Pet Disasters

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

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

  Text copyright © 2011 by Claudia Mills

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools,

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mills, Claudia.

  Mason Dixon : pet disasters / by Claudia Mills. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Nine-year-old Mason’s parents keep trying to get him a pet, but until he and

  his best friend Brody adopt a three-legged dog, he is not interested.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89958-4

  [1. Pets—Fiction. 2. Dogs—Fiction. 3. Best friends—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.M63963Mak 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010029724

  The illustrations were created using pen and ink.

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  To Jack and J. P. Simpson, editorial consultants

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Mason Dixon: Fourth-Grade Disasters

  1

  Mason Dixon didn’t mean for his pet goldfish to die. Really, he didn’t.

  But he couldn’t honestly say that he was brokenhearted about it, either.

  “Mom!” Mason hollered, staring down at the glass bowl where Goldfish lay floating on the still surface of the water. “Mom!”

  He found her in the family room sorting socks. All of Mason’s socks were brown, but his mother sorted them, anyway, according to how worn the heels were. Mason didn’t like it if one sock was thicker around the heel than the other one.

  “Mom?”

  She looked up from her sorting.

  “Mom. Um—I think Goldfish is dead.”

  “Oh, Mason!”

  He followed her back upstairs to his bedroom, stumbling on one step to keep up with her as she ran. Did she think that if she got there in the nick of time, Goldfish could be saved through CPR?

  Mason wasn’t sure how long Goldfish had been lying there. The last time he had stopped by to hang out with Goldfish for a minute or two had been that morning, and now it was midafternoon. Goldfish had seemed fine then. Or as fine as he ever had.

  “Oh, Mason,” she said again as together they gazed down at Goldfish’s motionless little body. “Your first pet!”

  Mason tried to look sad. He was sad, sort of. Poor Goldfish hadn’t had much of a life, swimming around in his bowl all day, in and out of his plastic underwater castle. In, out, in, out. Still, it was the only life Goldfish had had.

  “How could he just die like that?” Mason’s mother asked, twisting the brown sock she held in her hand.

  “Maybe he was old,” Mason suggested. He didn’t know how to tell if Goldfish was young or old. He didn’t even know how to tell if Goldfish was a boy or a girl. Mason had always thought of Goldfish as “him,” but he didn’t know for sure.

  “We’ve just had him a week!” his mother wailed. “I don’t see how a perfectly healthy goldfish could die in just a week.” Then her face brightened. “Maybe we can take him back to the pet store and they’ll give you another one! They must have some kind of guarantee for customer satisfaction.”

  Mason must have looked upset, because she continued, in a gentler voice, “Mason, I know there will never be another Goldfish. Goldfish will always have a special place in your heart. But we can find a fish that looks as much like him as possible. We can even call the new fish Goldfish, if you want. Not that I ever thought that was such a good name.”

  Mason didn’t know how to tell her.

  “Mom. I don’t want a new goldfish.”

  “But, honey—your father and I talked about this. You’re an only child. An only child should have a pet to talk to, to love. It was so good for you to learn how to take care of Goldfish.” She paused. “You did feed him every day, didn’t you?”

  “Yes! I fed him twice a day, just like the man at the pet store said.”

  “Twice a day?”

  “Yes!” Mason was getting angry. She didn’t need to look at him like he was some kind of fish murderer.

  “Mason,” she said. “The man said to feed him once a day.”

  Had he? Mason had to admit that he hadn’t really been listening to all the man’s instructions about everything from how big of a bowl to buy for Goldfish to how often they were supposed to clean it. Besides, who ate once a day? Nobody Mason had ever heard of. Mason himself was hungry every fifteen minutes.

  “That’s how he died, then,” Mason’s mom said, giving him an accusing look as she crumpled Mason’s brown sock for emphasis. “Overfeeding. Fish can die from overfeeding.”

  So he was a fish murderer. But he hadn’t meant to be.

  He’d be glad if Goldfish could come back to life and start swimming around in his bowl again.

  Especially if the bowl were in somebody else’s house.

  The goldfish, in Mason’s opinion, was just one more in a long series of bad ideas his parents had had about how to raise him. They always meant well. He had to give them that. But the history of the world was probably filled with bad ideas thought up by well-meaning people.

  Take his name, for instance. That was bad idea number one. His father’s last name was Dixon, and his mother’s last name had been Mason, which could be either a first name or a last name. His parents had thought it was a good idea to make it Mason’s first name. Besides, there was a famous line called the Mason-Dixon Line between the North and the South during the Civil War, so his parents thought the name had a nice ring to it. They thought it was an unusual and distinctive name that still had a pleasingly familiar sound to it.

  Basically, Mason had been named after a line.

  Luckily, at school they wouldn’t study the Civil War until fifth grade, so other kids didn’t know about the Mason-Dixon Line yet. Mason knew that when they learned about it, year after next, he would suddenly have a new nickname that would stick with him for the rest of his life. Hey, Line! they’d say. How’s it going, Line? Ha, ha, ha, ha! So that was something to look forward to.

  Mason’s parents, especially his mother, thought that variety was another good idea. (His father went along with her, but Mason could tell that usually his heart wasn’t in it.) She liked to try out new recipes from around the world: African peanut stew, a Brazilian potato salad that had olives in it. Both of those had been stunningly bad ideas. Peanuts were supposed to make peanut butter, not peanut stew. And olives were a bad idea even before they were mixed with cold potatoes and something called capers (another bad idea).

  Mason’s mother liked vari
ety in what she wore as well. She might wear a sari from India, or a poncho from Mexico, or something odd that she had knitted herself. Mason liked to wear jeans or shorts in a neutral color, a solid-colored T-shirt, and brown socks. Mason loved brown socks. Brown socks went with everything. White socks looked strange with long pants. Black socks looked strange with shorts. But brown socks always looked unremarkable. Brown socks didn’t call attention to themselves. Brown socks were quiet, ordinary, calm, and predictable.

  Unlike a comical name, African peanut stew, hand-knit Mexican ponchos, and pet goldfish who died, brown socks were a good idea.

  Mason’s best friend, Brody, came to Goldfish’s funeral. Goldfish funerals were the kind of thing Brody loved and Mason hated.

  Mason and Brody had been best friends since they were two years old. They lived next door to each other and had been in classes together ever since preschool. One day, in their first year at Little Wonders, Brody was absent and Mason walked up to another boy and asked him to play pretend: “Let’s pretend you’re Brody.” It was Mason’s mother’s favorite story to tell about Mason. Mason was tired of hearing it.

  Goldfish was going to be buried in the toilet. Not buried, exactly, but flushed away to the great fishbowl in the sky.

  Mason had thought maybe he could just do a private flushing, without too much fuss and bother, but he could tell that his mother would think he was heartless if he suggested it. So he had invited Brody, who adored fuss and bother. Now that it was summer vacation, they were at each other’s houses every single day.

  “Should I wait for Dad to get home from work?” Mason asked his mom.

  Mason’s dad worked for the city government in an office downtown. His job had something to do with roads. Whenever there was going to be road construction somewhere, Mason’s father was always the first one to know about it, glad that he could choose his driving route to avoid a detour. He wore a tie to work and carried a briefcase, but Mason had never seen him put anything in the briefcase or take anything out of it.

  “No, I think Dad’s going to be late today.” She hesitated. “He has a—a couple of errands he needs to run. And I have a conference call I need to prepare for. But I’m glad Brody will be here with you.”

  So Mason and Brody did the funeral all by themselves. Brody was wearing a black T-shirt, turned inside out.

  “So the words on it don’t show,” Brody explained. “That’s more respectful for a funeral.”

  Mason looked down at his own green T-shirt. It didn’t have words on it; Mason would never wear a shirt that had words on it. Still, it might be a bit bright for a funeral. He didn’t feel like changing it.

  “Anyway, this isn’t really a funeral,” Brody said. “People don’t have funerals anymore, my mother told me. They have celebrations of life. So this is a celebration of the life of Goldfish.”

  “What do people do at celebrations of life?” Mason asked. He wasn’t in the mood for anything overly festive.

  “They make speeches. And sing.”

  Two of Mason’s least favorite activities in the world.

  “Don’t worry,” Brody reassured him. “I’ll make the speeches. I’ll do the singing. I’ll do the whole thing. Is anybody else coming, besides Albert?”

  Albert was Brody’s goldfish, still completely alive even though Brody had gotten Albert a whole week before Mason got Goldfish. That was how Mason’s parents had gotten the idea of a goldfish for Mason. The pet Brody really wanted was a dog, but Brody’s father was desperately allergic to any pets with fur or hair. Still, Brody loved Albert and thought he was better than no pet at all.

  Brody had brought Albert over in his small bowl, the same size as Goldfish’s bowl. Now Albert’s bowl was perched on top of the toilet tank in the upstairs hall bathroom.

  Goldfish was already floating in the toilet, looking no less dead than he had before. Mason had poured him out into the toilet, along with most of the water from Goldfish’s bowl. He hadn’t felt like touching a goldfish, dead or alive, with his bare hands.

  “You don’t think Albert will be too sad, do you?” Brody asked, in a low voice, apparently so that Albert wouldn’t hear.

  “I don’t think so,” Mason said, stifling a sudden vision of Albert leaping in despair out of his bowl to join Goldfish in his watery grave.

  “All right,” Brody said. “We can begin.”

  Brody stood up straighter and spoke in a solemn voice. Brody was half a head shorter than Mason, so even when he stood up straight, he wasn’t very tall. Brody’s white-blond hair stood out every which way, unlike Mason’s dark hair, which lay nicely flat.

  “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to celebrate the life of Goldfish the goldfish, Mason Dixon’s first-ever pet. Goldfish was a good, faithful goldfish, who lived his life to the fullest. He always took great joy in …”

  Brody looked over at Mason for help in completing his sentence.

  “Swimming,” Mason said.

  “Swimming. And—anything else?”

  Mason tried to think of something. There must have been something else that Goldfish had liked doing.

  “Eating. Twice a day,” Mason said guiltily. At least Goldfish had died doing what he loved.

  “Goldfish will always be missed,” Brody said, his eyes filling with tears.

  Well, Brody and Albert would miss him.

  The speech completed, Brody sang a song for Goldfish: “One, two, three, four, five. I caught a fish alive. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. I let him go again.”

  Brody didn’t have a very good voice, in Mason’s opinion, but he sang with a lot of expression.

  After the song, Brody draped one of the Dixon family’s hand towels over the side of Albert’s bowl so that Albert wouldn’t see the actual burial part of Goldfish’s celebration of life.

  Then Brody flushed the toilet. Mason’s heart was strangely light. No more fish to feed—or overfeed. No more bowl to clean—not that he had cleaned it yet, but he would have had to if Goldfish had lived. No more pet to have to pretend to take an interest in.

  He heard his father at the front door, talking in a low voice to his mother.

  “Mason!” she called upstairs. “Mason and Brody! Come down—we have something to show you!”

  Mason’s father had a peculiar smile on his face, as if he was half trying to look sad about Goldfish but half wanting to announce something wonderful.

  “Mason,” he said. “I’m sorry about Goldfish, son. But …”

  He and Mason’s mother exchanged a fond, expectant look.

  “I stopped at the pet store on the way home, Mason, and we got you—a hamster!”

  2

  Summer art camp was not Mason’s idea.

  It was his mother’s idea.

  “Mason, you are not going to spend your entire summer vacation hanging around with Brody, doing nothing.”

  “Um—Mom?” Mason had said. “That’s why they call it summer vacation.”

  She had made him pick: sports camp, science camp, or art camp.

  Sports camp meant running around outside in the sun for hours in ninety-five-degree temperatures. Science camp sounded like the same thing as school camp. Mason might as well go to spelling camp. Or math-fact camp. Or statewide-standardized-test camp.

  So on Monday morning of the third week of June, Mason was sitting at a table in art camp, next to Brody. Brody had wanted to do sports camp and science camp and art camp. Brody’s mother had made him pick, too. Being Mason’s best friend, Brody had picked the same camp Mason picked.

  Although summer art camp was called “summer art camp,” it was held in the regular art room of Mason and Brody’s elementary school, Plainfield Elementary. So it really was school camp, after all. But it wasn’t taught by their regular art teacher. Instead, it was taught by a different art teacher, named Mrs. Gong.

  Mrs. Gong wore a smock and a beret, as if she were acting the part of an art-camp teacher in a play. Mason couldn’t tell how old she was—maybe
the same age as his parents. Too old to dress up in costumes, in any case.

  Art camp was going to run from nine to twelve, five mornings a week, for two weeks. Right now, two weeks sounded to Mason like a very long time.

  On this first morning of art camp, Brody sat drawing a picture of Albert the goldfish.

  Mason sat drawing a picture of Hamster the hamster.

  Hamster lived in a rectangular cage with a wooden floor and wire sides; the floor of the cage was covered with wood shavings. Inside the cage was a very squeaky wheel for Hamster to run on.

  At first the cage had been in Mason’s room, in the same place where Goldfish’s bowl had been. But after the second night, Mason told his parents that he couldn’t stand it any longer. Hamster loved his wheel. He never tired of his wheel. He ran on it nonstop all night long. Maybe he thought he was getting somewhere. Mason had a feeling that Hamster wasn’t the world’s smartest mammal. So Hamster’s cage moved to the family room, and Mason’s room was back the way he liked it: neat, orderly, quiet, without a single pet in it.

  Hamster had been Mason’s pet for four whole days now, but Mason couldn’t say that they had really bonded.

  At the table next to Mason and Brody, a girl named Nora sat drawing a picture of a pencil sharpener. Nora, Mason, and Brody had all been in third grade together last year. Nora was tall, thin, and bony—sort of like a sharpened pencil herself, come to think of it.

  As Mason watched, Nora walked over to look more closely at the actual pencil sharpener that hung on the classroom wall. She measured its dimensions, using a ruler from the jar on the teacher’s desk, and wrote the numbers down on a piece of graph paper. Mason wondered why Nora hadn’t picked science camp. She was definitely the science-camp type.

  Seated at the same table as Nora was another kid from their class at school: Dunk. His full name was Duncan, but nobody called him that. Dunk was drawing a picture of a football. At school, Dunk was always throwing a football at recess, often in the general direction of somebody’s head. Mason wondered why Dunk hadn’t picked sports camp. Maybe Nora’s mother and Dunk’s mother hadn’t let them do the picking.