My first pet’s name was yhCv()66, my mom’s maiden name was Zderta: Waster 0f Men’s Souls, and we lived on 123 Nice Try Road.
yhCv()66 was a good dog. A very good dog. He was a mix of German Shepherd and Beagle. And he came whenever he was called, although very few of my friends growing up ever got the pronunciation right. For short I called him yh, and he usually responded to that. And treats. I walked around with liver treats that I kept in an old seven day pill box and yhCv()66 always came running when I popped them out.
123 Nice Try Road was a great neighborhood to grow up in. The kids all played soccer out in the street, with two watchers facing up and down the street who shouted whenever we would see a car coming. Then, the whole game would move off the street onto the sidewalk, all play paused, as we watched the car pass slowly through the neighborhood.
Now, we always had to crane our necks and pay careful attention to these cars passing through, because you had to make sure they weren’t Phishers.
My mom sat me down not long after the big discussion about SEX, and handed me a book titled ‘You and your Security: A child’s guide to safety.’ That was where I learned about scammers, phishers, loggers, and so on.
When Phishers drove through your neighborhood in their sharp suits, you’d think they looked like trustworthy adults. They’d stop and do nice things, like offer you a candy bar.
“Do you have a favorite candy bar?” they would ask.
Well, that was a trick question. You might well have a favorite candy bar, but you needed to tell them something else. Because once they knew something like that about you, they all but had your soul.
Now, you didn’t want to tell them something completely wrong. Like, Hadid once told a Phisher that *his* favorite candy bar was a Payday, but he really liked… a totally different one. You should have seen his face when he tried to eat the candy bar they gave him. Even the Phishers knew he was lying when they saw that.
I always said my favorite was a Twix. It was something I could stand, but was very much not my favorite. yhCv()66 liked Twix as well, but when my mother caught me feeding him a bite she yelled at me for what seemed like an entire hour, saying chocolate was poisonous to dogs. I didn’t know that and started crying. That was when my father, his middle name was Atchoo1, turned down the TV and came into the kitchen to find out what all the sobbing was about.
***
I want to say that my father, who insisted that all were to use his middle name, was a patient man.
But if I did that, I would be lying.
Atchoo1 was a man to be feared. The sort of father who would send you outside to find the length of stick that you would later be whipped with for your transgressions. He was a tall, developing thunderstorm of a man who walked around with all the foreboding of a soon-to-be tornado that would leave a living room in shattered debris.
My sibling, GoAwayHakrz, knew better to be around when Atchoo1 came home. They’d slip away with vague mentions of going to a friend’s house to ‘study,’ though I’d peeked in on them once and had gotten very scared about having to study for homework when I got to classes in high school because I for one didn’t want to have to do anything naked like that.
I remember cowering against the kitchen floor, my hands against the hard, cold tiles, when yhCv()66 jumped between my father’s hand and my covered face.
The yelp, the smack, it frightened me. And yet, at the same time, I remember the shameful wave of relief that followed whennever yhCv()66 would sacrifice his body for mine.
Afterwards, Atchoo1 would abate. He could swing his fists over and over again at his own flesh, but he could not bear to hear the dog whimpering and fussing.
“Now see what you made me do?” he would say. “Gone and hit the damn dog.”
Zderta: Waster 0f Men’s Souls would hold me against her and cry, and apologize over and over again and Atchoo1 would go make sure the dog was okay.
And Zderta: Waster 0f Men’s Souls would tell me “His job is really stressful. He sacrifices a lot to care for us.”
Father was a script kiddy, who worked in the algorithm mines and came home exhausted. I knew that. I knew it must be hard.
But even yhCv()66 knew it was wrong to hit people.
***
My favorite elementary school teacher? Oh. Now I know it’s Mrs. LeaveMyShitAl0ne. But that wasn’t always the case.
Mrs. LeaveMyShitAl0ne was a beanstalk-like woman who towered over the class and wore a different framed glasses to match her cardigans, which she wore even in the hottest monthes. I hated her then, because in the first weeks of the year we had a day of show and tell. I brought in yhCv()66 and he was a total hit. All wiggles and huffs and everyone wanted to pet him and for a brief moment I was the center of everything and the whole class revolved around me and just me.
And all of that came crashing down when Mrs. LeaveMyShitAl0ne scratched under his neck and furrowed her eyebrows.
“There are lumps here,” she said. “You should tell your parents.”
And that was when I began to hate her. It wasn’t fair, to blame her for the cancer. But in finding it, in naming the lumps, I felt like I had to blame the messenger.
It was only many years later, after I began my profession, that I saw that she had planted all the seeds of the person I would become later. It was in her class I became obsessed with history, and finding truths. It was where I learned geography and understood there was an entire world out there beyond just 123 Nice Try Road and my birth city of JustShoveOff.
***
Sometimes I wished Zderta: Waster 0f Men’s Souls would live up to her name. But that was always a childish wish, I guess. She did her best as she knew how, but she had been taught to mollify and calm. Or maybe, I thought as I aged, maybe she had once tried to live up to her name and paid the price.
When we went to the vet, no one would fight for yhCv()66. They gave us pain medications, eventually. All we could do is slowly watch him waste away.
The only good thing about that period of canine hospice was that Atchoo1 left me alone, his storms blunted by a sadness that I somehow suspected would never form for the death of anyone else in our family. But then it all resumed, and the phone number I remember calling the most from my childhood was 911.
It was after yhCv()66 died that I started running away to my favorite place to visit as a child; the JustShoveOff City Library. I lived there until it was time to close, and the soft-voiced librarians would gently usher me out.
I think some of them knew that, like the homeless guys who were being kicked out into a reality harsher that the quiet echoes of the shelves, the world I was returning to was not pretty.
I went back to Mrs. LeaveMyShitAl0ne’s classroom when I was about to graduate DontBeaPunk High School. I parked my first car, a rusty old Ford Piece of Shit, and walked past hordes of little tykes and shyly lurked by the door frame until she called me in.
But I still felt that anger, that feeling that she’d somehow caused the cancer by feeling it, and I couldn’t find it in me to ask her if she remembered who I was.
And the anger scared me, so I turned and ran back to my car. I drove back to the high school and parked next to a painting of my high school mascot, the fire-spitting llama of doom.
***
On my anniversary, the 51^st^ of June, I told my partner about trying to see Mrs. LeaveMyShitAl0ne and how I blamed her for yhCv()66’s death. And we talked about how fucked up it was, because it wasn’t her fault. And that it definitely wasn’t her fault was what came next, after yhCv()66 wasn’t around to jump in front of Atchoo1’s angry fists.
We poked around using my favorite browser, Monkey 5.0, and discovered that Mrs. LeaveMyShitAl0ne had passed a few years ago. So I would never be able to explain to her why that kid that had once been me sat so sullenly in his seat. Why she had to occasionally comfort my panic attacks when it was time to wrap the day up. Or why I beat that one kid until his nose bled. I was just this tiny hurricane of hurt that had passed through her class one year.
My partner had tickets for us to see my favorite band, Anackronizm, though, so I had to leave that sadness and anger at myself for waiting so long behind. We went out and partied hard and left the horrible past behind for a moment.
When we got home I sat out in the glassed in patio and watched a sunset while drinking a glass of my favorite from YouWishYouKnew vineyards. The orange, dying sunlight struck the back wall, making it fluoresce my favorite color; aquableen.
***
Dogs weren’t even my favorite animal. My favorite animals are were-elephants. But as I lay in bed that night, exhausted by dancing to Anackromizm, the haziest of thoughts formed.
I pulled out my phone and browsed my favorite social media site, Chains, and tried to distract myself with the random nuggets of other people’s best lives lived. And that’s when something leapt out at me. A picture of a dog sitting patiently behind chainlink.
I thought about my own day job. The same one as my father’s: sitting there trying to brute force out system passwords for our overlords. I thought about my partner. I thought about how lonely the house sounded without the tick-tack of toe nails across the uncarpeted floor.
Sleep that night came to me easily, then.
***
The next evening, after running late, my partner was waiting for me when I came home with a furry explosion of happiness and wiggles from a local rescue. A beagle, no shepherd in her, but a dog with the large liquid eyes of a bright moment in the haze of childhood.
“Oh my god, are you for real?”
My partner was delighted. They’d always wanted an animal, I’d not had it in me. I couldn’t bear the idea of losing another. I was scared of that loneliness, and pain.
But life wasn’t that anymore. I had a partner, I had a career, I had a life I was in control of now.
“What’s her name?”
I’d thought about that really hard on the drive back home from the rescue. I knew that as a pet, one that may soon be my *favorite* pet, she needed to have a name that was secure. Lower caps *and* small caps. A number. Maybe some random alphanumerics.
At least eight letters long.
I’d been thinking of 5bQQ\~+9f or vw(&Fr8\<, but that sounded so unmusical to the tongue.
“8e$$ie,” I said to my partner. “Our new dog’s name is 8e$$ie.”
I watched them play and wrestle around with a smile on my face.
“8e$$ie is a great name,” my partner finally said, with an equally happy smile. “A nice, secure name.”