HAVING NO PERIPHERAL VISION is very disorienting. I know, because on Friday afternoon I experienced it firsthand.

I was also drenched in sweat. Beads of moisture dripped into my eyes, making any vision difficult. Only if I looked straight ahead could I see clearly, and what I saw were hundreds of people. All staring at me. All waiting to see what I’d do next.

I was terrified.

—

BUT ALLOW ME TO backtrack. The rest of the week that led up to my moment of terror had been exceptionally good. In fact, if I were to do a bar chart of my time at Borden so far, it would look like this:

Week four hasn’t happened yet, but I estimated it based on the previous data. Since Jared has taken me under his wing, even phys ed is fine. And Mathletes is just about the best thing that has ever happened to me. I fit in with Phoebe Schmidt, Walter Krasinski, George Hung, Oscar Bautista, Clark Fowler, and Aryama Daliwal. On Wednesday, we had our first actual competition against a high school on the west side called Trafalgar. Even though they had this one kid named Farley who was almost as good at math as I am, we won easily. On the way home on the bus, I sat beside Phoebe, so close I could smell her deodorant. “What did zero say to eight?” I asked her.

“What?”

“Nice belt.”

She laughed. I wanted to impress her, so I also told her that I was the new school mascot. “Jared Mitchell got me the job.”

But she just said, “Watch out for him.”

“Jared? Why?”

“He’s got psycho eyes. You know, like he’s kind of dead inside. Like he’s constantly trying to figure out how a normal person would react. Pretty on the outside but hollow on the inside.”

“I think you’ve watched too many CSIs.”

“Possibly. But I also have parents who are psychologists, and they’ve taught me to trust my instincts. That guy gives me a bad feeling. Like, why does he just suddenly show up at our school?”

“I just suddenly showed up at your school.”

“Yeah, but your story makes sense. He showed up ’cause his big, expensive private school kicked him out.”

“But we don’t know why.”

“No. But chances are, they had a good reason.”

I didn’t share Phoebe’s concerns. True, I hadn’t met Jared in the best possible way, but he’d been really nice to me lately. He’d come to our house a couple more times after school, and as per my agreement with Ashley, I didn’t tell. I even went upstairs once and let them have some privacy in the family room. I left my door open, and I could hear them talking and giggling. When it got really quiet at one point, I stomped noisily back downstairs. I’ve taken sex ed. I know the cold, hard facts. We don’t need a teen pregnancy on our hands.

When the bus pulled up to our stop, Phoebe and I hopped off. “See you tomorrow, Stewart.” She headed east. I watched her go. For the first time, I noticed that her head is disproportionately bigger than the rest of her body. I guess it’s housing that big, beautiful brain.

So, yes. It had been a really good week leading up to Friday.

Except for one small thing.

On Thursday after school I noticed that one of my mom’s figurines was missing. I counted once, twice, three times, but sure enough, Dopey was gone. At first I figured Schrödinger had knocked it off and batted it under a piece of furniture, but I looked under all the chairs and couches and tables, and I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Next I suspected Ashley.

“As if I would ever touch those hideous things,” she said when I asked her. “They give me the creeps.”

I hope it shows up soon. It was my gift to my mom on her last Mother’s Day. She’d told me that sometimes the chemo made her feel dopey. Get it? It was supposed to be a joke, a way of bringing a bit of levity to a bad situation.

Some people might have found it tasteless. Not Mom. She thought it was hilarious.

—

BUT BACK TO FRIDAY. I was still frozen to the spot, peering out at the crowds, when Coach Stellar yelled in my ear. Well, he was yelling in the dog’s ear, but I could still hear him. “What are you waiting for? Get out there!” The kids were getting restless, and the halftime clock was ticking down. My stomach gurgled in an alarming way. I wanted to make a dash for the change room.

Then I caught sight of my dad in the stands. My heart swelled, because I knew he had to take half a day off work to come see me. I saw Ashley, too, sitting nowhere near my dad, between her friends Lauren and Claudia.

Then I spotted Phoebe, sitting with Violet, and my heart swelled again.

I took a deep breath. I thought of my mom. I reminded myself that I was doing this for her.

Then I jogged to the center of the gym floor.

With the music blasting through the speakers, I did a pirouette and gave a little bow. The crowd cheered. “Borden Bulldogs! Borden Bulldogs!”

My stomach gurgled a little less. I started skipping up and down the gym floor, clapping my hands together over my head like I’d practiced at home. The crowd started clapping with me. I did “The Swim,” followed by “The Dougie.” In a moment of improvisation, I grabbed a random ninth-grade girl from the lower bleachers and got her to dance with me.

Then I did what I instantly knew would become my signature move. I got down on the ground and started doing “The Worm.” The crowd went nuts. I kept going even after the music ended, squirming around on the gym floor. Finally, Mr. Stellar had to run out and shout at me that the game was about to resume. “Get the hell off the court, Inkster!”

I skipped to the sidelines just as Jared and four of his teammates trotted out for the third quarter.

And I was so glad I had the costume on, because suddenly I was crying my eyes out under the dog head. I couldn’t stop picturing my mom, and how happy this moment would have made her. She was never anything but proud of me, but I also know that she worried about me. I’d heard her conversations with Dad, late at night, through the vent in my room.

“He’s safe for now at Little Genius Academy, but what about down the road? He has to function in the real world, too…. I know he’ll be an amazing adult, but it’s those in-between years that scare me. Young people can be so cruel….”

So I was crying because I couldn’t help but wish more than anything that she could’ve seen me, wearing a dog costume and doing “The Worm” across the gym floor.

It would have filled her with relief to see me acting so normal.