Free Brilliant Hues by Naomi Kinsman

lurched along the wide embankment between the two-lane road and the redwood forest as Higgins darted after every squirrel. Our house wasn’t really in a neighborhood. Woodside was more like a forest that had been tamed every half-mile or so to allow for a house.
    “Did anyone train him?” Grant asked as Higgins yanked his arm yet again.
    “He grew up in a real forest, and I gave up on leashing him. He’s addicted to squirrels.”
    “I see that,” Grant said, his elusive smile playing at the edges of his mouth.
    He tugged on the leash. “Sit, Higgins.”
    Higgins sat, immediately, and I stared, “How did you do that?”
    “Here, you take the leash.” Grant handed over the leash and traded me places. “Stand on his right, and give him a little slack with his leash. If it’s tight, he’ll always pull.”
    I let the leash out a bit.
    “Now say, ‘heel,’ and start walking. The minute he pulls, stop, and make him sit again.”
    I took two steps and Higgins was already tugging at the end of his leash. “He doesn’t know this command.”
    “No, but he’ll learn. As you go, give the leash little tugsand remind him to heel. When he walks beside you, give him a treat.” Grant passed me a handful of small treats.
    I started up again, tugging and telling Higgy to heel. The second he started prancing along beside me, I laid on the encouragement thick, telling him what a good dog he was and gave him a treat. He tilted his head and cocked an ear, his classic are-you-nuts look. We started up again, and he heeled for a good fifteen seconds. I gave him another treat.
    “He’s smiling at you,” Grant said. “And catching on.”
    We did the heel-treat thing until my treats were gone and my arm muscles ached.
    “Okay, your turn.” I handed the leash back to Grant.
    Higgins was far from a perfect walker, and he lost focus every time something rustled in the underbrush, but at least I could keep up with him and Grant now. If only every problem were as easy to solve. I felt like I might explode with all the secrets building up inside me, knowing that Dad might come home totally furious. Still, I wasn’t ready to talk about Karl. Maybe if I talked to Grant about one of my other million problems, I’d start to get a grip.
    “What do you think of Margo?” I asked, the question nearly bursting out of me. “You know, the girl who dropped the earrings in Bri’s purse?”
    After a pause, Grant said, “She’s angry about something.”
    I stopped walking. “Why do you say that?”
    “You can tell by the way she stands, the way she walks. Like with Higgins. You can see stubbornness in his bodylanguage. He clearly wants to do things his own way, but he also wants to please. All this heeling and giving treats wouldn’t work if Higgins were angry. We’d have to train him a totally different way.”
    There was no way that the solution to fixing Margo was like training a dog.
    Still, I couldn’t help asking, “So, uh … how would you train a dog if it were angry?”
    “First you’d have to convince the dog you were a friend,” Grant said.
    All I could think about was Karl. “Can I tell you something?”
    Grant didn’t answer. He just looked at me, waiting for whatever I would say.
    I chickened out. “My friends do this thing where they try to stop people like Margo from pushing them around, by intimidating them or threatening them. And I know it’s wrong, what my friends are doing, but I can’t ask them to sit back and let Margo treat them like that, either.”
    Grant nodded, and when he didn’t offer advice, I started walking again. It felt good to talk, even if I wasn’t telling him about Karl.
    “In Owl Creek, this girl, Frankie, picked on me from the minute I arrived for no good reason. But like you said, she was super angry about a lot of things that mostly didn’t have to do with me. And after a while, a long couple months, she and I started to work things out.”
    Grant had Higgins totally under control