“Very nice.” She smiled at me and went back to what she was doing.

Dad would be tougher. If I showed him the trick, he’d want to know how it was done. Luckily, he always took a nap after dinner. As soon as he had drifted off on the couch, I sneaked over with a rubber band and put it on his finger. Yellow!

That made three. I thought about all sorts of short words. I started playing with the Scrabble tiles again. Bed deb, tin nit, pen nep. None of them worked.There wasn’t anything like a car rac or a rac car either. But as I stared at the letters, I realized there was something even better. I went back to my closet, searched through the old toys, and pulled out a model racecar. I slipped a rubber band around it and smiled as the band changed color.

Four down, three to go. In less than half an hour, I found two more. Dad had a level in his toolbox. Level was a palindrome all by itself.And then I realized my sister Kaylee could be called Sis for short.And she loved magic tricks. So I did the rubber band trick for her.

That made six. But as easy as it had been to find the first six, I had no luck at all finding the seventh. I felt like a home-run king in a batting slump. I’d knocked a bunch of pitches out of the park, and then I couldn’t hit another ball. I flipped through the dictionary. I played with the letter tiles. I closed my eyes and ran words through my head until my brain felt like it was turning into alphabet soup.

“I’m doomed,” I told Buster when I went to bed.

“Woof,” he answered.

“Woof foow,” I said, checking it to see if it was a palindrome. Nope. “Bark krab.” Nope again. “Roof foor.” Nowhere near close enough.

The next morning, I felt like I hadn’t gotten any sleep at all. Sleep, I thought. I turned it around. Peels. Was there such a thing as sleep peels? Nope. It was just another useless phrase to add to the endless list of things that didn’t work.

I trudged off to school and took my seat.

“Still mad?” I asked Benedict when he sat down.

He didn’t answer me.

“If you’re not mad, we could anger round together this weekend.”

Benedict turned his back toward me.