Matt Posner's Entry

From the first draft of School of the Ages Book IV: Simon Geeta:

Simon gets some pets he wasn't expecting … which is one of the main ways we acquire them, isn't it? Robbie is his roommate. They are sixteen-year-old magic students. Let's note that I haven't published book 2 yet, so this is a sneak peek at something that won't be published till 2013!

I came back to the room one afternoon after lunch, walking slowly, feeling some of the indistinct sorcerous warnings of important events that I had three days out of four, to hear scratching and panting and then actual barking from the other side of the door. Two big young dogs. My defensive magic wasn’t warning me of anything, so they were probably real dogs, and if they were, I had nothing to worry about, since one of my magic powers is that all animals like me. I opened the door and was immediately tackled by two sandy-colored dogs that looked like giant terriers. Both jumped on me and continuously licked my hands. I managed to force my way into the room and sit on the bed. There was a poop smell, which I soon traced to a pair of coiled piles of poop, one on top of Robbie’s guitar in the closet, and the other on the floor overlapping my Construction IV textbook, Advanced Technological Activations by Ökmen Ökmenoglu. The dogs climbed on the bed and continued rubbing against me and sniffing at me.

Sniffing at me with two noses in their snouts.

Each dog had an extra-wide muzzle with two side-by-side wet black knobs snuffling furiously at my hands, my groin, and my armpits.

Two noses.

Double-nosed Andean tiger hounds.

*
Eventually I found Robbie in Conjuration Room A where he was scraping crud off the floor with a putty knife as a punishment for not having done a homework essay. The dogs started into the room, but then retreated into the hall. There was a bad chemical odor in all the conjuration rooms all the time.

“When you finish here,” I said, “you can clean up the dog crap in the room, okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Sorry, I was going to walk them later.” He looked at me as if to make sure I was done, but I wasn’t.

“Robbie, I don’t want to take care of these dogs.”

“I thought they’d cheer you up,” he answered, giving me a hopeful look. “Uh… You’ve been, like, in a funk, and stuff. Right? I mean, you have plenty of reasons, but… Well, you know.”

“You can’t keep two dogs this size locked in a small room.”

“But we have a window,” he said. "Uh… Happy birthday."

There was now a pair of noses rubbing against each of my hands. One pair of noses sneezed. Canine fluids ran along my palm to my fingers.

“What about dog food?”

“You can give them the same food we eat.”

I looked at the dogs. The dogs looked at me with big dark eyes and rubbed their narrow snouts against me. “For your birthday,” I told Robbie, “I’m giving you an elephant.”


****


Book One, School of the Ages: The Ghost in the Crystal Available now:

 For Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/5wf5ypu

 For Nook: http://tinyurl.com/3ttzsex

My website is http://schooloftheages.webs.com

Twitter  @schooloftheages

Facebook:  search "school of the ages series"