Following Baxter

by Barbara Kerley

  3

  An Awful Lot of Waffles

  The next morning, I woke up before everyone, and it was really boring with just me awake. It was so boring that I couldn’t imagine how much more boring it must be when I was asleep, so I was glad I slept through that part.

  It was good I woke up early. I had a lot to figure out. I had to convince TJ to walk Baxter with me on Monday and convince Mom to say yes.

  I walked into the kitchen for some orange juice, but when I poured it, a little splashed out. I leaned down and slurped it off the countertop.

  That was a trick I’d figured out after last year’s parent-teacher conference, when Mom came home saying the teacher wanted me to look for “opportunities to be more dependable.” Mom thought cleaning up when I spilled was a great opportunity.

  In fact, Mom didn’t nag me about anything anymore. She just said, “What a great opportunity . . .” and I knew I had to do whatever the naggy thing was.

  Suddenly, I thought, That’s it!

  Walking Baxter would be the perfect opportunity because Professor Reese was depending on me. Mom would love it!

  As for TJ, I’d try to convince him how fun dog walking would be. And I’d say it like Fun!—with a capital F and an exclamation point.

  But if that didn’t work, there was always a bribe.

  I finished my juice and hurried back to my room, which was a big fat opportunity, too. There were books and papers and clothes all over the floor, and that was a problem.

  Every Sunday, me and TJ had to clean our rooms so Mom could vacuum after she read the paper. If our rooms were too messy, then we had to vacuum, which was worse.

  I scooped up the papers and stuffed them into the recycling bin in the kitchen because I was pretty sure they weren’t homework. I figured some clothes were clean and some were dirty, so I split it half in the drawers and half in the laundry hamper.

  But I was always careful when I lined up my books-for-being-a-vet-one-day. I had books on cats, birds, hamsters, gerbils, rabbits, horses, and even one on elephants (because you never know). But my favorites were my four dog books. Now that Baxter was staying next door, I’d need to read them even more.

  I grabbed the biggest one, ran into TJ’s room, and plopped down on the end of his bed. If I read loud enough, maybe he’d get up and the Fun! could begin.

  TJ liked gross, goopy stuff, so I started there. “‘Common Dog Ailments—’”

  “Go away!” He rolled over and buried his face under his armpit.

  I read out loud about bloat and then mange. By the time I got to heartworm (which is seriously gross and probably a little goopy, too, because worms crawl around inside your heart), TJ was saying, “Eww!”

  I slammed the book shut. “Let’s go see Baxter this morning! It’ll be Fun!”

  “I need to work on my short.”

  TJ was using LEGOs to make a stop-motion short. (The short was short for “short movie.” But since it took eight pictures to make one second of film, for a thirty-second film he needed 240 pictures, which didn’t sound short to me at all.) He was learning how to make it in the Video Club at school, which met once a week during lunch. The club was planning a schoolwide Movie Night where families could come, and there would be popcorn, even. But that wasn’t for a while yet. “You still have three weeks,” I said.

  “I only have fifty-one pictures so far. That’s only six point four seconds.”

  “If we hang out with Baxter this morning, you can work on it all afternoon.”

  “No.”

  “TJ, please? It’ll be Fun!”

  “No.” He headed for the bathroom.

  My shoulders slumped. I slid like a wet noodle down off the bed and landed on his sweatshirt, which was lying on the floor.

  Darn, I thought. There was only one bribe I could think of that didn’t cost money.

  When he came back into his room to get dressed, I said, “How about I clean your room, and after breakfast, we go see Baxter.”

  “You’ll clean my room good enough for Mom to vacuum?”

  “But we have to stay for a while and take him for a walk.”

  He shrugged. “OK.” He grabbed his clothes and went back into the bathroom to change.

  I looked around and groaned. There were papers and clothes and books all over the place, plus a million blue and yellow and red and green LEGO pieces sprinkled everywhere, like his room was a big sloppy cupcake. Mom was always vacuuming up the littlest ones when she pushed the sucking part under his bed. As soon as he heard them clattering up the hose, he’d get mad. She’d get mad that he was mad and say that he should have cleaned better. By then, I usually went out to the front porch with a book because, seriously.

  I put TJ’s papers on his desk. I piled up his clothes to put in the hamper because I figured they were probably all dirty. I stuffed his books and comic books in his bookcase. Then I crawled around, reaching under furniture to pick up every single stupid LEGO piece.

  When TJ came out of the bathroom, I dumped his clothes in the hamper, and we ran over to Dad’s for breakfast.

  Mom and Dad are separated, but we all still live together. Sort of. Dad’s part of the house is a studio apartment built right on top of the garage. Four years ago, when he and Mom were fighting a lot, he moved out there one weekend to “cool off” and then just ended up staying there.

  My best friend Megan thinks it’s weird, but it happened so long ago that it just seems normal to me. Besides, as Dad always says, “It could be worse.” And he’s right—because even though they’re separated, I get to see him all the time. (Which is actually more than Megan sees her dad, who lives an hour away and she only sees every other weekend.) Plus, Mom and Dad hardly ever fight anymore.

  We ran up the steps on the side of the garage and into his studio. Dad was at his little kitchen counter, which had a sink, a microwave, and a minirefrigerator. He didn’t cook much, but waffles were his specialty, and he made them for us every Sunday—not the toaster kind, the real kind made in a real waffle iron he kept in the cupboard especially for us.

  He was mixing the batter when we came in. “Just in time,” he said as he poured batter onto the waffle iron and brought the lid down.

  I told Dad all about Baxter as the batter puffed up under the lid, baking toasty brown. Dad forked the waffle onto a plate and handed it to TJ, who slathered on peanut butter, squeezed syrup on top, and dug in.

  “It was so Fun! taking Baxter on a walk yesterday,” I said. “Wasn’t it, TJ?”

  “Mmpfh.” His cheeks were too full to answer. He wandered over to turn on the TV. He and Dad were always watching crazy movies about spaceships fighting each other with all sorts of crazy equipment, like lasers and weird flashing torpedoes. TJ made the sound effects right along with the movie. It was even worse when he was eating waffles because his sound effects got sticky with syrup and splattered everywhere, so I sat as far away as possible.

  Dad put a fresh waffle onto another plate and handed it to me. “Baxter sounds like quite a dog.”

  “He is,” I agreed. “I can’t wait for you to meet him!”

  I was full after a waffle and a half. But it took TJ forever to stop eating, and by then, I could hardly wait to see Baxter.

  I clicked off the TV and dragged TJ home. “Can we go over and see if Professor Reese needs help with Baxter while she unpacks?” I asked Mom. “Our rooms are already clean.”

  She looked up from her newspaper. “That’s a nice change. Sure.”

  So I ran over to Professor Reese’s house with TJ shuffling after me.

  When I rang the doorbell, Baxter started woofing. TJ must have thought it was the kind of woofing like, Go away, there’s an attack dog behind this door. He wouldn’t even come up the steps. But I knew it was the kind of woofing like, Yay, someone’s here, let’s see who it is.

  Professor Reese opened the door. “I’m glad you’re here. I need your help. Come on in for a minute.” She walked back into the living room.

&n
bsp; “OK!” I petted Baxter’s head as he looked up at me.

  “You’re a good boy!”

  I nodded, and he nodded back.

  I turned to TJ. “Did you see that? Come closer and let him put his paws on your shoulders.”

  “What are you, crazy?”

  “After you see eye to eye, he’ll nod to you, too.” I turned to Baxter. “Right?”

  I nodded, and he nodded back.

  “He’s just doing what you do,” TJ said.

  “No, he’s not! He understands me! Right, Baxter?”

  We both nodded again.

  TJ shrugged. “Whatever, Jordie.” Then he scooted behind me and into the house.

  Professor Reese showed us the flyers she’d made with Baxter’s picture. They said, Free to a Good Home, only I realized they should say, Free to a REALLY Good Home. So we fixed them and then walked around the park, putting them up. We even put one up next to the basketball courts at the park, where Tyler from my class was shooting hoops (which is what he seemed to do in his spare time when he wasn’t getting in trouble with the teacher, which is what I mainly saw him do).

  We put flyers up all over the neighborhood, and the whole time, I was not-so-secretly hoping that it wouldn’t work.

  Because Baxter was perfect, and he was right next door. He was the closest thing to having my own dog I could have without having one, which I couldn’t.

  When we got back, I said, “Would you like us to take care of Baxter while you set up your lab?”

  “Why, yes,” Professor Reese said. “That would be very helpful.”

  So we all trooped down to the basement.

  There were desks and tables and shelves, all made out of gray metal. The file cabinets had drawers that screeched when you opened them.

  I wasn’t sure how long TJ would stay, since technically we’d finished the walk and helping her in the lab was extra. But he discovered that in addition to two normal chairs, Professor Reese had a black rolling desk chair. He sat down and spun around. Fast.

  “You’re going to barf up your peanut butter waffles,” I said.

  “No, I’m not.” He kicked off with his feet to spin faster.

  Professor Reese crawled around on the floor, running cables everywhere, hooking up all three computers to the big electronic console (with lights and buttons).

  I started putting physics and math books on the shelves, keeping Baxter at my side. Whenever he walked toward TJ, I’d call him back, because TJ was finally forgetting he was scared of big dogs. I didn’t want Baxter’s “exuberance,” as Professor Reese put it, to remind TJ up the stairs and out the front door.

  But as long as Baxter stayed with me, TJ was fine. Besides, he’d discovered the little lever under the seat that made it go up and down. “Dude, watch this!” He spun around and made the seat go down. Then he tried to spin around and make it go up, which was hard because you had to sort of stand up and get your weight off the seat. TJ couldn’t figure out a way to simultaneously spin around in the chair and stand up out of it. Though he tried for a while.

  So everything was OK.

  Me and Professor Reese worked our way through the stacks of cardboard boxes filling the corner. She opened one box and pulled out a bright red hat, which she put on top of the bookcase. We pulled manila folders out of the other boxes to put in her filing cabinets. But when the stacks of boxes got low enough, I saw a strange piece of equipment pushed up against the wall. From the size of it, I guessed it must have been what was in the body-sized crate that the moving guys carried in.

  I thought, What is that?

  Then I stepped closer to get a better look.

  4

  The Body-Sized Crate

  The strange piece of equipment was long, red, and plastic, with a lid that could curve down over the top like a coffin. It reminded me of a weird bench, or maybe a skinny bed, only it couldn’t be a bed because it didn’t have a mattress. It had thin metal rods lined up side by side (where the mattress wasn’t) and more rods inside the top (where there wouldn’t be a mattress anyway). The whole thing looked very uncomfortable, like if you tried to sleep in Dad’s waffle iron with the lid down, and why would you do that?

  “What’s this big red thing?” I asked.

  “It used to be a sixteen-lamp home tanning bed,” Professor Reese said.

  “What does it do now?”

  “I’m still figuring that out.” She walked to a shelf and picked up a long cardboard tube labeled Do Not Bend. She slid out a roll of posters. “Could you help me hang these, dear? The lab won’t feel like home without them.”

  All three posters were the same drawing of the Electromagnetic Spectrum: a long thin band of different colors, like a rainbow, going red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet, one color fading into the next.

  “Oh, that’s pretty,” I said.

  “It is pretty.” Professor Reese nodded. “And it’s pretty darn important. This is the range of electromagnetic radiation—from radio waves all the way down to gamma rays.”

  There were a bunch of other waves, too, like X-rays (for seeing skeletons) and microwaves (for making popcorn).

  TJ stopped spinning in the chair. “What are all the numbers for?” He liked numbers, and the spectrum was covered with them, like ten with a little three next to it, or ten with a little negative twelve.

  “They show the length of the various waves. Ten to the third meters is ten times ten times ten—that’s longer than ten football fields, end to end. But ten to the negative twelfth is smaller than an atom.”

  “Oh.” He kicked off to spin the chair again.

  At first I thought if I were decorating a room, I would choose rainbow posters without all the numbers. But then I thought, maybe if you’re a physicist then a rainbow is pretty, but ten to the negative twelfth is pretty, too.

  “So why do you have three copies of the same poster?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  She had me hold the first poster against the wall while she taped it up.

  “It looks crooked,” TJ chimed in, but me and Professor Reese ignored him because by then his eyeballs were spinning around more than the chair.

  The second poster Professor Reese wanted to hang sideways, with the radio waves on the bottom and the gamma rays at the top. And even though the numbers were sideways, she didn’t care. The third poster she wanted to hang completely upside down, and then of course the numbers were upside down, too.

  “I’ve found as a scientist that I learn a lot by looking at things from a different angle.” She smiled. “Try turning a world map upside down sometime and make South America on top and North America on the bottom—”

  “Can you do that?” I asked.

  “You can, and you should. After all, there is no right side up in space.”

  I stared at the posters, thinking about how we could be upside down at that very moment without even realizing it, only at the same time there being no such thing as upside down. I was thinking so hard that it took a second to notice the strange gurgling sound coming from behind me. When I turned around, this is what I saw:

  TJ, with his eyeballs still spinning around in his head, leaning as far back in the seat as he could. And Baxter with his front paws up on the armrests (one paw on each side of TJ). Because the chair was still slowly spinning, Baxter was sort of walking around with it, sidestepping on his hind feet.

  It certainly gave me an opportunity to look at something from a lot of different angles.

  Baxter started panting. He leaned in so close his face was almost touching TJ’s, which looked a little green.

  “Baxter’s just saying hi,” I told TJ.

  “Gaaahhh . . .” TJ gurgled. He didn’t seem to realize that you could tell, if you would just calm down for a minute, that even though all of Baxter’s teeth were showing, his black lips were smiling, and you could tell that because the long shaggy tail at the other end was wagging. But I guess TJ couldn’t see that, as there was a lot of Baxter in be
tween.

  “He’s smiling,” I said.

  “Nuhhhh!” TJ moaned back, which made Baxter start making his own little moaning noises in a nice friendly way, as the chair spun slowly around.

  “Oh my!” Professor Reese exclaimed.

  You could tell the moaning (Baxter’s, not TJ’s) wasn’t growling if you just stopped to listen to it. But TJ was too busy making his own noises to be listening to anyone else’s, including mine.

  Baxter slowly raised a paw to put on TJ’s shoulder—

  “He just wants to see eye to eye,” I tried to explain.

  But TJ lurched the chair back, Baxter fell in his lap, the chair tipped over (with TJ still in it), and Baxter landed completely on top.

  “Ahhh!” TJ scrambled free. He ran up the stairs and out the front door. Just like I thought he would.

  I groaned. How was I going to convince TJ to go dog walking now? “I think I need to go home.”

  “Come by in the morning before school, and I’ll show you where I hid the key,” Professor Reese said. “You checked with your mom about walking Baxter?”

  “I can do it,” I said (which was technically true—I would do a great job as a dog walker). I hugged Baxter around the tummy and noodled his ears and went home, thinking it was impossible that anyone else could love Baxter as much as I did.

  When I got home, I found TJ at his desk, the hood of his hoodie pulled up over his head. He was working on his LEGO short. “Don’t. Say. Anything.”

  I plopped down on his bed. I knew there was no way I could convince him by tomorrow that dog walking would be Fun! And his room was still clean. I needed a bigger bribe—because Professor Reese needed a dog walker for days.

  I sat thinking, watching TJ work.

  The actors for the short were two LEGO figures I’d just given him for his ninth birthday. They were the kind of figures that came sealed in a bag, so I couldn’t tell which ones I was buying. TJ had been excited when he opened the first bag and it was a caveman with a big club, but the second bag was a cheerleader—and he wasn’t excited about her at all.

  But later he figured out if he took red and green Magic Markers and added gore and goop to her face, he could make her a zombie cheerleader. And then it was OK.