Baartock didn't like to remember about breaking things. During the summer, when he was building his bridge, an arch stone had fallen on his hand and it broke two of his fingers. It had really hurt. His mother had put some salve on his fingers so they wouldn't hurt and would heal faster, then she had straightened them and wrapped them. When she unwrapped them two days later, they weren't broken any more, and he went back and finished his bridge. But he remembered how much it hurt, and he was more careful after that.
He stopped listening to what the adults were saying. He was getting tired of just sitting. There wasn't anything in the room to interest him, but there was an open door to another room, so he got up to look at it.
There wasn't much in that room either. Just a little bed and a lot of little doors under a counter. They were too small for an adult to go through, but he thought that he might fit through some of them. He was just about to go look behind those doors when his mother said, "Baartock sit!"
Baartock went back and sat down and waited some more. He waited for what he thought was quite a long time. The adults just kept talking. Talking about him. He knew that they would keep on talking and then either he would have to do something now, or else he couldn't do something until he was bigger. And he was right. After all the talking, they agreed that he had to have a shot. Nurse Dodge went in the other room and came back with a tiny bottle and something she called a 'needle'. Baartock's mother did a lot of sewing, but this wasn't like any needle that Baartock had ever seen before. She put something from the bottle into the needle, then came over to Baartock. He was watching her carefully.
"This may hurt a little, Baartock," she said. "You might want to look over at your mother." Then she wiped his arm with something that smelled awful and made his arm wet, and she stuck the needle in his arm. It did hurt, a little like getting stuck by a thorn on a bush in the woods. Then she pulled the needle out and said, "That wasn't too bad, was it?"
"Not hurt," said Baartock, though it did hurt some.
Nurse Dodge put the needle in a metal trash can and put the little bottle back in the other room. Then she went back behind her desk and wrote something on a piece of paper. "The school needs this to show that Baartock has had his required shots," she said, "and I'll keep a copy here."
"Well, Baartock," said Mrs. Jackson, "shall we go to school now?"
"Go see Mississtog-Buchnersklass? Go see Jason?" asked Baartock.
"Yes. We should hurry, so we'll be there before lunch."