How I Got a Life and a Dog Read online

  “An appealing boy-and-dog story.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “The characters are vividly drawn.” —Booklist

  “Young people, especially those who have had to take on responsibility at home, will enjoy the story.”

  —School Library Journal

  “[A] fine, fresh mystery that is believable as a kid’s experience.” —Washington Post

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this book as follows:

  Corriveau, Art.

  How I, Nicky Flynn, finally get a life (and a dog) / by Art Corriveau.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Moving to inner-city Boston after his parents’ divorce, eleven-year-old

  Nicky struggles to cope with the changes in his life, including acquiring a

  former guide dog that leads to a mystery for Nicky to solve.

  ISBN: 978-0-8109-8298-7

  [1. German shepherd dog—Fiction. 2. Dogs—Fiction. 3. Guide dogs—Fiction.

  4. Divorce—Fiction. 5. Moving, household—Fiction. 6. Boston (Mass.)—

  Fiction. 7. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C81658Se 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009022935

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4197-0015-6

  Text copyright © 2010 Art Corriveau

  Photograph on page i, title page, and page 252 copyright © 2010 Getty Images

  Book design by Maria T. Middleton

  Originally published in hardcover in 2010 by Amulet Books, an imprint of

  ABRAMS, under the title How I, Nicky Flynn, Finally Get a Life (and a Dog).

  This edition published in 2012. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may

  be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any

  means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without

  written permission from the publisher. Amulet Books and Amulet Paperbacks

  are registered trademarks of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity

  for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use.

  Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact

  [email protected] or the address below.

  115 West 18th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  www.abramsbooks.com

  Contents

  Part One: You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks

  Friday Night. The New Apartment.

  A Little Background Info ...

  Saturday Morning. My So-Called Bedroom.

  Saturday Morning. Back at the Apartment.

  Saturday Morning. In the Car.

  Sunday Morning. Eden Street.

  Sunday Night. Back at the Apartment—Where Else?

  Monday Morning. The Living Room.

  Monday Morning. Homeroom.

  Monday Afternoon. Out on Eden Street.

  Monday Night. Back at the Apartment.

  Tuesday, Lunch Recess. My Crappy Middle School.

  Tuesday, Final Bell. Homeroom.

  Later Tuesday Afternoon. Charlestown Bridge.

  Tuesday Night. Back at the Apartment.

  Wednesday Afternoon. The Shrink’s Office, Cambridge.

  A Little Later, Wednesday. Driving Back to Charlestown.

  Later Still, Wednesday. Up at the Mounment.

  Thursday. Beginning of English Period.

  Thursday, Final Bell. The Library.

  Later Thursday. Up at the Monument.

  Friday. Lunch Recess.

  Friday, Spanish Period—Well, Supposedly. School Hallway.

  Friday, English Period. School Library.

  Saturday Morning. On the Way to the Strip Mall—or Are We?

  Saturday Afternoon. Up at the Monument.

  Lunch Recess, Monday. The School Playground.

  Monday Afternoon. The Apartment on Eden Street.

  Tuesday, After School. Hanover Street.

  A Few Minutes Later. Noyes Place.

  Tuesday Night. At the Dinning Table.

  Wednesday Afternoon. The Shrink.

  Wednesday Afternoon. Stuck in Traffic.

  Later Wednesday Afternoon. The Esplanade.

  Thursday, Lunch Recess. In the Locker Corridor.

  Thursday After School. Monument Square.

  Later, Thursday Night. Eden Street. Moments Later.

  Part Two: In the Doghouse

  Friday Morning. But Where Am I?

  A Little Later. Paul Revere’s House.

  Later Friday Morning. Park Street Station.

  Friday Afternoon. Taco Mucho.

  Friday, 2:45 P.M. Outside the School Gates.

  A Few Minutes Later. Eden Street.

  Just After Dark. Noyes Place. Again.

  Twenty Minutes Later. Old Alf’s.

  Part Three: It’s a Dog-Eat-Dog World

  Saturday Morning, Early. Copp’s Hill Burying Ground.

  Saturday Morning. Outside North Station.

  Later Saturday Morning. Storrow Drive.

  Saturday Afternoon. North Station.

  Late Saturday Afternoon. Littleton Station.

  Twenty Minutes Later. My Old House.

  It All Comes Flooding Back ...

  A Few Minutes Later. Resolution Road.

  Dusk. Littleton Train Station.

  After Dark. My Old House.

  An Hour Later. The Vet’s on Fairfield Street.

  Part Four: Every Dog Has His Day

  Wednesday, Lunch Recess Bell. Chucktown Middle School.

  Lunch Recess. The Playground.

  Wednesday Afternoon. The Shrink’s Office.

  Later, Wednesday Afternoon. Warren Street.

  Later, Wednesday Afternoon. Strazzulo’s.

  Suppertime. Eden Street.

  Case Closed

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  e have this dog now.

  His name is Reggie.

  Don’t look at me, I didn’t name him. My mom got him at the pound yesterday. That’s the way pound dogs come: already named. Supposedly, it’s too late to change this one’s name from Reggie to something more doglike, like, say, Trooper or Flash or Blitzkrieg, because it would confuse him. Or, at least, that’s what Mom says the pound told her.

  Then again, she lies.

  “Take him back,” I told her.

  Mom was supposed to be bringing stuff home from the Supa-Sava to make tacos with. But she wasn’t holding a bag of groceries—just a leash, with Reggie hooked to the other end. “This apartment is way too small for a dog,” I told her. And it’s totally true. I’m sleeping on a foldout sofa in the living room. There’s barely enough room for the two of us without adding a big, drooly pound dog into the mix, especially one that looks all sad and sort of embarrassed about his name.

  “Guess what, Nicky?” Mom said.

  (That’s me, Nicky Flynn, though technically speaking, my name is Nicholas. But nobody ever calls me that except her—and only when she’s mad.)

  “I hate guessing,” I said.

  “Reggie used to be a seeing-eye dog,” she said. “Isn’t that great?”

  “So why isn’t he working for some blind guy?” I said.

  Seeing-eye dog my foot. I’m nobody’s fool. In fact, you wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through. Mom says I’m way too serious f
or a kid my age. She says I’m like this forty-year-old man trapped in an eleven-year-old body. Yeah, well, believe me, if I were a real forty-year-old, there’d be a few changes around here. P.S., I’m eleven and three-quarters.

  “I guess it didn’t work out,” Mom said.

  “What did he do?” I said.

  She didn’t have the details. The pound doesn’t give those out. All they would tell her was that Reggie was a full-blooded German shepherd, which is supposedly one of the smartest breeds out there. I gave him the once-over. He didn’t look all that smart to me. Just sad. He did look like a German shepherd, though; I’ll give him that much.

  “Take him back,” I said.

  “But you’ve always wanted a dog,” she said.

  “I’ve always wanted a pool table. But the landlord’s not going to allow that up here either,” I said. Our landlord lives right below us. He’s always telling me to pick up my feet and turn down the TV. I never even thought about my feet where we used to live. We had a big house of our own and we could say or do whatever we wanted.

  “I already asked,” Mom said. “The landlord told me a dog was OK, as long as it wasn’t too big and didn’t make a mess of the new carpet.”

  We both looked over at Reggie. He must go eighty pounds, easy.

  “Let’s just give it a few days,” Mom said.

  And that was that. She led Reggie into the living room—my room—and told him to make himself at home. He sniffed around a little, then whined. “What’s the matter, boy?” Mom said. “Are you hungry?”

  That’s when she remembered about the groceries.

  We ended up going to Taco Mucho over in the strip mall. We drove-thru and ate in the parking lot, with the public radio station on so we could catch the rest of the news. Reggie just sat there in the backseat, panting. Maybe he guessed we would stop off at the Supa-Sava on the way home to buy him a can of dog food. Or maybe he just knew better than to beg any tacos off of me.

  ike I said, my mom lies.

  Which is why I decided to start this mental log of when and where and how. That’s what Dr. Ice, my secret favorite cartoon crime-fighter, does whenever he’s keeping tabs on his archenemies, the Heat. Technically speaking, I’m a little old for Dr. Ice. But I’m sick and tired of Mom getting off scot-free with everything she says.

  Here’s a list of a whole bunch of stuff she told me this past summer that just isn’t true. She said, for instance, that we’d be much better off living here in Boston than out in the suburbs. I can already tell you after just three weeks here: We’re not.

  First of all, Charlestown isn’t Boston. You can sort of see Boston from Charlestown, if you squint through a bunch of highway overpasses and bridges. But Charlestown itself is pretty much exactly what it says—a town named Charles—not much bigger than Littleton, where I’m from. About the only difference is that Charlestown’s a lot more run-down and dirty. Plus the buildings are all squished together in rows, which they call town houses, even though the houses where I’m from in a real town have big front and back lawns with lots of trees. We now live in a one-bedroom apartment on the parlor level (which is the first-and-a-half floor) of one of these so-called town houses on Eden Street. Eden is supposedly the beautiful garden where Adam and Eve lived when they named all the animals. About all they could name here in Charlestown are alley cats and squirrels. And Adam would have to sleep in the middle of the living room, just like me.

  Back in Littleton we used to own a real house on King Street, a big, white one with green shutters. I had my own room with a door that locked.

  Plus I went to fifth grade at this really great elementary school in Littleton Common that had a campus with a swimming pool, an auditorium, and a computer lab. In fact, I was just about to ask my best friend, Marky, if he wanted to try out for junior high soccer when—ZAP!—Mom tells me out of the blue in mid-August that she’s put the house on the market and rented an apartment in the city. I had the worst Labor Day weekend ever. While Marky was barbecuing hot dogs and hamburgers in his backyard, I was actually, you know, laboring. I can’t tell you how many boxes of old clothes and toys I schlepped out of my room, into the car, and over to Goodwill. The very next Tuesday, I found myself walking through the doors of this totally sketchy middle school in Charlestown you’d swear was a maximum-security prison if you didn’t read the sign. Forget about sixth-grade soccer. My new school doesn’t even have grass. It only took about a week for everybody in class to realize I’m, like, a half a grade ahead when it comes to math and reading. Me. So now everybody thinks I’m some kind of book freak and nobody will talk to me. In Littleton I was just a normal kid who had tons of friends. Well, maybe not tons. But lots.

  But that’s not what this log is about. It’s about Mom’s lying.

  Here’s another example: Mom swears this new apartment is a lot less work than that big old house. Oh yeah? So how come there’s always dishes in the sink and dust kitties under the table? Big fat one. She loved our old house. Plus she had this gigantic flower garden she was really proud of. She spent half the day out there, digging and humming and pruning her roses. She doesn’t ever hum here in the city, and the one potted plant she brought with her—the philodendron from our front hallway—isn’t looking so hot.

  Example number three: Mom likes her new job. She’s always telling her old friends back home how much she loves standing on her own two feet. As if! She just sits at a desk all day, answering the phone for these two lawyers downtown—that father-and-son team you constantly see on TV, shouting at you to give their 800 number a call if you’ve been hurt on the job or involved in a bad car accident. Mom calls them the Ambulance Chasers behind their backs. She’s told all her Littleton friends she likes hearing other people’s hard-luck stories for a change. Whenever they call to see how she’s doing, she tells them all about the mailman who slipped on an icy sidewalk, the old lady who got run over at a crosswalk, or some hospital patient who had the wrong parts taken out. Mom’s favorite stories seem to be about wives who take their husbands to the cleaners for cheating on them. Back in my old neighborhood, whenever anyone cheated at kickball, we just stopped playing with them.

  Anyway, if work is such a barrel of laughs all day long, why is Mom so tired when she gets home? All she ever wants to do is flop in front of the TV in the living room with a glass of white wine and watch nature shows until I finally wake her up so I can go to bed. She used to do stuff all the time with her old friends—work out at the gym, play tennis, go to gallery openings and parties and stuff. Now she only ever talks with them on the phone, and that’s just once in a while.

  Which leads me to number four, and the biggest whopper of all: Talking to a shrink will help us adjust to our new life.

  Don’t look at me—seeing Dr. Holkke once a week wasn’t my idea. My opinion? If Dr. Holkke really wanted to help out, he’d lend us the money for a new set of front tires. Instead he’s constantly asking me all these How are you feeling? and What’s on your mind today? questions—stuff he couldn’t care less about. What he’s really trying to get me to talk about is my dad, which is, frankly: (a) none of his beeswax and (b) kind of a sore subject with me at the moment.

  My parents split up a couple of months ago, just before the Fourth of July.

  To Dr. Holkke, though, I just say stuff like “not bad” or “not much” and sit there for half an hour until it’s time to switch places with Mom out in the waiting room. Which isn’t much better, by the way, because Dr. Holkke doesn’t have any decent magazines. I swear he thinks kids still like to read Highlights. Basically, the only thing good about the whole setup is that I get to leave school early on Wednesdays. But I for sure don’t feel any better adjusted afterward. Neither does Mom. She may act all jolly and jokey when she comes out of Dr. Holkke’s office, but her eyes are usually puffy. And if I ask her what’s wrong in the car, she says something totally random like we should get a pizza for dinner. Lie, lie, lie. One time I tried to call a spade a shovel. I said, “May
be we should stop seeing Dr. Holkke if all he’s going to do is nose around in our private life and make you cry.” She laughed. She pulled my ear the way I hate but secretly sort of like. She said, “That’s what he’s supposed to do, Nicky. Talking to him makes me feel better.”

  Such a liar.

  So when she says we’ll give it a few days with Reggie—just to see how things work out—I know she’s lying about that too. Reggie is here to stay. And I’m telling you right now, it’s all going to end in tears.

  wake up and he’s staring right at me. Reggie, I mean. He’s so close I can feel his breath on my face. His chin is literally resting on the edge of my pillow.

  “Gross,” I say. “You ever hear of mouthwash?”

  He whines a little and licks his chops.

  “Beat it,” I say.

  He doesn’t. He just rolls those big, sad eyes.

  “Go tell Mom if you’ve got to pee,” I say. “You’re hers, not mine.”

  I reach for the remote on the coffee table. I zap through the channels until I find a rerun of Dr. Ice, the one where he only pretends to be a bad guy so he can infiltrate the headquarters of the Heat. I get kind of wrapped up in the episode, even though I’ve already seen it ten hundred times. Until I hear Reggie by the front door whining again.

  “Put a cork in it!” I say, looking over.

  Oh great. He’s standing in a big puddle of pee.

  I climb out of the sofa bed. I tiptoe over to Mom’s room and rap on her door.

  Silence.

  “Better wake up,” I say. “Somebody had an accident, and it wasn’t me.”

  Silence.

  I press my ear to the door. Usually I can hear her snoring, which she says she doesn’t do, but I know better. “Mom?” I say. Still nothing. I open the door and stick my head in, though, technically speaking, I’m not supposed to unless I’m invited. But I’m not taking any chances these days.

  She’s totally fine. Curled up like a little baby. Must be she has her earplugs in again. The car alarms are always going off in the alley behind our building.

  I close the door without waking her. It’s Saturday. She has the day off—the Ambulance Chasers are closed Saturday and Sunday even if their TV ads run all weekend—so she likes to sleep in. Fine by me. I make my own breakfast anyway. We would both rather have a bowl of Galactic Crunch than eggs and all that. Plus you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work a toaster. I like to eat right after I get up, and she usually needs a cup of black coffee to get things rolling. Then we do the laundry and grocery shopping at the strip mall, while every other kid in America gets to watch cartoons. Welcome to my fantastic new life.