Not everyone feels this way, but doctors’ offices make me feel safe. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much time in them. I have the same doctors other people do, like a pediatrician and a dentist. Then I also have special doctors. I have a doctor who knows the most about Turner syndrome and my shots, called an endocrinologist. I have a doctor for my heart, called a cardiologist. And a doctor for my ears that don’t hear so perfectly, called an ENT. That stands for ear, nose, and throat. Sometimes that makes me laugh. They didn’t try super hard to come up with a creative name for that one, huh?

I like going to doctors even when it’s someone new. Everything is clean and organized and you get to talk to someone who can fix things. Or who can make absolutely sure there’s nothing broken. (My ear doctor even has a tiny camera hooked to a screen so when she pokes the camera stick in your ear your whole waxy eardrum pops up on the TV. It’s pretty impressive!)

When we went back to the small white room, Nonny lay down on the crinkly paper. It was actually a bit strange not being the one on the exam table. Nonny lifted her shirt, exposing her milk-skin belly that was recently beginning to pudge.

Dr. Willoughby rolled over on her stool and squeezed a glob of jelly onto Nonny’s stomach, a blue, sparkly, toothpasty blob of stuff that might have been what genies are made of. Then Dr. Willoughby took what looked sort of like a white plastic showerhead and rubbed it into the blue goop and smeared it across Nonny’s stomach.

And that’s when something magic happened on the TV screen attached to the weird showerhead tool. (Doctors get the best TV!) The screen was nothing but gray fuzz, and then all of a sudden there was a black space in the fuzzy gray, and in that black space was a little bean.

A human bean.

Nonny’s baby bean.

It looked like a space ship in the middle of a swirling, faraway galaxy.

Then there was a sound. A squishy, squelchy sound almost like stepping in mud, and it came like the ticking of a clock. Squish. Squelch. Squooch.

The bean had a heartbeat.

Dr. Willoughby smiled.

Nonny looked at Mom and smiled.

Mom put her hand over her mouth and made an ohh sound.

I couldn’t stop looking at the tiny gray staticky bean. That was a baby on TV right there. Nonny’s baby.

My baby.

Well, my niece. Or nephew. I was guessing niece.

Nonny’s face made me think of one of our Hard Reading Words—radiant: glowing or emanating light.

Dr. Willoughby started talking to Nonny, explaining things, and even though I was only paying attention to the screen and the squelching noise, Dr. Willoughby’s rolling-wave voice and sunshine eyes told me everything I needed to know.

While the adults talked about how big the tiny baby was, I stared at the screen. I looked at what Dr. Willoughby said was the baby’s face. Little nose and lips. What if the baby was a little girl? What if she was born with moles on her cheeks like mine? What if she was short and had round ribs, too? And in the nanosecond space between squelches, one teeny, pinprick-size thought came poking through.