Tyler: Knock, knock.
Me: Who’s there?
Tyler: U. R. A.
Me: U. R. A. who?
Tyler: You are a butthead.
Tyler: What do you call a guy whose face looks like a butt?
Me:
Tyler: “Buttface,” you butthead. What else would you call him?
Tyler: What did one butthead do when the other butthead made a joke?
Me: Shut up, Tyler.
Tyler: Crack up. Get it?
By the time we got to Room Six, I’d decided that Tyler was the butthead and also that I’d have to remember that last joke to tell TJ because he’d like it.
When we went into Mrs. Wilson’s room, Katie and Maya were sitting at the table with the goldfish aquarium.
“We’ve been talking this morning about how observations teach us about the world,” Mrs. Wilson explained. Me and Tyler were each supposed to help our group write down five observations about the fish.
So Tyler sat down on one side of the table with Logan and Chloe, and I scooted in with Maya and Katie on the opposite side of the aquarium.
“OK, first we need to observe the fish,” I said. Maya took turns peeking at the fish and then peeking at me. Katie just stuck her face up to the aquarium glass, her tongue working at a dried blob of something strawberry in the corner of her mouth.
“Now we need to write down what the fish look like,” I said.
Katie sat back in her chair. “Their eyes are round.”
“Good.” I wrote it down. “What else?”
“They’re orange,” Katie added. “They wiggle their tails.”
I wrote all that down. Then I turned to Maya, because she hadn’t said anything yet. “What do you observe about the fish, Maya?”
Her eyes got big. She turned and looked at the fish, and me and Katie waited.
We waited some more.
It was hard to wait because Maya was looking at the fish, but I didn’t know if that was the same thing as observing them and if that was supposed to take longer.
Katie bounced up and down in her chair. Her hair was tangly, and one of the tangles had a big strawberry blob that stuck out and bounced up and down, too.
Maya leaned forward, resting her chin on her hands on the tabletop. So I leaned down to look deep into the aquarium, too.
I could see Tyler’s group through the glass, huddled around their paper. He wrote down their last observation, and they all laughed. Then Logan started sucking in his cheeks and puffing out his lips to make fishy lips.
I looked over at Maya. She sat back and brought her hands up by her shoulders and wiggled her fingers.
“They wiggle their arm fins?” I asked her.
She smiled and nodded.
I wrote it down. “Can you think of something you like to do that the fish like to do, too?” I was thinking she’d say “swim” or maybe “eat,” and then we’d be done.
So Maya observed the fish some more. Katie jiggled her legs, and the hair blob jiggled right along, and I watched Tyler’s group through the aquarium glass.
Logan stuck his fishy face right in front of Chloe. She pushed him away.
I heard the tiniest voice say, “They like to hide.”
I turned and saw that Maya was pointing to one little fish hiding in the aquarium plants. “Good observation!” I wrote it down.
But then Chloe started making a fishy face, too. She and Logan pushed each other more. And just as Mrs. Wilson looked over and said, “Tyler!” Chloe pushed Logan so hard, she knocked him against the table. I barely had time to pick up our assignment before a slosh of water slopped out of the aquarium onto the tabletop.
The whole class watched as Mrs. Wilson hurried over.
I held our paper out to her. “We’re done with our assignment.”
She nodded. “Good.” But she didn’t take it because she was too busy picking up Tyler’s paper. She read it and frowned. Then she handed it to me. “Could you put them on my desk, please, Jordie? It’s a little wet over here.”
I said good-bye to Maya and Katie and carried the papers over. Tyler had written:
Fish are wet.
Fish don’t talk.
Fish are boring pets.
Fish make bubbles from their mouth.
They make bubbles out the other end, too.
Mrs. Wilson said, “Jordie, could you tell Mrs. A. that Tyler will be late returning to class? We need to have a chat.” And by the way she was glaring at Tyler, I had a feeling she thought he really was a Study Butt-y.
The rest of the day, I took sneaky looks at Tyler, once he got back to class, to see if he was upset about Mrs. Wilson’s chat. But he didn’t seem any different than before. And when me and TJ walked Baxter by the park after school, Tyler was shooting hoops, same as always.
When we got back to Professor Reese’s house, we found her in her lab, making notes in a notebook. TJ rolled around on the spinny chair. I snuggled Baxter on his bed (which Professor Reese had brought down to the lab) and told her about me and Tyler at Study Buddies. “I get why Mrs. A. chose me, but I can’t believe she chose Tyler—he’s like . . . I don’t know, the worst kid in the whole class.”
She looked up from her notebook. “Did Mrs. A. say that?”
“No.” I shook my head. “She didn’t need to say it out loud. Everybody just knows.”
“Hmm. That’s a pretty big assumption.” Professor Reese turned back to her notebook.
And just as I snuggled into the warm fur on Baxter’s fuzzy neck, she added, “You might want to think about that some more.”
8A Really Good Home for Baxter
When me and TJ got home from school the next day, I said, “Let’s get Baxter!”
But TJ said, “I want a snack.”
So after I paced around the kitchen, eating my string cheese and then pacing some more while TJ ate his string cheese (and then his other string cheese, his handful of crackers, his apple,
