Toby Recharged: Rising Star

To the woman who provided me with invaluable insight into the minds of girls, a gender whom she says seldom even make sense to themselves.

Thank you, Dragon's Lady.

The wind blew cold outside the thin wall. Wall, not walls, because the canister was round. And metal. And filled most of the way with garbage that, even frozen solid and covered with a layer of ice, stank. The pup inside shivered, fighting to hold off an encroaching shadow, a well even darker than the darkness within the can. She knew what was coming; her family had had enough near brushes with death even before she was born, brushes she had heard about in their stories and even witnessed once in her mother's case. But this was no near miss, and neither was it a bedtime story. This was the real deal; the Grim Reaper was on his way, in the can at that very moment it seemed, ready to steal away her spirit with her final breath.

Her name was Star, daughter of Toby and Luna. And as she struggled not to fall asleep, not to die, thoughts continued to eat away at her will to survive like freezing water pushing wide a crack in a rock. These thoughts all boiled down to one at heart, just six words in length.

It's my fault for being ugly.

To better explain how she came to this conclusion, we will have to look back a few weeks. Star had been out for a walk with her sisters Angel and Arrow, her brothers Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior (so named because they were all born on Christmas Eve), and their mother. All were attached to leashes held by Luna's owner, Connie Calvin, but that did little to stop them from doing as pups on the main street of town are wont to do, namely darting this way and that, jumping on the ankles or over the feet of passers-by, barking to every dog and half the people in sight, and generally making a ruckus. The pups' diminutive size, plus the fact that they never tried to go any one direction all at the same time, was some saving grace for Connie. Luna, on the other hand, was hard-pressed to get her young to behave as they twined their leashes around each other's, amongst her legs, and generally tangled them like so many vines in a fence.

Their antics were disrupted by a bark from close by. “Hey Angel!”

“Lily!” Angel barked in excitement, drawing the attention of the others as a bushy-furred Akita drew near. Except for Angel, none of them had seen this dog before. But Angel had met her a week ago while playing with the family in a vacant lot, and had been hoping to see her again ever since. The other pups, who had not met her then because of an injury that prevented her from playing, were anxious to do so, and so for the first time that day they all started straining in one direction with their sister.

Shushing their excited yipping, Luna smiled at the newcomer. “You must be the famous Lily,” she greeted cordially. “I'm Luna.”

“Hi,” Lily greeted, tail wagging as she fell into step with the family. “I don't think Angel mentioned you.”

“Really?” Luna raised one eyebrow. “Well, she may not have mentioned me to you, but she's certainly been anxious to see you.”

This seemed to please Lily. “Yeah, sorry I haven't been able to drop by. My paw was killing me.”

Luna nodded. “Mm-hm, so I heard. Are you feeling better?”

“Yeah, lots.” Lily paused to extend the healed leg backwards as if to make a show of how good it felt. Then she had to increase her pace slightly to catch up. “So, what about the others? I don't think I've met all these guys before.”

More barking broke out from the pups, all of them doing their utmost to talk all at once. Luna, raising her voice, called out, “One at a time, one at a time.”

They quieted down then, and Caspar was the first to speak again. “My name is Caspar,” he greeted.

“I'm Melchior,” added the second boy. “But most people just call me Mel.”

“Balthasar,” added the third, “But just call me Zar.”

Lily's face twisted just a little. “Weird names,” she said.

“We were named on Christmas,” explained Star. “That's how I got my name, Star.”

“Huh, finally a normal name,” Lily murmured. Then in response to some rather displeased looks, she added, “No offense.” Looking to the oldest pup, Arrow, she asked, “What about you, kid?”

“Name's Arrow,” she replied. As a pre-emptive counter to the usual question about her appearance, she added, “I'm adopted.”

“Ah,” Lily nodded. “Gotcha.”

“Toby and I adopted Arrow a few months before we had our own pups,” Luna explained.

Lily seemed to study Arrow for a moment, her mouth and eyes set in the ponderous way Connie or Eugene would adopt sometimes when they played that odd game of putting patterned pieces together on the floor or table. After a moment she nodded again, smiling. “Well, I guess it was lucky for Angel you adopted a girl,” she said cheerfully. “It's not much fun being the only girl in the family.”

“The only...? Luna was taken aback by this remark.

“But I'm a girl too,” Star protested.

Lily seemed surprised, and a bit rattled. “You are? Oh, uh, sorry. I guess I got confused; I mean, you look so much like your dad when I met him that...”

Luna headed her off. “Yes, Star takes after Toby quite a bit.”

Lily paused for a long moment, then changed the subject. “So, uh, where are you guys headed?”

Star paid little attention to the rest of the conversation, too busy mulling over this news.

Now, as I am sure you have seen if you ever spent a great deal of time with puppies, sometimes they are inclined to have a short attention span. With young minds eager to explore, it's easy for them to get caught up in one rabbit trail after another, sometimes finding themselves back on the original one with no idea that they've ever left it.

This had often been the case for Star, but on this occasion the news that she did not look like a girl struck a deep and unsettling note in her mind. Although she did manage to forget about it briefly at dinner, as she settled down to rest she found that discordant tone coming back to haunt her afresh. As far as she could reason, she wasn't beautiful like her mother or her sister. Luna had creamy orange fur that shimmered when the sunlight fell on it, sunlight rare in the early part of the year but growing steadily with the passing days. Her figure was slender but strong, the blood of pedigrees and fighting dogs mingled in her with a trace of wolf, each one's best seeming to be at its zenith in her. Although a third-generation mutt, she bore herself with dignity and elegance as if she were of royal lineage.

As for Angel, she was the spitting image of Luna. Although her figure was a great deal more rotund with baby fat and short, chubby puppy bones, Angel's fur was exactly that of her mother, the shape of her face showing hints of refinement even at an early age, her eyes bright and clear, and her senses as sharp for her age as those of the wolves four generations or more back in the family tree. Friends and strangers alike noticed and often commented how much she looked like Luna, and Toby had even said that Angel, “looks just like you did when we were that age.”

But she never got comments like that. Her fur was long like Luna's, and from the neck back she and Angel were shaped much the same. However, her fur was brown – not a distinct chestnut brown like Toby's, which was in both human and canine opinions a rather handsome shade – but mingled with Luna's orange hue. Ordinarily one would expect beautiful and handsome colors to produce a pleasant result. But as Star looked over herself, she decided her fur looked more like rusty metal and mud.

And her nose, oh her nose! It had to be, she thought, twice the size of Angel's. She was over-guessing, really, but when one is small and sensitive about one's appearance, even the slightest difference in the size of anything is magnified like a fairground artist's caricature. So it was that a difference you would probably need a tape measure just to confirm (if you bothered to do so over so small a matter) left Star feeling like little short of an elephant.

Now to some of you, it may seem quite a triviality how Star looked. What did her outward appearance matter, especially in the canine world where male and female look almost exactly alike? Indeed, in some dog breeds – collies, for instance – one might say that the males look better in appearance than the females, and in just about every breed they look especially similar as puppies. But think, if you can – some know all too well – what it might be like to find yourself tremendously fat (if you are a girl), or ridiculously thin (if you are a boy, especially one who wants to be a football or rugby player). That is how Star felt upon discovering that in the eyes of some she looked like a boy.

If a human met with such unfortunate news, they would, and in reality often do, go to extreme lengths to rectify their ugliness. This is exactly what Star did, and from that day on for several weeks she began a serious regimen of trying to un-uglify herself. She tried a number of self-designed beauty treatments. Some, like watching Luna to learn how to wash herself and neaten her fur, were moderately successful. Others, like rolling in fur that Luna had shed and trying to make