading about the affairs of the world, weather that threatened to tip the globe off its delicate axis and wars that could shake the planet to dust.
“Well, it’s nice to have someone around to appreciate my cooking,” Mrs. Healy called out from the kitchen. “Since my own kids always seem so eager to escape.”
Peter glanced at the doorway, where he could see her poking at the eggs on the stove. He was surprised by how easily she joked about this kind of thing, when just yesterday his own dad had accused him of more or less the same thing—trying to escape—only he’d done it with a look so dark and injured you would have thought Peter had suggested making a permanent move to New Guinea.
“I don’t know about kids these days, Pete,” Mr. Healy joked from behind his newspaper, his gray eyebrows bobbing up and down. “I mean, what kind of sixteen-year-old wants to spend a weekend in New York City? Must be terribly boring.”
Peter looked up from his tea. “She’s just gone for the weekend?”
He noticed the Healys exchange a brief glance, and once again, Peter felt his face flush, worried they might find another meaning in his question. This was not a subject Peter took lightly. He’d had time to give it plenty of thought over the years, and the conclusion he’d come to—one that he was determined not to think of as wishful thinking—was that he didn’t like Emma. At least not in that way.
She was pretty, of course, with those unsettling gray eyes and that way she had of smiling with only one side of her mouth, and there was something careless about her that made the other guys at school glance at her sideways in the halls. But although Peter couldn’t help being drawn to her, he chalked it up to more of a quiet affinity than a lovesick hopefulness. They were both loners in their own way—for Peter, out of necessity; for Emma, more of a choice—but he was fairly certain the bond they shared didn’t amount to anything more than that.
He willed his face to return to its usual shade, a color pale enough to make his freckles stand out. “It’s just that I thought she might be gone longer.”
“Nope,” Mrs. Healy said as she deposited two plates full of runny eggs onto the table, then snatched the newspaper from her husband’s hands. “Back on Monday.”
Peter realized that Emma must not have told her parents about the full extent of her plan either. It was his experience that people who lied were either hiding something or looking for something, and he wondered which was the case with her. He frowned at the eggs on his plate, then stabbed at one with his fork. There was far less confusion in things like math and history, with their straightforward numbers and dates. It seemed that people were a great deal more difficult to figure out.
Chapter five
Emma was halfway to taking a bite of her burger—mouth open and breathing in the sharp smell of onions—when she caught a glimpse of something white streaking past the rest stop. She lowered her hands and looked off toward the straggly woods to her back, where a thin layer of trees separated the expressway from an office complex that lay just beyond. Seeing nothing, she turned her attention back to her burger, and she was just about to bite down again when a few of the kids from a nearby table began to scream and laugh and jump up and down.
It took a moment for Emma to realize it wasn’t a wolf. Standing a few yards away in the grass and eyeing her burger with an unblinking gaze, a huge white dog was balancing on three legs. What had once been his fourth—the front right one—was now no more than a stump, cut short just above where the knee would have been. But there was something about the way he carried himself, like he didn’t even know it was missing. He looked like a husky that had had a run-in with a bottle of bleach, pure white and enormous, but with a crust of mud along his belly and a collection of thorny brambles caught in his fur, which—along with the lack of a collar—gave him away as a stray.
He took a few hobbled steps forward, waving the stump of his leg up and down as if to say hello. Emma could see that one eye was brown and the other a startling shade of blue, as he sat down a few feet away from her and wagged his tail. Behind her a few people hastily shuffled their kids away or grabbed their trays and headed for another table. But Emma watched, fascinated, as he approached her.
She’d always loved dogs, but her parents had never allowed her to have one, and this, to Emma, seemed completely illogical: Wouldn’t the best way to remedy irresponsibility be to have something to be responsible for? She’d spent years campaigning against the decision, dragging her parents down the street whenever she spotted a puppy, twice bringing home stray dogs (both of which were reclaimed within a few hours) and even once kidnapping the neighbor’s puppy (also reclaimed within a few hours, though not quite as joyously).
And so now, as the white dog stood trembling a few feet away, his coat muddy and smelling of mulch, she held out one of her French fries. And when he took a tentative step forward, she tossed it in his direction, watching as he tipped his head back and caught it handily, snagging it in midair with a clean snap of his jaw. Each time she looked up from her burger, he had inched a bit closer, scooting along the pavement until he was settled near the end of the picnic table. And when he was near enough to rest his chin on her sandaled foot, Emma reached down and offered him another fry, which he took from her fingers with a well-mannered wag of his tail, his whole body wriggling with gratitude.
All her life Emma had dreamed of someday being a vet, even as her science grades continued their steady downward plunge. In fact she’d come so close to failing chemistry this year that her parents had forced her to have weekly tutoring sessions with Patrick, who spent hours rattling off formulas over the phone while Emma stared out her window, only half listening. Her grade had just barely improved—enough for her to pass the class, anyway—and her family was able to go on thinking of their youngest daughter as a scientific dunce.
But she knew there was more to being a vet than just science, even if her family didn’t. Something about her shifted when she was around animals; she had a calming effect on them, a certain affinity that couldn’t be learned from a textbook.
“It’s not enough to think puppies are cute,” Annie had told her. “There’s a lot of science involved. And math.”
“That’s that subject with all the numbers,” Patrick had pointed out, while Mom and Dad looked on with indulgent smiles.