Nugly, p.1
Nugly, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Part One: Nugget
Chapter 1: The Number One Main Thing
Chapter 2: Nugget’s Family
Chapter 3: The Pattern
Chapter 4: How Nugget Looked
Chapter 5: That Thing We Said We’d Come Back To
Chapter 6: The Pillars Come Down
Chapter 7: A House Divided
Chapter 8: Early Adopters
Chapter 9: Next Steps
Chapter 10: Outside
Chapter 11: A Brief Note on Boston
Chapter 12: Anyway, Where Were We?
Chapter 13: Lucky
Chapter 14: Bears
Chapter 15: The Zoo
Chapter 16: Log Jam
Chapter 17: The Tour Guide
Chapter 18: The Porcupine’s Dilemma
Chapter 19: The Lions’ Den
Chapter 20: Love
Part Two: Ugly
Chapter 21: Dog Dreams
Chapter 22: Gimme Shelter
Chapter 23: On Second Thought, Maybe Do Not Gimme Shelter
Chapter 24: How Nugget Looked Now
Chapter 25: Hope
Chapter 26: Linh Trần
Chapter 27: Emily Trần
Chapter 28: (For the Record, He Was House-Trained)
Chapter 29: Life at
Chapter 30: The Captains of Ronan Park
Chapter 31: Hockey(s)
Chapter 32: Fetch Happens
Chapter 33: Sticks and Stones
Chapter 34: Being Honest
Chapter 35: Acceptance
Part Three: Nugly
Chapter 36: Hunger
Chapter 37: The Happy Seagull
Chapter 38: Meanwhile, Back at the Beach
Chapter 39: Triple-Decker; Sandwich
Chapter 40: A Bit of an Odd Chapter
Chapter 41: The Shirt off His Back
Chapter 42: Castle Island
Chapter 43: The Final Betrayal
Chapter 44: What Nugly Didn’t Know
Chapter 45: Where, Why, and How
Chapter 46: Reunions
Chapter 47: How Nugly Looked
Chapter 48: One Final Example
Acknowledgments
Sneak Peek
About the Author
Also by M. C. Ross
Copyright
The number one main thing a dog does every day is: fall in love. Dogs do this over and over again, often without really thinking about it, the same way you and I sneeze or blink at bright lights.
The second main thing a dog does is: be hungry. That one’s pretty self-explanatory.
Within five seconds of Nugget being born, he did both.
Being born is a bit overwhelming, so it was sort of nice that Nugget had something to focus on. Also playing in his favor was the fact that puppies are unable to open their eyes for ten to fourteen days after they’re born. This is a very smart system. Imagine going from never having seen anything at all to seeing a crowded room with lots of people all paying attention to you. It’d be a lot to take in. You’d want some time to adjust. Like, say, one to two weeks. This is exactly the amount of time puppies get, and just one of the many ways in which humans have yet to catch up to dogs.
But even though he couldn’t see that he’d been born, Nugget could certainly feel it—and smell it. One moment his entire universe had been warm and extremely compact. Now there was air on his fur, and that warmth, which had previously been all around him, was suddenly behind him, big and soft and breathing in and out. To Nugget’s nose—which even from birth could smell things no human would ever be able to—the big warm thing smelled like comfort and courage and home. And a voice, delighted, came from on high: “Aw, look at that cute little nugget!”
Nugget had been born and named in a single instant. Again, a bit overwhelming. But just before Nugget could panic, that big, warm, good-smelling presence beside him stood up, shifted around, and plopped back down right in front of him, where it proceeded to lick his face urgently. Hello, those licks said. Don’t worry. I’m here for you. You’re safe. It’s okay.
That’s when Nugget realized: This was his mother.
That was also the first time Nugget loved someone.
He’d get a chance to try it out again soon. Like, right now. Because, all of a sudden, his mom was standing back up and turning away from Nugget. His tiny heart, just a few ba-bumps into its professional career, nearly stopped. Why had she left him? Was this forever? But no—within moments Nugget’s mother had completed a full rotation, and when she returned, she used her nose to nudge someone right up next to Nugget. Someone just as small as Nugget, and just as wriggly, and just as eager to get a big, wet, sloppy face bath from their mother.
Nugget’s heartbeat came back twice as fast. A sibling. He had a sibling!
Soon came another puppy, and another, and pretty soon Nugget had six brothers and sisters, and he loved each one of them more than the last. Or, wait, no—he loved each one of them just as much as the last. Or, hold on, wait—well, actually, Nugget wasn’t too worried about the details just yet. Love, in Nugget’s case, was quite literally blind.
And, anyway, he had more pressing things to focus on right now. Because while all this had been happening—while he and his siblings had been entering the world, and while the voices from on high had been cooing and conversing amongst themselves, and while his mother had been making sure each and every puppy received a warm welcome—Nugget had also been experiencing another feeling for the first time ever. It was a constant dull ache, like waves on a beach, and it pushed him and his siblings toward their mother.
Because Nugget was a dog, and therefore, Nugget was hungry.
Again: pretty self-explanatory.
As he enjoyed his mother’s milk for the first time, squeezed up between his siblings almost as tightly as they had been before they were born, Nugget decided that on the whole, being alive seemed like a pretty good state of affairs.
But if that tiny heartbeat ever fluttered in those first few minutes—if doubt ever flickered behind Nugget’s closed eyes—it was because some part of him still remembered those terrible seconds when his mother had turned away from him. When, for a second, Nugget held out all the love he had to give in his little body and felt the terrible fear of not knowing if that love would be returned.
Later, when people spoke about Nugget, they would say he was different from other dogs. Unique. Some would mean it in a nice way; others would not. Almost all of them would be referring to the parts of Nugget that were easiest to notice, that even a stranger could see.
But from his very first breath, Nugget had been unique in a much less obvious way. What set him apart was this: He had so much love in him that he could change people’s lives. It was so much love that it felt like it might give him unimaginable strength—or tear him apart.
In time, it would do both.
For now, Nugget just enjoyed the feeling of being safe and happy and taken care of and loved by his family with no questions or hesitations. It took precedence over any other worries he may have had.
It was the number one main thing.
Nugget had a mother, three brothers, and three sisters. That first night, all of Nugget’s siblings got their names in more or less the same fashion as Nugget, which was how he wound up with three brothers named Biscuit, Bacon, and Frosty, and three sisters named Pepper, Sprite, and Cheese Fries. As far as Nugget was concerned, his mother’s name was Mom, but according to those voices he’d heard earlier, she could also be referred to as Wendy, so that was interesting.
Something worth mentioning here is that dogs have a dog language, which they all know how to speak from birth. Take, for example, huskies, who never shut up from the moment they are born. But when a dog loves a human, they can also understand that human’s language, even if they’ve only just met.
And those voices Nugget had been hearing were, in fact, human. They belonged to the Vandycks, and Nugget loved them from the moment he met them. In the weeks that followed, as the puppies graduated from crawling to walking to following the Vandycks around their home, Nugget’s love for his humans only grew.
The Vandycks lived in Dorchester, a sprawling, tree-lined neighborhood on the south side of Boston. Specifically, they lived at 99 Ichabod Lane in a little blue house hidden behind a hydrangea hedge. Mr. Vandyck was a businessman who went to work every day in a suit and tie, came home, and immediately changed into jeans and a T-shirt bearing the name of some old rock band. Then he’d go to the sound system, put on a record by whatever band he was wearing that day, call out “Wendy!” and wait patiently for Nugget’s mother to lumber over so he could scratch her behind the ears while he mused on what to make for dinner that night and how much counter space he had to work with.
The counters were constantly full because Mrs. Vandyck was a professional baker who always filled the house with amazing smells, working on new recipes for cookies, cupcakes, and other treats. Unfortunately, she was also always placing those treats on surfaces far too high for Nugget and his siblings to reach.
“It’s a crime,” said Bacon, peering into the kitchen from around the corner.
“It’s an accident,” said Nugget. “It has to be. If she knew how badly we wanted to eat the cupcakes, she would obviously leave them on the floor. She’s a nice lady. She just doesn’t know.”
“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” said Cheese Fries, who had discovered TV this week.
“We should just tell her,” Sprite said. “On three, let’s all ask her politely but firmly to reconsider her actions. One … two … three!”
At which point all free-roaming, opinionated puppies were promptly rounded up by Mrs. Vandyck and ushered back into their nest. This happened about once a day.
But no human held a higher place in Nugget’s heart than Taylor Vandyck. Taylor was twelve years old, bright-eyed, tall for her age, and an astoundingly easy girl to love. First off, she had given Nugget his name, and Nugget liked his name, and when someone gives you a gift like that, you’re inclined to love them forever. On top of that, Taylor was kind and warm and quick to laugh when you licked her face, which was always a nice quality for a friend to have.
But what really sealed the deal—what made Nugget feel that love so strongly it made every inch of his fur stand on end—was the Pattern.
The Pattern started just before spring of that year, a couple weeks into Nugget being alive. Well, possibly it had started before then. But that was when Nugget’s ears started to turn from puppy ears into dog ears, capable of hearing things thousands of feet away.
That was how, at 3:00 p.m. every day, he started to hear it: a slap, slap, slap, always beginning far in the distance before quickly growing closer. And as it grew closer, it grew louder. And as it grew louder, a smell became clearer, blowing on the wind, a scent like grass stains, laughter, and vanilla. And as the smell became clearer, the sound grew faster and louder still, until it all reached a fever pitch: slap, slap, slap, SLAP—SLAM!
At this point the Vandycks’ front door would fly open, two objects would smack against the foyer wall like they’d been thrown at high speed, and a voice would ring out: “I missed you guys!”
The Pattern was the sound of Taylor Vandyck rushing back from school—not walking, but running as fast as she possibly could—every single day, so that she could kick her sneakers off with wild abandon and find the puppies she’d been thinking about since 7:00 that morning. Once she’d reached the nest in the back of the house, she would get down on the floor with them and let them know how excited she’d been all day to play.
How could you not love a girl like that?
It wasn’t long before Taylor could tell Nugget and his siblings apart much better than Mr. or Mrs. Vandyck could. She knew that Biscuit had white ears and a black nose, but that Pepper had black ears and a white nose. She knew that Frosty and Bacon loved playing tug-of-war, but that, depending on who lost, Frosty could be salty and Bacon could be frosty. She knew that when Sprite got excited, she could wag her tail so hard she knocked herself over, and that somehow it was the chronically dozy Cheese Fries that always got caught underfoot, so you had to look out for her. And she knew that Nugget was the one who looked—
Well, actually, we should probably stop and talk about how exactly Nugget looked.
It would be very easy to tell you how Nugget and his siblings looked, if only Nugget and his siblings had been any particular breed of dog. If they’d been Weimaraners, you could simply read the sentence “Nugget and his siblings were Weimaraners,” and then go look up Weimaraner on the internet and say to yourself, “Oh, I see. They looked like that.” Or, if you happen to own a Weimaraner, you could go into the living room, look at them very intently, and then say to yourself, “Yes, just as I remembered.”
But in this case, it wasn’t that simple. For one thing, Wendy was already a canine of indeterminate origin. She was a big black dog with white paws, a thick snout, and a curiously curly tail. Once, the Vandycks had a DNA test done, hoping it might tell them what kind of dog Wendy was. The woman who processed and returned the test included a note congratulating them. In all her years of canine research, she said, she’d never seen a test where so many of the results were just question marks.
Then there was the matter of paternity. If anyone knew the breed of the puppies’ father, then they may have known at least 50 percent of what Nugget and company were. But no one even knew who the father was, let alone what he looked like. The only member of the Vandyck household who had met him was Wendy herself; and though the puppies would occasionally ask Wendy about his identity, more often than not, she would just smile a private half smile and not say a word. (We’ll come back to this.)
So Nugget and his siblings weren’t Weimaraners. Or if they were, they were only Weimaraners the same way a hot fudge sundae is only maraschino cherries—there’s a little bit of that ingredient in there, yes, but there’s also a whole lot of everything else.
So it’s going to require a bit more effort to tell you how Nugget looked.
One easy way to describe a dog’s appearance is often its size, but given that he was a puppy, Nugget’s size was less of a fixed fact and more of an ongoing news story with frequent, and frequently baffling, updates. It was anyone’s guess as to whether the puppies would end up being as big as their mother, or twice as big, or half her size. Some of them were growing faster than the others. (Pepper in particular was really going for it, and her rapid growth made her the envy of her siblings one and all.) Nugget, though, was growing slowly compared to his siblings—with a couple notable exceptions. Nugget’s ears appeared to have made a private agreement, early on, that they would race each other to see which of them could grow bigger fastest. Failing that, they would team up against the rest of Nugget’s body and make a mad dash to outgrow the whole package.
So we have our first rough sketch of Nugget: a tiny, inquiring face, framed by two large, silky-soft ears that, if Nugget ran fast enough, threatened to send him tumbling over his similarly outsized paws by flopping up and down over his deep brown eyes.
Which brings us to another trait: coloration. As previously discussed, Wendy was black with white paws, and Pepper and Biscuit carried on proudly in their mother’s likeness, mixing up black and white in a furry free-for-all of spots and specks. From there, things grew gradually less easy to keep track of: Frosty was almost entirely white, with a black spot that seemed to be growing. Sprite was almost entirely black, with a white spot that seemed to be shrinking. Bacon’s and Cheese Fries’ black spots were outlined by streaks of russet red that had to have come from either their mysterious father or some long-forgotten red wolf forefather. And by the time you got to Nugget, any sort of strict color scheme had fallen apart altogether. Everything from Nugget’s giant ears to the tip of his tail was an eye-catching explosion of black, white, dark orangey-red, light reddish-orange, and—in the case of one streak that ran right down the middle of Nugget’s nose—brown, a rich, radiant shade that shone in a sunset’s light and brought out the beautiful brown in Nugget’s eyes.
Okay. We’re getting closer. Brown eyes peeking out from behind big ears, on top of big paws, surrounded by coronas of color. You now almost know what Nugget looked like. But there is more to knowing someone’s appearance than knowing how they look. There is also the matter of how they appear.
For example: Nugget’s eyes may have looked brown, but they appeared inquisitive, curious, always looking up at what his mother or the Vandycks were doing, all the better for him to learn how to do it too, how to help, how to show the people he loved that he wanted to be just like them.
Nugget may have looked small, but he appeared mighty, energized, and animated by an excitement for everything around him that caused his paws to bounce clear off the ground and inspired his hindquarters to wag back and forth so fast his tail began to neither look nor appear like anything so much as a colorful blur.
And Nugget may not have looked like any particular breed previously recorded in anyone’s particular breed book. But he did appear to be one specific thing, a thing he was reminded of over and over in his first few weeks of life, a thing he’d been hearing since the same breath in which he’d been given his very name.
Because, according to all available experts on the subject, Nugget was cute.
Taylor Vandyck had cried it out involuntarily when Nugget was born. Dr. Sheynberg, the veterinarian, had said it in a laugh when Nugget had wriggled and sneezed at his first vaccinations. And either one or both of the Vandyck parents had said it the day Nugget had first ventured out onto the front porch.
It was hard to remember who had said it first that day; in that moment, Nugget had been a little overstimulated. Walking was a relatively new concept at that point, and while he’d pieced together the basic concept of the outdoors from various glimpses and smells, it was still more of a theory to Nugget than a practice. On top of all that, the hydrangea hedge was in full bloom that week, and when the sweet smell of those gigantic flowers first crashed into him, it was with a force that knocked Nugget onto his back. As the Vandycks wiped tears of laughter from their eyes, Nugget wiggled all four paws in the air and waggled his tail furiously, looking for all the world like a deliriously happy overturned turtle. And all the while, there was that oft-heard word: cute.
