Brendan Buckley's Sixth-Grade Experiment (26 page)

I started down the hall. My bedroom door, which I remembered having closed on purpose, was cracked. Was Morgan in my room? A bunch of thoughts flooded my mind at once:
She can't just go into my room without me! Did I pick up my dirty underwear? But if she feels comfortable enough to go into my room, then we must be pretty good friends. Maybe even best friends. You can't be best friends with a girl!
My thoughts made me feel all jumbled up inside, like a scrambled radio signal.

I peered through the opened door. Morgan stood looking down at my desk, on top of which sat my logbook!

I burst into the room. “That's private!” I cried.

She spun around, eyes wide. Her face turned pinker
by the second. “I—I didn't look. I would never look.” She started to rush past me out the door.

“Wait.” I pulled her back inside and shut the door. When I turned around, we were about a centimeter from each other's faces. I cleared my throat and stepped back.

She looked down. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have come into your room without asking. I just wanted to see Einstein's tank … one last time.” She looked at me earnestly. “I swear I would never look at your journal.”

“It's a logbook,” I said.

“Right. Your logbook.”

This is it
, I thought.
My chance
. I would make it official. Right then. I would ask Morgan if she wanted to be my girlfriend. It didn't matter what Khal thought.

“Mor—”

“I've been—”

“Would you—”

“Maybe we—”

If we had been at a dance we would've been stepping all over each other's feet.

“You can go first,” I said, trying to be gentlemanly, like Gladys had told me to be after sitting next to Morgan at the tournament. “Here.” I gestured toward my outer space bedspread.

Morgan pulled in her bottom lip. She went and sat on Jupiter. “I'm really glad we got partnered together for the science contest,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, sitting on the sun. I held on to the
bedpost as if I were afraid a black hole might open between us and suck us in. I kept hearing the sentence Mr. H had taught us to help us memorize the order of the planets:
Mary's violet eyes make John stay up nights permanently
. (Pluto is no longer considered the ninth planet, of course, but he still wanted us to learn it as a dwarf planet.)

Instead of hearing
Mary's
, though, I heard
Morgan's
, and I wasn't just
thinking
about her eyes, like that John guy. I was staring into them.

Morgan's velvet eyes make Jupiter silly.…

I shook my head, which had clouded over like a Puget Sound fog. What was wrong with me?
Pull yourself together, man
!

“I've been wondering,” Morgan continued. “I mean … we've been spending a lot of time together.”

“Yeah, I know.” Maybe this wouldn't be so hard after all. It sounded as if she was headed in the same direction I'd been planning to go.

“I was thinking …”

“Me too!” I said.

She blinked a few times. “Really? You were wondering if we should spend less time together so we don't end up not having any other friends?”

“Oh.” The disappointed sound came out before I could stop it. It felt as if someone had hammer-fisted
me
on the head this time.

Morgan's eyes got even rounder than usual. “That's not what you were thinking, was it?”

I nodded quickly. “No—I mean, yes! You're exactly right.” I rubbed my sweaty palms on my pants, trying to think of what to say. “I've been thinking I need to start hanging more with my friends. You know, Khal and Oscar and Marcus. They're my crew, after all.” I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, then back at my hands.

“Right. Your crew.” She traced Saturn's rings with her finger. “Do you consider me a friend, too?”

“Um …” I had a sick feeling in my stomach. This was not going well at all.

“That's okay. I understand. You were just being nice because I was new and all that. You probably only spent time with me because you wanted to win the competition. And on the boat”—it was the first time either of us had mentioned that day since it'd happened—“we were just caught up in the excitement of learning we'd been chosen as finalists, right?” She stood as if she was planning to leave.

I grabbed her wrist. “Wait! That's not it at all.”

She pulled her hand away and crossed her arms over her stomach.

“I mean, maybe at first I was just being nice. And of course I wanted to win. But I
do
like you. You're smart and funny … and, and …”

I heard Khal's voice in my head.
Where's your
baekjul boolgool,
man?

“And I liked holding your hand.” I said it quickly, then looked over at Einstein's tank. It was so quiet I thought I could hear the beads of sweat popping from my forehead.

Morgan sat again—on Venus this time. “I liked holding your hand, too.”

“Do you want to hold hands now?” I asked.

“Sure.”

We reached across Mercury. Our fingers had just touched when someone knocked on the door. We jerked our hands back into our laps, as if we'd been burned by the planet's hot gases.

“Brendan, you in there?” Dad called.

“Yes,” I said, trying to sound as casual as possible, even though every molecule in my body was ricocheting around from the heat of the last few moments.

“It's time to play the game,” Dad said. “You and your friends going to join us?”

“Sure. Be there in a minute.”

I looked at Morgan, then took her hand again, hoping mine didn't feel too sweaty. “I have something for you,” I said. Grandpa Ed and I had spent some extra time in the lapidary shop over the past few weeks. He'd shown me how to cut and polish a cabochon—or cab, as they were called in the rock club world. I hadn't been exactly sure who I was making it for, but right then, I knew.

“Ooh, a surprise. I love surprises.”

“Me too,” I said, thinking about how surprising it was to be sitting on my bed holding a girl's hand.

“Soooo?” she said, glancing around.

“Oh, right.” I jumped up and went to my desk. I pulled out the middle drawer and found the rose quartz cab—flat on the bottom, concave across the top, and shaped like a heart.

When I turned she was standing in the middle of the room.

“Here,” I said, thrusting it at her before I lost my nerve. “This is for you.”

Her eyes opened wide. She beamed and grasped the pink stone to her chest. Then she pecked me on the cheek. “It's
beautiful
! I love it. Thank you.” She gazed at the heart again, smiling.

I had a feeling there would be more hand-holding in Morgan's and my future, and that made me smile, too.

Christmas morning, I woke up with a strange feeling in my stomach. It wasn't hunger, even though Mom's sticky buns already filled the air with a fantastic cinnamony smell. And it wasn't eagerness to get to the presents.

It was sadness.

December 25 was Grampa Clem's birthday. He'd always taken pride in being born on the same day as Jesus.

I'd known it was coming, of course. Dad had been talking to Gladys for a while about visiting the cemetery on Christmas Day. I didn't know if they were going or not, but if they did, I wasn't going with them. That filled-in hole just held some old skin and bones—not my Grampa Clem.

There was a knock on my door. I pushed myself up in bed and rubbed my eyes. “Come in,” I said.

Dad poked his head in. “You up?” he asked. A few
years back, I would have been up at the crack of dawn, bouncing on my parents' bed, begging to open presents. But not anymore.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just thinking.”

“Oh yeah? 'Bout what?” Dad stepped into the room and flipped on the light. He held something long and skinny wrapped in garbage bags.

“Grampa Clem.”

“Mmm.” He glanced at the shelf over Einstein's tank. “That's quite a collection you've got going.”

“Twenty-two specimens,” I said. “Nothing close to Grandpa Ed's, though.”

Dad picked up a quartz crystal from the dig back in August. “Is this one of the rocks I found in the garbage?”

I felt my face scrunch. “You put those back on my desk?”

“Who'd you think did?”

I shrugged. “Mom.”

Dad nodded. “I can see why you might think that.” He looked at the crystal more closely. “I found them when I was emptying your trash can. Didn't think they belonged there.” He put the quartz back on the shelf. “So, you ready to open your first present?” He held out the long, skinny whatever-it-was.

As soon as I grasped it in my hand, I knew. A fishing pole.

I pulled off the top bag and shook the rod free. “Grampa Clem's pole,” I said, my heart starting to
thump. “I wondered what Gladys had done with it … I didn't want to ask.”

“It's yours now,” Dad said. He put his hands on my shoulders. They didn't feel like weights this time. More like Khal's football pads. “My dad might not have been a very large man, but he sure left a large hole.”

My heart squeezed. “Yeah,” I said.

Dad pulled me into his chest. My eyes started to sting, but I swallowed it all back down.

He made space between us again. “Every day I find myself thinking about what he'd say about this or that, wishing he could see me finishing my degree.…”

I'd heard Dad say that all sons wanted their dads' approval, but I'd never thought about that including him.

I looked for the scratch on the soft handle from when Grampa Clem almost lost his pole off the pier. The big fish that had nearly pulled the pole—and Grampa Clem—over the railing had gotten away, of course.

“How'd you like to go fishing this morning, before we open the rest of the presents?”

I smiled. “Really? That would be great.”

“All right. Get yourself ready and we'll get out of here.” He slapped me on the back and started to leave the room.

“Dad—” I swallowed. I was a scientist unsure about what to do or the outcome of my next step.

Dad stood in the doorway.

“Do you think I'm weird …?”

Dad's eyebrows pulled together.

“I mean, for liking science and … and school?”

He drew his chin into his chest. “Why would you think that?” He stepped back into the room and pushed the door almost closed.

“I heard you talking to Mom.” I bit on the inside of my lip. “You called me an egghead.”

Dad's jaw went slack. “Oh.” He looked at the floor, then peered at me through squinty eyes. He studied me as if I were a page in one of his books and he was having a hard time with the subject. “Look, Bren, I didn't mean … I mean, there's nothing wrong with being good at school.”

“But you think I should be tougher.”

Dad pointed to the bed and we sat, side by side.

“Your grampa was a strong, proud, tough man.
Too
tough on me and my brother, at times. Seemed like all he cared about was me getting better grades than I ever could, ever did. I worked so hard to make him proud … in baseball, at the academy. But it never seemed to be good enough.” Dad looked down at his hands—open, empty.

“Your grampa was not a perfect man, Bren. And I'm not, either. I've been too hard on you at points, just like my dad was too hard on me.” Dad put his hand on my shoulder and gazed at my face. “The last thing I want is for you to feel like I did—like you're always coming up short.… I couldn't ask for a better son.” His eyes started
to water and he looked away. The words that came next came out as a whisper, but I heard them loud and clear: “I love you, you know.”

I put my arm around his back and held on. “I love you, too, Dad. And I'm really proud of you for going back to school.”