Treasure Island!!!

scratching my forearms. Finally, rather than continue the task, I took him up by the ears and pitched him back into the cage, three paws untrimmed. A little later Nancy, who had been massaging Willie the poodle’s lower gum line, looked into the hutch and remarked, “Bobby needs his nails finished,” to which I replied, “Bobby needs a lot of things that he won’t be getting as well.” There followed a battle of looks that ended, I am happy to say, with Nancy taking up Bobby herself for trimming. I stood resolute and refused to hold even his legs.
Hello, backbone
, I muttered as I walked away.
    It was intoxicating to realize I could say no to her. A few days later when she asked, “Did you clean litter boxes?” I said, “By god I did not clean the litter boxes.” The truth is I
had
cleaned them but I was still getting the hang of the “no” business and liked the way the word felt in my mouth. Eventually I got better at asserting myself and she began to chide me regularly. “You read book,” she would say. “Time to feed hamsters. Later you read book!” One afternoon I was sitting at the desk—with Jim Hawkins just about to tear open Billy Bones’ shirt—when Nancy playfully tipped the book shut.
    “What are you doing?” I said coldly.
    I forget now exactly what she wanted, but she repeated the demands without pausing for breath and claimed that whenever she turned around, I wasn’t working: “Floor dirty, you read book! Animal hungry, you read book!” Yes, I said, “I read book.”
    I’d drop my book for an emergency, but to remedy the slowly accreting smell of urine in a room dedicated to the accrual of urine, I didn’t know. Maybe she didn’t know the word “accretion,” but she definitely took my tone.
    I was pretty pleased with how that encounter ended, but when I told Lars, he expressed alarm. Lars was a mild-mannered guy and worried a good deal about offending people. His own boss happened to be a boisterous, supportive teddy bear of a guy, which inclined Lars to see employers as somewhat sympathetic and endearing—and this no matter how often I told him about Nancy’s flaws. I think he was too invested in my image as a nice girl (docile, accommodating) to appreciate the emotional territory I was exploring. Was I a bit acerbic at times? Yes, I was—not just with Nancy, but with him. I heard Lars out, of course, but in the end I dismissed his worries. It’s what Dr. Livesey would have done.
    As I grew more confident about what boldness meant, I began to see that the real problem was I had been letting Nancy define my job for me. She was my boss, of course, but from the moment I had been hired, my duties—which as far as I was concerned were somewhat flexible—had devolved to drudgery of the most degrading sort. When I think about all the different things I might have done for The Pet Library—well, it almost seems a joke! I could have been entrusted with budget, or community outreach, or acquisitions—not that I was terribly interested in any of these things—but instead Nancy had me scraping out litter boxes. I never said this out loud, but also I objected to the fact that she made no effort to build a more varied collection of animals. Before my time, she’d set up a super-size drop-off kennel in the parking lot for discards and, if anything, the Library had become the town’s dumping ground for unwanted cats and dogs. Two weeks after Easter, you should have seen the rabbit landslide. Certainly I’m no economist, but even I could tell that the llamas, who stayed in a three-sided shelter out back, wouldn’t qualify as a cost-effective acquisition. The enormous amount of care they required—which Nancy claimed stemmed from their emotional problems (they’d been abandoned by their previous owners after a bitter divorce)—hardly balanced out the minor delight they afforded patrons. No one had the
space
to check them out, although people at the Shop ‘n’ Go sometimes stared at the llamas’ scabs as they loaded their groceries. Why didn’t she put
me
, a college graduate, in charge of acquisitions?
    It’s dumbfounding, but even after I’d read
Treasure Island
a few times, I clung to my bitterness and didn’t do all that much to change my situation. For a while my attitude was: “I don’t mind sitting up here at the counter, reading my book, and charging out a cat or two, but I am
not
going to fall all over myself checking the hermit crabs’ bedding for fungus