The Story of Us Read Online Free PDF Page B

and rise into the sky?
    Mom saw me and waved. Even from there, I could see how bright her smile was.
    “My mother thinks two dogs is too many,” Amy said. Amy had long, shiny black hair parted in the middle, and so did her sister. They were both thin, with hungry hip bones jutting from tight clothes. Amy smiled, sugar-cereal sweet. She wore a pink T-shirt, and I had no reason to think it, but I did—pink could be cruel too. Hailey looked off into the distance as if even the ocean itself was irritating. One corner of her mouth curled up, as if she’d just stepped in something disgusting.
    I was smiling, but inside my stupid head a siren started to blare, a mental fire truck rounding an internal corner. Youwere supposed to pull over when you heard that. I wondered if Mom heard it too. I looked her way, but she was just laughing at something Dan said.
    “He’s soooo cute,” Amy said. She was stroking Jupiter’s black head, but she was looking at Ben, whose hair was shoved up in the back from his nap. He’d straggled down to join us outside, and he’d greeted everyone and joked around, still wearing a pillow wrinkle on his face.
    “She,” I said.
    “He’s got the cutest ears,” Amy said.
    “It’s free -zing out here,” Hailey said.
    “Well, they’re doing okay so far,” Dan Jax said, gazing at the dogs. Cruiser was sniffing Jupiter’s butt, and she was handling it with a great deal of dignity.
    “She’s not really used to other dogs,” Mom said. She was hovering a little, standing close enough to rescue Jupiter if she needed it. Cruiser was only three years old, and Jupiter was ready for retirement. He looked like he could snap her up in one rambunctious bite. Now he wanted to play. He got down on his front paws, barked loudly. But she was playing it cool. Or else, that beach walk tired her out.
    “You guys want to walk them around a little together?” Dan said.
    Ben took the leashes from Dan. “If they kill each other, it’s not my fault,” he said.
    “They’ll do fine,” Dan said. He kissed the back of Mom’s neck. He was likely right—Cruiser was now busy investigatingan old cigarette butt, and Jupiter didn’t look capable of killing anyone, with her graying muzzle and that friendly white spot on her back.
    “Come on,” Ben said to me.
    We headed away from the group. The dogs ignored each other, doing their own thing at the end of their own leashes. I wouldn’t exactly call it bonding. Jupiter sat down, watched that big dog out of the corner of her eye, just in case. Cruiser kept his distance, but lifted his leg on every blade of grass. We were on the far slope of the lawn. The view up there was great. “It’s beautiful here,” I said. “Oh, wow. Hey, look—that house has a helicopter on the roof.”
    Ben saw it too. “Cool,” he said.
    “Well? What do you think?”
    “I wouldn’t want a helicopter pad on my roof.”
    I socked him. He knew what I meant. “High maintenance,” Ben said.
    “We’ve got to give them a chance.”
    “Yeah, we do. We will . Still, it is what it is,” he said. And it was true. You knew more often than you didn’t right away about people. One butt sniff, like Cruiser and Jupiter, and you understood pretty much what you needed to. Sometimes dogs didn’t even need a butt sniff to form an opinion. A certain guy could walk down our road, and Jupiter would bark her head off. Not everyone got that reaction. She just distrusted certain people for her own reasons, same as us.
    “We can’t expect to love some strangers we’re throwntogether with,” I said. “Gavin and Oscar irritate the hell out of me, and I actually chose them.”
    “I know. What can you expect? It’s like going into Starbucks and coming out with two new relatives.”
    “Dan, though,” I said.
    “Good guy.” There was efficiency to male language. Those two words were what guys said about other guys that they really respected. Guys they could count on, that were solid, whose word