Free The Journey Back by Priscilla Cummings

he’d run away from a bad situation—like me. When I finished cutting him free, he tried to stand up but couldn’t, and I had to help him. When he finally got his four legs square under him, he shook himself off and licked his chops. I thought he was gonna bark, but he started gagging instead. He coughed up some water, then hobbled toward the river to take a drink.
    The dog was really skinny, like you could see his ribs under his gray fur. When he finished his drink, he gazed up at me with water still dripping from his mouth. He had a cute face with dark eyes and ears that sort of flopped over.
    â€œDon’t get any ideas,” I warned him. “I don’t want no dog trailing after me. I don’t have any extra food.”
    But the dog didn’t trot off.
    â€œGo on. Go home!” I ordered, pointing upriver. I even kicked dirt at him.
    Still, the dog didn’t budge.
    Great, I thought, rolling my eyes. What did I get myself into this time?
    I returned to my backpack and sat down to eat the two snacks I had laid out.
    Of course you know what happened, right? Exactly. The dog followed me and sat in front of my face looking so starved and hungry that I gave in. I gave him a nice piece of the beef jerky, which he didn’t even chew, just swallowed whole. That did it. I was
not
gonna waste food on a dog that didn’t even taste his food.
    I tried to ignore the dog. I finished the jerky that I laid out, and the raisins, too, one at a time. But the dog just sat, watching me. When I laid down with my hands behind my head to take a rest, the dog stretched out, head on his paws, beside me.
    My mind is always jumping around and I started thinking about random things again. Like how I didn’t want a dog, and even kicked dirt at it, but how I also fed it and so now it was lying down beside me. I was like a palindrome myself, I thought. Forward and backward all the time. There was no direction in my life. I wondered if that’s what religion did for people, straightened them out so they’d know what direction to go in all the time. Plenty of times I wished I had religion like J.T., who read the Bible and went to church regular, including at Cliffside where a minister from a nearby church preached in the dining hall Sunday mornings.
    Even Abdul, the boy who slept in the bed beside mine back in the dorm—and the first Muslim person I ever knew—made me envious sometimes ’cause he seemed so calm, and had a real purpose in his life, which was praying five times a day. First thing Abdul did when we come back from dinner was get out his black rug and go out into the room where we lined up our laundry baskets. It was the only place he could go for privacy. They stopped letting him wear his hat, his kufi cap, because the other boys gave the counselors grief about it, like why couldn’t they wear a hat, too? But Abdul was cool about it. He told me it didn’t matter to Allah whether he was wearing his kufi cap. What mattered was what was in his heart. . . . Although I did wonder what Allah thought about all the shoplifting Abdul done to get himself into Cliffside.
    I don’t know. I wished I had religion sometimes ’cause I wanted to believe there was someone or something big enough to reach a hand in and fix things up. But it hadn’t happened in my life yet. So I could never decide what to think about God. It’s like I wanted to believe in
something,
but I didn’t know what.
    I opened my eyes then and saw a huge “V” of geese honking their way across the sky. The birds were so high up they looked like tiny dark spots in a big ocean of blue. It was late September—were they coming or going? The sun was so bright I had to close my eyes.
    Do geese see God?
    I smiled.
    Another palindrome.

CHAPTER NINE
----
    A REAL FRIEND
    â€œT
hink of the other person,” Mr. R. was telling us one night as we sat around the campfire. “Before you