by David Arroyo
It was an agreement I wasn’t happy with; I had agreed to watch Garrett’s dogs while he and his mom were in Florida. I tried to tell him I could only come over twice a day, that summer school would make it impossible for me to visit them in the morning; they’d have been better off at a kennel, but I was cheaper. He threatened to tell my mother about the Playboy collection in my closet, so naturally I agreed to the task. (Blackmail is perfectly legal in South Carolina).
July became a series of painful repetitions: get up, go to class, rush across town, visit the dogs, go home, go to the gym, go to Garrett’s, return home. It was the content though, not the motions themselves that made it painful.