“Avarice is Greed, right? That’s the way I learned the seven deadly sins. So why not just name the dog Greed?”

“Don’t you know anything?” Crawley growled. “Avarice is a much better name for a dog.”

He spun his wheelchair and rolled into the deeper recesses of his apartment. “Leashes are hanging in the kitchen.” And he was gone.

At first we tried to walk them two at a time, but they were so strong, so untrained, and so excited to be outside, they practically pulled us into oncoming traffic. There were no shortcuts. We each could only handle one dog at a time. Walking dogs for no pay for two hours a day wasn’t exactly my idea of fun. But the Schwa and I did it. We could have gotten out of it. We could have just told our parents what we had done, and taken whatever punishment they dealt out. Even if Crawley went to the police, they wouldn’t do much about it—especially after we had shown what decent guys we were by volunteering to walk his dogs for those first few days. Still, we kept on doing it. Maybe it’s because there was a kind of a mystique to it, walking the infamous Old Man Crawley’s dogs. Everyone knew whose dogs they were—it’s not like the neighborhood is teeming with Afghans. Somehow it made us important. Or maybe we kept on doing it because we gave him our word. I can’t speak for the Schwa, but for me, my word had never really meant much of anything. I can’t count all the times I gave someone my word, then flaked out. This time was different, though, because if I didn’t keep my word, Crawley would be able to sit in his dark apartment and gloat. He’d see it as proof that I was at the shallow end of the gene pool, and I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction, no matter how many barking sins I had to walk.

“Hey, Bonano,” said Wendell Tiggor from across the street while we walked Charity and Gluttony that first week. “So I like your new girlfriend,” he says, pointing to the dog. “She’s got real animal attraction.”

“We’d let you have one,” I told him, “but we don’t got one called Stupidity.” The Schwa and I high-fived as best we could with two dogs pulling us down the street.

Walking dogs also meant there was less time to hang out with my other friends. Namely, Howie and Ira. It’s not like they made any extra effort to see me anyway.

During our second week of canine slavery, however, Howie did join the Schwa and me for a few minutes one afternoon while we walked Hope and Lust.

“I can’t hang out long,” says Howie. “I gotta walk my little brother to tae kwan do.”