What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay by Amanda Cockrell Page B

bleeding. “What happened?”
    “Bit me,” he said. “Apparently you didn’t notice.”
    “Oh, poor little Cookie,” Mom said.
    “It looked to me like she was having a seizure,” Felix said.
    Mom said, “Poor little Cookie,” again, and Felix squeezed her shoulders and said, “Seizures aren’t painful, they just look scary. I’ve seen some.”
    Then the vet came out. “We’ve cleared all the bone fragments but your dog is still having seizures,” she told us. “We don’t know why. She growled and snapped at my tech. We’re concerned at this point about the possibility of a failed rabies shot.”
    Ben looked at his hand.
    “We’d like your regular vet to hold her for a day or two,” the vet said, while Cupcake skittered around the waiting room and peed in the corner. She collared Cupcake. “I’ll just give Baby here a quick look, too.”
    “I wouldn’t worry,” Felix said to Mom after the vet disappeared with Cupcake. “Stress can trigger seizures, and I’d growl too if I’d been through all that.”
    Mom nodded supportively. At Felix.
    “Good to know,” Ben said.
    This was so not what I’d had in mind—Ben getting bit by a possibly rabid dog while Mom bonded with Felix over the crisis. My kind of plan works in the movies, but I should have known. If anyone knows the movies are smoke and mirrors, it should be me.
    It turns out—after a week at the vet and a lot of worried phone calls and urine tests they made us collect because none of the techs wanted to walk her—that Cookie does not have rabies. That’s a plus, particularly for Ben, but what Cookie does have is epilepsy, apparently triggered by the stress of the turkey-bone incident. So now she takes phenobarbital to prevent further seizures, which it does, except for times of extreme stress like baths and additional vet visits. Then she lies down and foams at the mouth and twitches on the sidewalk. It completely unhinges Wuffie, who thinks Cookie is going to die each time, so Felix has started coming over to Wuffie’s to do things like bathe Cookie and take her for her checkups. Mom picks him up, or he walks there. All the way. He says it gives him time to think. I worry that what he’s thinking about is Mom.
    I can’t wait for Christmas. The house will probably catch fire. In the meantime, there’s the Posadas procession.

10
    The Monday after Thanksgiving, there was a drawing of the Posadas stable in my locker. The angels were leaning down from their sign with brooms, whacking at a donkey with Noah’s face that had just pooped on the floor. I couldn’t help snickering even though I knew Noah was right behind me. It looked just like him. Jesse is good .
    I heard Noah’s locker door slam and shoved the drawing into my folder before he could start anything. I showed it to Lily at lunch and she cracked up, too. “You’re way too good at that,” she told Jesse. “You ought to be doing cartoons for the Oak Tree .” That’s our school paper.
    Jesse gave her an evil grin. “None of my ideas are fit to print.”
    Some of his drawings are just wicked, like the one of Noah, but a lot of them are sweet. He’s done two of me as an angel, and one as the Virgin from the Posadas parade. I’ve quit taping them up on my bedroom wall, though. There are too many, and Ben will start in on me or tell Mom or both.
    I told Jesse I’d love a ride home after Posadas rehearsals, to make up for last time.
    Father Weatherford has gotten nearly every store in the arcade to let us bring our donkey up to their door. City Hall will let us take the donkey down the sidewalk as long as someone goes along behind us with a shovel. Felix got assigned that job, which he doesn’t seem to mind any more than he minds bathing a dog who has fits or cleaning the fifty-year-old crud out of St. Thomas’s antique plumbing. I don’t understand that very well. Sometimes I think he’s trying to pay for something.
    Jesse came early on Sunday to watch the rehearsal