Minerva Clark Gets a Clue (5 page)

“Mark! I got it! Gawd!” I wish I could say that only your mom or dad have the ability to make you roll your
eyes, but it can happen with your lecturey older brother, too.

Suddenly, the phone rang. With all the cell phones in the house, almost no one ever called on the real phone, which hung on the kitchen wall. Morgan answered it; we heard a funny click and traded glances. Morgan pressed a button and put us on speaker phone.

We made our voices go all high. In unison we said, “Hi, Charlie!”

Our dad's name was actually Howard, but because we never really saw him, and when we talked to him it was always on speaker phone, we called him Charlie, the invisible boss from
Charlie's Angels
.

“I just called to see how your art opening went, Mark,” said Dad. He was at that moment in New York on business.

“It's tonight,” said Mark Clark. “Starts at seven.”

“I knew that!” said Dad, which he obviously didn't.

For a few minutes Mark Clark and Dad talked about Mark's new exhibit, which I, like my dad, had forgotten about completely. Since it had nothing to do with me—or not at that very moment, anyway—I spaced out. I thought about what my hair must have looked like when I fell off DDR. It had been in a ponytail, but the scrunchie had come out. I must have looked monster scary.

Then I heard Mark Clark say, “I bet I can get Minerva to give me a hand.”

“Sure,” I said automatically. I thought maybe he was talking about pouring the rigatoni into the strainer, or making garlic bread, or something.

“It won't take long,” said Mark Clark.

“Whatever.” I wondered if maybe the scrunchie was still on the floor of the arcade. Someone had probably taken it, or maybe the janitor picked it up. Would a scrunchie be something the janitor would take to the lost and found, or would he toss it out? I was pretty sure that he would toss out a plain elastic ponytail holder, because it looked so much like a rubber band. This is what I was thinking about when I said yes to the thing that would change my life.

“Don't say okay until you know what you're agreeing to,” said Charlie over the speaker phone.

But it was too late. I'd already said okay. That was the bad part about living with all boys. Once you said you'd do something, you were expected to do it.

SEVEN THIRTY P.M. WORST DAY IN
the Life of Minerva Suzanne Clark. Trapped in the backseat of the Electric Matador.

“I'm not sitting in front of a bunch of people with electrodes connected to my head,” I said.

Mark Clark, Quills, and I were driving downtown to the Narino Art Gallery, where Mark Clark was having an art show of his fractals.

“You already said yes,” said Mark Clark. “I need you to help me out. And once they see the fractal I'll make from your brain waves, everyone will want one. You'll be the most popular kid at the gallery.”

“I'll be the only kid at the gallery.”

“That should make you feel better, then. No one
to see Mark Clark make a fool out of ya,” said Quills.

“I don't want to do it. You shouldn't make me do something I don't want to do. It's bad parenting.”

Quills and Mark Clark roared with laughter. Quills spit out the SweetTart he was sucking on. I then heard about eight hundred hours' worth of stories about how it was when they were growing up with Mom and Dad living together in Casa Clark, and how they had to clean the garage every Saturday and take showers every night and blah blah blah.

We parked two blocks away from the Narino Gallery, in front of a big warehouse that now housed a fancy sushi place and an antiques store. The air was warm and sticky. I snuck a whiff of my pits; I'd forgotten to put on deodorant after my shower. How could I have forgotten? How could I be so dang stupid all the time?

This was so totally unfair. Inequitable is what it was. Maybe I'd be a Gigantor my whole life, a snarly-headed loser who said yes to stuff without thinking, but I would have a good vocabulary.

Have you ever noticed that all art galleries look just like art galleries do in the movies? It's always wood floors and white walls with a row of pictures all in a line, and not too close. Mark Clark's fractals were big
and bright. They looked like hippie posters dripping with color, or pictures of the human body as seen through an electron microscope, or those bright snowflakes at the end of a kaleidoscope. Sometimes they looked like pictures of complicated shorelines as seen from outer space.

I made a beeline past the fractals to the table at the back of the gallery, where there were all kinds of weird-looking grown-up snacks. I grabbed a handful of pale yellow crackers and stuffed them in my sweatshirt pocket. Then I remembered that Jupiter had taken a long nap in my pocket only hours before. Was it still gross to eat the crackers if no one but me knew Jupiter had been in there?

Mark Clark stood in the middle of a circle of grownups with sleek shoes and good manners. They held glasses of wine that they didn't drink. The ladies all had big rings on their bony fingers. They looked young, but you could tell they weren't. They had very neat hair. I thought they were rich people, and not the computer nerds Mark Clark worked with. Otherwise, they'd know about fractals, wouldn't they?

“… all computer generated,” Mark Clark was saying as I stood next to him. He propped his elbow on my shoulder, as if it were a ledge. “These are basically prints of electronic images derived from mathematical equations.
They're so hypnotic because there's only one shape in the fractal, and it's repeated over and over and over again, to infinity.”

The people around him with the wineglasses nodded.

“A very simple example would be a fractal composed of small squares that creates, let's say, a large propeller shape. If you zoom in on the propeller, you'll see the smaller squares. The computer uses basic geometric shapes to create complex shapes, but if you looked closely at the simple shapes, you'd see the complex shapes inside of them.”

“But how do they know how to form themselves into a propeller?” asked a woman with her blond hair twisted up in a bun.

“That's where the math comes in,” said Mark Clark, rubbing his hands together and grinning in a dorky imitation of a movie villain. “Every equation begins with a seed number. You'll see. At eight o'clock, I'm going to demonstrate how it works.”

The people with the shoes and the wineglasses started talking about the rise of computers in modern life and then, like always, one of them asked Mark Clark a question about why her printer didn't work.

I wandered around and snuck a cracker now and then from my pocket. I had seen all these fractals before. There was “I Am a Rock,” where the seed number was
extracted from something having to do with the way light hit a piece of gray stone in our side yard, and “Groove Is in the Heart,” made from Jupiter's heartbeat.

Through the big glass front door I saw Quills pacing up and down, talking on his cell phone. He was mad about something and almost crashed into one couple hurrying through the door. I wondered if he was talking to that creepy Toc.

Morgan showed up with some girl with a head of very cool blond dreadlocks. Since they were college students, they made a point of standing in front of each fractal and impressing themselves and each other with a lot of big words. I heard the dreadlocks girl say “fantasia of color.” What did that even mean? I thought only boys could be poseurs. Note to self: Ask Reggie. Could girls be poseurs, too?

As the gallery filled up I started getting stomachache nervous. It was almost eight o'clock. The food table had been moved against one wall and another table was being set up by a few computer nerds Mark Clark knew from work. I recognized them because sometimes they came over with their six-packs of beer and family-size bags of M&M's to play video games. They put equipment on the table: a machine Mark Clark had made himself from parts he got at Radio Shack, a laptop, some kind of a printer, and other stuff.

I said “Hey” to DeMaio, who was Mark Clark's assistant at work. DeMaio had a first name, but no one ever used it. He was just DeMaio. He was the tallest person I knew, and he had kinky black hair that he wore in a ponytail. It was so kinky the ponytail looked like a pinecone.

DeMaio was the one who got Mark Clark into fractals. Mark Clark said DeMaio was a fractal freak, and I knew he was here tonight to deliver his Fractal Manifesto. Mark Clark is just that kind of geek: He knows people who have manifestos.

“Everyone! Gather round!” yelled DeMaio to the people in the gallery. He was wearing a black velvet cloak, which made me think of magicians. DeMaio gestured with his long arms all dramatically. “Come see a fractal in the making!”

Mark Clark stood with his back to the gathering crowd. He booted up his laptop, turned on his machine, which was about the size of a microwave, but with various colored switches and dials, and plugged in a bunch of thin gray wires.

I felt my hands start to sweat.

I felt my feet start to sweat.

“Sit down, Min,” he said. I sat in a white wooden chair next to the table. I started bouncing my leg, all nervous. Why why
WHY
had I said I'd do this?
This reminded me of one of my all-time best rebuses:

Sitting duck. That was me.

From where I sat I could see straight through the middle of the gallery and out the front door. Quills was still on his cell phone. The sky behind him was the same color as a bruise I once got on my thigh when I fell off my skateboard. Suddenly, there was a crack of thunder, like giants were bowling. More thunder. Quills turned up the collar of his army jacket; it whipped against his cheek in the wind.

Mark Clark took the spongy ends of the electrodes and dipped them in a bowl of salt water. He told the crowd salt water conducts electricity best.

He then put one electrode on each temple, one behind my ear, and one smack in the middle of my forehead. Suddenly, I wasn't just nervous, but a little pissed off. Mark Clark was making me look stupid, with this electrode in the middle of my forehead, like I was some doofus in a lab experiment.

All this time, DeMaio was giving his manifesto. You could tell he loved having an audience. “What one must
appreciate is not simply the beauty of the fractals, but also their
perfection
.”

Mark Clark fiddled with his machines. As if from far away, I heard him tell DeMaio to tell his audience that he was now recording my brain waves on his laptop. Everyone was staring at me like I was some freak show freak. I
was
a freak show freak. Why else would my parents have basically left me to be raised by my brothers, who turned me into a lab rat for art?

“Even the brain waves of a thirteen-year-old girl can produce a gloriously perfect work of art,” DeMaio was saying. “Perfect and beautiful. Total perfection.”

The audience smirked—I knew that look!—and a clap of thunder hit us, as if a giant had dropped a bowling ball right onto the roof.

DeMaio jumped, startled. He was saying, “beauty of perfection.”

Then it was like a black curtain came down in front of a stage, only the curtain was smack in front of my eyeballs. That's the last thing I remember: the word “perfection” and that window-rattling thunder, before everything went black.

WHEN I OPENED MY EYES I
thought I was in my room. But the bed wasn't my bed. It was too high. The light in the room was low and the air smelled funny, sour but clean. The bed was surrounded by white curtains. Then Mark Clark's face was in front of mine. He bent over me. He said, “Thank God.”

Quills stood at his shoulder, tugging at his short crayon-yellow blond hair. “Jeez, Min, you scared the living sh—snot out of us.”

Morgan stood up from where he sat in a chair on the other side of my bed. He'd taken off his earflap hat. Unlike the rest of us Clarks who had thick reddish brown hair, Morgan had a mess of wispy dirty-blond curls that were plastered against the sides of his head, giving him a
mean case of hat hair. “I'll get the doc,” he said, slipping through the curtains.

Was I in the hospital? For some reason, my teeth hurt, as if I had just had my braces tightened and gotten new elastics.

Mark Clark took my hand. He looked … Could he have been
crying
?

“Why am I here?” I asked. Someone had taken off my shoes and socks. For some reason, I kept thinking, “Perfection.”

Perfection?

Mark Clark must have known I was all right, because he clicked into semilecture mode and started giving me some long sciencey explanation about how the Narino Gallery was in a one-hundred-year-old brick building and had one-hundred-year-old electrical outlets. The building was struck by lightning and there was a power surge, which is when too much electrical power is forced through the lines, and then somehow, because I was hooked up to Mark Clark's fractal-making laptop, the electricity surged into me. It didn't help that I was wearing my purple Chuck Taylor high tops, with their thin soles, which allowed the electricity to zap right on up to the top of my brain. Or something like that.