2 Ollie
Ollie
Ollie wakes up in a huge white bed and blinks for a moment, trying to remember where he is.
He lifts his head and examines the room: white everything, except for some stray black dog hair, which reminds him—the Strongs’.
He usually just walks their dog, Pete, a cute black Chug with an extensive sweater collection.
But they were going to Capri for a few weeks, and not wanting to send Pete to a doggie day camp where “he wouldn’t get the attention that he needs” and not wanting to bring him along “because the restaurants there aren’t as cool as they should be about having dogs, even super well-behaved ones like our li’l Petey,” they asked Ollie to house-sit for a few weeks.
He was happy for the gig, since his last house-sitting stint for the Blakes had ended a few days before and he didn’t want to crash on Brandon and Ian’s tilting futon again or ask Nicole about her home office with the pull-out bed (that always made her look sad, like she just remembered she even had an apartment outside the office).
So it was perfect timing when the Strongs asked. It usually was.
Ollie knows he’s lucky, the way these opportunities keep falling in his lap, and he knows part of it is because his mom knows a lot of rich people, and those rich people tell other rich people, and now he’s Park Slope’s number one house sitter and dog walker.
But it’s not nepotism, right? Maybe. He should think about it, try to figure out if taking these jobs is the right thing to do. But later.
For now, he throws off the fluffy white comforter and looks for Pete, who is curled up on the bed in the master bedroom (Ollie is staying in the guest room “because you can make it your space, and that’ll be so much more comfortable”).
Pete’s head lifts nervously when Ollie stands in the doorway, but he quickly recognizes Ollie and trots over, looking at him expectantly.
“Breakfast time?” Ollie asks. Pete keeps staring. “Okay.”
Ollie goes downstairs, Pete following, his short legs not quite long enough to reach the steps in front of him, so he practically tumbles past Ollie to the kitchen, a wide-open space with white tile, a white island, and white dog bowls, which Ollie fills up.
Pete happily dives headfirst into the bowl of deeply expensive organic dog food, and Ollie takes out some cereal.
The house has a smart-home system, complete with HomePods, which the Strongs let him connect his phone to, and as he eats, he tells Siri to resume his podcast, and it goes on, the sound seemingly coming from everywhere.
This is a good one. An unsolved murder of two college girls in Colorado.
Ollie couldn’t say exactly why he loves true-crime podcasts so much.
Or, more worryingly, why he finds them so soothing.
Maybe it’s the voices, the hosts always speaking in low, serious near whispers, but more likely it’s the knowledge that these things happen far away from him.
They’re real, and he can try to solve the case, ask questions that no one can hear, watch a whole life and death play out, feeling like he can help—even if he never does.
But it still feels like he helps. Listening to it helps somehow, right?
He’ll have to think about that later, too.
Pete finishes breakfast before Ollie and then sits by the table with his favorite toy, a blue rubber teething ring.
Apparently it’s the same kind he had when he was a puppy, and the Strongs have since bought a new one for him each month, instead of letting it get worn out from all that biting.
Ollie found a stack of them in a closet.
This one seems fresh though, gleaming. Ollie goes to pet his head, and Pete leans into his hand, staring at Ollie, waiting.
He hasn’t given up his dog-walking route for these two weeks, so he should get going soon.
He heads upstairs and takes a quick shower in the guest bathroom, rubs some T gel into his shoulders, and waits for it to dry.
Then he takes some of the Strongs’ fancy hand cream from the bathroom and layers it on, to cover the astringent smell with sea fennel and oud, and because the T gel dries his skin so much.
He puts on a T-shirt, jeans, beanie, flannel.
The whole time, the podcast keeps playing—how the body of the second girl was discovered, how there were no signs of sexual trauma, how she had oxycodone in her system.
“Maybe it was the mom,” Ollie says aloud to Pete as he dresses.
“She had the prescription because of that car accident.” Pete looks at Ollie, confused.
Ollie shrugs and goes to his stash, a little Tupperware of edibles he bought from around the city.
Not the ones from last night though; those were too strong.
He plucks out a small mint, pops it in his mouth.
It’s a mellow one, so he’ll barely notice.
Then he scoops up Pete and hugs him to his chest, bringing him downstairs.
He takes his phone out of the smart-home attachment and pops in the earbuds, continuing the podcast: “But as Kaylee would soon discover, the music of life can sometimes end in a deafening crash and an unbearable silence. The kind you don’t hear coming…
” He picks out a sweater for Pete—pink tweed—and puts it and the leash on him. Then they go outside.
It’s still early. Park Slope is filled with parents bringing their kids to school, all of them in little fall coats that look like brightly colored bells ringing in the cool weather.
Ollie starts the walk around the neighborhood to pick up his puppies.
That’s how he thinks of them, though many of them are older, and none of them are really his.
But they’re his puppies for a few hours a day, once in the morning, once in the afternoon.
Mostly the dogs are left home alone all day, and Ollie has keys to get into the houses and apartments to go grab them.
Sometimes a housekeeper or live-in nanny brings him the dog.
In one building, the doorman does. There are seven puppies in total, six not counting Pete: a Pomchi named Samba, a Weimaraner named Zoey, a shihpoo named Harpo, an Afghan named Pepper, a Frenchie named Linus, and a standard black poodle named, unfortunately, Malkia, because, as her white owners had told Ollie, it meant queen in an African language.
He doesn’t hold any of the owners’ awfulness against the puppies though.
They’re all good dogs who create a lovely fan pattern, pulling him along like a kite as he walks them on the sidewalk, attracting smiles from the kids walking to school and sometimes photos from other pedestrians.
Ollie likes to take them to different dog parks every day, and today he chooses the Washington Park Dog Run, which is new and unpretentious, with good turf that the dogs love running up and down, sniffing each other.
Ollie sits and watches them all, listening to his podcast, feeling the mint start to kick in and make his body feel slower, in a good way, a sort of walking-through-jelly way.
The group chat dings as Brandon and Ian wake up.
Nicole has undoubtedly been awake for hours but keeps her phone on Do Not Disturb until late.
She can’t be distracted from work. Sometimes Ollie thinks it’s sad, how focused on it she is.
She can’t see anything else. Other times he feels jealous that she knows what she wants and is willing to give up so much for it.
Ollie doesn’t have a clue what his life should look like.
He knows he’ll figure it out though. Later.
OLLIE
I love a party
NICOLE
Won’t a guy you just met think it’s weird if you throw him a party?
No one responds to that, which means Ian and Brandon are probably talking over breakfast. Ollie feels kind of left out when they do that, wonders what they’re saying in those silences. He should talk to them about that. Think of how to phrase it. Later.
A party would be fun though. Aside from going to Ian’s shows at the bar when he can (and where it’s so loud, Ollie can barely hear the conversation), and their weekly Saturday brunches (Ian works a Sunday drag brunch, so they do theirs a day early), Ollie feels like he barely sees them anymore.
When they were all in college four years ago, they met in the common area of their dorm every day.
They had classes together. They saw each other even when they didn’t want to.
Now it’s just…brunch. That’s not enough time to get through everything.
The group chat shows only slices and always ends up being everyone teasing each other.
Ollie likes the quiet moments best. Walking together outside, talking about ideas.
Things. TV. Podcasts. What they want to do with their lives.
It used to be that they’d share the boring parts of their days.
Now they have time only for the big, exciting moments. Ollie doesn’t have any of those.
He worries, a little, that maybe they’ve noticed that. That maybe he’s getting too boring for them. Too quiet too. Maybe that’s what Ian and Brandon talk about in their apartment, far from Ollie.
“Oh yes, you’re a good puppy,” he says, throwing the ball back for Linus, who chases it, thrilled.
The mint is strong now, and all his thoughts seem to have slipped away.
Just him and the dogs. He had some stuff he was thinking about, he knows, and some stuff he was supposed to think about. Oh well. He’ll remember it later.
After about forty minutes, he gathers the dogs up again and walks them back to their respective homes, making sure each of them has done their business along the way.
Back at the white house he’s staying in, he has eggs, spinach, and some of his father’s homemade pique.
All you need to eat for a week, mija. Ah, mijo .
Lo siento. Still getting used to it. He never quite got it right, but he always apologized.
He died last year in a hit-and-run in Flatbush.
There were jars and jars of his pique in the basement.
Mom doesn’t use it. Too spicy for my white taste buds, honey.
Still, she keeps it for Ollie, even after she moved out to New Jersey, to a little retirement community she’s technically a year too young for.
Ollie closes the fridge. He doesn’t need to go shopping.
He had some things he wanted to think about though.
Maybe figure out what comes next. In two weeks, when the Strongs get back, he has to find a new place to live.
Or maybe figure out if he should find a real job, one that doesn’t rely on his mom telling all her friends to tell their kids to hire him to walk their dogs.
Maybe something… He looks down at Pete, who is holding his teething ring in his mouth and looking up at him with an expression of what next?
“I dunno, bud.” Ollie hits Play on the podcast, and it echoes through the house. “I don’t think it was the mom though. It was definitely the sister.”