Dog's Best Friend Read online

  “So listen,” I said. “I’m seriously ready to put all of this behind us. I wouldn’t even think about sending those pictures out to your customers.”

  Now they looked a little bit confused, and a little bit relieved.

  “But I would,” Georgia said, and the twins looked a tiny bit less relieved.

  Then Georgia kept going. “What my brother’s trying to say is, you messed with the wrong family. You got caught. And now we’re offering you a way out of this. See? You leave our business alone—”

  “And we leave you alone,” I said, because now she was doing all the talking and getting all the best lines.

  “I guess we have to think about that,” Eddie said.

  “Nope,” I said. “The offer expires as soon as we walk out that door.”

  “Take it or leave it,” Georgia said.

  “Yeah, I just said that,” I said.

  Eddie and Ethan looked at each other again, for a long time. Maybe they had some silent twin language, for all I know. Because then Eddie nodded.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Deal.”

  “What you do is your business,” I said. “What I do is my business—”

  “Our business,” Georgia said.

  “And let’s just leave each other alone from now on,” I said.

  We didn’t bother shaking on it, but I had a good feeling about this. Now that we had something on them, they had a reason to back off once and for all.

  Thirty seconds later, we were outside and headed home with Junior. And just like that, the war was over. Amazing.

  “Soooo?” Georgia said, once we were heading back up the street.

  “What?” I said.

  “Oh, come on!” she said. “I just saved your butt, big-time.”

  “Yeah, that could have gone worse,” I said. Which was as close to a compliment as she was going to get. Georgia’s head was already big enough.

  And besides, she barely took a breath before she was onto the next thing.

  “Okay, well, good, because I had a few ideas about how we can make Dogs To Go even better,” she said. “And hopefully make more money too.”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  And the funny thing is, I really was.

  Cha-Ching II: The Sequel

  It’s baaa-aaaaaack! Can you hear that sound?

  Cha-ching!

  Cha-ching!

  Because instead of looking over my shoulder for the next sabotage all the time, I was looking ahead to my next five bucks, and the next, and the next. Now that the war was over, Cheap Walks was leaving Dogs To Go alone, and we were growing my business as much as we could.

  Well, okay. Our business.

  Besides her promising future in global espionage, it turned out Georgia was good at coming up with ideas too. And I was pretty good at making them happen.

  Like for instance, our next invention, which I like to call the Walking Billboard. Every customer who let us use it got a discount. And believe me, those discounts paid for themselves, because this thing was impossible to miss.

  In other words—cha-ching!

  Pretty soon, we had five more new customers, a fleet of company vehicles, a lifetime supply of Zoom and M&M’s in the garage, and a six-figure book deal for Junior to tell his story, Walking Is Winning: The Junior Khatchadorian Story.

  Well, five new customers, anyway, with all kinds of good stuff still to come—fingers crossed. So after a private consult with my corporate vice-presidents, I agreed to let Georgia start coming to our staff meetings.

  And by staff meetings, I mean Flip and I would play TrollQuest in his basement, and Georgia would throw out all kinds of new ideas. Like for instance—

  “We should set up a table at the school winter carnival!” she said at the next meeting. “Everyone’s going to be there, including a ton of parents. And they’re the ones who hire dog-walkers.”

  “Hmm,” I said, while I fit another key in the door of the stone tower I was trying to open. The giant slugs were back, and I was all out of salt grenades to fight them with. I had to hurry. “What do you think, Flip?”

  “I’m in,” he said. I thought he was talking about the tower, but he wasn’t. “The only thing is, who’s going to care about dog-walking at a carnival?”

  “Then we have to make them care,” I said.

  “Ooh! Ooh!” Georgia said like there was electric current in her chair. “What about free dog biscuits?”

  “Yawn,” Flip said, just before he threw his last vial of fighting potion at the tower door and blew the whole thing away in a cloud of green smoke.

  Which gave me my next idea.

  “You know what?” I said. “I’ve got this. I’ll take it from here.”

  Who says video games don’t have anything to teach you? Because I’d just gotten the brainstorm I needed, and unless Cheap Walks had… oh, I don’t know… MAGIC POWERS… they were never going to top what I had in mind.

  Now I just had to make the magic happen.

  Special Request

  On the way home from Flip’s, I ditched Georgia and went straight over to Mr. Schneider’s house. This one was my idea, and I wanted to see it through myself.

  “Come in, come in, my friend,” Mr. Schneider said. “But tell me I’m not crazy. Didn’t Maxie already get his walk today?”

  “Actually, I wanted to ask you a favor,” I said. “Maybe a big one.”

  “How big?” he said. “Three hundred pounds? Four hundred pounds?”

  Mr. Schneider was pretty hokey, but here’s the thing. The more I got to know him, the funnier he seemed.

  “I need a magician,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said. “Well, you came to the right place.”

  “Actually, it’s for my table at the school carnival on Friday night,” I said. “I was kind of hoping you might come and—”

  “Hold it right there, Rafe,” Mr. Schneider said. “I don’t know about that. Magic is all bang, flash, and boom these days. Trust me, nobody’s interested in an old-school guy like me anymore.”

  “Sure they are,” I said. “You’re really good. Georgia and Flip think so too. I mean, the HVMS carnival isn’t exactly the big time, but you’d kind of be the star attraction.”

  Mr. Schneider thought about it for a minute. Like for an actual minute. I was starting to wonder if maybe he’d forgotten what we were talking about, when he finally spoke up again.

  “You know, it’s been a long time since anyone asked for Magic Murray,” he said. “But what the heck? I guess I could dust off the old tux.”

  “Awesome!” I said. “Just tell me what you need.”

  Now I was more excited about the carnival than ever. And I think Mr. Schneider was happy about it too. Because when I was getting ready to leave, he kind of turned away from me and pulled this handkerchief out of his sleeve—and then another, and another, and another, and another, and another…

  … and then he wiped a little tear out of his eye.

  That was when I knew I’d done the right thing for someone that day. Which felt really good. Also, I was ready to finally kick some Cheap Walks butt.

  Once and for all.

  And fair and square.

  SPLORT!

  So everything was going great, right?

  Right!

  And that meant everything was just going to keep going that way, right?

  Well…

  If you thought so, you probably haven’t ever met me before.

  There I was, sitting in my room a couple of days later, when Georgia came cruising in without even knocking.

  “Hello?” I said. “Learn to knock. It’s good for your health.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. “Trust me, you need to see this.”

  Then she closed the door and locked it, and then checked the lock, like she was sitting on big government secrets or something.

  “This better be interesting,” I said.

  “I guess interesting is one word for it,” she said. “Bu
t if I was going to pick three words, it would be more like really bad news.”

  And all I could think was—It was nice while it lasted.

  “See, I did some more research,” she said.

  “Of course you did,” I said.

  “I figured it would be good to go all the way back, and make sure… Well, let me just show you,” she whispered.

  Then she opened her laptop again. This time, instead of pictures, she had a video. It was all grainy and black-and-white.

  “Is that from a security camera?” I asked.

  “Yep,” she said.

  I recognized the dog park right away. You could see the gate, the fence, the trees, the bulletin board—everything. I could even see Candy Crush playing around with her little poodle, Beckham.

  “Where’d you get this?” I asked.

  “Abigail Schultz’s dad works at the doughnut shop across from the park, and they have a security camera on the building,” Georgia said. “I’m not really friends with Abigail, but her best friend is Martha Brewer, and—”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Just get to the point.”

  “Hang on,” she said. “It’s coming right up at…”

  She actually took out a little pad of notes and looked at it.

  “Four thirty-five and eighteen seconds,” she said.

  Seriously, my sister was born to spy.

  And sure enough, at exactly four thirty-five and eighteen seconds, something happened on the screen. Candy Crush’s dog took a squat.

  “There!” Georgia said.

  “That’s what you wanted me to see?” I asked. “News flash, I walk dogs. I see that every day.”

  “Just watch,” Georgia said.

  Candy Crush reached into her pocket and came up empty. She looked around. Then she walked over to the bulletin board.

  And then she tore down my poster. Not only that, but she used it to clean up Beckham’s poop and threw the whole thing in the trash.

  “No way!” I said.

  “Hold on. There’s more,” Georgia said.

  She fast-forwarded the video a bunch of minutes, until one of the twins showed up. It was too grainy to see if it was Eddie or Ethan. Whoever it was, he put a new poster up in the one blank spot left on the board—where mine used to be.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  “You mean—” I said.

  “Yeee-ah,” Georgia said, really slowly, like my brain might explode if I got too much bad news too fast.

  “So they never—”

  “Nope,” she said.

  “And I, uh—”

  “Mm-hmmm,” she said.

  In other words, the Finn twins weren’t lying. They didn’t take my poster. And I really did start that war.

  Which meant I was going to have to come clean with Cheap Walks.

  And… apologize?

  And that’s right about when my brain exploded anyway.

  This Is Getting Old

  I probably don’t have to tell you this, but sometimes growing up and acting more mature is about as much fun as a permanent detention.

  When I was little, my problems were things like what kind of cereal I could get Mom to buy, or how to draw hands and feet that didn’t look like balloons.

  Now I was trying to come up with a way to tell Eddie and Ethan the truth, and maybe even (barf) tell them I was sorry.

  I know, I know. Me, doing the right thing without an adult forcing me to? Crazy Town. Maybe I did start that war, but those guys weren’t exactly goody-goodies. It’s not like they deserved… well…anything from me.

  But at the same time, if all this was my fault, and I didn’t say something, how was I any better than them?

  The old Rafe never would have even wondered about that kind of stuff. But I’m not the old Rafe anymore. I’m more like Rafe 2.0. And there’s no going back.

  But wait. What if I confessed and they told their mom, who would tell my mom what I did? She might make me shut down Dogs To Go… and that would mean the end of my WormHole dreams forever.

  And more importantly, I couldn’t help out the family anymore.

  I knew Mom pretty well, though (practically my whole life), and deep down, I figured she would want me to do the right thing. Even if it was the worst thing.

  I decided to make like a Band-Aid bandit and pull the whole thing off fast before I could think about it too much.

  I took a deep breath. I wished I was somewhere else.

  Then I picked up the phone and dialed Cheap Walks’ number.

  “Hello, Cheap Walks!” one of them said.

  “Is this Eddie? Or Ethan?” I said.

  “Ethan speaking, how may I help you?” he said.

  “This is Rafe,” I said. “And I—”

  That’s when I got the world’s loudest CLICK.

  “Hello?”

  Of course, he was already gone. But I wasn’t giving up that easily.

  So I tried again the next day at school. In fact, I tried a bunch of times—at their lockers, in gym, and once when I saw Eddie in the hall alone.

  And every time I got anywhere near either of those twins, it was like we were two magnets facing the wrong way. They’d just go flying off in some other direction.

  I even tried putting it in writing. Then I went by their table at lunch, dropped the note between them where they couldn’t miss it, and kept on walking.

  A second later, I heard a crumpling sound behind me. Then that note flew right past my head and landed in the garbage can for two points.

  Now I was getting kind of ticked off. Because I realized something else. These guys weren’t just avoiding me. They were competing with me. At everything.

  I guess that would have been a good time to just let the whole thing go. But do you remember earlier when I told you how sometimes I take things a little too far? Or a lot too far?

  And how when I get mad, my brain goes kind of kerflooey?

  And how sometimes (okay, a lot of the time), I just can’t keep my stupid mouth shut?

  Well, I do, and it does, and I can’t.

  In other words, I thought, Challenge accepted. I was going to do whatever it took to make these guys listen.

  Whether any of us were going to like it or not.

  Big Night

  Finally, the night of the carnival came. It was pretty awesome, I have to admit. They had games and food all set up in the cafeteria. The school band was playing on the stage in the gym. And right there on the gym floor, anyone who wanted to could set up a table.

  That’s where we were, along with the PTA, the chess club, some seventh graders’ babysitting business, and a whole ton of others.

  But no Cheap Walks. I guess they didn’t think of it, which was fine with me.

  Meanwhile, nobody had a bigger crowd at their table than Dogs To Go! Magic Murray was a gigantic hit. He was doing the quarter trick, the handcuff trick, fancy card shuffling, and a bunch of magic I’d never seen, while half of Hills Village stopped, and watched, and even signed up for some dog-walking.

  It was almost like we had too many good ideas. Junior was there, saying hi to people and getting petted like crazy. We also had homemade dog biscuits from Grandma Dotty to give away. And I drew the T-shirt designs myself.

  “Step right up! Check it out!” Flip kept saying. Georgia was signing up customers. And I helped Magic Murray with his props and stuff.

  I felt like I was at the Las Vegas Middle School carnival instead of Hills Village. It was all going exactly like we planned.

  Right up until Eddie and Ethan showed up at our table. I think they were just looking at the magic. Maybe they didn’t even know it was me at first. Not until they were standing right there, and we were face-to-face, with nothing but a folding table between us.

  The timing was terrible. Couldn’t have been worse. But you know me. I went for it anyway.

  “Listen,” I said before they could make themselves disappear. “I’ve been trying to tell you guys something all week. I just wa
nt to talk. What’s your big problem?”

  Then Eddie leaned right in and got in my face, right in front of everyone.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” he said. “We’re not interested in anything you have to say.”

  “And here’s a news flash, Einstein,” Ethan said. “You can’t make us listen.”

  And I thought—Oh, really?

  That’s when I picked up Magic Murray’s magic handcuffs, reached out, and—CLICK!—popped one of the cuffs around Eddie’s wrist, right before—CLICK!—I popped the other cuff on myself.

  Now we were going to have that talk.

  And at least one of them was going to listen.

  Unnecessary Cuff-ness

  It wasn’t exactly a plan. It just kind of happened. And now that I was attached at the wrist to half of Cheap Walks, I had to go with it.

  “What are you doing?” Eddie yelped.

  “I’m coming clean,” I said.

  “That’s what you think!” Ethan said, and yanked on Eddie so hard, I slid halfway across the table.

  “Hey! Let go of him!” Flip said.

  “I can’t!” Eddie said.

  “Not you. The other one!” Flip said. Then he grabbed my arm and yanked me back. Right before Ethan pulled Eddie even harder in the other direction. It was like a full-on tug-of-war, except Eddie and I were the rope.

  And I think my arm had just grown a foot too.

  “Eddie… just… listen… to… me…” I kind of grunted out.

  “Why… should… I?” he grunted back. Flip was pretty strong, but so was Ethan. It was like a tie, and we weren’t going anywhere.

  “Because…” I said.

  “’Cause… why?” Eddie said.

  “Get off him!” Flip yelled.

  “You first!” Ethan yelled.

  “Because this war… was…all… my fault!” I said.

  And that stopped Eddie cold—but not Flip. He was still pulling like crazy, which meant Eddie came flying at me, right across that table. The whole thing fell over. Dog biscuits and playing cards went flying everywhere. And Eddie and I kept on going. In fact, the two of us didn’t stop until we’d plowed right into the Babysitters’ Club table and sent all of their stuff flying too.