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never noticed dogs before, at least in this way, and I thought of Father Jasper, and what he would say about each dog’s situation, whether it was good or bad, fair to the dog, working to bring out the canine’s best qualities. I hate to say it, but even with a quick glance you could see most people didn’t have a clue about their dog’s world. To them a dog was just another thing, like a barbecue grill or a fancy porch rocker, and it didn’t mean that they didn’t love the dog, it just meant they didn’t recognize a dog for what it was and what it needed.
    I wasn’t an expert by any stretch, but simply looking critically at what was going on with people and dogs opened my eyes. I started writing little notes in my head to Father Jasper about what I observed. In the final analysis, that’s what he preached:
Leave your people world for a second and see what it means to be a dog.
That was empathy, and it counted for dogs as much as it counted for people.
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    Cow Bell got shoved hard into the bus side by Larry Grieg as soon as we climbed down the stairs. Everyone laughed. Cow Bell laughed too, but I wasn’t sure he thought it was as funny as the other people did. Larry Grieg was demented, and you had to laugh at whatever Larry Grieg did or risk making him go even crazier. His dad had died in a lumbering accident, and he told anyone who would listen that he was the man of the family now. No one believed it, of course, not even Larry himself, but you couldn’t say anything without making him bull charge you if you were a boy, or flip an obscene gesture your way if you were a girl.
    Anyway, the hard thing was watching Cow Bell. His camo was supposed to make him some sort of Marine tough guy, but it didn’t give him the sawdust when it came right down to it. Larry Grieg unmasked him. When Cow Bell bounced off the bus, he laughed and kept his momentum going so he could drift away from Larry, and I knew without looking that he had a scared look on his face and a line of nervous sweat on his lip. I had known Cow Bell a long time, and now he knew himself.
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    Rumney High School. Home of the Catamounts, which is an old word for mountain lions. Purple and white are our colors. Our most famous graduate was a Civil War general who died from grapeshot—the guts inside a cannonball that fly out when it explodes—just as he mounted his horse. With his last breath he yelled, “Be true, boys!” then he fell off his horse and died before anyone charged in either direction.
    His name was Captain Earl Piedmont Rumney, and his last words were etched into a marble lintel above the main entrance.
    His last words, though, didn’t say anything to girls.
    He came from our town more than our school, but the school adopted him as our founding father. We celebrate his birthday every May by playing a school-wide Ultimate Frisbee game that the football players take over and turn into an ape carnival.
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    I went in to see Mrs. Cummings. It was better to have someplace to go than to wander the halls and wait for an attack. Mrs. Cummings was not the lunch lady but the assistant lunch lady, and she had a tiny office—the old furnace room, actually—at the back of the school, where she caught a breath before starting all the chopping and peeling she had to do each day. She was a nice lady, the nicest, really, and we had become friends because she had known my mom back in the day. Way back. Mrs. Cummings had mostly gray hair now, and her skin had gone soft like a spotted pear, but if you spent time with her, you could tell she had been pretty once. She was short and still trim, but you could hardly see her figure because she wore an elephant-gray cardigan every day. The cardigan had big, baggy pockets where she kept her Tic Tacs, and her memory pad. Her memory pad was just a small notepad, brown and rusty colored, with white pages and blue lines. Sometimes she wore the memory pad