“What’s this big red thing?” I asked.
“It used to be a sixteen-lamp home tanning bed,” Professor Reese said.
“What does it do now?”
“I’m still figuring that out.” She walked to a shelf and picked up a long cardboard tube labeled Do Not Bend. She slid out a roll of posters. “Could you help me hang these, dear? The lab won’t feel like home without them.”
All three posters were the same drawing of the Electromagnetic Spectrum: a long thin band of different colors, like a rainbow, going red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet, one color fading into the next.
“Oh, that’s pretty,” I said.
“It is pretty.” Professor Reese nodded. “And it’s pretty darn important. This is the range of electromagnetic radiation—from radio waves all the way down to gamma rays.”
There were a bunch of other waves, too, like X-rays (for seeing skeletons) and microwaves (for making popcorn).
TJ stopped spinning in the chair. “What are all the numbers for?” He liked numbers, and the spectrum was covered with them, like ten with a little three next to it, or ten with a little negative twelve.
“They show the length of the various waves. Ten to the third meters is ten times ten times ten—that’s longer than ten football fields, end to end. But ten to the negative twelfth is smaller than an atom.”
“Oh.” He kicked off to spin the chair again.
At first I thought if I were decorating a room, I would choose rainbow posters without all the numbers. But then I thought, maybe if you’re a physicist then a rainbow is pretty, but ten to the negative twelfth is pretty, too.
“So why do you have three copies of the same poster?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
She had me hold the first poster against the wall while she taped it up.
“It looks crooked,” TJ chimed in, but me and Professor Reese ignored him because by then his eyeballs were spinning around more than the chair.
The second poster Professor Reese wanted to hang sideways, with the radio waves on the bottom and the gamma rays at the top. And even though the numbers were sideways, she didn’t care. The third poster she wanted to hang completely upside down, and then of course the numbers were upside down, too.
“I’ve found as a scientist that I learn a lot by looking at things from a different angle.” She smiled. “Try turning a world map upside down sometime and make South America on top and North America on the bottom—”
“Can you do that?” I asked.
“You can, and you should. After all, there is no right side up in space.”
I stared at the posters, thinking about how we could be upside down at that very moment without even realizing it, only at the same time there being no such thing as upside down. I was thinking so hard that it took a second to notice the strange gurgling sound coming from behind me. When I turned around, this is what I saw:
TJ, with his eyeballs still spinning around in his head, leaning as far back in the seat as he could. And Baxter with his front paws up on the armrests (one paw on each side of TJ). Because the chair was still slowly spinning, Baxter was sort of walking around with it, sidestepping on his hind feet.
It certainly gave me an opportunity to look at something from a lot of different angles.
Baxter started panting. He leaned in so close his face was almost touching TJ’s, which looked a little green.
“Baxter’s just saying hi,” I told TJ.
“Gaaahhh . . .” TJ gurgled. He didn’t seem to realize that you could tell, if you would just calm down for a minute, that even though all of Baxter’s teeth were showing, his black lips were smiling, and you could tell that because the long shaggy tail at the other end was wagging. But I guess TJ couldn’t see that, as there was a lot of Baxter in between.
“He’s smiling,” I said.
“Nuhhhh!” TJ moaned back, which made Baxter start making his own little moaning noises in a nice friendly way, as the chair spun slowly around.
“Oh my!” Professor Reese exclaimed.
You could tell the moaning (Baxter’s, not TJ’s) wasn’t growling if you just stopped to listen to it. But TJ was too busy making his own noises to be listening to anyone else’s, including mine.
Baxter slowly raised a paw to put on TJ’s shoulder—
“He just wants to see eye to eye,” I tried to explain.
But TJ lurched the chair back, Baxter fell in his lap, the chair tipped over (with TJ still in it), and Baxter landed completely on top.
“Ahhh!” TJ scrambled free. He ran up the stairs and out the front door. Just like I thought he would.
I groaned. How was I going to convince TJ to go dog walking now? “I think I need to go home.”
“Come by in the morning before school, and I’ll show you where I hid the key,” Professor Reese said. “You checked with your mom about walking Baxter?”
“I can do it,” I said (which was technically true—I would do a great job as a dog walker). I hugged Baxter around the tummy and noodled his ears and went home, thinking it was impossible that anyone else could love Baxter as much as I did.
When I got home, I found TJ at his desk, the hood of his hoodie pulled up over his head. He was working on his LEGO short. “Don’t. Say. Anything.”
I plopped down on his bed. I knew there was no way I could convince
