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
