Following Baxter

by Barbara Kerley

  Me and TJ were doing science.

  We looked at the map and chose a spot to send the hat. Professor Reese deleted the old coordinates on the main computer, and TJ read out the new ones for her to type in. “45.530313, –122.696471.” Professor Reese left to walk to the landing site, and me and TJ and Baxter sat in the lab, waiting for three o’clock.

  But the closer it got to three o’clock, the louder the clock on the wall ticked. Pretty soon, me and TJ couldn’t talk anymore over the tick-tick-tick, and I started thinking that being a lab assistant was maybe not so great after all.

  Because even though by then we’d seen a bunch of teleportations, it was still scary to think about clicking down the lid of the teleporter and having the whole room start buzzing, angry-bee style. Even though it hadn’t blown up before, what if for the first time it did?

  At 2:59, I said to TJ, “So if you want to put the hat in, go ahead,” like it was a really hot day and I was generously handing him the last Popsicle in the box. He said, “That’s OK, you can do it,” like he was pushing the Popsicle box right back at me. But by then it was 3:00, and we didn’t have time to argue about it. So I grabbed his shirt and pulled him up out of the chair, and we got the hat off the bookcase and stuck it in the teleporter. Then we clicked the lid down together, so we’d blow up together.

  Everything started buzzing and shaking, and it all seemed even louder with Professor Reese not there. And when the POP popped, I screamed a little bit, even though I knew it was coming.

  But we didn’t blow up. After the last computer powered down with a final beep-beep-boop and Baxter booped back, I pushed off the big red button, and we headed out.

  Even though we’d just teleported the hat, for once Baxter wasn’t really galloping. He stopped between gallops to look around. Sometimes he shook his head or stopped to scratch his ear with his hind leg. Then he looked around some more.

  I figured Professor Reese’s half of Baxter must be looking for Professor Reese (even though my half was fine) and wondering where she was. I knew dogs loved their owners best of all because I’d been reading about dogs ever since me and Megan started planning our vet/beauty parlor, and I’d been reading even more about dogs since Baxter.

  Me and TJ followed Baxter, who was sort of galloping all the way over to where we’d tried to send the hat.

  Professor Reese was sitting on the curb. “Nothing,” she said, but she didn’t seem sad about it. “All right. That’s good information to have—I’ll have to think about that.”

  “How can you think about nothing?” I asked because when nothing happens that means nothing happened.

  “Ah—but it’s not nothing.” She stood and smiled.

  “Huh?” TJ said.

  “The fact that I couldn’t see or hear anything is new information. I need to see how it fits in with what I already know.”

  “So when you’re a scientist, nothing is something?” I asked.

  “Exactly.”

  When Baxter found the hat lying on a hedge two blocks south, Professor Reese just nodded. “We need to think this through some more.”

  TJ picked up the hat and plunked it down on his head.

  And that’s when I saw something slip down from beneath the edge of the hat, by TJ’s left eyebrow: the hard brown tip of a gross bug abdomen. “Eww. There must have been a bug on this hedge because it’s in the hat.”

  “Ahhh!” TJ whipped off the hat and flipped it over.

  A big brown bug rolled down into the middle of the hat and landed on its back with its little feet in the air—not moving at all.

  TJ’s eyes got big. “Spike?”

  “Oh my!” Professor Reese said.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “No!” TJ cried.

  Because if Spike was in the hat, that meant that Spike had just been teleported—and we didn’t know if he was OK or not.

  14

  Caveman vs. Zombie Cheerleader

  “Spike? Are you OK?” asked TJ, and we all, even Baxter, leaned in to get a better look at Spike lying on his back, inside the hat.

  “I’ve never teleported anything alive before,” Professor Reese said quietly. “I don’t know if the reconfiguration instructions can put a living being back together.”

  Spike looked the same. His little bug antennas still stuck out from the sides of his hard brown head. He still had six spiky bug legs and his long bug abdomen. But his bug antennas weren’t wiggling, and the spiky legs weren’t kicking.

  Professor Reese shook her head. “I don’t know if the instructions were detailed enough to restart his respiratory and circulatory systems.”

  Which meant she didn’t know if Spike’s little bug heart would ever beat again.

  “Spike?” TJ tried once more. But Spike lay still.

  “I’m so sorry, TJ.” Professor Reese put her hand on his arm. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think he felt anything.”

  And that’s when I thought I saw an antenna twitch. “Wait!”

  We all leaned in closer. Baxter started panting. “Come on, buddy!” TJ said.

  And then there was a kick. And another. And another. And then all six spiky little legs were kicking like crazy as Spike tried to get right side up again.

  “Yay!” I yelled because even though a bug on its back kicking its legs was still gross, it wasn’t just a bug anymore, it was Spike.

  “I knew you could do it!” TJ put his finger down into the hat and tipped Spike over so he could stand on his little spiky feet again. Then TJ tucked the hat up against his stomach to keep Spike safe, and we all hurried back to Professor Reese’s.

  TJ spent the rest of the afternoon giving us updates on Spike in his tank. “He’s eating an apple slice,” he told us as I cuddled Baxter. Meanwhile, Professor Reese was scribbling her notes as fast as she could because Spike was the first living being to teleport! And survive! Who knew a big bug would make scientific history!

  “He’s walking on the roof of his bark house,” TJ said.

  “Spike’s all better.” I smiled at Baxter.

  He grinned back.

  TJ probably would have stayed in the lab forever, telling us what Spike was doing, but I noticed on the clock that we’d been there a long time, maybe longer than Mom would think an opportunity to be dependable should take. “We better go home, TJ.”

  But when I noodled Baxter’s ears to say good-bye, he whined and pulled his head away. “Oh! Professor Reese! I forgot to tell you—I think Baxter’s ear is sick,” and I told her how it had been bothering him all afternoon.

  Professor Reese frowned. “Hmm. I’ll keep an eye on him tonight.”

  I gave Baxter a little scritch between his shoulder blades. “I’ll check on you tomorrow morning, OK?” I nodded, and Baxter nodded back.

  That night after dinner, TJ worked on his stop-motion short. After 114 pictures, Caveman had run step by step across the table. Zombie Cheerleader had jumped out from behind the building. Now Caveman raised his club while Zombie Cheerleader whapped his head with her pom-poms.

  Picture by picture, the battle was about to start.

  I went into my room and walked over to the bookcase. I wanted to see what the dog books said about ear infections. Baxter had two of the symptoms: shaking his head and scratching his ear. Plus, he didn’t like getting his ears noodled anymore. So even though none of the books mentioned noodle avoiding, I decided it was a symptom, too.

  The next morning, me and TJ ran over to Professor Reese’s.

  She opened the door holding her crossword and wearing a red leotard and red footless tights, looking like an elf or maybe a fire hydrant. “Hi, Jordie. Hi, TJ.”

  “How’s Spike?” TJ asked before I had a chance to even ask about Baxter.

  “Spike seems fine,” Professor Reese said. “Right now, he’s enjoying a slice of banana from my morning cereal.”

  So TJ ran down to the lab to see, and I hugged Baxter gently around the middle. Professor Reese turned to me. “You were
right, Jordie. Baxter’s ear was bothering him all night.”

  “Aw, you poor thing!” I petted him but not near his ears.

  “I just made an appointment for the vet to see him at three fifteen,” she went on. “Can you walk Baxter to the vet’s after school, and I’ll meet you there?”

  “Of course!” I kissed him right between his crazy eyebrows—a kiss to help him feel better. Then I yelled down the basement stairs for TJ, and we headed to school.

  The whole way to school, I worried about Baxter. And my mood didn’t get any better when I realized it was already Wednesday, which meant our second week of Study Buddies was almost over. Tyler hadn’t gotten in trouble on Monday or Tuesday, but that was only because Mrs. Wilson had kept an eagle eye on Tyler’s group the whole time: every time Tyler or one of his kids looked up from the assignment, they’d shrink back like a mouse who didn’t want to get gulped.

  And now we only had a few days left because at the Good-bye–Hello Ceremony next Monday, me and Tyler would say good-bye to the second graders, and then they’d say hello to the new Buddies.

  Just a few days left, and Tyler was wasting his.

  “This is so stupid, this is just baby stuff,” he moaned as we walked up our hallway. “Stupid baby drawings,” he said about the penguins (on icebergs) the second graders had drawn that were posted in their hallway. But I thought the drawings were adorable and that Tyler was the one who was stupid.

  We were supposed to help our groups practice presenting A Special Person in My Life in an “appropriate manner,” which I decided meant “nice and loud.”

  Katie did fine. She was already pretty loud, so she only needed to practice once. Helping Maya was tougher because she was so shy. She had ideas she wanted to share about her Special Person, but she stared at the floor the whole time. All you could see was the top of her head, and you couldn’t hear her at all.

  But just before it was time to present, I figured out a way to make it better maybe. “I’ll sit in the middle of the back row. Just look at me when you say it, OK?”

  The whole class gathered on the rug in front of the classroom, with me and Tyler smooshed in with the back row of kids. It was so smooshed that I had kids practically stepping on my hands and sitting on my feet to fit us all on the rug.

  First Katie did hers on her grandma, and she was nice and loud and appropriate. Then Maya got up. At first, she looked so hard at the floor that you could see the top of her head almost all the way to the back of her neck.

  But then I guess she suddenly remembered what I had told her because she looked up. When Maya saw all the people, her eyes got huge, but then she found me in the back row. I nodded and gave her a big smile. She looked straight at me and talked about her baby sister so appropriately, we could even hear what she was saying. I clapped louder than anyone when she was done.

  Chloe and Logan did OK in their presentations, but Tyler himself wasn’t doing that great, sitting in the audience. All of us smooshed together so much was just too much for Tyler: he kept poking a kid in front of him to make him giggle.

  “Tyler . . .” Mrs. Wilson said. She eagle-eyed him from across the room.

  “I didn’t do anything!”

  When the presentations were done, Mrs. Wilson walked over to Tyler. I heard her say to him in a low voice, “I expect more from you, Tyler. I expect better. But I also believe in you. I believe you can be an outstanding Study Buddy, and I’m looking forward to seeing that tomorrow.”

  And Tyler didn’t say anything to me the whole way back to class.

  For the rest of the day, Tyler seemed quieter than usual. But as soon as the final bell rang, I didn’t have time to think about it anymore. I needed to get home to take Baxter to the vet.

  When me and TJ opened Professor Reese’s back door, Baxter came out to meet us. But he wasn’t bounding-out-of-the-house happy, he was only achy-ear-but-still-a-little-bit happy.

  I looked in Baxter’s eyes. “You’re not feeling better, are you?” I shook my head.

  Baxter shook his head.

  “It doesn’t look like you want to be King of the Bounce today.” I shook my head again.

  He shook his head even harder than I did because he had achy ears attached to his—and head shaking was another symptom the books talked about.

  TJ gave him a little pat and then went downstairs to say hi to Spike. I stayed upstairs, cuddling Baxter to cheer him up, but he just scratched his ear and whined.

  At three o’clock, I yelled down to TJ, “Time to go!”

  “I want to stay here with Spike!”

  “This counts as our walk, TJ.” And then I added, “Baxter’s ear is really gross!” because TJ likes gross, goopy stuff.

  “OK.” He came up the stairs.

  As we hurried over to the vet’s, I worried even harder because it seemed like Baxter was tilting his head, which was another symptom the books talked about.

  When we got to the vet’s, we sat on the waiting room bench, with Baxter on one side of me with his head in my lap and TJ on the other side, jiggling his legs. While we waited, I read Baxter the pamphlets on the waiting room table to distract him and chose the grossest, goopiest ones so that TJ would like them, too.

  When Professor Reese got there, the receptionist handed her a clipboard with a patient information sheet. Professor Reese filled out her address and phone number. The receptionist weighed Baxter, and we found out he weighed 78 pounds (which is actually more than TJ). She wrote that on the chart, too.

  Then she brought us into the examination room.

  The vet, Dr. Sheffield, came in and said hello. He looked over the chart and noticed the space for a microchip ID number was blank. “Let’s write it down and get you registered,” Dr. Sheffield said. “If Baxter ever gets lost, it will be easier to identify him.” He opened a drawer and pulled out a thing that looked sort of like a TV remote.

  I’d read about microchips in my dog books, but I’d never seen the scanner way up close. “How does it work?”

  So Dr. Sheffield explained: a microchip, which is the size of a grain of rice, is inserted under the skin between the shoulder blades with a big needle—

  “Cool!” TJ said.

  —and it contains a unique identification number: a different number for every dog. When you run the scanner over the shoulder blades, it activates the chip, which transmits a radio wave showing the ID number (so now I knew another thing the waves on Professor Reese’s posters did). The scanner displays the number on its LCD screen, and that’s how a vet knows it’s your Baxter and not somebody else’s.

  When Dr. Sheffield waved the microchip scanner over Baxter’s shoulder blades, he paused. He studied the number on the screen and said, “Hmm.” He frowned. “Baxter’s chip isn’t working right.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “See the number?”

  Me and TJ crowded in. TJ read out the number on the LCD screen. “45530313.”

  “A standard microchip has between nine and fifteen digits, but this number only has eight. So it’s not a standard microchip.” Dr. Sheffield shook his head. “There was a company a few years ago that went into business with a new design—a programmable microchip. The idea was that people could program the chip with their phone number. But the company used cheap parts. A lot of the microchips didn’t work reliably—like this one—and the company went out of business.”

  “But how do you know Baxter’s chip isn’t working right?” I asked.

  “Well, look at the number. It’s not a phone number because those are seven digits long or ten with the area code. And it doesn’t look like a street address.” He looked back up at us. “Frankly, I don’t know what this number is.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know either,” TJ said.

  Dr. Sheffield shrugged. “I’ll go ahead and write it in the chart, but you might consider having this chip removed and a standard chip inserted. It’s a small surgical procedure that most dogs tolerate well.”

  “An
other time, perhaps,” Professor Reese said. “I don’t want to do anything else to Baxter while he’s not feeling well.”

  “Fair enough.” Dr. Sheffield nodded. “All right, let’s take a look at those ears.”

  He opened a drawer and pulled out an ear-looker thingy, which he called an otoscope, and when I said I wanted to be a vet, he let me look. It was even cooler than looking through Professor Reese’s spectrometer (though Baxter’s ear canal was so red and oozy that I didn’t think it would be ending up on a poster any time soon).

  “Do you want to be a vet, too?” Dr. Sheffield smiled at TJ.

  He shook his head. “No way. I’m going to make movies.”

  “But he likes gross stuff,” I added, and I stepped back so TJ could take a look.

  TJ peered in Baxter’s ear. “Ewww! Awesome!”

  “There’s definitely an infection in the right ear,” Dr. Sheffield said. “And the left ear is looking a little inflamed, so I think we better treat both.” He cleaned Baxter’s ears and showed us how to use some ear ointment and gave us a copy of his report with instructions written on it for how to take care of his ears. “Between the infection and the ointment, Baxter’s hearing may be affected for a few days, but he’ll be feeling better in no time.”

  We were extra careful walking home to go nice and slow and let Baxter sniff as much as he wanted. When people stopped us to ask if they could pet him, I said temporarily no, because I was afraid they would bang into his ears by mistake, but that if they saw us again in a few days, then yes, of course, absolutely.

  But when we crossed the park, Tyler came over from the basketball court. He knelt down and put out his hand for Baxter to sniff.

  “Be careful of his ears—” I started to say, but Tyler was already petting him.

  Only he was petting Baxter so gently that after a minute, Baxter closed his eyes. “Who’s a good boy?” Tyler said quietly.