Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous (11 page)

Spencer's mom expects him to win the Nobel Prize in physics or chemistry someday. Spencer himself has begun to have his doubts.

He's a genius, according to his mother. According to his father too, sort of. When his father says so, it's in the context of, “Okay, genius, knock off the dissertation and go cut the grass!” Or, “Get your genius apparatus off the kitchen table so I can figure out what's wrong with my amplifier.”

His mom, Maureen Maguire Haggerty, admits to being a little pushy sometimes but insists she isn't that way by nature. She was just a happy-go-lucky teenager when she dropped out of college to marry a struggling young musician who happened to be drop-dead gorgeous, and for years they lived large together, gig-to-gig and hand-to-mouth, until Spencer came along. If Spencer had been a normal baby who just slept and pooped all the time, Maureen Maguire Haggerty would have settled down to being a normal mother, whatever that was. Maybe even have more kids.

But from the first week, if not the first hour, Spencer was no ordinary baby. Everybody remarked on how attentive he was. “The nurses all said it looked exactly like you were
thinking
about them, the way you looked at things with your big blue eyes,” his mom likes to say. And of course, he talked early and walked early, knew all the letters of the alphabet by the time he was two, and could read (not recite)
The
Cat
in
the
Hat
before kindergarten.

Raising a genius became a full-time job for Maureen Maguire Haggerty, who bought classical music for him to listen to and
Baby
Einstein
DVDs to watch and flashcards to look at. As soon as he was old enough, she started enrolling him in science clubs and summer enrichment programs. Now that he's on the list for Space Camp, she is quietly checking out universities and scholarships.

Meanwhile his dad, Chuck Haggerty, the struggling musician, bought a house and half a music store. Running the store and teaching guitar and playing local gigs with his band, Whiplash, keeps him so busy he doesn't have much to say about Spencer's educational opportunities—except for the occasional, “Where we gonna get the money for that?” But in spite of his (sometimes) sarcastic comments, he agrees that Spencer is unusually bright and should be encouraged. “As long as we're not too pushy. Let him enjoy being a kid.”

Spencer enjoys being a kid, but he mostly enjoys being a genius. Except lately, not so much.

“What are you doing for the science fair?” Igor asks him as they gather at the gazebo on the first day after winter break.

Igor is not what you'd call the academic type; normally he'd be asking everybody what they got for Christmas (Spencer got a NASA-rated telescope and an Ultra-Tetris game pack). So it's funny, and a little disturbing, that the first thing out of Igor's mouth this morning would be the very thing Spencer is starting to worry about. “Why?”

“'Cause I'm going to have the coolest project this year! I got the idea right after Christmas. I gotta scoop out the competition.” Igor is talking so fast his words pile up on the cold air in little puffs of steam.

“You mean ‘scope out.' What's your project?”

“It's a secret. And I'm gonna do it all by myself with no help. So what's yours?”

Igor's as eager as a squirmy little puppy, so Spencer decides to tell him. Not that it's a big secret: “Mouse maze.”

“Awesome! You mean, with real mice?”

“Duh. What's the alternative—windup mice?”

“What are they supposed to do?”

“Run around in the maze—what else?” These questions are beginning to irritate him.

“Cool! I asked you first because you're sure to have the best project. But it won't beat mine.”

The bus arrives, a blob of yellow on the gray landscape, rolling to a stop in a cloud of exhaust. The Thompsons' SUV pulls up at the same moment and ejects Bender from the backseat, but just as Mrs. Thompson steps on the accelerator, the STOP sign swings out from the side of the bus. She's so frustrated she almost lays on her horn but taps it instead, making a peevish little toot. Bender moseys over to the bus, taking his time to join the end of the line.

Spencer observes the drama while waiting to board.

“They're splitting up,” says Shelly to Miranda, directly behind him.

“What? Who?”

“Bender's folks. Didn't you notice the for sale sign in their yard? His dad moved out when they got back from Colorado.”

“How do you know?”

“Mrs. Thompson asked my mom to review her sales contracts, like Mr. Thompson used to do. It'll be a little extra money since Mom quit her job. But not enough.” As he steps up into the bus, Spencer glances back to see Shelly make a face and nibble a fingernail.

Igor grabs a seat in front of Kaitlynn and immediately turns around to “scoop out” her science project. Jay boards last after dashing across the common. “Slept late,” he explains, settling in next to Spencer. “Winter break ought to last a month, like they do in college.”

The STOP sign snaps, and immediately Mrs. Thompson dodges around the bus, gunning the motor. “Did you hear about Bender?” Spencer asks Jay.

“Hear what?”

“His mom and dad are splitting up.”

“Oh. Too bad. That must be why he's been such a jerk lately.”

“What do you mean,
lately
?”

“Yeah.” Jay yawns again. “Good point. Hey, me and Poppy made our play-offs chart last night. You want to hear my picks?”

“Sure,” Spencer says, knowing he doesn't have much choice. Every January, Jay and his grandfather draw up their projected Super Bowl play-off teams, with winners and point spreads. That means football talk for a whole month, or actually from mid-December to mid-February. Spencer puts up with it. Jay is in the middle of a long-winded comparison between the Patriots and the Giants when Bender yells from the back of the bus.

“HEY!” Heads turn to the back where he sits straight as a pencil. “We didn't stop!”

It's true—instead of slowing and turning on Farm Road 152, the bus barreled right by.

“What's going on?” Bender demands.

“It's not on the route anymore,” Mrs. B calls back.

“How come?”

“Is that any of your business?” The driver is keeping her eyes forward.

Bender slumps back in his seat, arms crossed and brow furrowed, as though thinking through one of his math problems. Meanwhile, a scuffling in the seat in front of Spencer earns a roar from Mrs. B.

“Sit DOWN, Igor!”

“Dang,” Igor mutters, shrinking back to his place in front of Kaitlynn. “Jay!” he hisses across the aisle. “Catch you later!”

“What's he all excited about?” Jay asks Spencer.

“Science fair.”

“Dude.” Jay's jaw creaks with another yawn. “Science fair's not for
weeks
. Who's thinking about it now?”

• • •

Spencer, that's who. Science fair is a very big deal around his house, since he's supposed to win the Nobel Prize someday. Ever since third grade, when his mom came down hard on his desire to build a plaster volcano (“
No
volcanoes. If you can't do something original, don't do anything.”), he'd come up with a bigger and better project every year. This year especially, because sixth-graders are eligible to go to the regional science fair in March and state in May. Then on to nationals in June. He's aiming for state, though nationals would be fine with him too.

His project had sounded promising at first. “I'm going to build a mouse maze,” he told his mom early in October.

“Great. And what will you investigate with the maze?”

He hadn't thought far beyond the basic idea, mostly because he just wanted to build a maze. Mazes were cool. “Um…test their memory.”

“Sounds good. How?”

He did some online research and discovered several nutritional supplements that were supposed to feed the frontal lobe—the section of the brain mostly responsible for memory. The most extravagant claims were for milk thistle, a substance he'd never heard of. But it was available at the local health food store.

So there was his plan: buy the mice, build the maze, run the trials, and keep careful records to determine if herbal supplements really had any effect on the critters' memories. He should have started in November, but his mom signed him up for an interactive “Live Cam in Space” project that required a lot of prep, and his Youth Court duties took up way more time than he expected.

In December, his “normal kid” regulator kicked in: with Christmas and winter break, who wanted to worry about the science fair? After a little prodding from his mom, he purchased three pairs of mice in various colors, which he named Lucy and Linus, Albert and Marie, and George and Martha. He kept the sexes apart, or at least tried to, until he discovered George building a nest. So Georgina went into the ladies' cage and Spencer kept the babies as alternates, even though two of them died tragically young.

The mice are the raw material for his experiment but don't actually get down to business until the first weekend in January. “It'll be awesome,” he tells Jay, who's helping build the maze.

“I guess,” Jay says as he lets Lucy crawl over his hand. He's supposed to be cutting corrugated cardboard strips. “These things feel creepy with their itty bitty paws.”

“Put it back. They shouldn't be handled too much—it might interfere with the data.”

“‘Interfere with the data'? That's so
scientific
, dude. Hey, what if you breed a superior race of mice that remember where you put your gym shoes? You could teach 'em to communicate and sell 'em in little cages so they could be carried right along with us and—argh! It pooped on me!”

“They do that a lot. Put it back, okay? No, not in the boys' cage—the other one!”

“Stupid mice.” Jay returns Lucy to her cage, a converted aquarium with a screen wire top. “For little things, they sure do stink.”

“They eat all the time. So they poop all the time. That's what my research has uncovered so far.”

“Cool. I didn't know science could be so…”

“Interesting? Useful?”

“No…poopy.”

Spencer hadn't realized how science could be so frustrating. Earlier projects from third, fourth, and fifth grade involved bread mold, sunflowers, and earthworms. They had also involved help from his mother, but both agreed he was going to do it on his own this year. That might have been the kind of resolution made to be broken, except that last fall, Chuck Haggerty bought out his partner to become sole owner of the music store, and Maureen Maguire Haggerty is really busy with bookkeeping and taxes. So whenever Spencer starts to ask her a project-related question, she shakes her head. “Uh-uh. It's strictly hands-off this year, remember? Look it up or ask Mr. Betts.”

Mr. Betts is his science teacher but not much better than his mom when it comes to questions. He seldom gives a straight answer but makes suggestions about how you can find it out on your own, which is really helpful. Not.

So Spencer is on his own, even when Georgina croaks and Martha escapes and Lucy and Albert nibble holes in his cardboard maze because he left them in there too long. Or, worst of all, show no improvement in memory whatsoever, even when he ups the dosage or combines memory-boosting supplements. He keeps careful records on his laptop—except for the three days' worth that he accidentally deleted and couldn't get back. And that week he was sick with the flu. But no matter how he views the data, it still says the same thing. Which is nothing.

“Well, then,” his mother says after three weeks. “That's your result. ‘Commonly marketed herbal supplements promoted as memory enhancers are shown to have no discernible effect on laboratory mice.'” She's slicing beef for sukiyaki and can't help looking disappointed because his project isn't sexy enough to go to state.

“That's not very interesting,” Spencer mutters.

“Except now you know what
doesn't
work—”

“You know what?” his dad chimes in while crossing the kitchen from the garage. “I'll bet most scientific research is boring as a box of rocks. Ninety percent, at least.”

“Don't discourage him, Chuck—”

“I'm not. That's just a fact. I'll write a song about it; that'll be interesting.”

What makes it worse is that his peers in the neighborhood—well, some of them…okay, two of them—are really getting into the fair this year. Igor still refuses to say what his project is, only that it'll be the best ever. Hard to believe, because Igor went the volcano route in fourth grade and nothing before. This year, he's not only entering, but he continues to be very interested in the competition.

“What are you doing?” he asks everybody on the bus, even the Brothers Calamity (who just laugh at him). When asked, Matthew shrugs, Kaitlynn cheerfully admits to making a volcano, Miranda's has something to do with plants, and whatever Alice says is soon forgotten. Shelly gasps, “Science project?! My camp application is due in
four
weeks
! I have to finish my demo CD!”

Jay is studying the salt-replacing effects of Gatorade, and Bender is making a shrunken head.

“Wow!” gasps Igor. “A real one?”

Bender snorts. “Why bother if it's not real? I've been reading up on how they do it in South America.”

Igor is so excited he's halfway over the seat. “So how do they do it in South America?”

“Sit down, Igor!” Mrs. B yells from the front.

“First,” says Bender, “you take off the head of the victim.”

Jay, who is sitting with Spencer across the aisle, joins the conversation. “But don't you have to ask them if you can borrow it?”