Following Baxter

by Barbara Kerley

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, I can keep walking him every day—no problem!” I said as he flopped down next to me.

  “Good.” She stuck a green pin in one spot on the map and a red pin in another.

  TJ walked over to the map. “What are the pins for?”

  “The green one shows where I thought I’d find my hat and the red one shows where Baxter actually found it.” She studied the map. “The question is, why wasn’t the hat where I thought it would be?”

  I lay down and rested my head on Baxter’s tummy. “Maybe you forgot where you were walking when you lost it.”

  She frowned. “I don’t think that’s it.”

  When me and TJ got to the lab after school the next day, Professor Reese was still frowning. She stuck a new green pin in a new spot on the map. “Maybe we’ll have better luck today,” she said.

  “You lost your hat again?” TJ said as we all followed Baxter up the stairs and out the door.

  Baxter galloped, pulling me down the sidewalk, and Professor Reese and TJ practically ran behind us. When we reached the corner of Seventeenth and Lovejoy, Professor Reese nodded. “All right. My hat should be here—”

  But Baxter pulled me three blocks farther, where he found it, like magic.

  “You did it again!” Professor Reese said to Baxter.

  He wagged his tail.

  TJ grabbed the hat, and we turned toward home. And that’s when I noticed a Baxter flyer on a streetlight pole, looking old and faded. I realized it was Friday, and it had been almost a whole week!

  I thought, No one has called about Baxter!

  The whole walk home, it was like a drum beating with every step: no one has called, no one has called, no one has called about Baxter.

  No one had called saying they had a really good home. Now that I was dog walking, there was no reason why Professor Reese couldn’t be the really good home. And actually, it was a really great home because I lived next door to it.

  So as soon as we got back to the lab, TJ spun around in the spinny chair, and I decided it was time to convince Professor Reese. “So it’s been almost a week, and no one has called about Baxter.”

  “That’s true.” She stuck a red pin in the spot where Baxter had just found the hat.

  “I’ll bet he’s great company when you go to bed and when you wake up,” I added.

  “He is.” She studied the map, tapping her fingers on her chin.

  “He’s great company while you’re working in the lab, too.”

  Professor Reese turned to me. “Jordie, is there something you’re trying to tell me?”

  I took a deep breath. “Please let Baxter stay. You don’t need to find him a really good home—he already has one. He has us.”

  She sighed. “I know you love him, Jordie. And you’ve been very helpful this week. But even when I’m home, I’m very busy with my work . . .”

  “I can keep helping you! All I do in the afternoons is get stuck with TJ—”

  “Hey!” he cried.

  “And Baxter helps you, too,” I added. “He helps you find your hat.”

  Professor Reese opened her mouth like she was going to say something, and then she closed it. She looked over at the map, then down at Baxter. “Hmm. Excellent point.”

  Baxter cocked his left eyebrow up at her.

  She turned to me. “I’d need you to give him a walk every day after school.”

  “I will!” I nodded as hard as I could, and when I looked over, Baxter was nodding, too.

  She studied his face for a moment. “All right.”

  And just like that, like it was no big deal (even though I was whooping inside!), Baxter was officially half my dog!

  Professor Reese said, “We’ll need some supplies. Want to go to the pet store?”

  But I don’t know why she even asked, because of course.

  9

  Spectrometers and Elbows

  When we got back from the pet store, I ran home to tell Mom the great news—me and Professor Reese were keeping Baxter! “So I’ll need to keep walking him every afternoon and maybe on the weekends, too,” I said as she pulled stuff for dinner out of the fridge, “but I already said yes because I knew you’d think it was a great opportunity to be really dependable!”

  Then I ran out of the kitchen before she could point out that I maybe should have checked with her first.

  I grabbed the phone and took it into my room so I could call Megan and tell her, too.

  “That’s awesome, Jordie!” Megan said. “I can’t wait to meet him!”

  “You’ll love him!” I said, and I got jumpy excited just thinking about it! “Oh, and I wanted to ask you something about our vet/beauty parlor. I think we should add a day care, too!” I told Megan how I’d started thinking about it when I was having so much fun with Maya and Katie. “And we know a lot of the women getting their hair done will be moms, so they can just bring their kids with them!”

  “OK,” Megan said. “I’ll probably want to get a special salon cape for kids in case any of them need a haircut—they make really cute ones with animals on them. And maybe some special kids’ shampoo . . .”

  So it was all set. When I climbed into bed that night, between the vet/beauty parlor/day care news and the keeping-Baxter news, I could barely sleep.

  In the morning (Saturday = Baxterday!), I brought my dog books into the kitchen to read while I ate my Crispy Rice. Now that I was officially half a dog owner, I had a lot to learn.

  The books talked about how to help your new dog overcome the “insecurity” of a new home: You needed to give him a quiet place to retreat to (and Baxter had two beds now—his old bed and a new bed that I’d just chosen at the pet store). You also needed to spend lots of time with him so he wouldn’t be lonely.

  Baxter hadn’t seen me all night. My half might be feeling lonely and insecure.

  I ran over to Professor Reese’s house. But when I got to the front door, I didn’t know if it was too early to knock.

  I didn’t see anyone through the living room window. I went around to the side of her house and got down on my hands and knees to peek into the lab window.

  There was Baxter, all adorable on his old fuzzy bed that I’d tucked under a desk. (We’d put the new pet store bed upstairs because I wanted the old bed to stay in the lab—I liked its Baxter smell.) And next to him was Professor Reese, sitting at a table lit by a bright lamp. She was looking into this piece of equipment that was like a microscope, only with two tube thingies sticking up instead of one.

  I thought, Huh. What’s that?

  I knew Mom wouldn’t let me hang out at Professor Reese’s without TJ. I ran back home and into his room. “Wake up!” I hopped up to sit on the end of his bed, bouncing it hard when I landed. “Baxter might still be insecure! We need to get over there.”

  TJ groaned and pushed me off with his feet. “I need to work on my short today. I only have seventy-eight pictures.”

  “TJ, we have a deal!”

  He opened his eyes and glared at me. “We have a deal for an afternoon walk—one walk for all my chores.” He rolled over to face the wall.

  I slumped down on the bed again. I didn’t want to see Baxter for only one little walk—I wanted to see him all weekend. Plus, I wanted to know what the weird microscope thingy was.

  TJ would never want to go over just to see Baxter. But maybe I could convince him that hanging out in the lab was Fun! “Professor Reese has a new piece of equipment in her lab!” And I made it sound as Fun! as possible.

  He rolled back over and opened his eyes. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know! I’m going to go find out!!” And I said that with an extra exclamation point. “Eat your breakfast and come on over!” Then I ran out again.

  When I got back to the lab window, I knocked on it as politely as I could. Baxter woofed, and Professor Reese jumped in her chair. But then she motioned me in.

  Baxter met me crazy happy at the back door. “Saturday is Ba
xterday!” I nodded, and he nodded, too. Then we went down to the lab so I could see what the new piece of equipment was. “What is that?”

  “A spectrometer,” Professor Reese answered. “It belongs to the science museum, but sometimes I borrow it for a day.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Scientists use spectrometers in different ways. I’m using this one to study different wavelengths of light.” She smiled at me. “Want to see?”

  When I looked through the “adjustable telescoping eyepiece,” I saw the rainbow color band but with the red and indigo-violet ends shorter than the posters on the wall showed.

  “Are you doing an experiment?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” she said. “Right now I’m thinking.”

  “Oh. What are you thinking about?” I’d never thought while looking through a spectrometer before, and I wanted to try it.

  “T-waves.” Which, she told me, she had discovered, all by herself. Only she had discovered them so recently that no other scientists knew about them.

  “Can I see one?” I asked. And even though I didn’t know what a T-wave was, I started feeling excited because it wasn’t even on the posters yet.

  So I looked into the spectrometer again at the rainbow color band, and she explained, “What you’re looking at is the middle section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Now imagine it’s laid out flat, as if you had placed a ruler down on a table and were standing over it, looking down on it.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “Now I’m going to recalibrate the spectrometer”—and here she began adjusting the adjustable telescoping eyepiece—“until it’s as if you squatted down with your eye level to the top of the table and looked at the ruler from the side . . . just . . . like . . . so . . .”

  The color band got narrower and narrower as the eyepiece rotated until I was looking at the color band sideways. It was so thin, even thinner than a ruler, that it almost disappeared completely. “I can barely see it anymore.”

  “Just wait . . .” she said.

  All of a sudden, on the red end of the rainbow, there was a tiny flash of white light like a piece of glitter glinting in the sun. “Hey!”

  “You’ve just seen a T-wave.” She smiled.

  I got up and walked over to study the posters on the walls. “What does it do?” Because if radio waves sent music and X-rays showed you skeletons and microwaves made popcorn, I was wondering what was left.

  “I’ve been asking myself that question for months.”

  She sat back down at the spectrometer, and I tried to figure out what I could do so that Baxter would be half mine on the weekends, too. And the best thing I could think of was to help her as much as I could by making Baxter as happy as I could. “Can me and Baxter play in the yard with his new ball?” I asked because we’d bought one at the pet store and hadn’t even opened it yet.

  “I’m sure he’d enjoy that,” she said.

  So me and Baxter ran upstairs to the kitchen. The pet store bag was still on the counter. I found the ball—and actually the package called it a Superbouncy Ball, but since it was just sitting there in the shrink-wrap, how would you know?

  I unwrapped it, and then we headed out to the yard. The ball was superbouncy, which was really fun because that made Baxter superbouncy, too. I threw it, and he followed the bounce, running after the ball and catching it in his mouth right after it had thwacked down on the ground and was coming back up.

  TJ arrived, chewing a big wad of gum. I grabbed onto Baxter’s collar since he was looking a little exuberant, and we all went down to the lab.

  Professor Reese showed TJ a T-wave. Then he wandered over to spin in the spinny chair, and she sat back down in a boring chair to look into the spectrometer again.

  Baxter trotted to his bed. I snuggled in next to him. When I looked up, Professor Reese was peering into the spectrometer again and thinking—hard, it seemed, because whenever I asked something, she was dreamy and quiet and didn’t finish her sentences.

  “Are you going to work in the lab all day?” I scritched Baxter’s chin.

  “ . . . hmm? . . .”

  I noodled Baxter’s ears. “I could take him on all his walks today, if you want.”

  “Yes, well . . .” But then she was thinking again.

  I patted Baxter’s tummy and started thinking, too—only, instead of T-waves, I thought about Baxter.

  Sometimes he was all bony, like he had a dozen elbows sticking out everywhere, and it took a second to find a place to cuddle up next to him. But as soon as he relaxed, all the elbows went away, and then he was a big fuzzy pillow. I rested my head against his belly and wondered how that was possible and if everybody was like that or just dogs.

  Meanwhile, TJ had gotten up and was fidgeting around the lab, picking up stuff, even dumb stuff like a coffee mug full of pens, and putting it back.

  Pretty soon, I started feeling sleepy. My head rose and fell as Baxter’s breathing snuffled down his long nose and got quiet and full of sighs.

  And then TJ said, “What are those numbers for?”

  He was standing next to the map of Portland, pointing to a little slip of white paper stuck under one of the red pins (the where-Baxter-actually-found-the-hat pins). The map, I now saw, had a tiny slip of paper stuck under each pin, which I hadn’t noticed when I’d walked in because I’d been so busy thinking about spectrometers and elbows.

  But when TJ is fidgety, he notices stuff, even stuff Mom doesn’t want him to. Plus, he likes numbers in general, so he notices them even more. “45.533529, –122.689605,” he read off one of the slips.

  “ . . . hmm?” Professor Reese looked up from the adjustable eyepiece. “Those are GPS coordinates.” She turned back to the spectrometer.

  “Oh.” TJ wandered over to the bookcase to fidget some more.

  But I thought, Wait a minute, what? Because I knew GPS coordinates showed you exactly where something was. Like, exactly. Like, careful-we-have-to-land-this-rocket-ship exactly, or aaah!-the-asteroid-hurtling-toward-Earth-will-land-in-this-spot exactly. Not oops-lost-my-hat-around-here somewhere.

  “You wrote down the GPS coordinates for your hat?” I asked.

  “What? . . . oh yes . . .” Professor Reese said and drifted back to the spectrometer.

  I squeezed out from under the desk and sat up. “For your hat?” Baxter squeezed out from under the desk, too, and stood next to me, leaning against my shoulder. “Why would you do that?”

  TJ wandered toward the back of the lab, running his hand along the electronic console and fingering the lights and buttons.

  I wrapped my arms around Baxter’s ribs. He rested his chin on the top of my head. “Why would it matter exactly where it was, as long as you found it again?”

  “Hmm? . . .” Professor Reese said, refocusing the eyepiece. “Don’t play with the teleporter, dear . . .”

  TJ snatched his hands away from what used to be a tanning bed and shot me a look like, Huh?

  “Wait.” My head clunked on Baxter’s chin as I scrambled to my feet. “What did you just say?”

  Professor Reese’s face popped up from behind the spectrometer. “Oh.” Her eyes got big. “Uh . . . what did it sound like I said?”

  “It sounded like, ‘Don’t play with the teleporter, dear.’”

  “Oh my.” She looked a little sick. “I didn’t mean to say that, but apparently I did.” She took a deep breath. “And now it looks as if I must ask you two a very important question: How good are you at keeping a secret?”

  10

  Baxter and the Boop

  “I’m excellent,” I told Professor Reese. “I’m the best secret keeper ever. Just ask anyone.” Then I thought about it. “Well, don’t ask anyone ’cause nobody ever believes I am. But really, I’m excellent—”

  “What do you mean, teleporter?” TJ broke in. “That’s crazy!”

  “At first glance, it would appear so,” Professor Reese agreed. “But it’s true.”

  “A telepor
ter. A teleporter.” TJ’s eyebrows climbed higher and higher up his forehead. “Like you stick something in and push a button and it ends up somewhere else? You mean teleportation?”

  “I do.” Professor Reese nodded.

  TJ’s jaw dropped so far his gum fell out of his mouth, and he had to catch it, quick. “A teleporter! Cool!”

  Professor Reese grinned. “I know!”

  “So T-waves are . . . ?” I asked.

  “Teleportation waves,” she said.

  “And your hat wasn’t really lost, was it?” TJ asked.

  She shook her head. “I’ve teleported it. Twice.”

  TJ shrugged. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell anyone.” He stuck his gum back in his mouth. “They’d never believe it, anyway.”

  “Exactly,” Professor Reese said. “And if you were a little old lady and told anyone, they wouldn’t believe it and they’d probably think you were senile. And you’d lose your job at the university. And they’d ship you off to a nursing home.”

  “But why do you have to keep it a secret?” I asked. “If anyone doesn’t believe you, you can just show them.”

  Professor Reese walked over to the map and touched the pins lightly. “There’s still a big problem: the hat doesn’t land where I think it will.”

  “So what?” I asked.

  She turned to me. “The first thing the scientific community is going to demand is a demonstration. Then they’ll ask why the landing site doesn’t match the coordinates I put into the computer, and how it is that Baxter finds it so easily when I can’t. I don’t want to give a demonstration until I can answer those questions. I don’t want to tell the world about T-waves until I have a better understanding of how they work.”

  “OK.” I noodled Baxter’s ears and stared at the pins on the map. “That makes sense. You want to figure it out first.”

  “Yes,” Professor Reese said. “And so far I haven’t had any luck.”

  “Well, we can help you,” TJ said.

  “Right,” I added, “because Dad always says three heads are better than one.” (Which I guess is true even if one of the heads is TJ’s.) “So, let’s teleport that hat again, and we can all try to figure it out together.” I nodded, and when I looked over at Baxter, he was nodding, too—so actually that meant four heads.