Brendan Buckley's Sixth-Grade Experiment

by Sundee T. Frazier

  “Yeah. See ya.”

  Grandpa Ed started up the truck. It roared before settling into a low rumble. Morgan looked as if she was waiting for me to say something else, but my mind was as blank as the pages of my new sixth-grade science notebook.

  “In case you were wondering why I’ve never been to public school, I’ve always been homeschooled.”

  I hadn’t been, but that explained some things. Like why she talked to adults as if she were one of them. And why she knew so much. And why, honestly, she was so nerdy. The one homeschool kid I’d met at Tae Kwon Do was the same way.

  I waited for Grandpa Ed to say it was time to go, but he just sat there humming and tapping the steering wheel with his thumbs, as if he weren’t listening.

  “I’m glad you liked the hematite I gave you,” Morgan said.

  I glanced at Grandpa Ed. I hadn’t been planning to tell him about that. Didn’t want to give him any more fuel for girlfriend jokes. His lips curled into a smile.

  “Oh, yeah. Thanks again.” The sample was in my backpack. I’d made a note in my Book of Big Questions to look up that word Morgan had used to describe it.

  She peered around me. “Thanks for leading the expedition, Mr. DeBose. I can’t wait to go again!”

  “Any time, darlin’. See you around.”

  “You certainly will.” Morgan looked at me. Her eyes sparkled a little too much.

  As we drove away, I watched her in the side mirror. She was still waving as we took the first bend headed back down the hill.

  We got home around noon. Gladys met us at the door. “My milk chocolate is back!” Gladys has been calling me her milk chocolate as long as I can remember. Mom’s the color of milk, Dad’s the color of chocolate, and I’m the color of them together. “Give me some sugar.” Gladys’s curly popcorn hair looked newly dyed—orange in the front, black everywhere else.

  I pecked her on the cheek. I didn’t have to stretch my neck to reach her face anymore. Seemed like I’d grown a couple of inches in just the last few weeks. There had been some other changes, too. Thinking about them made my ears get warm.

  “What’s a man got to do to get inside?” Grandpa Ed was still on the front steps, holding P.J. by the collar. P.J. barked and strained toward the door.

  “Pass inspection,” Gladys said, “of my grandson. Now let me see that pretty face.” She grabbed my chin and turned my head side to side, peering from behind her pointy glasses. “Better not be any scratches.” She eyed Grandpa Ed. “Did Mr. Rock Hudson here take good care of my grandbaby out in that wilderness?” She had given Grandpa Ed the nickname Rock Hudson (some hotshot actor from a long time ago) since he’s the president of a rock club.

  It was hard to tell whether Grandpa Ed’s response would be acidic or neutral. I jumped in. “I’m not a baby anymore, Gladys. I’m starting middle school next week, remember?”

  Gladys narrowed her eyes. “I see what you’re doing, young man. Let the man speak for himself. He’s certainly old enough.”

  “He’s my grandson, too, you know. Of course I took good care of him.”

  “Mama!” Dad spoke from the living room at the top of the stairs. “Let them in already.” Football game sounds came from the TV.

  “Well, I suppose …” Gladys’s eyes twinkled. Her face lit up with a smile. “It’s good to see you, too, Rock. Come on in.” She started up the steps and Grandpa Ed, P.J., and I followed. “Find anything good out there?” she asked.

  “A few things,” I said, hoisting my backpack higher on my shoulder.

  “Well, let’s see ’em!” Gladys went and sat next to Dad on the couch.

  “Hey, Bren,” Dad said, glancing away from the game.

  “Hi,” I replied, wondering what it would take to get Dad’s full attention. A commercial, most likely.

  Grandpa Ed took P.J. to the backyard through the sliding glass door in the dining area.

  Mom appeared from down the hall. “Hi, sweetie. Did you have fun?” She wrapped her arm around me and kissed the side of my face.

  “Forget fun!” Gladys said. “I want to see the booty.” She picked up the metal stein she’d recently bought for drinking her Mountain Dew and sipped through the straw.

  “Yeah, I had fun,” I said to Mom. “Did everything go okay with Einstein?”

  Mom nodded. As soon as Gladys was satisfied, I’d go give my anole some top-notch personal attention.

  I sat on the love seat and zipped open my backpack’s front pocket. I dug around for the largest quartz specimen. I held it up, hoping it would gleam impressively in the sunshine coming through the front window. It looked better than it had back at the campsite.

  “That’s the biggest diamond I’ve ever seen in my life!” Gladys exclaimed.

  “It’s not a diamond. It’s a quartz crystal,” I said. My family needed some serious education in the field of petrology.

  “Oh. Well, it’s the largest one of those I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  Mom reached for the crystal, and I handed it to her. She turned it in her hands, looking at its surfaces. “This is beautiful, Bren. Sam, did you see?”

  Dad looked away from the TV and squinted at my find. He nodded. “Hmm.” It was a short sound. The sound Gladys sometimes made when she fell asleep sitting up. “Is there more?”

  The ground collapsed inside me. All the work I’d done—first to find the crystal, and then to convince myself it was a good one—vanished into the sinkhole.

  I reached into my pack. “I’ve got a few more in—”

  Dad jumped up and hollered at the screen. “Run it! Run it! Run it! Yesssss!”

  But nothing worth getting too excited about, I thought, leaving the fragments where they were.

  Mom handed me the crystal. “It’s beautiful, honey.” I dropped the mineral back into the pouch and zipped it shut.

  Grandpa Ed came back inside without P.J. “When’s lunch? I’m starving!” He slapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Fresh mountain air makes a man hungry, eh, Brendan?”

  Lately, it seemed I’d been famished every moment of the day, but suddenly I had no appetite. My heart felt like a big dirt clod. And it had just been smashed to smithereens.

  The first day of school, I was up and ready to go an hour early, which gave me time to do some online research. I wanted to make sure I knew what botryoidal meant before I saw Morgan again. I quickly discovered that a habit, when referring to minerals, just means the shape a mineral takes as a result of its crystalline structure. A botryoidal habit is one that looks like bunches of grapes, which does accurately describe my piece of kidney ore.

  I’d put my newest acquisition on the shelf with my Ellensburg Blue, where I kept my entire collection of fourteen specimens. Morgan might have been a little too excited, but still, it had been cool of her to give me the hematite. I’d tossed all the quartz pieces into my garbage can the night we’d returned from the dig. They were like the fish Grampa Clem and I would throw back into the bay. Too puny to keep.

  I checked and recorded Einstein’s tank temperatures and misted the tank. “See you after school, boy.” I grabbed my backpack, turned out my bedroom light, and went to find my parents. They were in the kitchen. Dad was gathering up the garbage to take it to the curb, and Mom was on the phone.

  “You sure you don’t want me to take you on my way to work?” Dad had suggested that he walk me into school wearing his uniform. “Be a sure way to keep the older kids from pushing you around.”

  Be a sure way to get a whole lot of the wrong kind of attention, I thought. “Nah. I’ll be all right. Thanks, though.”

  Mom hung up the phone. “Ready to see how much you’ve grown, Boo?”

  I nodded. It was our first-day-of-school tradition. I’d stand against the inside of the kitchen doorjamb and Mom would mark my height.

  “I’m not sure I’m ready,” Mom said, smiling.

  I backed up against the wall and looked straight ahead. Mom’s eyes were no longer level with mine. They we
re a little lower. The pencil scraped back and forth across my head. I stepped away and Dad measured. “Five-five and a half,” he announced.

  Mom gasped. “You’ve passed me by half an inch!” Her green eyes watered. Mom wasn’t going to cry, was she? She isn’t usually a crier.

  Dad pounded me on the back. “Way to go, buddy! Three inches since last year.”

  I looked at the marks. It was crazy to see how much I’d grown in the past few years. Even crazier to think I might one day be as tall as Dad.

  Mom had turned away to get something from the counter. When she turned back, her eyes looked normal again. She handed me a stiff notebook with a black and white marbled cover and a black binding. It said COMPOSITION on the front and had lines for the user’s name, school, and grade.

  “I know you were keeping a question notebook this summer,” Mom said. “I thought you might like to have a new notebook for starting middle school. A place to write down things you’re thinking about.”

  “You mean, like a journal?” I felt my face scrunch up. Weren’t journals for girls?

  Dad spoke up. “You could think of it as a log, like officers keep when they’re on duty.”

  “Or like scientists keep when they’re doing research,” Mom said. “It could be your own private lab book—a place to record your observations about being in the sixth grade.”

  A scientific log. Now, that was more like it. I could already see the title page: Inquiries and Investigations of a Sixth-Grade Scientist: A Log by Brendan S. Buckley.

  “Thanks, Mom.” I put the logbook in my backpack and we all went down to the garage.

  “Remember to show respect to your new teachers,” Dad said, giving me a sideways hug. He gripped my head with his large palm.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He kissed Mom. “See you tonight—after my first class. Wish me luck.”

  “Should we measure you, too?” Mom smiled and kissed him again. “And you don’t need any luck. You’ll do great.”

  Mom and I got in her car and she drove me to school. It was just a couple of minutes’ ride. After today, I’d be walking—at least until I could save up enough allowance money to buy a new bike. My old one had been stolen one day this summer when I’d left it in the bushes at a bus stop. I’d been secretly going to see Grandpa Ed. It had been a stupid thing to do. Not visiting Grandpa Ed—just the way I went about it. I had learned the hard way that keeping secrets like that from my parents didn’t pay.

  Mom pulled in to the turnaround and stopped near the front of the school, in line with several other cars dropping kids off. “First day of middle school. My boo is truly growing up.” She was getting mushy on me again. I had to make my escape quick, before she planted her lips on my face.

  “See you later, Mom.” I hopped out of the car.

  Mom leaned over and looked out the passenger door. “See you right here after school. Got it?”

  “Got it.” I shut the door firmly and turned toward the building. I heard the automatic window roll down.

  “Love you!” she called out.

  “Me too!” I yelled over my shoulder.

  A few steps later, I turned for real and waved. The car hadn’t moved, of course. She blew me a kiss. We grinned at each other. I love my mom. I just didn’t want her to give me a big smooch in front of a bunch of other kids on my first day of middle school.

  I walked toward the entrance, gripping the straps on my backpack. Khal had told me he’d heard of sixth graders getting shoved into lockers, or having their underwear ripped off and hung in the bushes. Would I get stuffed into a locker or be tackled for my underpants?

  Dozens of kids milled around on the sidewalk and playing field. No one else seemed in a hurry to get inside, but I wanted to go say hi to Mr. Hammond. My fifth-grade and favorite teacher of all time had taken an open science position at Eastmont, so he was moving from grade school to middle school, same as us. Knowing Mr. H was somewhere in this big sprawling building helped me feel a little less nervous.

  A blur came at me from the side. Was someone after me already?

  I shouted and put up my hands in a mak-gee—a block. After two years of practicing almost every day, Tae Kwon Do moves came as naturally to me as riding my bike.

  The blur rammed into me. Khalfani wrapped his arm around my neck and pulled me into his chest. “Hey, man! Where you been? Oscar and I been waiting ten minutes already.” We pretended to spar for a second; then he tugged me in the direction of the far side of the building. Oscar and Marcus stood on the other side of the chain-link fence, throwing a football back and forth.

  I was glad I wasn’t being led to a bathroom stall to have my head flushed in a toilet, but I didn’t feel like playing ball right then. “Wait a sec.” I stopped and Khal let go. “I was headed in to say hi to Mr. H.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Hammond. Our science teacher.”

  Khal rolled his eyes. “Aw, man. That can wait. Come on, we need you to play two-on-two!”

  A girl’s voice came from behind. “Brendan! Brendan!” I didn’t need to look to know who it was. Even though my Tae Kwon Do integrity meter told me I shouldn’t, I started walking toward the field. Quickly.

  Khal caught up. “Did you become a celebrity recently or something? Because you’ve got a girl chasing you.”

  I didn’t stop. “Oscar and Marcus are waiting, remember?”

  “Too late,” Khal said.

  Morgan rushed up, her eyes gleaming. “Hi, Brendan! Isn’t this so exciting? Our first day of middle school! I was hoping I’d see you outside, so we could walk in together. It’s much nicer to walk into a new place with someone you know. Don’t you think?”

  She was talking a mile a millisecond. “Sure,” I said. I didn’t want to be mean, but I already had friends to walk into school with.

  Morgan held out her hand to Khalfani. “Hi, I’m Morgan. What’s your name?”

  Khal scrunched his face. “Morgan? As in Morgan Freeman? Isn’t that a boy’s name?”

  “Actually, it’s unisex. And how do you know I’m not named after Morgan Freeman? He’s an extraordinary actor.”

  “Extraordinary?” Khal’s eyes slid over to meet mine.

  “This is Khalfani. My best friend,” I said, so she would know the position was already taken.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Khalfani.” Morgan held out her hand again. If she ever took up Tae Kwon Do she wouldn’t have any problem with tenet number three, in nae. Perseverance. “What’s the origin of your name? It’s beautiful.”

  “Beautiful?” Khal’s face scrunched even more. He looked at Morgan as if she had just dropped in from outer space.

  “I mean, it’s—it’s very n-nice,” Morgan stammered. Her cheeks turned pink.

  I felt kind of bad for her, but she had brought this on herself. Calling a boy’s name beautiful was never a good idea.

  “It’s Swahili.” Khalfani puffed out his chest and lifted his chin. Morgan and I still stood taller than him. “It means ‘destined to lead.’ But that doesn’t mean I want everyone to follow me.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me along.

  The skin between Morgan’s eyebrows crinkled. I saw the hurt look in her eyes, but I turned and walked away before that look could get to me and make me do something I’d regret.

  “Who was that?” Khal asked.

  I had a feeling she was still there, watching us walk away—watching me do something that I knew was cold. But didn’t she know she was embarrassing me in front of my best friend? Maybe this way, she’d get the message.

  “Just a girl from my rock club.” I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d spent a night in the woods with her. Or that I’d promised to hang around with her at school.

  “Why was she talking to you like you’re her best friend?”

  I shrugged and kept walking, but I felt like a slug trailing slime. I started to run. When I got to the fence, I glanced back. She was gone.

  When we got to homeroom, Morgan wasn’t
there. My shoulders relaxed with relief. I wasn’t trying to be mean. It was just that Morgan was like this wiry, bouncy, talking paper clip. And I was a giant magnet. I didn’t want a talking paper clip stuck to my backside my whole first year of middle school. Hopefully she’d find some girls to be friends with and wouldn’t want to be around me so much. Problem solved.

  The final bell rang and Ms. Manley called us to attention. “Okay, listen up. You are currently in Room 6E. Look at your class schedule and make sure you’re in the right place. This is where you’ll come at the start of each day for roll call and advisory. We’ll work on the skills you need to make the best possible transition to the new and exciting world of middle school.” She didn’t sound too excited. “If you’re in pre-algebra, you’ll stay with me for first period as well. Got it?”

  Several people nodded, including me. This woman was serious.

  Khal smacked his gum. The teacher eyed him, lifted the garbage can, and walked to our row. She didn’t say anything—just held the can in front of Khal’s face. Her biceps were nearly as big as Dad’s. Khal spit his gum out.

  While she was taking roll, the door opened. I expected it to be an adult with some kind of message, but it wasn’t. It was a short kid with a buzz cut wearing camouflage pants, a brown T-shirt, and a military dog tag around his neck. His skin was brown, but he didn’t look black, exactly. His eyes were shaped like footballs and were black as coal.

  Behind him was Morgan. The rims of her eyes looked pink and watery, and her face was splotchy.

  I shriveled like an ant under a magnifying glass in the sun.

  “She was lost,” the boy announced, “but I found her.” He led her to Ms. Manley’s desk.

  “Thank you, Mister …” Ms. Manley waited for the boy to tell her his name.

  “Del Santos. Dwight David!” The boy threw back his shoulders, clicked his heels, and saluted the class. Some of the kids laughed. Was he joking? Or did he really think school was like the army? Ms. Manley sure enough could’ve been a drill sergeant.