Pet Disasters (14 page)

Mason couldn’t begin to guess. “I give up.”

Brody’s face glowed with pleasure at having stumped Mason.

“It’s shaped like—a dog! I think it even looks a little bit like Dog.”

Brody dug in his sack for the pencil sharpener, pulling out heaps of notebooks with bright, busy covers: pictures of dogs, of cats, of all kinds of fish. Mason’s notebooks were plain, solid colors: red, yellow, green. He had wanted them all the same color, brown (to match the brown socks he wore every day), but the store didn’t sell brown notebooks. Besides, his mother had said it would be better to have a different color for each subject. She had obviously given a lot of thought to the notebook issue.

“Here it is!”

Brody held out his pencil sharpener, which did look sort of like Dog. The pencil-sharpening hole was in the dog’s tail.

“Cool,” Mason said, since he had to say something.

“Okay, Mason,” Brody announced after a long pause to give Mason time to appreciate the pencil
sharpener in its full glory. “Are you ready for a surprise? Because I have a surprise for you!”

Mason generally didn’t like surprises. But he couldn’t imagine that Brody’s surprise could be anything too terrible.

“Sure,” he said guardedly.

Brody held out a twin dog-shaped pencil sharpener, which he had been hiding behind his back. “I got one for you, too! Because we’re best friends, and co-owners of Dog. Now we’ll have matching dog pencil sharpeners!”

Mason returned Brody’s grin. It was weird to have a best friend who was so excited about a pencil sharpener, but Mason had nothing against weirdness. Some people even thought that he himself was a tiny bit unusual.

“And wait till you see my eraser!” Brody went on. “You aren’t going to believe my eraser!”

This time Mason felt more comfortable venturing a guess. “It’s shaped like a dog.”

“It is! And guess what, Mason.”

“You got one for me, too.”

Triumphantly, Brody pulled two matching dog-shaped erasers out of his sack.

third
disaster
adventure coming soon!