Dewey bounces up and down in front of me with her ball in her mouth before she drops it at my feet. I throw it and she chases, but she doesn’t quite understand about bringing it back to me. She’s more interested in running through the piles of leaves. I can feel how much fun she’s having, so I join in. We jump, and the leaves fly all around us. Then I gather them up again. We do this over and over, until we’re too tired to get back up.

We lie there next to each other, looking up at the sky, which is blue and full of white puffy clouds that remind me of Macy’s bedroom ceiling. I wish time could pass as slowly now as it does when I’m in school.

“Dewey, I was wondering, how did you get your name? Where did you live before you found me? Did you have a family?”

Her story comes into my mind like a memory. I can see her outside of a house, with a chain-link fence all around the yard. She has a wooden doghouse that smells like mold and sits under a big tree in the shade so the ground never fully dries.

She’s always cold and wet.

I can see the people she’s talking about, and they’re not very nice. They never let her inside, and they don’t feed her enough or give her clean water.

They wanted me to be a guard dog. But I wasn’t very good at it.

The mean people want her to be scary so no one tries to come to their door, but she’s too friendly and lets someone in the gate. The people yell at her, and tie her to the doghouse with a rope so she can’t walk around very far in any direction.

They never pet her or even talk to her, but they talk about whether or not they should keep her. They look at her and say, “Do we?” And she barks. That is the only time they look at her and speak.

So that’s how I got my name.

She shows me what had happened on her last night there: It was raining and lightning and thundering so loud she pulled on the rope so hard that it broke. She scratched on the door to be let inside because she was scared.

The mean people yelled at her again, and instead of letting her in, they pushed her outside of the gate in the pouring rain and told her, “Get! Go!”

She was so scared and so lonely. She cried, but nobody paid attention.

She walked around for a long time, hiding, finding things to eat out of garbage cans. Sometimes she would meet people, but they were never nice. She could always hear what they were thinking, but they could never hear her.