Brendan Buckley's Sixth-Grade Experiment (6 page)

“Morgan, would you assist me, please?”

The jealousy bug wormed around inside my chest.

Morgan got that goofy smile on her face again and went to the front.

“I need one more assistant. Brendan …”

The jolt of hearing my name made my face tingle and my heart race. I jumped up and hurried forward like a contestant on Gladys's favorite game show,
The Price Is Right
.

Mr. H handed me the green balloon, to which he'd tied a string. He gave the red balloon, also on a string, to Morgan. “If you would be so kind as to rub these latex spheres on your heads.” He motioned to the balloons.

I hesitated. Rub a balloon on my head? I knew what would happen if I did that. I'd have one giant Afro. But for Mr. H, I'd do it.

We both started rubbing.
Scritch, scritch, scritch
. Morgan's hair jumped up and stuck to the balloon. I could feel the static electricity building. By the time this was over, I would look like the electrocuted stick figure on Mr. H's sign.

“Now,” Mr. Hammond said, “hold your balloons by the strings and bring them near each other.”

I didn't want to have to get too close to Morgan—especially in front of the whole class—but again, for Mr. H and for the sake of science, I went along. We brought our balloons together. They separated, as if under a magic spell. Of course, it wasn't magic. Just two negatively charged balloons repelling each other.

Morgan leaned in and whispered, “Same charges repel.”

“Yeah. I know,” I whispered back.

“Now,” Mr. H said again, “watch this.” He put a piece of paper between the balloons.
Swup
. They glommed together.

“Ooo, they're kissing!” Cordé shouted out. I felt my face getting warm.

Mr. H pulled out the paper and the balloons moved away from each other. “Uh-oh. Lovers' quarrel,” Javier said. More giggles.

“Can we get them to make up somehow?” Mr.
Hammond asked. Did he have to play into all this mushy stuff? It was bad enough we had to talk about it in health.

Lauren Dweck spoke up. “Use the paper again.”

Mr. H slipped the paper between the balloons and they went right back to sucking face.

“Can anyone give me a scientific explanation for what we're witnessing here?”

Morgan jumped in so fast I didn't have a chance. “The balloons picked up electrons from our hair, giving them an overall negative charge. Like charges repel; therefore the balloons moved away from each other.”

“Very good. And now?” Mr. H asked, looking down at the stuck-together balloons.

“It looks to me like Brendan's and Morgan's balloons are
attracted
to each other!” Cordé said. Some of the guys laughed, including Kahl. I scowled at my best friend out of the corner of my eye. He'd better watch it.

“Actually,” I said, “they're attracted to the paper, which has a positive charge.
Not
to each other.”

“That's right, Brendan,” Mr. H said. “Opposite charges attract. Same charges repel. Hopefully, this was just a review for everyone, but if you didn't know it before, you should learn it now. Let's give our volunteers a round of applause.”

Everyone clapped. I kept my eyes down and returned to my seat. Khal nudged my arm. I ignored him.

Mr. Hammond went on to talk about how electrons
move around and that's where electricity comes from. I had to write like lightning, but I got it all down. By the time he was done, I felt all charged up, like a big rain cloud.

“Now, I have a very important announcement to make,” Mr. H said. “This year, we have the opportunity to participate in an online science competition for middle school students. The theme is ‘Making the World Better.' ”

A science competition!
Yes!
I buzzed from head to toe.

“There are divisions for sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade teams, and each team must consist of at least two people.…”

I bumped Khal's elbow with mine.

“Regional finalists will be chosen from across the United States.”

Kids from all over the country? This was huge!

“The winning team will receive a nice sum of money—”

“Ka
-ching
,” Khal whispered. “Now we're talking.”

“—to enhance their school's science program.”

Khal groaned in disappointment.

“They will also get to travel to an institute of higher learning to work with top scientists in the field of their project.”

Whoa
. Now,
that
would be cool!

Mr. H smiled. “I believe we have some finalist
potential in this room.” His eyes dared us to rise to the challenge. “Who knows? Maybe even a first-place team.”

I grinned. Winning the top prize in a national science competition … No touchdown, no matter how impressive, could even come
near
that.

That Friday I was still researching ideas for science projects. Mr. Hammond had given us two weeks to come up with our proposals. He would pair us up based on common interest and leave it to us to choose between our two proposals or come up with a third idea. Khalfani and I had agreed: No matter what, we would be partners.

I sat at my computer, rubbing my almost-pinky-sized quartz between my fingers. I'd discovered it and a few of the other fragments next to a pile of folded laundry on my desk when I'd gotten home from the first day of school. Mom had probably seen them in my garbage can and couldn't just leave them there.
Oh well
, I'd thought.
I'll keep them for now
. I could replace them with bigger ones later.

I turned my attention back to my assignment. I wanted my experiment to be focused on something
big
,
something that really mattered. I'd know I'd found the right project idea when I got the Jitters—that tingling, twitching, electrical-storm feeling in my body that came on whenever I had a whole bunch of questions about something.

Another half hour of browsing the Internet passed, and I still hadn't come up with a single idea—nothing that lit the flame in my Bunsen burner, anyway.

I went to find Dad. Maybe he'd play a few rounds of Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2 with me. I'd already finished my homework from that day, spent some time observing Einstein, and practiced my
hyung
for Tae Kwon Do. I needed to come up with a proposal, and playing video games sometimes sparked good ideas in my brain.

Hey … maybe there was a science experiment in
that
. If I researched the connection between playing video games and getting good ideas, I'd have to play Mario hundreds, maybe even thousands, of times. That wouldn't be too bad—for the sake of science, of course.

Dad sat at his desk in the basement, hunched over a book. He'd turned an unfinished side room into his study. It was dark everywhere except for the small desk lamp and the glow of the computer's wiggly neon screen saver that reminded me of Proterozoic amoebas swimming around in dark, uninhabited ocean waters.

I knocked on the hollow wooden door to get his attention. He glanced my way but went right back to his
book. His square jaw worked a piece of gum. “Hey, buddy, what's up?”

“Do you want to play Nintendo?”

“Done with your homework already?”

“Yeah.”

“Teachers go easy this first week?”

“Actually, they gave us a ton of work. I think they wanted to make sure we know we're not in elementary school anymore.”

“Mmm.” Dad wrote on a yellow legal pad next to his book.

“So, do you want to play?”

“Can't right now. My ton of work is still a ton.” He turned to the computer and opened a blank document. “Later. Promise.”

If Dad said
Promise
, I knew he was good for it. Problem was, when was later? He'd been using that word so often in the last couple of weeks I could have charted its frequency on a line graph.

By nine o'clock, when Dad still hadn't appeared, I got ready for bed, said good night to Mom, and gave Einstein's tank one last squirt. Einstein crawled out from the ivy along one of the jungle vines I'd attached to the side of the tank. I stared into his black dot of an eye, which looked like a blob of extra ink from a ballpoint pen. It sat in the center of a round ridge of skin like a bull's-eye. The skin under his eye was tinged light blue. I
recorded these things in the
Other Observations
section of my green notebook. In the
Questions
section I wrote, “Do all green anoles have a patch of light blue under their eyes? Why?”

Einstein lapped at water droplets on an overhanging leaf, then darted into the shadows.

“Good night, boy.”

A glint from the shelf caught my eye. I put down my notebook and picked up my specimen of slate. I'd found it this summer and decided it would be for Grampa Clem, because it was black and thin like he was, but also because it was sedimentary—rock that had been formed under pressure, just like black people in the United States.

I sat on my bed, loosely grasping the rock. It was barely heavier than a penny. Not at all like the solid presence of Grampa Clem as we sat on the bench outside his and Gladys's apartment, talking about how I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up. He had told me about George Washington Carver—“that man knew about a whole lot more than just peanuts”—and Vivien Thomas, “a black man who taught the nation's top heart surgeons how to do their jobs, back when a black man couldn't even urinate in the same spot as a white man.”

So you go on and be a scientist
, Grampa Clem had said that day on the bench.
You'd be joining a long line of our people who made life-changing discoveries. Made this world a
better place, they did
. He put his hand on my knee.
And you'll make it better yet
.

I still didn't have a proposal for the science competition, but I went to sleep with Grampa Clem's voice in my ears and a little reminder of him in my hand.

At Oscar's house that weekend, Khal, Oscar, and I loaded up our Super Soakers and ran around Oscar's house trying to drench each other. It was a warm day, but not exactly hot. I never stopped moving, because when I did I got goose bumps the size of geodes. Still, I couldn't shake Khalfani. He'd blasted me pretty good a few times.

When Khal went for a refill, I pulled Oscar into a bush at the opposite side of his house from the spigot. Oscar's T-shirt was soaked and water dripped from his hair and face. It was hard to tell what was from the water guns and what was sweat, but clearly, Khal was dominating us both. It was time to team up.

“We'll ambush him,” I said. “You go around back. I'll go around front. As soon as the water is off, attack!” We had a rule that you couldn't squirt someone in the middle of a refill.

Oscar nodded. We crept from our hiding place, nozzles pointed up. I had barely gotten around the corner of the house when I heard Oscar yelling. His voice was getting louder. “Ahhhhhh!”

I looked back just in time to see him ram into me. We both fell to the ground. Khal stood over us, pumping his soaker mercilessly.

I jumped up and stood my ground, shooting at Khal even as a spray of water pummeled my face and chest. When Oscar finally got to his feet, it was two against one, but Khal wouldn't back down. We all just kept screaming and pumping until our soakers were empty.