Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself by Zachary Anderegg Read Free Book Online Page B

she walked me back to the front door, she shared something with me.
    “My husband was at the landfill last week. He heard some noises coming from a sofa somebody left. He looked at it. There were eight kittens that got stuffed inside the sofa. They just threw ’em away. A lot of times we get strays that have highway injuries. People around here don’t spay. Especially not on the Navajo reservation. So we get a lot of unwanted animals.”
    I realized my jaw was clenched, and that my disdain for people was surfacing again. Of course, this was in reaction to her news, not to her.
    “Thanks for your help,” I said. “I’ll be in tomorrow.”
    I went to look for a place to eat, though Page, Arizona, is not exactly the restaurant capital of the Colorado Plateau. If you Google “Page + Arizona + restaurants,” you find a single listing for a place called Wahweap’s Rainbow Room on Lake Powell. Most of the people who live in Page either work for the Glen Canyon Dam hydroelectric plant, the Navajo power plant, which is coal-fired—you can see the smokestacks for miles—or they work in the tourism industry. There are a lot of great scenic views in Page, but only if you’re in town, looking away from town at the distant mesas and buttes burnt red by the sun. Anything you see that’s green is the result of irrigation, and everywhere else, it’s high desert.
    I settled for dinner at McDonald’s. I didn’t realize how famished I was, and I wanted to ingest the greatest number of calories in the shortest amount of time. It seemed almost obscene that it only took me ten minutes to take in more nourishment than the dog had had in weeks.
    Another thing I hadn’t realized was how thinking about the dog was evoking memories I thought were buried, resurrecting ancient hurts and sending me on trips into the past I didn’t necessarily want to take. For example, while at McDonald’s, I saw a kid with red hair and I reflexively recoiled from him—a sign of how I’m scarred. I knew my bias was irrational and unjustified, but Wade, the kid who bullied me when I was in grade school, had red hair. Wade was athletic and had a reputation for being tough, so a lot of people followed him, sensing it was probably smarter to be his friend than his enemy. It’s irrational to distrust people with red hair, just because you had a problem with one person who had red hair, but I recognized it as a propensity I had.
    Then a girl at McDonald’s reminded me of a girl I knew in fifth grade who’d sent me a “love letter.” “Dear Zak, I think you’re really cute . . .” etcetera. It was a joke, a prank, but I fell for it. I’d known this girl since preschool, and I thought she was particularly smart and confident, and not someone who moved with the popular kids, necessarily, but high enough in the social hierarchy of elementary school to do as she pleased without fear of making herself unpopular. It didn’t seem so far-fetched, that she might like me, though in fifth grade, I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. Girls mature more quickly than boys do in this regard. The letter was, apparently, a random joke she decided to play for her own amusement, and then she saw it as an opportunity to humiliate me in front of the class. I wrote her a letter back, a sincere response, and she mocked me for it, read it aloud to her friends, who squealed with delight, and passed my letter around for everyone else to read. I was mortified. She played it out for days.
    If I had a good year, it would have been sixth grade, when I became one of the oldest kids in my elementary school, and some of the kids who’d bullied me the previous five years had all moved up to junior high school. For nine months during the school year, I was no longer afraid of leaving the house or getting on the bus. I made a few friends, was able to concentrate in class, and I enjoyed learning about the physical sciences. I even enjoyed the more challenging math that we were being