“That’s very sweet, honey,” Mama says, and then she gives Mom one of her looks. “Wouldn’t you say that’s a pretty mature attitude?”

“It is.” Mom sets the poster back down and Catniss immediately curls up on top of it again. “Very mature, Sadie,” she says, with a nod of approval.

Noah scoops Catniss off of the counter and whispers, “Yeah, mature for a toddler” into Catniss’s ear as he carries her into the living room.

Noah sets Catniss down on the couch and bounds up the stairs, but I stay behind.

“So, Mom, what’s going to happen to Dewey now?” I ask.

“I’ll let the shelter know that she has an owner, and we’ll figure out a time for them to come and pick her up.” She smiles at me. “I’m proud of you for being so grown up about this. And I love how much you care about this dog, Sadie. I mean it.”

“She’s a good egg,” Gramps says, picking up the poster and looking at it more closely.

I only feel relieved for a few seconds before I realize that this was just the first step. When no one comes to pick up Dewey, then won’t she be back in the same place? The poster has only bought me some time to figure out what to do next.

Up in my room I unzip the little pocket on the inside of my backpack and pull out my phone, which is only supposed to be used for emergencies, “real emergences,” and never during school. Which means that technically I’m not breaking any rules: I am not at school, and if Dewey’s predicament doesn’t qualify as a real emergency, then I don’t know what does.

I text Jude in all caps, one word: BUTTERFLYER.

Once, back in our fairy-fortress days, Gramps was playing with us in the backyard; he picked up the butterfly magnet that we’d added to the fairy community—it had shimmery plastic wings that could actually flutter—and making it soar all around the tree, he shouted, “Mayday!” Gramps dubbed it the “Butterflyer,” and he told us that Mayday is the word that pilots would use over the radio when they were in trouble and needed help. It’s “Mayday” because it sounds like a different word in French that means “help me.”

Well, I’m having a major Mayday moment. Also known as a “butterflyer” between Jude and me, and we reserve it for only the direst situations. Like life-and-death seriousness. I didn’t even use a butterflyer when everything was happening at the beginning of the school year with all the testing and the meetings and the IEP.