He would tell Harvey what to do. Try to make him do stupid tricks. Yell at him if he did something different than what Rusty wanted. A couple of times I told him to chill out and it seemed to help for a time, but before the end of the day he would be back to treating Harvey like he was a misbehaving dog that he planned on bringing to heel.

Maybe that doesn’t sound like much. He’s a teenage boy treating a magic animal like a non-magic animal. Except it was more than that. First, Rusty would get this odd look on his face at times. The best way I can describe it is that it reminded me of how our mother could look sometimes when she was still around. Like she was just waiting for you to step wrong so she could jump you. Not because she wanted to correct you, but because she wanted an excuse to talk bad to you, maybe slap you a little. It was a terrible kind of happy anger that was brimming and ready to be poured out on you at the first sign of provocation.

This memory was part of how I knew that, despite the odd way that Rusty was treating Harvey at times, it still was Rusty. It wasn’t like he was being possessed or controlled by Harvey or something. He always seemed like Rusty while he was doing it—just a version of Rusty I wasn’t as familiar with.

The second reason it worried me so much was because of what it said about how Rusty viewed Harvey. Every day he was treating him more and more like a pet. A wild animal maybe, but one that Rusty was working hard to tame.

Except we knew literally nothing about Harvey except for how we had found him and how he had acted so far. He could be totally sweet and harmless, or he could be able to kill us without a second thought. He could have the understanding of…well, a hedgehog…or he could be far smarter than we were. After two weeks had passed since freeing Harvey, I was getting ready to talk to Rusty about it all. About how he needed to respect Harvey more and quit treating him like he was a stupid toy.

Then I got sick. I woke up in the middle of the night with chills, and when Rusty got the thermometer, I had a fever of over 104. I had come down with the flu, and with Karen’s compromised immune system, Rusty was the main one that took care of me for the next several days as I got over the worst of it.