Tj and the Rockets (2 page)

SCIENCE FAIR!

It was written on the blackboard when we got to school that morning. Not one word about it until now, but as soon as Seymour and I thought about it just the tiniest amount, there she was way ahead of us.

“This is it—the year you get to do the best projects ever and display them in the gym. Has anyone decided what to do?” she asked.

There was a long moment of silence. Then Gabe called from the back of the room.” I've decided to be sick that day!”

Everyone turned to look at him. Gabe is
never
sick. If he were sick, his parents would make him stay home from hockey practice or soccer practice or baseball practice. Gabe hates school, but he loves sports. He doesn't play sick. Ever.

The next moment everyone else started calling out too.

“I'm going to be sick the whole week!” said Jen.

“I'm going to be sick the whole month!” said Roddy.

“I'm going to be sick for the rest of the year!” said Mia.

I hadn't realized that everyone in class felt the way I did. Even Amanda Baker, the smartest kid in the room, was nodding her head.

We all knew what was going to happen. One part of the gym would be full of the amazing projects done by Mr. Wilson's class. The other part of the gym would have the very ordinary, very pathetic-looking attempts done by the kids who didn't have Mr. Wilson for a teacher. We'd all seen it. I guess we'd all secretly assumed, back
when we were little, that we'd be the ones in Mr. Wilson's class with the wonderful projects. We weren't. We had Ms. K.

But we liked Ms. K.! We liked her a lot! We had her last year, and everyone asked to be in her class again when she moved up to the next grade. If we could just make the science fair go away, everything would be fine.

Ms. K. took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders.

“I'm sure you'll all come up with excellent projects,” she said. “Let's get out our books.”

She was acting brave, but everyone could tell that even she was worried. Being a witch and
knowing
things is different from being a scientist and helping someone build a solar-powered radio.

“I told you,” I said to Seymour after class. “We all have to be in the science fair. Even being sick for the rest of the year doesn't count.”

“I didn't say I wasn't going to be in the science fair,” said Seymour. “I just said I wasn't doing a regular project.”

“What
are
you doing?” I asked.

“I've got to go to the library first,” said Seymour. “I'll tell you at the store later.”

The store is my mom and dad's hardware store. It's not a big place, but they've always wanted to run their own business and they're really proud of it.

Thursdays after school and Saturday afternoons I take care of the pet supplies; that's my department. After that I help wherever else I'm needed. I'm not old enough for it to be “officially” a job, but it's pretty much the same except I only do it because I want to. That day a big order had come in, and Mr. G., who started working at the store about two months ago, helped me carry out the boxes.

I like Mr. G. He jokes with everybody while he works. He joked with a carpenter about buying a board stretcher (a board stretcher almost sounds like it might be a real tool—until you think about it). He even got a smile out of a lady with frizzy gray hair and a frizzy gray knitting bag while he sold her a bar of soap.

“Where's your excitable friend today?” asked Mr. G. as he brought out the last of the boxes.

“Living dangerously at the library,” I said.

Mr. G. laughed and headed home for the day.

Talking about Seymour made me think about the science fair again. So did seeing Amanda's mom when she came in to buy diet food for their cat. After that I ducked into a side aisle to avoid Mr. Wilson, who walked by with six boxes of batteries that were on sale. Someone in his class was probably going to build a giant electromagnet that could lift small locomotives. How could I
not
think about the science fair?

“TJ, have you seen the radio alarm clock we had, the one with the giant snooze button?”

Mom was standing at the end of the aisle. She was holding her mouth funny, the way she does when something is bugging her, but she wants to pretend it isn't. What was going on?

“Nope,” I said. “But I can look for it.”

Mom nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “I don't remember it going through the till.”

I walked around the store to look for the alarm clock. Sometimes customers pick something up and leave it somewhere else. I was in the household section when Seymour showed up. Books stuck out the top of his backpack, and he had a strange look in his eye. Mr. G. thought I was joking about the library being a dangerous place, but in Seymour's case it's true.

“It's an even better idea than I thought!” he announced.

He picked up a flyswatter and began smacking the shelf.

“A schoolteacher invented this a hundred years ago. The little holes let the air pass through. No one's ever invented anything better for swatting flies.”

Mom and Dad like Seymour, but they don't like it when he starts being loud in the store. I took away the flyswatter. Seymour picked up a couple of can-openers and began waving them around.

“The first tin cans had to be opened with a chisel and a hammer,” said Seymour. “A chisel and hammer! Someone had to
invent
the can-opener!”

I took the can-openers away and steered him into the next aisle.

“The lightbulb!” announced Seymour. “Invented by Thomas Edison, who had a whole
system
of inventing.”

He moved a few steps down the aisle.

“Flashlights!” said Seymour. “Did you know that the first flashlights were invented as electric flowerpots?”

I didn't know it, and I didn't believe it either. I figured it was time to head home. I hurried to the back room to grab my jacket. When I came out, Seymour was in the middle of the aisle, waving a pair of gumboots.

“Rubber!” he called across the store. “Usable rubber was invented by accident—by
accident!
”

The toy section was the fastest way to reach the front door.

“Monopoly!” This time Seymour's excitement reached new heights. “Charles Darrow
invented it when he was out of work. He became a multimillionaire!”

We'd reached the checkout counter. Happily Mr. Wilson was gone, but a man with a beard was buying nails in a small paper bag.

“Paper bags used to be flat like envelopes,” Seymour told him. “A store owner invented bottoms and folding sides. A lady invented a machine to make zillions of them at a time.”

The customer looked sideways at Seymour, paid quickly and left the store. The
ping
of the till set Seymour off again.

“The first cash register was invented by a bar owner who wanted to stop his staff from stealing money. He got the idea from a machine that counted how many times a propeller went around!”

I crowded Seymour out the door.

“TJ?” Mom called.

I stuck my head back inside.

“Did you find that alarm clock?”

I shook my head.

“Maybe Mr. G. sold it,” I said. “Or maybe Dad's turning it into some kind of
marketing gimmick.
Don't Be Alarmed— It's Time to Visit Barnes' Hardware Store
.”

I like it when Mom laughs. Parents who run hardware stores can get way too serious and worried about things.

“Zip up your coat!” she called as I went out the door.

Of course I didn't zip it up, but it set Seymour off again.

“A hundred years ago you wouldn't have been able to zip up your coat because zippers weren't invented,” he said.

“A hundred years ago I didn't have a coat to zip up,” I told him. “I didn't have fingers to zip with. I didn't have hands to attach fingers to. Now stop with the inventions because I've got it figured out—you're going to invent something for the science fair.”

“It's even bigger than that,” said Seymour. “Think how neat it will be to have a friend who is a famous inventor. Years and years from now you'll be able to say, ‘This invention changed the world, and all because of my friend Seymour'!”

I hate it when Seymour gets that kind of look on his face, mysterious and hopeful all at once. Suddenly, however, his expression changed to a frown.

“But it's got to be a secret,” said Seymour. “I don't want Mr. Wilson's class stealing my idea of inventing things and using his fancy equipment.”

I nodded. That part I understood. Seymour grinned again.

“So it's a great idea, right?” he asked. “Seymour, the Inventor!”

“I'll ask the kittens what they think,” I said.

“Ask T-Rex first,” said Seymour. “Tell him I'm the one who's inventing something. And remember to feed him at the same time.”

When I got home, however, T-Rex wasn't hungry. Neither was Alaska. I was really, really worried that they were sick. I grew even more worried when they disappeared. Cats who are really sick sometimes go off alone to die. I didn't want the kittens to die!

Suddenly I heard strange noises in
the laundry room. I raced in, thinking I might need to do something heroic to save them.

Nope. The cat-food bag on the top shelf now had a big hole chewed in the corner, and they were feeding themselves by the gravity-flow method.

The wild teenagers had turned into a pair of juvenile delinquents.

Chapter 3

That night, just before I went to bed, I rummaged through the rocket box. Alaska and T-Rex rummaged with me.

“Most engines for model rockets use black powder as a propellant,” I read aloud from one of the booklets. Gran was right. These rockets really flew—not into outer space, but definitely up into “bird land” if the diagrams were correct.

“Do you think I could build one?” I asked the cats. “Do you think it would fall apart if Mr. Wilson was around?”

The cats couldn't decide. Neither could I. Every night for the next week we got out the box. We read and rummaged. It was the following Wednesday when
Amanda Baker announced her science project in class.

“Parallax,” she said. “That's how humans have estimated how far it is to the planets and the stars.”

Amanda never ceases to amaze me. When Ms. K. had mentioned the science fair, Amanda had been as discouraged as the rest of us. A week later she'd come up with an idea that took in the entire universe. And it's not like you can run a tape measure out into the universe.

“Hold your finger way far out in front of your face and close one eye and then the other—your finger will seem to move,” said Amanda. “Now hold your finger closer in and do the same thing. Your finger appears to move even more. That's the basis of parallax and it's one way to measure the distance to the stars.”

Of course for the next fifteen minutes everybody in class, including Ms. K., was doing weird winking stuff with their fingers and rulers and pencils and anything else they could find.

“Trust Amanda to think of something neat!” said Seymour after school. “Now I'm a million times as glad that I thought of inventing something.”

Seymour likes Amanda in his own way—Amanda is not only the smartest kid in class; she's also the nicest kid— but it drives him crazy when she does things better than he does, which is most of the time.

“
Have
you invented something?” I asked.

Amanda was the only one who'd actually told Ms. K. that she had a project.

“I'm not there yet,” said Seymour. “The books say there are three stages to inventing—immersion, incubation, illumination. I'm still at stage one. I'm filling my brain with the
idea
of inventing.”

When Seymour thinks hard, one eyebrow goes up and one eyebrow goes down and he gets a cross-eyed look.

“Until I started reading the books, I didn't realize how many inventions there are in the world,” said Seymour. “They're everywhere.”

He pointed to the cars waiting at the street corner.

“Traffic lights are an invention. The first one was a lantern. A policeman stood underneath and turned it back and forth with a lever—red, green, red, green. One day it exploded. Someone had to invent a better one.”

The light changed. The traffic came toward us. I thought he'd say that cars were an invention. Instead he was staring at the tires.

“Inflatable tires,” he said. “The Michelin brothers were the first people to make tires with air in them. They took 22 inner tubes on a car race in France and had so many flat tires they used them all.”

He was right. Cars were an invention, but so were all the parts that went into a car. I hadn't thought about that before.

We were walking by a store that sold furniture. A rug was hanging in the window.

“The game of Parcheesi was invented by workers making rugs in India. They played it on the pattern they were
weaving,” said Seymour. “Akbar the Great had a giant Parcheesi board made in his garden with colored tiles and real live people as playing pieces.”