The Boy and the Dog

A boy has a birthday and turns thirteen. His parents tell him he needs to grow up and start making smart decisions and that he will be treated more like an adult from now on. He went to summer camp at the YMCA and comes home and the lights are off. When he walks in, a bunch of people pop out from behind the door, out from the back room, and from under the table. They all yell “Surprise!” After he realizes what happened, he asks if he has gifts or food. He finds out he has just one. They go to the back and bring out a big box with his name on it. He walks over and looks at it as if there is something curious about it, so he opens it. He reaches inside and pulls out a fuzzy creature and it turns out to be a small dog, a puppy.

He says, “Well, aren’t you the cutest little thing?” Then he turns to his parents and asks if it’s a boy or a girl and his mother says it’s a boy.

After a few weeks of having his now grown puppy, he has grown accustomed to feeding, walking, and cleaning it. They grow to be companions. That has helped with the little problems that he has had in past because he used to steal from peoplepick-pocketing.

But he knows that he needs to be a new boy when his mother says, “You need to grow up.” He knows that means he has to start making smarter decisions so he has more options than stealing.

After he wakes up on a cloudy Sunday he eats two waffles from his toaster and his puppy walks up to his chair. “Oh boy, you wanna go out for a little walk?” he says.

So they go outside and walk a few blocks down to the subway station. They walk down planning on filling his MetroCard, but the boy gets sidetracked by someone who is very unorganized and suddenly he has an urge. It is an urge he hasn’t felt in a while after he got his friend. He looks at his dog, but it isn’t enough. He follows the person a little bit behind and ends up getting on the train not looking at the entire situation he was in.

Meanwhile, up above the station he just left, there is a street vendor with hot dogs and other meats with a smell that you can sense a mile away. The dog quickly perks up looking in that exact direction. He pulls but his leash is tied to the metro station pole. It doesn’t budge, so he turns and starts chewing. But it starts to rip at the biting point so the dog pulls harder and it gets close to breaking so he bites and pulls and at one second it snaps and the jolt mixed with the force of him pulling sends him straight into the legs of people. He quickly turns and goes straight up the stairs and starts barking at the food. He realizes he can’t get any and he gets sidetracked by all the cars, people, and noises. He just runs, luckily not in the road, down the sidewalk past all the new people.

The boy does not get to the person in time so he walks back to the subway where he left. But when he gets back, he is surprised to see the half-chewed up leash and he immediately looks down the whole subway thinking the worst, that the small dog had fallen down in the tracks and couldn’t get up.

But, he gives a sigh of relief to see that there was no sign of a dog in the tracks so he goes to the closest stranger, a man in a black business suit and asks, “Sorry to interrupt, sir, but my dog chewed through his leash not to long ago. Did you happen to see him?”

The man thinks for a second and says, “When I was walking down the right side of the stairs, and a small dog with a small gold coat of fur ran up the stairs.”

***

When he comes back home, his mom is waiting. “Where have you been?” she asks.

“I was out walking the dog,” he says.

His mom asks where the dog was and the boy says he left him out in backyard because he was still using the bathroom. He goes to bed, but he does not sleep at all knowing that the dog could be dead or worse. This is the worst feeling in the world.

First thing in the morning, he wakes up to start the search of his missing dog which meant he goes back to the subway. He sees people. He asks them, “Have you seen my dog? The dog is gold and small.”

“No,” says the people.

He goes home.

“Where is the dog?” says his mom.

“He is in his room,” says the boy.

The boy makes fliers with the dog’s picture on it. He takes them out the next day and puts them on the walls. He put his phone number on the flier.

The boy goes home and waits for someone to call him. No one calls him for a while. He looks for the dog again on the sidewalk and on the street.

The boy goes back home and finds dog hair in his house. He looks at the hair and tries to find where the hair is going. The hair is going down to his basement. He walks downstairs and it smells like dog. He has an unfinished basement. It’s just concrete and there is no furniture, just storage space.

He sees the boiler room and there is another door. He looks in it. His dog is inside of it.

“Jason,” says the boy. He pets his dog. He is embarrassed because he knows he has been telling his mom that he knew where his dog was while the whole time she knew where it was.

Later in the day, his mom says, “Your dog found his way home.”

  

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