A Friend in Need

Jay Smouse pounds on Zoe Grant's front door with a desperate plea: he needs her help, and fast. While his parents were away for the weekend, Jay's cousin Vincent came over, and during an Elvis movie marathon a rare, expensive baseball card disappeared. It turns out Vincent, short on cash when the pizza arrived, handed the delivery driver the card as a tip. Jay insists he must get it back before a baseball card convention ends in just three hours, and since he has managed to offend Emily with one spectacularly insulting sentence, Zoe is his only hope. She refuses to go along with his plan to ambush the pizza guy, but agrees to help on one condition: afterward, Jay has to do his share of their history presentation for Friday.

Digging through the pizza boxes scattered around Jay's house, they find a greasy receipt from the night before, and a phone call to the restaurant points them to the driver: Buck Meltsner. At the busy pizza shop, Buck remembers the card well, calling it his cheapest tip of the night, and says it is probably in his car. He is too slammed to leave right away and asks them to wait fifteen minutes, since he does not want anyone digging through his messy car without him.

While they wait outside, Zoe's mom calls. Her mom has been planning a mother-daughter dance at their church, but Zoe suggests skipping it so she can help with a library fundraiser instead. When she hangs up, she discovers Jay has climbed into Buck's car through the open sunroof, eavesdropping the whole time. Between rummaging through the clutter, he offers Zoe some unsolicited advice: ditch the teacher, not the mom, because "chances for mom points should never be wasted." Buck comes out early, orders Jay out of his car, and delivers bad news: the card is not there. Since the card was technically given to him, Buck declares he deserves a percentage of its value, but he offers an idea. He dropped off a box of donations at a thrift store the night before, and the card might have fallen in. At the store, though, the manager has already unpacked the box himself, and there is no card.

While Jay wallows in despair on the sidewalk, Zoe confronts him with a simple question: how many innings are in a baseball game? He has no idea, and when Buck wonders why he owns a rare card without knowing anything about baseball, the truth comes out. The card belongs to Jay's dad. It arrived in the mail, Jay took it out to study it, and then Vincent gave it away. Jay had been trying to learn about the player so he would have something to talk about with his dad at the convention, since baseball cards are his dad's great love and Jay cannot follow his rocket science. Now he is sure that when his dad finds out, he will be shipped off to a banana farm in Costa Rica. When Zoe asks why he does not just call his dad and confess, Jay fires back that she is the one dodging time with her own mom.

Buck remembers one last stop from the night before: a smelly pond where he was collecting algae samples for an experiment with Eugene. Sure enough, after some searching in the muck, Jay spots the card in the weeds and crows in triumph, declaring, "I feel like Lewis and Clark when they discovered the lost city of Atlanta." With ten minutes to spare, Buck races them to the convention center.

After dropping Jay off, Buck notices Zoe's phone buzzing with texts and gently asks what is going on. Zoe admits she actually wants to go to the mother-daughter dance very much, with all the hair appointments and dinner reservations her mom is planning. The problem is that she is sure her mom hates that kind of thing and is only doing it out of guilt, because she overheard Zoe telling a friend she wished they went. Buck shares that his favorite part of coming home from work is gathering pond slime for his dad, who lights up over every sample like buried treasure. Buck does not understand most of the science, but he always has a good time, simply because his dad loves it. Zoe begins to see her mom's plans in a whole new light.

Inside the convention, Zoe helps Jay find his father, who cheerfully embarrasses his son by recognizing "Princess Zoe" from Jay's descriptions. Mr. Smouse already knows the whole story, because Vincent called to apologize from a safe distance, convinced his uncle would toast the boys like marshmallows. Then comes the real surprise: the card was never in danger of causing a family disaster. Jay's dad bought it for Jay, to start him on his own collection and build a stronger bond between them, and it is only a twelve-dollar replica of his own first card. Father and son head off to explore the convention together, both quietly pleased to discover they had the same idea about spending time with each other. Zoe promises to catch up, but first she has a call to make. She dials her mom and asks, "So, do you think we could get our nails done for the dance?"