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from the contents of the can, strong and putrid, made me gag, but when I held the can under the dog’s nose, it acted like smelling salts and revived him. The dog lifted his head, eyes barely open, and extended his tongue to lick the lid. I knew that humans who go on extended fasts feel hungry for the first few days, but then the hunger feeling goes away and sometimes they have to be force-fed to start eating again. How I would manage that with the dog was beyond me. I emptied the dog food into a Styrofoam bowl, set it in front of him, and was gladdened to see I wouldn’t have to force him to eat. He took a big bite and swallowed.
    Almost immediately, his body began to convulse; he hunched forward as he retched involuntarily. After a half dozen convulsions, he stopped, and thankfully the food stayed down. I pulled the dish away to give him a moment to recover, and then I sat with him and fed him slowly.
    I’m fourteen and in my high school cafeteria at a table by the door. I am sitting alone. Everyone who comes in or out of the lunchroom sees me sitting by myself. They see me, but they don’t know what I’m thinking. What I’m thinking is this: Who am I? Why am I so worthless?
    Every day, I bring a bag lunch and take my sandwich out and look at it and keep my head down, perfecting my thirty-inch stare, while all around me people are laughing and socializing and yelling, the usual chaos of a high school cafeteria. I’m not a stranger or a new kid. Cudahy, Wisconsin, is a suburb of Milwaukee but it feels like a small town where everybody knows everybody. It’s a small school, only about seven hundred students. Everybody knows me, but everybody also knows my label. Sitting by myself every day is in-my-face proof that I’m worthless. I am unwanted. I do not dare ask to sit with anybody because if they say no, that would be even more humiliating. And no one wants to sit with me because it’s just easier not to. And safer. Anyone sitting with me risks being labeled a loser, too.
    I look around the cafeteria and wonder why everybody else is smart enough to figure out how to be in a group. The jocks have groups. The really pretty girls have groups and sub-groups of not-as-pretty girls who act as entourages to the really pretty girls. Every ethnic minority has its own minority group. There’s even a group of unpopular kids—a group for kids who don’t have a group—but they don’t seem to want me either. If I gathered the courage to ask, I wonder if they’d let me join them, but I don’t try, because it would be too embarrassing if they rejected me, too. The loneliness I feel is merciless, and the message comes across clear as a bell: “You’re on your own.”
    I let the dog eat and didn’t try to pet him, but I sat with him to let him know someone was there. Buck Brannaman, the horse trainer on whom both the book and the movie Horse Whisperer were based, never had to use physical pain to discipline his horses because he understood that the pain of isolation was worse and that depriving an animal of the safety and security of its social community was a more powerful negative reinforcement than any spur or whip. I sat with the dog, thinking that dogs are social animals, just like horses, and that unless he’d learned to mistrust humans entirely, my presence might comfort him. When he stopped eating, not because he’d had enough but because, I assumed, what was left of his atrophied stomach couldn’t hold any more, he moved to the drinking water I’d poured in a bowl for him. He took slow, deliberate laps of water. I wasn’t exactly sure why I felt the need, but I decided to shoot some video footage of him to document his condition and perhaps to help me process, later, what I was experiencing. It wasn’t making sense now, but maybe it would upon further contemplation.
    Shortly after partaking of food and water, the dog collapsed. It reaffirmed what I’d surmised earlier: he was too frail to carry out of the