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Overview
How can Barkley, a sweet springer spaniel, belong to an arrogant guy like Jack, who laughs whenever one of our dogs at Perfect Paws has literally dragged me through the dirt? Plus he's dating Megan-the-Mega-Snob! I'm not sure why that gets to me—it's not like I like Jack, despite his surprising smile and the way he is with dogs. Sigh.
How do I know so much about puppies and so little about love?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061972096 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 10/06/2009 |
| Series: | First Kisses Series , #3 |
| Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 471 KB |
| Age Range: | 13 - 17 Years |
Read an Excerpt
First Kisses 3: Puppy Love
Chapter One
It was Rufus who started all the trouble.
Wait. That's not fair. Rufus was just chasing the squirrel. So I guess you could say it was the squirrel's fault. But that's not really right either. The squirrel was minding its own business until Rufus decided to chase it. And I can't blame a squirrel for what happened. I mean, it was only doing what squirrels do. But then Rufus was only doing what dogs do, so now we're back where we started.
I should back up. My name is Allie. Actually, it's Allison Elizabeth Morris, but no one calls me that except for my great-grandmother Codwell (my mom's mom's mom) and she's something like eleventy-nine years old and lives in a house filled with way too many doilies and way too many cats. Not that she isn't great. She is. I love visiting her. Well, except for the doilies. They kind of freak me out. And the cats. I'm not really a cat person. I like dogs.
I don't just like dogs; I love dogs. In fact, I think dogs are just about the greatest things ever invented. I know, the rule is supposed to be that girls like cats and guys like dogs. But that's just dumb. Don't get me wrong. Cats are okay. I think they're cute, and I don't mind when they sit on me or want to be petted. But dogs are something else. Dogs are like people, but better. Not that I'm antisocial or anything. I like people. It's just that dogs are, I don't know, more reliable maybe. You always know where you stand with a dog. With people, sometimes it's hard to tell.
Anyway, I'm almost fourteen, and I'm going to be in ninth grade when school starts again. I'm pretty excited about that,but I'm not in a rush for summer to be over. I'm having too much fun with the dogs. Well, most of the dogs. There's one I could do without. Her and her owner. But I'm getting way ahead of myself again.
I'll start at the beginning. Not all the way back, like when I was born or anything, but right before what my friend Shan would call the Regrettable Incident with Rufus and the squirrel. See, my mother has this business called Perfect Paws. It's a dog grooming salon. She started it when I was little, so I grew up around dogs. When I was really small, my mom says I used to think I was a puppy. My first word wasn't mama or dada, it was woof. I'm serious!
I've been helping out at Perfect Paws since I was about eight or nine, washing the dogs and sweeping up hair—that kind of thing. But this year I wanted to do something more. A few months ago, I heard one of our customers talking about how she was sending her two kids to theater camp during the day so that they had something to do all summer. She joked that it would be nice if her Lhasa apso had somewhere to go too, so that he wasn't home alone all the time. Well, that got me thinking, and that night at dinner I suggested that we think about offering day care at Perfect Paws. My parents thought it was a pretty good idea, and we decided to try it over the summer and see what happened. Best of all, my mother put me in charge of it.
I really pushed the doggy day care idea to our customers, and the weekend before opening day we already had six sign-ups. I was kind of nervous because I wanted everything to go perfectly, and I tend to worry a little too much. So I decided to take my dog, Rufus, to the park for a walk. That almost always calms me down.
It's hard not to be relaxed around Rufus. He's the happiest dog I know: a big, brown mutt who thinks everything in the world was made just for him. My father calls him a Labragrizzly because he looks like a Labrador retriever crossed with a grizzly bear. We rescued him from a shelter about five years ago. When we walked by his cage he was sitting all alone in the corner, looking like he didn't know what he'd done wrong to be abandoned by the people he loved. As soon as I saw him I knew he had to come home with us.
He's been my best friend ever since. Well, one of my two best friends. My best human friend is Shan, who I mentioned before. Everyone thinks Shan is short for Shannon, but it's not. She's just Shan. Shan Chan. I know, it's totally unfortunate, right? She says one good reason for her to get married is that she can get a new last name. But then sometimes she says she's going to keep her own name when she gets married, so who knows. With Shan you can never tell.
Shan and I have been friends almost as long as Rufus and I have. She was going to help me with the doggy day care, but then her parents decided she was going to spend the summer in San Francisco with her grandparents, and that changed everything. I was really bummed that Shan wouldn't be here to have fun with me.
So anyway, Rufus and I went to the park. I love walking with him. He's curious about everything, and he always acts as if it's the first time he's sniffed grass or heard birds or seen people on bicycles, even though he's almost ten and we go to the park just about every day. There's no way to be sad when you're walking Rufus, or any dog for that matter. They're just so happy to be outside that their happiness rubs off on you. I'm telling you, the way to get yourself feeling good again when you're sad isn't to eat a dozen chocolate chip cookies or buy some new shoes, it's to walk a dog.
First Kisses 3: Puppy Love. Copyright © by Jenny Collins. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.