The Case of the Wilted Broccoli (2 page)

Elon and Kazuki startled at first, then caught on instantly, ducking and twisting, pulling out their own sabers and using the Force to hold Linden back.

In a fierce series of blocks and counterstrikes, the battle continued until Kazuki called out, "Got you!"

"No," Linden yelled, "Bobby blocked you."

Kazuki stared into empty space. "Oh, right, sorry about that." He turned and fought a wicked one-on-one battle against Bobby only he could see, while Linden and his twin-brother, Elon, cheered them on.
 

Bobby was the fourth member of their group. They had invented him two years ago, in the first grade, when they started turning in homework assignments for him. Their first grade teacher caught on pretty quick, and she'd even grade and return his homework and call on him in class. Of course, he never answered. Gradually word got around, and most of the school knew about Bobby now. He even won a perfect attendance award last year from the principal.
 

After recess, sweaty from the playground, they walked back to the third-grade classroom. Linden stuffed his lunchbox into his backpack, but Elon was hot lunch, so he walked into class empty-handed.

They took their seats in the Japanese classroom for the afternoon.
 

"
Gakusei kon'nichiwa. Chakuseki sa sete kudasai,
" their teacher called out.

"
Kon'nichiwa
," the kids replied in unison, taking their seats as instructed and saying hello.

Elon, sitting one table over, rubbed his stomach and whispered, "I don't feel so good," to Linden.

"Go to the office then," Linden said, glancing over at him.

Elon nodded.

While the teacher handed out papers, Linden forgot about Elon and started to think about their science-fair project. Elon wanted to build an electric self-flying airplane. The science-fair committee had been doubtful they could do it. But the three siblings demonstrated the Lego robot they'd built during the summer to clean up Legos (their mom had said, "How meta!"), and Willow showed off the computer program she'd written from scratch to chat with her friends over the Internet. Suddenly the committee was convinced.

Linden drew shapes in his head, thinking about the design. Elon was just plain awesome at building physical stuff, and Willow was going to write most of the computer code, so that left Linden with planning the structure and components. The plane needed to carry itself, a battery, a computer chip, a camera, and a transmitter to get the pictures back to the ground. He wondered whether Elon wanted to just take pictures to view later, or if he expected to see the video from the camera live while the drone was in the air.
 

He turned to whisper the question to Elon, but his seat was empty. He must have gone to the office after all. As Linden looked around, he noticed a lot of empty chairs, which was funny, because when they started school today, no one was absent.

CHAPTER THREE

O
N
W
EDNESDAY
, W
ILLOW
'
S
parents dropped them off at school. Elon and Linden ran outside to play while she met Atlanta in the cafeteria to hang out before school started. The ever-present food odors made her nauseous and glad she'd brought lunch from home.

"Let's get out of here," Atlanta said, obviously feeling the same way.

Willow nodded and they walked upstairs.
 

After being sick on Monday, Willow and Elon had to stay home on Tuesday. It was her first time back since leaving the classroom covered in vomit. Aside from Atlanta and Basil asking if she was okay, and a snide comment from Natalie, most of the rest of the class seemed to have forgotten about her throwing up on Monday. With so many kids that went home sick, apparently even projectile vomiting wasn't that remarkable.
 

"Twenty-three kids went home sick on Monday," Atlanta said. "The school nurse says it was stomach flu."

"I don't think so," Willow said. "It was what I ate." Even thinking about Monday's lunch made her queasy.

"Me, too," she said, but then the teacher came in and they had to cut their conversation short. They spent the morning learning kanji for foods and writing essays in Japanese about what their families ate at home. Then they had to read the essays out loud.

When Atlanta read "
Watashinokazoku wa yūshoku no tame ni inu o tabeta
," the class broke into laughter, because she said her family eats dogs.
 

"
Furankufuruto
," Akiyama Sensei corrected.

Later that day, after lunch, they went to Mrs. Dozen's classroom. Willow looked for the snake on entering, but Mr. E and his cage were gone. He'd been replaced by, of all things, an armadillo in a baby playpen.
 

The morning food theme continued, a conspiracy between their English and Japanese teachers.

Mrs. Dozen started class by showing them how to use a bread-maker. She mixed flour, yeast, salt and water, and then dumped the ingredients into the bread-maker. After they each had a turn to watch the mixer in action, they took their seats.

"Where did the flour come from?" the teacher asked as the smell of warming dough wafted over the room.

She called on Maddie, a quiet girl sitting near the front.

"The grocery store," Maddie said.

"True," Mrs. Dozen said as she drew a box toward the right side of the board and wrote the word 'Store' inside the box. "Where did the grocery store get it? Any ideas?"

"A farm," Basil yelled out.

Mrs. Dozen walked to the other end of the long board, and made another box with the word "Farm" inside it. Then she looked at the white bag of flour with the yellow label. "Correct, but I'm pretty sure wheat doesn't grow in the form of a bag containing flour. Other thoughts?"

"A flour mill," Willow said, waving her hand in the air.

"Right, Willow," Mrs. Dozen said, as she added a box in the middle with the label "Mill". "What does the mill do?"

"Grinds the wheat seeds into flour."

"Very good, Willow. Now, how does the wheat get to the mill?"

Hands went up.

By the time they were done, a long diagram on the board stretched from the farm to Mrs. Dozen's kitchen, and in between sat trucks, mills, grain silos, and warehouses.
 

Mrs. Dozen held up her hands for quiet. "How far do you think the food you eat has to travel from the place where it was grown or raised, to get to your plate?"

"A hundred miles," Basil said.
 

"Two hundred," Atlanta said.

"Five hundred miles," Willow said.

Mrs. Dozen picked up an orange off her desk and tossed it into the air while looking at it admiringly. "Where do oranges grow? How far away is that?"

Alice had her hand raised. "Florida. I saw orange farms when I visited."

Mrs. Dozen nodded. "They grow in warm places like Florida, California, and Texas." She picked up a banana. "Where does this come from?"

No hands went up.
 

The teacher waited for a minute. "Even warmer places, tropical places. Mexico, Ecuador, Columbia, Panama. Do you think a truck drove this banana from Columbia to Portland? On average, the food you eat has traveled one thousand, five hundred miles to get to your plate. That means some has traveled less, but some has traveled more, much more. "
 

Now the diagram on the board got airplanes. And after a discussion about how some fruits and vegetables have to be shipped before they're ready to eat (imagine mushy bananas bouncing around in a cargo hold), she also added ripening rooms at the distributor. They talked about trucks driving long distances across the United States, and how they needed air conditioning to keep the food cold, and how that added to the cost and environmental impact.

"Mrs. Dozen," Willow called out loud with her hand raised.

"Yes?"

"We raised money to get local, organic food in the cafeteria. I donated my own money. Where does that food come from?"

"Good question. The amount of money raised was about a hundred and twenty dollars per student. The purpose was to get local, organic food. There's no single definition of how far is still local, but often it's considered four hundred miles or less."

"So our lunch average is less than four hundred?" Willow asked.

"Not exactly. How many meals does a hundred and twenty dollars buy?"

The class shook their heads.

Basil raised his hand. "Lunch costs two dollars and twenty cents. So it's one hundred and twenty divided by two dollars and twenty cents."

Mrs. Dozen wrote the numbers on the board and did the math. It worked out to fifty-four lunches. But now she shook her head. "The cost of the ingredients is not the total cost of your lunch. Who makes your lunch?"

"Miss Berry!" Willow called out.

"Exactly. Miss Berry and other cafeteria staffed are employed by the school. But your lunch is also partly subsidized by the school, which means that you pay less than the full price. But it's still a good estimate, and if we don't have an exact number, an estimate is better than nothing."

Now she wrote more math on the board.

"The school year is more than fifty-four days long. It's about one hundred and seventy days. Which means that roughly one in three days is the local food you've paid for. So on about a third of days, the average distance your food travels is less than four hundred miles. All the rest comes from a lot farther away." She pointed to "1500" on the board.

Then the bread-maker dinged and the class rushed over.
 

Basil and Willow jockeyed for a place in line to get a slice. She wasn't exactly sure how long or how far the bread had to travel to get into her stomach, but it still tasted great.

CHAPTER FOUR

E
LON
AND
L
INDEN
sat together on the bus home. Elon drew a picture of an airplane with swept-back wings and a propeller in his notebook while Linden watched over his shoulder.

"We need to use a quadcopter, not a fixed-wing plane," Linden said. "A quadcopter is like a helicopter with four rotors, one at each corner." A football flew through the air, thrown from one of the forward rows, and Linden ducked just in time. It sailed overhead and went right out the window. "Oh, snap. Did you see--?"

"I know what a quadcopter is," Elon said, ignoring the football and other insanities of the school bus. "But a plane will be faster and have a longer flight time." He'd researched all kinds of autonomous drones before suggesting the project to his brother and sister.

"True, but you also want to put a camera on it. A quadcopter can hold steady to take better pictures."

Elon knew Linden was right, but he still had dreams of their drone swooping in like a fighter plane.

Linden must have seen the hesitation in his face. "Quadcopters can hover and pick up and drop off stuff. Some guys in England even built a copter that can carry a person!"
 

Elon jumped out of his seat. "Can we build one like that?"

"Sit down back there!" the bus driver called.

Linden shook his head. "No, but we can definitely carry the camera. We might be able to do a small grappling hook."

"Could we pick up someone's backpack?"

Linden shook his head no.

"Someone's lunch box?"

"No."

"A baseball?" Elon asked.

"Uh-uh."

Elon threw his hands up in the air. "Well then, exactly what can we carry?"

"Maybe a piece of paper."

"A piece of paper? What good is a piece of paper?"

Linden's head drooped. "Forget it."

Elon realized he'd hurt his brother's feelings. He needed Linden's help, though, so he had to be more diplomatic.
 

"Can you explain why?" Elon asked in his nicest voice.

Linden looked up. "We have to buy an ArduPilot, a frame, battery, engines, controller, and transmitter. We're borrowing the camera from dad. Between the three of us, we have barely enough money. If we want to carry more weight, we need bigger engines, which cost more money."

"How much more for the bigger engines?" Elon asked.

"Fifteen dollars."

"We can get that. We can wash mom and dad's cars. Twice." The going rate was four dollars per car.

"But if we have bigger engines," Linden said, "then we need a bigger battery and bigger motor controllers, and if we have those, then we need a bigger frame."

"How much does all of that cost?"

"A hundred dollars," Linden said. Just then two wrestling boys flew into their seat, landing in Linden's lap.

"Stay in your own seats!" the bus driver yelled.

The wrestling boys went back across the aisle.

Elon did the math in his head. They needed to have the project done in three weeks. He didn't want to wash mom and dad's cars twenty-five times, and besides, they probably wouldn't pay to have them washed more than once per day.
 

"OK, a piece of paper it is. We'll figure out something to do with that. Show me the design."

Linden flipped open his notebook and showed off his plans. "We'll use Willow's laptop to monitor the drone's camera in real-time. We can take photos or video."

"How fast can it go?" Elon asked. He had a vision of racing after cars to take pictures of their license plates.

"Twenty miles per hour. At least."

So not racing after cars. "Well, how far can it go?"

"It should be able to fly for fifteen to twenty minutes, but it depends on exactly how heavy it is."

Elon was deep in thought when he noticed Linden staring at him. "I'm trying to figure out something useful we can do," Elon explained. "The science fair judges are going to ask what we learned or what we can use the invention for."

"We can use it to take pictures of criminals," Linden said. "You know, we can match people with the wanted posters at the post office."

Elon nodded vigorously. "Sure, or we could pick up our homework at school when we're absent."

Willow was sitting four rows back, but she must have been able to hear their conversation, because she popped up and yelled, "Or we can use it to fly over a neighborhood and take pictures of all the animals to find lost dogs."