22King of the Bounce
I studied the map, stuck all over with green pins where we’d thought the hat would be, and red ones where we’d found it—always too far north or south or east or west. . . . Never where we could find it ourselves. We always had to follow Baxter.
He whined.
Professor Reese said sometimes it was good to look at things from a different angle. I lay down on the floor and stared up at the map. I stood beside it, pressing my head against the wall to look at it sideways. I put my face so close I could only focus on a tiny spot at a time. Professor Reese was right—there didn’t seem to be any pattern to the pins at all.
I took a step back, then another. Then another and another until I was halfway across the room and could take in the whole map—and all the pins—in a single glance.
And suddenly it was like I was floating above the city, seeing the streets all lined up, crisscrossed like the grid on our waffle iron. Floating above the city, the pins didn’t seem like the street corners where I followed Baxter as he galloped ahead. They seemed like little polka dots.
And when I hurried back to the map and stuck in one more pin in the one place we didn’t have one (Professor Reese’s house), I suddenly saw that the pins weren’t random after all. They were in a pattern.
A starburst pattern.
Professor Reese’s house was in the middle, and the other pins shot out from the center like a firework bursting on the Fourth of July. They shot out in tracks ending green-red, green-red, green-red—the green pin where we thought the hat would be, and then, a little farther on, and the red pin where the hat landed.
For the first time, I didn’t think about us finding the hat, I thought about the hat landing. And I realized I’d always assumed that the teleporter picked up the hat and put it down someplace else.
But Professor Reese always said that a good scientist challenged assumptions, so what if my assumption wasn’t right?
“What if the teleporter doesn’t pick up the hat . . .” I said to Baxter.
He wagged his tail.
I studied the starburst pattern more closely. “What if the teleporter . . . throws it?”
He stood up and wagged harder.
“Like when I throw the superbouncy ball to you . . .”
He gave a little bark.
“That’s it!” I shouted. “The hat is never where we think it will be—because the teleporter throws it, and it bounces!”
He woofed, long and loud.
“And that’s why you can always find it: you’re King of the Bounce!”
I wrapped my arms around Baxter and gave him a big hug (and noticed his microchip humming quieter again, which was good because his hearing would be better in a day or two and a loud hum would probably bug him). I was so happy I’d figured out the answer to one of Professor Reese’s questions: that hat was never where we thought it would be because it bounced.
That still didn’t tell me where Professor Reese was. “But since she teleported herself,” I said to Baxter, “the more we know about teleportation, the better we can find her.”
After dinner, I whispered my Bounce Theory to TJ while he took more pictures: instead of Caveman getting his brains eaten, he got up, swung his club, and knocked Zombie Cheerleader to the ground.
Then Dad came over to go with us while we took Baxter on a walk before bed. We couldn’t do a Baxter Slumber Party again because that had been for one night only—Mom was afraid the landlord might stop by unannounced and catch us. But Dad said he’d go with us while we took Baxter for a walk and then sit on Professor Reese’s porch and play guitar for a little while, so I could snuggle Baxter enough to last all night by himself in Professor Reese’s house.
It felt sort of mysterious walking through the dark neighborhoods, with the yellow glow of lights coming out the windows of the houses and me wondering what everybody was doing in there.
TJ told Dad all about his LEGO short and how Caveman’s brain was almost eaten but then wasn’t.
“Wow, that sounds exciting,” Dad said. “So how does it end?”
“What?” TJ asked.
“The epic battle,” Dad said. “Is Caveman going to kill Zombie Cheerleader, or is Zombie Cheerleader going to kill Caveman?”
“Um . . .” TJ said, and then we all stood there quietly while Baxter stopped to sniff a little bush. “I don’t know. I haven’t figured out the ending yet.”
We walked back and sat on Professor Reese’s porch. Dad played his guitar quietly while TJ blabbed some more. “I don’t want Caveman to die. But it’s really hard to kill a zombie with a club, I think.”
“Aren’t zombies already dead?” I asked as Baxter flopped over half on the doormat and half on me.
“Exactly,” TJ said.
I listened to TJ while I rubbed Baxter’s tummy. Pretty soon Baxter was snoozing and making little boop-barking noises in his sleep. His paws started twitching, and I realized he was dreaming about running. I wondered where he was going in his dream—if he was galloping on the end of his leash, looking for Professor Reese.
TJ went on and on. “I have one hundred sixty-two pictures, which is twenty point two seconds. I still need to take seventy-eight more to make a thirty-second short. I don’t want to take them until I figure out the ending.” He shook his head. “But I’ve never made a movie before.”
“Don’t think of it like a movie,” Dad said. “A movie tells a story. You just have to figure out how you want the story to end.”
“Oh,” TJ said. “OK.”
Then Dad said it was time for bed. When I gave Baxter a big good-night hug, I could hear the faint hum of the microchip. But it didn’t seem to be bothering him, especially with his ears still not working right. We tucked him into Professor Reese’s house and
