The Fourteenth Goldfish (14 page)
Read The Fourteenth Goldfish Online
Authors: Jennifer Holm
Ananda has started his college search. Raj and I go with him the day he checks out Berkeley. The campus is beautiful, the lawns green and bustling with students. I can almost see Oppenheimer striding around, full of purpose.
Momo and I have been spending a lot of time together lately. She’s into scary films, too. We discover a whole category of old horror films about science gone wrong (
Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Tarantula, Godzilla, The Fly
). Our favorite is
Them!
It’s about a bunch of ants that turn into giant ant-monsters after being exposed to radiation during
the New Mexico atomic bomb tests. We even convince Mr. Ham to do a class about monster movies and science. It’s fun hanging out with another girl again.
And there are other new beginnings. When Ben comes over to take my mother out to dinner, she meets him at the door, dressed and ready to go, waiting like a teenager on her first date.
She steps across the threshold and into his arms, startling him.
“Yes,” she says.
He looks confused, but I know what she’s saying.
“I’ll marry you.”
They have a small ceremony at City Hall, with me as their witness. Ben wears a blue tie to match my mother’s hair.
“I love happy endings,” the judge tells the newlyweds.
“It’s not a happy ending,” I correct her.
She looks at me quizzically.
“It’s a
happy beginning
.”
I pay twenty dollars to join the Official Melvin Sagarsky Fan Club. I’m the 232nd member. They mail me a welcoming kit from Helsinki, Finland. It includes a membership card and a T-shirt with a picture of my grandfather on the front. He’s staring at the camera, a Melvin-esque expression on his face.
I miss him.
And then the slippers start arriving. Bunny slippers. Fuzzy pink slippers. Thickly lined bootie slippers. Leopard-print slippers. Zebra slippers.
The latest package contains slippers that look like alligators and a postcard from St. Augustine, Florida. There’s a picture of an archway that says
FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH
. On the back, my grandfather has included a mailing address and has written:
HA!
P.S. My fan club has invited me to speak at their annual conference in Helsinki!
I send him a care package with hair bands and another book by the author of
The Catcher in the Rye
. It’s called
Franny and Zooey
.
I’m working on a new puzzle at the kitchen table when Nicole walks in. It’s Egyptian-themed, with a picture of the pyramids and King Tut’s sarcophagus. Raj got it for me.
“Your mom called,” Nicole tells me. “She and Ben are going to be late. She said we could order a pizza.”
My mother and Ben are meeting with a real estate agent about looking for a new house. Something bigger, with a toilet that doesn’t get clogged and a yard so I can get a dog.
We call for a pizza, and the doorbell rings five minutes later.
“That was fast,” I say.
When I answer the door, there’s no pizza-delivery
kid. Instead, a courier van is pulling away from the curb.
“Looks like you got a package,” Nicole says.
There’s a box on the front porch. The label says
CONTAINS DRY ICE
.
“What is it?” she asks.
I look at the label. It’s addressed to my grandfather and is from somewhere in the Philippines. There’s an envelope taped to the package, and I open it. Inside is a handwritten note, and when I read it, my breath stops. It says:
Dear Dr. Sagarsky,
I found a jellyfish even stranger than the last one. Thought you might want it.
—Billy
The
End
Beginning
I have always been inspired by science. As with Ellie, my connection was sparked by someone very close to me: my father.
My father, William Wendell Holm, MD, was involved in two wars in which scientists played a significant role: World War II and the War on Polio. He served in the navy during World War II, and later he became a pediatrician and vaccinated children against polio. When I was growing up, he kept petri dishes with blood agar in our refrigerator to grow bacteria cultures. They were usually on the same shelf as the cottage cheese.
All the scientists mentioned in this book were real people. The discoveries of Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Robert Oppenheimer, and Jonas Salk changed the world in ways that still echo today.
You, too, can be a scientist. Observe the world
around you. Ask questions. Talk to your teachers. Don’t give up.
Be inspired by the scientists who came before you, and fall in love with discovery.
Most of all, believe in the possible.
With thanks to Robert J. Malone, executive director of the History of Science Society
Marie Curie and the Nobel Prize
nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/themes/physics/curie/index.html
History of Science
Manhattan Project
amnh.org/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/einstein/peace-and-war/the-manhattan-projecta
Isaac Newton
newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1
Louis Pasteur
accessexcellence.org/RC/AB/BC/Louis_Pasteur.php
Jonas Salk
salk.edu/about/jonas_salk.html
Scientists
Fortey, Jacqueline.
DK Eyewitness: Great Scientists
. London: DK Publishing, 2007.
JENNIFER L. HOLM
grew up in a medical family. Her father was a pediatrician and her mother was a pediatric nurse. It wasn’t unusual for Jenni to open the kitchen refrigerator and find petri dishes of blood agar that her father was using to culture bacteria. She grew up listening to him talk about the wonder of antibiotics and Jonas Salk and how science could change the world.
Today, Jennifer is the
New York Times
bestselling author of three Newbery Honor Books, as well as the cocreator of the popular Babymouse series (an Eisner Award winner) and Squish series, which she collaborates on with her brother Matthew Holm. You can find out more about her by visiting
jenniferholm.com
.