“That’s a great idea!” I said, and I felt a little relieved because it looked like no one wanted to do the vet part but me, which meant that even with four of us, I’d still get to do all the animal stuff.
Then the bell rang, and we all had to run to class. Mrs. A. was starting a language arts lesson on how to punctuate compound sentences, so I hurried to tell one last thing to Jasmine and Aisha—
“Jordie.”
About how me and TJ were now lab assistants—
“Jordie . . .”
“Shhh!” Jasmine hissed. She snuck a peek at Mrs. A.
I thought, Exactly. If Mrs. A. would be quiet for a second, I could finish telling them about looking into the spectrometer. So I leaned in closer to whisper while Mrs. A. went on and on—
“JORDIE.”
—about the stupid comma in sentence number three.
Mrs. A. was in an impatient mood, which made me wonder how come kids were the ones who got report cards with Needs Improvement on them (which of course I got because, as Dad always says, who doesn’t need to improve on stuff? Nobody, that’s who). But even though kids got report cards, teachers never did or maybe there would have been a Needs Improvement mark in the Patience column of Mrs. A.’s. Not that anyone ever asks me.
She was impatient all morning. I was so happy when it was finally time to leave for Study Buddies.
When me and Tyler got to Room Six, we walked over to the little table. Maya and Katie were sitting on one side, and Chloe and Logan were on the other side.
Tyler gave them high fives, while Maya peeked out from under her bangs to give me a smile, and Katie jumped up to hug me. Whatever she’d had for snack was stuck all over. After she hugged me, the sticky was stuck on my arms, too.
Me and Tyler sat down.
On each side of the table was a worksheet, a small, empty box, and two bags—one filled with little marbles and one filled with big marbles.
Mrs. Wilson came over to explain the assignment: our kids were supposed to predict if it would take more little marbles or more big marbles to fill up the empty box. Then we were supposed to see if we were right by filling the box first with little marbles and then again with big ones, counting how many marbles it took each time.
The answer was so obvious that I was surprised by the assignment—of course it would take more little marbles than big marbles to fill up the same space. But Mrs. Wilson said the purpose of the assignment was to start thinking like scientists, predicting what we thought would happen and then experimenting to find out.
We were supposed to write up our report on the worksheet. We had to fill out a section for WE PREDICT, WE DISCOVERED, and WE CONCLUDE.
Mrs. Wilson finished explaining and went back to working with the class, leaving me with my group, Tyler with his group—and a whole bunch of marbles.
My group got busy deciding what to write.
But it wasn’t hard to PREDICT what would happen when Tyler and Logan and Chloe got busy: within a few minutes their bag of little marbles tipped over. All the marbles rolled across the tabletop and clattered to the floor.
We DISCOVERED that it only takes Mrs. Wilson a few seconds to get from her chair across the room to the table where we were sitting. It didn’t take a genius to CONCLUDE that Tyler was in trouble. Again.
But even though Tyler wasn’t having a good day, I was having a great one, and that was because Megan was finally coming over after school to meet Baxter!
We blabbed the whole way home, with TJ tagging behind.
We dumped our backpacks in the living room. “Let’s go get Baxter!” I said.
But TJ said, “I want a snack.” He got out the crackers and the butter and started making his cracker stack—he makes a billion little cracker-butter sandwiches and stacks them on top of each other until it’s a cracker tower. Then he demolishes it like he’s Godzilla or King Kong or something. (There are crumbs everywhere, I swear.)
I grabbed two string cheeses, which me and Megan ate in ten seconds. We hurried TJ while he stacked up his crackers and hurried him even louder while he ate them.
When he was finally done, he grabbed a carrot from the refrigerator.
“Since when do you eat carrots for snack?” I asked.
“It’s for Spike.”
We all ran over to Professor Reese’s. Baxter was waiting as we opened the door, his tail wagging so hard he practically fell over.
TJ ran past him and down the stairs to see Spike, but Megan stayed with me, petting and patting Baxter, his nose cool and wet against our hands.
“Aw!” she cried. “He’s so cute!”
I was so happy that she thought Baxter was cute (though of course she would because everybody did). Megan scritched his neck and under his chin as Baxter wagged his tail. But then she looked up and said, “So what are we supposed to do now?”
And the way she said it made me suddenly wonder if, now that she’d met Baxter and petted him, he wasn’t exciting to her anymore. What if she thought taking Baxter for a walk was a chore, like clearing the table or loading the dishwasher—the thing you had to do before you got to do the fun stuff?
It had taken forever to convince TJ that Baxter was Fun! but it had never occurred to me that I’d have to convince Megan, too.
“I got to choose his nice new collar at the pet store because his old collar was gross,” I told her. “Doesn’t the purple look pretty next to his silvery fur?”
“That’s a great color on him,” Megan agreed.
“I got to choose all the other stuff we got, too.” I showed her the pile, still in the pet store bag on the kitchen counter.
“Oh!” Megan twisted the cap to the shampoo bottle
