The most common questions you’ll ever hear a kid ask their parents are, “Can we get a dog?”, “What about a cat?”, “Maybe even a gerbil?” But for 5-year-old me, a troublemaker fresh into Pre-k, pets were out of the question.

My preschool had a not-so-unique system for promoting good behavior. At the end of each day, teachers would give every student a colored card representing how they behaved that day: green cards meant the student was good, red cards meant the student was bad, and yellow cards were neutral. By my third week, I collected a total of ten red cards, four yellow cards and only a single green card.

To say my mom was disappointed by my poor conduct would be an understatement. Every day, she’d ask me why I acted the way I did, and every day I would respond with, “I dunno. Can we get a dog?” The answer was always no, given that both my mom and I are allergic to dogs. However, this pestering question would eventually become my mom’s solution to my bad behavior.

It wasn’t long before I came home from school, listening to my mom repeat her spiel; this time, however, she suggested something new.

“If you can get ten green cards in a row, I’ll buy you a hamster,” she said jokingly, failing to consider how seriously I would take on the challenge.

This was the opportunity of a lifetime. I’d begged for a pet countless times, but I had never been offered one. The fact that it was coming from the final adjudicator made it all the more real. For the next week and a half, I behaved in a way that made my teachers wonder whether I had been switched out with a doppelganger. Instead of talking during lessons, I raised my hand and asked relevant questions. Instead of fooling around in between classes, I helped out my peers. I held my breath until my teacher handed me that bright green card on the tenth day. My face was even brighter as I told my mom the news.

Unprepared to house a pet, my mom found herself wishing for the first time in her life that I would misbehave. But as she walked with me into the pet store, hand in hand, she smiled bigger than I had ever seen.