The Dog Park. Laura Caldwell

the exact kind of work I wanted to expand into. Dog styling—probably not much work out there but even less competition.

      “Absolutely,” I said to Victory. “I’ll find a grooming appointment. And I’ll pick her up.”

      “God love you. And however you want her fur to look is good for me,” Victory said. “I’ll pay you your usual.”

      “Sounds good,” I said. “What is Dee wearing?”

      “Wearing? Like her collar? It’s the same one you saw last year.”

      “The olive green one?”

      “Yeah. It’s cute, right?”

      “I think you want her to show a little sass.”

      “Good point,” Victory said. “What’s your thought?”

      I’d been sitting at the kitchen table, but I stood and headed for the office. “Do you see her in a baby-pink?”

      “No,” Victory said. “I can’t look like a socialite with a purse dog.”

      “One that’s already called DeeDee.”

      “Precisely,” she said.

      “Got it.” I picked up a few more things. “I’ll have options.”

      We hung up, and I lifted a purple canvas strap with lime-green trim.

      By the time I got to the photo shoot that afternoon, I’d made a few other collars and harnesses. As they were styling Victory’s office, I showed her the various collars I’d made or brought.

      Melody, Victory’s thirteen-year-old, came home from school and helped us narrow the collars down further to the preppy purple-and-green one and a playful lavender one with white suns. We put both of them on DeeDee.

      “Notice what you’re wearing?” I pointed to Victory’s own wrist, where she wore a watch and a bracelet. “The two at once?”

      Victory looked down. “They look good together.”

      “Right,” I said. “So do hers. Let’s leave her in both collars.”

      “Yeah!” Victory’s daughter said, and snapped a photo. “I’m posting this.”

      “You know she has more followers than I do?” Victory said as we walked DeeDee to the set.

      “Your daughter? How is that possible?”

      “She’s in this youth choir that has played all over the country. She drives traffic to me.”

      The photographer liked the two collars, liked the texture and color it leant the photo.

      Victory’s daughter took another picture during the photo shoot.

      My dog, Dee Dee, is so cool, the Tweet said. She’s Superdog #2, then just #Superdog.

      That photo and the comments were reTweeted by Melody’s friends and Victory and her followers, and then the hashtag Superdog started getting repeated, which just fueled the story. Pet owners raced to post a pic of their own pup so they could claim to be something like Superdog #87. Or Superdog #114. Always they ended it simply #Superdog. Quickly the race ramped up and people were bragging that their dog was in the top thousand, then the top ten thousand. Soon, #Superdog was trending again.

      It multiplied and multiplied. And multiplied. And, at least for a while, I felt very, very alive.

       12

      “You really don’t have a great throw,” I heard.

      Baxter and I were at the dog park a few days after Victory’s photo shoot, and I was using a Chuckit! stick to throw his green ball. We hadn’t been out there enough lately, and in trying to fill all my orders, we kept missing our usual crew of dogs and owners.

      Today, as always, Baxter had tore into the park as soon as I’d unhooked his leash. But when he didn’t see his dog friends, he’d raced back to me, plunked the ball at my feet and had taken off again, looking over his shoulder as he’d run. I could almost hear him saying, Go long, go long.

      But now someone else’s voice. “You really don’t have a great throw.”

      I turned to see a guy laughing. He wore a pink button-down shirt, cuffed at the arms with shorts and brown loafers. “Former prepster gone casual”—the loafers weren’t fussy, the guy’s blond hair was a little shaggy.

      I looked at Baxter, who stood panting at the base of a tree, his eyes trained upward to the branches where the ball had traveled.

      “Yeah,” I said, pointing to the throwing stick, “and I can’t even blame it on anything.”

      The guy took a few steps, shook the branches of the tree, and the ball fell to the grass.

      “I take it you’re not into softball.” The guy threw the ball for Baxter, sending him streaking across the grass.

      “Nope,” I said. “I’m into other things. Like jiu-jitsu.”

      Sebastian had taken years of jiu-jitsu classes, mostly with former college wrestlers who wanted to continue hand-to-hand fighting with the martial art, a skill Sebastian very much wanted to learn.

      I had no idea why I had blurted that out, except that I thought it would be funny. I was becoming more and more bold. The latest social media wave about Superdog just made me more so. I was loving the attention and so was my business. I’d received calls and emails from over ten countries, and the orders for the collars and leashes increased, along with requests to style dogs (or people with their dogs).