#progress pictures of acne or me checking if something is in my teeth

[wewontbesleeping]

Hmmm maybe some of the choices I’ve made in the past 29 years have been the wrong ones. That’s a good thought exercise for right before bed.

[realm-sweet-realm]

Defining Memories, chapter 7

Alright, this is the last one before we get to Henry and Joey. And will be dogs! (I like this chapter.)

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The memory showed Wally walking home from work on a rainy day, looking maybe five or ten years younger than in present. He heard a whine coming from an alleyway and went to investigate. What he found was a golden retriever puppy taking shelter in a cardboard box. It was trembling. Wally wasn’t sure what to do, but he couldn’t just leave her.

“Oh, come here,” Wally cooed, bending down to gather the dog up in his arms. No collar. Huh. He carried her home to his apartment. About a block before he arrived, he hid her under his jacket. All the squirming made this a very unconvincing disguise. “Shh... simmer down,” he whispered, “I’m not supposed to bring you in there.” Somehow, that actually seemed to calm her down a little. Enough, at least, for him to sneak her into his apartment.

“Hey, girl,” he said to her, finally letting her out to explore her new surroundings, “You’re stayin’ here for the night.” The puppy sniffed around and began chewing on a discarded plastic cup she found on the floor. Yeah, you’d never know I clean for a livin’.” Then he noticed the little paw prints she’d left on the floor. He couldn’t have those giving him away, so he immediately picked up the dog and took her to the bathroom for a wash. It was one heck of a mess as the puppy didn’t want to be bathed and jumped out twice before Wally figured out he had to hold her down. Still, Wally was able to laugh over the situation.

The scene shifted to Wally sleeping with the puppy, then to him smuggling her out. He returned to the alley he’d found her in, let her out, and said. “Alright, girl. Sorry I can’t keep ya. Run along.” The puppy cocked its head adorably and whined a little. “You’re makin’ this hard, but it ain’t my choice. Good luck out there.”

Wally turned away and walked another fifteen feet before realizing the puppy was following him. Wally sighed. “Alright, you win, you little bugger.” He loaded the dog back into his jacket and headed back to his place. “Goldie. I’m callin’ ya Goldie.”

The scene changed to what must have been a few weeks or months later. Goldie was a little bigger, and Wally’s apartment had dog bowls and a couple chew toys in it now, and had the trash picked up off the floor so that it wouldn’t end up in her teething mouth. The doorbell rang. Wally, as though by habit, picked up Goldie and her toys and bowls, and put them in another room, putting a cardboard box over them just for overkill.

He opened the door. His neighbour was hanging back, with a little girl in a Girl Guide uniform in front of him. “Wanna buy some cookies?” The little girl asked.

“Aw, of course. Just let me get some money and I’ll be right back.”

The click-click noise of dog claws on linoleum could be heard making their way across the floor now, along with the sound of a cardboard box dragging across the floor. Wally realized then that he must have forgotten to shut the door when he moved Goldie into the other room.

“What’s that?” the little girl asked.

“It’s uhh... my toy train!” Wally answered.

His neighbour rolled his eyes. “Wally, do you really think we’ve never heard that thing bark?”

“Oh.” Apparently his secret was not as well-kept as he had assumed.

“Can I pet him?” the little girl asked.

“Alright, sure. Come on in.” Wally took the box off of the dog and watched as she licked her face.

“So, uh. Are you going to tell on me if I keep her?”

“Nah. She’s not causing me any issue. And hey,” the neighbour leaned in, “I actually know someone who needs a home for their dog. They’re moving in a week, and they’re hoping to find someone to take him in so they don’t need to leave him in a shelter. What do you say?”

“I guess I could take him for a while, if he’s clean and quiet. If the dogs ever cause problems with the neighbours, that’ll be the end of this.”

“You’ll have to talk with them. I know it’s a pug, and he seemed pretty quiet to me, but I wouldn’t know.” The neighbour took out a piece of paper and wrote down a phone number.

The scene shifted to show Wally receiving the pug, shifted again to show him welcoming a third dog into his home, and shifted a third time to show him passing on the pug to a new owner.

The scene changed. Wally was checking out a bulletin board in the lobby of his apartment. One poster in particular caught his eye: it read, “A note to residents from your landlord: I have decided to, out of the goodness of my heart, look the other way on Wally Franks’ dog rehoming hobby. THIS IS A ONE-TIME EXCEPTION. OTHER RESIDENTS ARE NOT ALLOWED PETS OR OTHER ANIMALS. A ps to Wally Franks: if you don’t want your landlord to find out about your dog rehoming hobby, refrain from hanging posters about it with your name and phone number in public spaces. I will be over on the first Monday of each month to see that your apartment is being kept sanitary. If the other residents complain of noise, I will also be forced to have you let go of your dogs. Thank you.

The scene changed a final time. Wally was arriving home to his apartment, and was greeted by three dogs: a border collie, a toy poodle, and a fully-grown Goldie. “She took her!” Wally announced proudly to his dogs. He made his way over to a corkboard he’d hung up. On the corkboard were several pictures of dogs, the one in the upper-left corner being the pug he’d first rehomed. Looking as proud as anyone there had ever seen him, he added another picture to the board, of his most recent rehomed dog. The scene faded back to mist.

After a couple of minutes of Allison, Lacie and Tom (the biggest dog people in the room, aside from Wally himself) asking questions about the dogs, the light appeared by Wally’s shoulder again, blue this time.

The scene took place in a bedroom that looked just as disastrously messy as Wally’s apartment had been. Wally was there, and amazingly enough, he looked even more lanky and boyish than he did in the present. The acne and shoulder-length hair didn’t help his appearance any, either. He was leaning over a math textbook, idly doodling a tree. What looked like a college-aged Henry came in. “Hey, Wally. Make any progress since last time?” he asked.

Wally looked pained. “I think so. But I couldn’t finish it. Is this right?” He passed Henry a sheet of paper. Now Henry looked pained.

“No. Look, you need to look things up in the textbook when you don’t understand things. Just leaving them off until I’m here to tutor you isn’t going to make you enough progress to pass.”

Wally scrunched up his eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand a word of what goes on in the textbook. It’s like my brain is allergic to it.”

Henry took a deep breath. “Well, I’ll explain it again. Alright?”

“Okay. Henry? Do you think I can still pass? The school’s not gonna hold me back again. If I can’t get through this, I’m outta there. Flunked out. But that’s not necessarily what’s gonna happen, right?”

Henry paused. “No, you’re going to pass,” he said, staring down at the textbook. He sounded utterly defeated and not at all genuine.

The scene changed to that of a classroom in which Wally was taking an examination. He was leaving a solid third of the questions blank, even taking the time to draw in one of the blank spaces to give his overtaxed brain a break. He knew at this point that he needed almost 80% to pass (assuming his own calculations were correct, and that point he felt stupid enough that he didn’t trust as much, even for something so simple). There was no way he knew enough to get that. He glanced over at the person beside him for a few seconds, then flipped to the question his classmate had been working on and scribbled down as much as he could remember. He repeated the process a couple times before a hand closed over his wrist. It was a teacher. “You’re doing the rest of the exam in the hallway,” she whispered sternly, “and afterward, I’m taking you to the principal’s office so we can decide on a consequence for this.”

The scene changed again. Wally has come home from school. “Wally. How was the test?” his mother asked him.

“I failed,” he said, dropping his backpack and heading to his room.

“Hey, we can’t know that yet.”

“I do know, okay? Look, I don’t wanna snap at you, ma. Please just leave me alone for a while.” With that, he shut himself into his room. “And it’s probably not the only subject I’ll fail, either.”

The scene shifted to later that evening. Wally heard an angry-sounding knock on his bedroom door and all but froze.

“Wally, open up!” It was his mother. Wally sat down on the floor. A gentler male voice followed.

“Oh, calm down. Wally, we just want to talk.”

“Come in,” he groaned.

The door creaked open. “You cheated on an essential fucking test? What were you thinking?!” his mother yelled.

“I wasn’t,” Wally cried. It was the truth. He’d fantasized about doing it, sure, but he hadn’t thought he’d actually do it until it happened.

“Well, at least the school decided to let you off easy,” His father said. “If they’re just docking the test 20%, there’s still a chance you passed, right?”

Wally just stared up at him.

“You needed quite a bit on it, I take it?”

Wally just nodded. A couple tears ran down his face.

“Oh... I’m sorry. You know we have to ground you for cheating, but I promise it’s going to be okay.” His father knelt down to get on his level.

“Okay? Where is he going to get in life if he’s flunked out?”

His father turned to glare at his mother. “Quit! Don’t you think he’s miserable enough over this?”

The scene faded back into mist. Wally had a pained smile on his face. Deep down, he was trying to hold on to the pride and joy from his best memory.

“You okay?” Henry asked.

“Wha? Yeah, I’m fine. I’m used to makin’ a fool of myself, honest! You just have to learn to laugh at yourself.”

Bertrum laughed. “Well, it seems that you would certainly have the practice.”

Shawn glared at him. “Ya’d best take that all the way back, laddy.”

Bertrum shrugged. As though some random worker could hurt one of the if not the most important people that Mr. Drew was partnered with, and while he was in the room, no less.

“Isn’t your worst memory one of the last ones left?” Henry asked. He wasn’t one for confrontation, but it would be nice if Bertrum realized what a glass house he was living in.

As though on cue, the light, blue this time, appeared by Bertrum’s shoulder.

The scene changed to that of a field in which a whole bunch of college-age boys and girls were having a party. Bertrum was basically impossible to pick out from the crowd, both because of how dark it was, illuminated only by the light of a bonfire, and because of how much younger he would have been. “Where are ya?” Shawn asked irritably.

“Oh, I er... don’t know! Wait, yes. I was in the bushes. Let’s go check in the bushes.”

“Are you sure you’re not just doing what I did?” Grant grumbled. Now that he’d heard Bertrum's laugh again, he was sure that Bertrum had been the one to laugh at him for having a panic attack, something he did not appreciate in the slightest.

“Yes, I’m sure, I-“ Bertrum was cut off by the sound of a car pulling up. A man that looked quite similar to present-day Bertrum stepped out. His face was comically puffed up with anger.

“Bertie!” The man boomed, in a voice loud enough to rival Bertrum’s own. The group of youngsters, largely amused, split to reveal Bertrum, who was looking like a terrified little sheep.

“Y-yes, Dad?”

he stuttered.

“Get into the car at once. There’s something I need to show you.”

“My father always was a drama queen. It’s nothing as bad as he makes it sound,” Bertrum explained to keep his dignity together as his past self was dragged by the arm into the car. They took off, and the scene changed so that everyone could see what was going on during the ride.

“Bertrum Piedmont, you irresponsible, idiotic, ill-conceived little cad, what did I tell you to do the night that your ride began operation?!”

“Stay available in case something went wrong,” he said, utter submission in his voice.

“And what, pray tell, did you do?”

“I thought for sure that it would be fine.”

“Well, you were wrong. And now that I've finally found you, you're going to personally explain to the public, which will get back to my stockholders, I remind you, that this is your fault, that I had every reason to trust you, and that you failed me horribly. Really, do you know how much of a risk I was taking, letting you design a ride before you were even licensed? You begged me for that. You have no idea how high your bail would be if someone had gotten hurt. No idea. Do you hear me, Bertie?"

"Yes."

"Well, thankfully, the ride broke down before anyone was even on it."

That seemed to shock Bertrum a little. "It broke down that quickly?"

"Yes. That quickly."

The ride continued in silence, allowing present-day Bertrum to do some damage control for his dignity. "You know, the good thing about having a forty-year legacy is that you don't have to worry about little mistakes you made early on like that. My father practically begged me for that one ride design."

"That's not how he made it sound," Lacie quipped.

"Yes, well, he always was a drama queen. But anyhow, I've made far better since. And what was wrong with it truly was minor, and it wasn't really my fault anyway, and-"

"Bertrum, desperation is dripping from your voice like candy off an apple and you're about as red as one. Do yourself a favour, and just shut up and take this like the rest of us."

Bertrum looked annoyed, but he did shut up. Lacie was, after all, rarely wrong about this kind of thing.

Finally, the car came to a halt. The two of them got out in the parking lot of an amusement park. They made their way to the malfunctioned ride. Parts had flung off of it. "Alright, Bertrum. Explain to them why the ride failed."

Mercifully, that is when the scene faded back into mist.