Marooned in Manhattan by Sheila Agnew

fantastic, but her coach, a tall skinny woman in a blue and white tracksuit, yelled harshly at her several times. At the end of the lesson, I could tell the coach was having a go at Kylie although I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
    ‘Why is the bully coach being so mean to Kylie?’ I asked Greg angrily.
    Greg looked surprised.
    ‘The coach is just trying to motivate her to do better, to be better. Kylie has a competition coming up.’
    ‘It’s not the Olympics,’ I muttered.
    ‘Not yet,’ said Greg.
    After Kylie had changed back into normal clothes, the three of us went for burgers and fries and shakes at the diner and had a great laugh. Kylie didn’t mention her coach and she didn’t seem upset at all.
    ‘Your coach seemed a bit mean,’ I ventured.
    Kylie swung around so that her green-streaked ponytailnearly landed in my raspberry-chocolate milkshake.
    ‘Suzie is the best. She’s the greatest coach in the Tri-state area. I’m lucky she is teaching me. She’s tough on me because I haven’t practised enough, and she’s right.’
    ‘Does Rachel come down on you to do better?’ I wondered.
    ‘Nooooo! My mom is so not the competitive type. She just wants me to be happy. I think she would prefer if I did not compete at all, if I just skated for fun, but I like competing. Sometimes I wish she was one of those pushy moms so I would be forced to practise more.’
    I looked out the window as I drained the dregs of my milkshake. I spotted Finn, dressed in hockey gear, walking past the diner with a slim blonde girl. He saw us and waved with his hockey stick.
    ‘Finn’s too old and too good to play for the River Rats anymore. Now, he plays in a different league. He’s their big star,’ announced Greg proudly.
    ‘Who’s his girlfriend?’ asked Kylie.
    ‘Tamara something. She’s a freshman at Nightingale-Bamford,’ Greg said.
    ‘That’s one of the best private girls’ schools in the city,’ Kylie explained to me. ‘A freshman is someone in their first year of high school.’
    ‘She’s very pretty,’ I noticed.
    ‘If you like blondes,’ said Greg.
    ‘She’s too All-American, Gossip Girl slash cheerleader slash prom queen type. YAWN,’ said Kylie.
    The more I get to know Kylie, the more I like her.
    There was a note waiting for me when I got home, written in green ink.
    ‘Evie, the very old vacuum your uncle owns sucked up the trunk on your elephant yesterday. Sorry, Eurdes xx.’
    I was horrified. I had punished Ben for nothing. I scrambled off to search for him straight away, but he was not in any of his normal places. Eventually, I found him lying under the receptionist’s table in the waiting room of the clinic, gnawing on what looked suspiciously like a tube of Leela’s lip-gloss. Good boy. I knelt down beside him. I knew he wouldn’t understand the word ‘sorry’ but I wanted to say it anyway.
    ‘I’m sorry, Ben.’
    He licked my hand and he wagged his tail.
    ‘Longest walk ever, coming up right now,’ I told him and he happily stretched out his front paws so far that his belly hit the ground as I went off to search for his leash.
    Later that evening, Ben and I hung around the clinic, keeping Snickers company. Snickers is a little, cotton-wool white bundle of tight curly fur, a Bichon Frise, which is a very popular breed of dog in Manhattan. He was staying overnight in the crate in the backroom of the clinic because Scott had to perform dental surgery on him the following morning. I was sitting cross-legged beside his crate, desperately yanking my almost bristleless hairbrush through an enormous knot when Scott walked in.
    ‘What is it?’ he asked, looking at my face screwed up in pain.
    ‘The mother of all knots,’ I answered.
    Scott bent over to have a look, disappeared for a couple of minutes and returned with a scissors we use for trimming cat hair before operations and, with a decisive single snap, chopped off the large knot and handed it to me.
    I stared at it,