Totally Middle School Read online

  On our street, I never saw Donny without Mindy. I think, if he could have, he would have brought her to church, too—which would really have gotten Pastor Jamieson going.

  I knew Mr. Lentz, too, since he was the principal of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Junior High School. I don’t know what it was like for Donny to be a student in the same school where his father was principal, since he’d graduated before I got there. But maybe it was easy, since everyone liked Mr. Lentz. He went to every basketball game and soccer match and football game and volleyball match and track meet. And he went to every play the Longfellow Thespians put on, and every concert the seventh-grade choir, and eighth-grade choir, and ninth-grade women’s chorale, and ninth-grade men’s glee club put on. He knew our names, and sometimes he’d come and sit in the cafeteria with us—sometimes he’d even eat the food. And sometimes he’d come in and read to us, and he’d do all the voices. He was that kind of principal.

  The Sunday after Donny got his draft notice, Pastor Jamieson began his announcements with the news. It seemed like he and God were all excited about it. Donny was being called to a Great Cause. He would be a small part in America’s task of holding back Communist atheism. He would bear witness to the light through the strength of his arms. Then Pastor Jamieson went into an impromptu prayer. Like Joshua, may Donny Lentz defend his people. Like Samson, may Donny Lentz smite the godless. Like Gideon, may he lead others into battle for his Lord.

  I don’t know how Donny took all this, since it was prayer after all, and Pastor Jamieson was death on anyone who might look up for a glimpse, so we all kept our heads bowed and our eyes closed. I suppose.

  But I don’t think Mrs. Lentz was all that happy about the draft notice. She and Mr. Lentz left after the last verse of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and weren’t in the church vestibule when everyone was shaking Donny’s hand and telling him he’d be fine and wouldn’t it be good to see his brother again soon and Mr. Ingmer told him the joke about remembering which was his gun and which was his rifle and he’d better be careful with each one and the old guys laughed and Donny looked embarrassed and someone said he should remember to keep his head low and then no one was laughing.

  I didn’t see him and Mindy running the whole next week. I looked for them. But they never showed.

  Until Saturday morning, when they came to my house and knocked on our door.

  When I opened it, Donny was standing on the porch, Mindy sitting beside him, watching him with those eyes, her ears up and her left one tipped forward.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said.

  I told him congratulations.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I told him he must be pretty excited. I mean, going off to war. Fighting in the jungle. All that stuff.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Killing commies,” I said.

  He looked at me. “Ethan,” he said, “another way of saying that is ‘Killing people.’ ”

  I told him I knew that.

  “A lot of people don’t,” he said. He reached down and played with Mindy’s ears. “So,” he said, “I have a favor to ask.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I wonder if you’d take care of Mindy for me while I’m gone.”

  I looked down at Mindy. She was still staring at Donny with those eyes.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. She needs someone to run with her, and play and stuff, and my folks aren’t going to do that. I thought, maybe, you might like to.”

  * * *

  —

  That night at dinner, I asked my parents about Mindy. I said I’d take care of her all by myself. I said she wouldn’t be any trouble. I said I’d run with her every day. I said it was, like, a patriotic duty.

  I guess my mother thought so too. She started to cry, and left the table.

  My father said I could take Mindy.

  Donny brought her the morning he was going to leave for Louisiana. She was sitting beside him when I opened the front door. He had put a leash on her, and you could tell she didn’t like it one bit. She held it in her back teeth, just beneath his hand, and every so often she’d tug at it.

  But her eyes never left him.

  “She’s a good dog,” Donny said.

  “I know.”

  “And she’s smart as anything. Whatever you say, she’ll know what you mean.”

  “I know.”

  “And she’s really well behaved—except she’ll try to get up on your bed at night, but don’t let her.”

  “Okay.”

  “She knows she shouldn’t be up there, but she likes to curl up in the covers.”

  “All right.”

  “Don’t let her.”

  “Okay.”

  He played with her ears.

  “She loves peanut butter, so maybe give her a little every so often.”

  “I will.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. I’ll take care of her, Donny.”

  “Okay.” He handed me the leash, and immediately Mindy looked at me, her ears went down, she looked at Donny, she looked at me again, and she gave this small whine from deep inside her.

  He played with her ears a little more; then he turned and walked down the porch stairs.

  Mindy pulled once to follow him, but she knew. She lay down, put her head on her front paws, and watched him walk away.

  That whole day, if she was outside, I had to keep her on the leash; otherwise she would have run back home. When she was inside the house, she lay by the front window, watching.

  That night, she never even tried to jump up to my bed—even when I told her she could.

  And I knew she was Donny’s dog. I knew that. But somehow, it changed everything. Somehow, when you know you have a dog waiting for you to come back home, it sort of puts junior high in perspective. I mean, a dog doesn’t care if you get first or second or third seat in band. A dog doesn’t care if you can’t spell effacious, or efacacious, or efficacious, or whatever. A dog doesn’t care if Mr. Blue drives sixty miles an hour south while Mr. Green drives forty-five miles an hour north and how far apart are they after twenty minutes?

  A dog is just waiting for you to come home and run.

  I’m not sure Mr. Lentz cared all that much about Mr. Blue and Mr. Green, either, because whenever I saw him in the halls of Longfellow Junior High, he only asked about Mindy. “She behaving?” he’d ask.

  “She’s great,” I’d say.

  “We appreciate what you’re doing,” he’d say.

  “Thanks,” I’d say. “Tell Donny she’s fine. How’s he doing?”

  Then Mr. Lentz would nod, and he’d give a little wave, and go to wherever junior high principals have to go.

  * * *

  —

  For a while, Donny wrote letters back to the church, and Pastor Jamieson read them aloud during announcements, and then he would pray for Donny smiting the Communist peril, and he would pray for protection from the enemy, and he would pray that Donny would return to the church victorious when God’s will had been done. And I would wonder if, back home, Mindy was sitting by the front window, watching, praying her own doggy prayers for Donny. I even wondered who God listened to more.

  She never watched me like she watched Donny. She was always looking for him. We ran every morning, and she watched. We ran every afternoon after I got home from school, and she watched. We ran past Donny’s house, and sometimes Mr. and Mrs. Lentz would be on the porch, like they were watching for us, and Mr. Lentz would give that little wave, and Mindy would run up on the porch and wag her whole hind end at them and ask if Donny was home yet, and they’d scratch her behind the ears, and she’d know, and come back to me to finish our run.

  Mindy even watched when we turned on the six o’clock news and saw the pictures
of the soldiers fighting in Vietnam and I learned, I learned, I learned that Pastor Jamieson didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Mindy and I would sit together, and I would hold her, and I hoped we wouldn’t see Donny on the screen. Not with what was happening to them there. Sometimes my mother would get up suddenly and turn the news off. Sometimes my father would use words about President Johnson that I never heard him say anywhere else.

  Then the letters from Donny stopped. Or at least, Pastor Jamieson stopped reading what they said. I wasn’t sure which.

  And so, a year went by, and who knew how many hours of algebra problems, and social studies essays on foreign cultures, and life science lab reports, and book evaluations on To Kill a Mockingbird and 1984 and The Diary of Anne Frank and Flowers for Algernon—all done in the dining room while Mindy watched at the front window. And who knew how many hours of running with Mindy—enough so that, late in the spring, when Mr. Lentz saw me run the mile in PE—he was the PE coach too—he told me I should run cross-country in ninth grade, and I told him I would.

  At the beginning of my last year of junior high, two things happened. First, we stopped going to Pastor Jamieson’s church. My mother said she’d had one too many “smites” preached at her. In the middle of a sermon about Jericho, she looked at me and she almost started to cry, and then she took my hand and she said to my father, “We’re leaving.” And we did. Right in the middle of the sermon, before the walls came tumbling down.

  And second, Donny Lentz came home—but it was a few weeks before we found out.

  I think Mindy knew before I did.

  After a year, she had stopped looking out the front window—at least, she didn’t do it all the time. Now she sat beside me at dinner. She lay beside my bed at night. She followed me to the backyard and caught anything I threw: a Frisbee, a tennis ball, a stick of wood, a biscuit. And I didn’t need to keep her on a leash ever; when we ran, we ran just like she and Donny used to: side by side, with her looking up at me most of the time, and even sometimes jumping up and nipping at my butt, joking around like I was a sheep she was herding. Until one Saturday when she stopped when we got to the end of Donny’s block, looked down it, and sprinted to his house. She wouldn’t stop, no matter what I yelled. She ran down the street, scooted across the front yard like border collies do—close to the ground and fast—took the four steps on the porch with a jump, and skidded with her back legs splayed out to the front door.

  So, I rang the doorbell. I mean, suppose she was right? But no one answered. Then I knocked because Mindy was watching and she wanted me to. But no lights came on—nothing. Even so, it took a long while before she’d come away—and after that, Mindy went back to watching out our front window.

  She knew—but that wasn’t how I found out that Donny was back.

  I found out when Pastor Jamieson and Mr. Lentz knocked on our door one afternoon. I had just gotten back from school and was getting ready to run with Mindy. She was eager; she was standing up on her toes, the way border collies do. Ears up, left one tipped forward. Grinning. A perfect day: blue October, leaves starting to tilt toward new colors, high clouds, that dry smell of autumn. I was looking for my sweatshirt in the mudroom when I heard the knock, and Mindy scooted to the door.

  Pastor Jamieson was in a full-on suit, of course. He wasn’t holding his Bible, like he usually was, and he looked sort of stiff—maybe because we hadn’t been coming since Jericho and things felt sort of awkward.

  And I hadn’t seen Mr. Lentz for a few days. Actually, when I thought of it, it had been a couple of weeks.

  “Hello, Ethan,” he said. “She behaving?”

  “She’s great,” I said.

  I looked at Pastor Jamieson. “Pastor, I’m sorry, but my parents aren’t here.”

  He laughed a little. “You know, I’ve never done this before, but we’re actually here to see her.”

  He pointed to Mindy.

  “You’re here to see Mindy?”

  “Ethan, Donny is home,” said Mr. Lentz.

  And you know, I knew this day would come, but I suddenly felt like I was either going to throw up or cry. I mean, of course Mindy was Donny’s dog. I knew that. Of course he was always going to come back and she’d be his dog again. Of course. But for the past year, we’d run together like we belonged together. And it didn’t matter so much if during the day there were jerks who do what jerks do in junior high, or teachers who didn’t like you because they were in a bad mood or because they hadn’t had their morning coffee, or this girl who laughed when you asked if she might want to go out on Friday because there was this movie and you thought…but she never thought. None of that mattered so much, because Mindy was always ready to run.

  I loved her.

  “I think Donny needs his dog,” Pastor Jamieson said.

  “Ethan, at night, when he’s alone, the dreams he has…” Mr. Lentz couldn’t finish.

  Mindy looked up at me.

  I guess she knew.

  “Okay,” I said. I think that’s what I said.

  Mr. Lentz looked down at me. “I bet you meant the world to her this last year,” he said. He reached down and rubbed her between the ears. “I bet this will be hard as hell for both of you.”

  I looked at him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “No,” said Mr. Lentz. “None of this is okay.”

  * * *

  —

  It was as hard as hell.

  Mindy and I went for our run. It was longer than usual.

  We messed around when we got home.

  I took a long shower. I took a long time to get dressed. We played tug-of-war with my socks and I didn’t try too hard to get them.

  I found her leash and put it on—which she wasn’t happy about.

  She held the leash with her back teeth.

  I tried not to cry as we walked the two blocks.

  Then, as we got closer to Donny’s house, Mindy dropped the leash, and she started pulling.

  Then she was pulling really hard.

  Then we were on the front porch, and she was wriggling so much, I could hardly take off the leash.

  I rang the doorbell.

  No one answered.

  I knocked.

  No one.

  You can’t believe how hard it is to get ready to give up what you love most in the world, and then not have anyone take it.

  You can’t believe how hard it is.

  But then…then the door jerked open, and Donny stood there.

  Mindy went crazy.

  She jumped. She cried. She lay on her back with all four feet up. She whined. She jumped again. She ran around him. She nipped at his butt. She jumped again. She cried again.

  And Donny, he never moved.

  He never moved.

  He looked at me like he didn’t even know who I was.

  He looked at me like I was standing way away on the horizon. A million miles away.

  “Hey, Donny,” I said.

  He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he said, “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “What?”

  But he didn’t answer. At the sound of his voice, Mindy stood up on her hind legs and reached with her paws like she wanted to hug him, and with one quick move, he pulled back and smacked her on the side of her head, so hard that she yelped and skittered across the porch.

  “Donny!” I said.

  Mindy crouched into herself. She put her tail low between her legs, brought her head down, crawled back, and turned her belly up to him.

  He kicked her square in the ribs.

  I knelt down over her.

  “It’s Mindy. Donny, it’s Mindy.”

  “Don’t…No one can…” Then he closed the door.

  I heard it lock
.

  And Mindy crept down the porch stairs, her tail still tight beneath her. Then she turned and waited for me.

  I didn’t need to put the leash on.

  That night, and for many, many nights afterward, Mindy slept on my bed, and when she whined in her dreams, I leaned over and held her tightly.

  Gary D. Schmidt is the award-winning author of many books for kids, including Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, The Wednesday Wars, Okay for Now, and Orbiting Jupiter. During his middle school years, he lived in Hicksville, New York, on Long Island, with one brother and an assortment of dogs, including Boots (a lovable mutt), Jiggs (a barking beagle), and Kim (a schnauzer). His favorite activity by far was visiting nearby Jones Beach, where he could swim in the Atlantic Ocean. He was also a prodigious reader and in middle school fell in love with the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, like most middle schoolers of his generation. He has lived for quite a while on a farm near Grand Rapids, Michigan—with dogs. He has six grown kids and two granddaughters. He divides his time between writing for kids and being an English professor at Calvin College, at Hamline University, and at the Robert A. Handlon Correctional Facility in Ionia, Michigan.

  SECRETS

  Mama and Daddy had a surprise.

  I assumed they were not having another baby

  because they were old.

  And here was the secret plan

  I was hearing whispers about:

  Don’t tell Grandma and Grandpa

  yet.

  We are moving to a new place,

  A place where it never snows,

  Said my daddy who had to shovel the snow.

  A place where oranges grow in the backyard

  and roses in the front.

  You can wear shorts all year round,

  said my mother who had to buckle us up inside

  snowsuits.

  Was this enough to make us leave

  Chicago,

  Sparkle the dog, and

  Grandma and Grandpa?

  Uncle Stooge and Uncle Chester?

  Could they come with us? Will they at least visit?