Free The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas by Blaize Clement

Billy Elliot’s, but friendly. If Tom were a dog, he’d be a standard poodle. He has short curly black hair, round black eyes, and a round face. When he’s working, he wears round glasses with black rims that make him look a little bit like a grown-up Harry Potter.
    Tom’s on his computer a lot. I suppose he researches things for business. Maybe he also e-mails and tweets and chats and blogs, I don’t know. I’m the only person in the western hemisphere who doesn’t do any of those things, and I don’t ever intend to. But occasionally I need the kind of information that computer-savvy people can get in a trice—whatever a trice is—and when I do, I throw myself on Tom’s mercy.
    I said, “You know that football player named Cupcake Trillin?”
    “I know somebody got killed in his house this morning.”
    Bad news really travels fast.
    “I’ve just been wondering, you know, where he’s from. Could you look that up?”
    Tom gave me a calculating look, probably the way he scans a list of numbers when he suspects some of them are wrong. “He’s from Louisiana.”
    Sports fans always know where sports stars came from. They may not know where their best friends grew up, but they know all the statistics about their favorite athletes.
    “Yeah, but where in Louisiana? Like where did he go to high school?”
    Flat voiced, Tom said, “You want to know where Cupcake Trillin went to high school.”
    “I just wondered.”
    “I don’t mind looking it up, but you know him. Why don’t you just ask him?”
    Billy Elliot had come to sniff at the backs of my knees, a not-so-subtle reminder that he and I had some running to do.
    I slapped Billy’s leash against my open palm. “The Trillins won’t be home until tomorrow night. You know how it is when you start wondering about something and you want to know right then or you’ll never get it out of your mind. Like the name of a movie star that you can’t remember.”
    Tom gave me a long hard look. He obviously thought I had some other reason for asking, but he was too polite to say so. “I’ll do a search while you and Billy run.”
    Billy Elliot shoved his head against my thigh, and I bent and snapped his leash on his collar. Tom watched me the entire time. I could feel question marks pelting me, but I led Billy out of the apartment without giving Tom any excuses for wanting to know where Cupcake had gone to high school. I figured I’d take it one step at a time.
    Tom’s condo building has a parking lot with a green oval in the middle. Cars park around the perimeter of the oval, and the blacktop driving area makes a perfect track for Billy Elliot to pretend he’s back chasing a mechanical rabbit while humans in the stands cheer and wave and slosh beer on one another. He’s very considerate of the fact that I’m two-legged and therefore slow. On the first lap he takes it easy, or at least runs at a pace he considers easy. I gallop along behind him and try not to wheeze. But by the third or fourth lap he’s decided that the blonde behind him has had plenty of warm-up time. He stretches his body out and goes for broke while I sort of leap and lurch to keep up with him. When we’re done, he’s grinning and whipping his tail in pure joy, and I’m a sweaty, red-faced, quivering blob.
    On the way up in the mirrored elevator, I sagged against one wall and eyed my rumpled reflection. Even though Billy and I go through the same routine twice a day, I’m always impressed at the way he glories in the fact that he’s designed for speed. The animal kingdom has its natural athletes the same way humans do. And, like humans, if they’re not allowed to be what they were designed to be, they get depressed or mean.
    At Tom’s apartment, I hung Billy’s leash on its hook in the foyer closet while Billy trotted to the kitchen to wag his tail at Tom by way of saying, “I had a really good time, Dad!”
    I followed him, got a glass, filled it at the sink, and leaned on the