Things got better when we went into the lapidary shop. My mind got completely focused on learning how to use the polishing belts.
Grandpa Ed gave me a pair of protective goggles and half of a thunder egg he’d sawn in two; then he showed me how to hold the flat surface against the wet belt, moving it slightly to keep it even, checking it now and then to see if it was ready for the next grade of sandpaper. I could have stayed there all night polishing that stone. As it was, I only got about halfway done, but Grandpa Ed said we could come back any time I wanted to work on it. He had the keys to the building, after all.
Morgan had been there, too, of course. Her reputation at school didn’t seem to be suffering too much. The last couple of days, I’d even overheard a few kids come up to her and thank her for getting them out of trouble. Apparently, Dwight David’s clowning around hadn’t improved social status at Eastmont Middle.
Khal couldn’t be swayed, however. He maintained that Dwight David had acted as our fall guy.
“But he brought it on himself,” I insisted the next night when Khal was at our house. I’d invited him over to hang out, eat dinner, maybe watch a movie.
“We all laughed,” Khal said, “so we were all in on the joke, and we all should have covered for him.”
I just didn’t get what Khal saw in that kid.
“Really, that was so not cool, what your girlfriend did.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Right. She’s just your science partner.” Khal looked into Einstein’s tank, but Einstein was hiding out somewhere.
“Did you want to get a negative interim? Your stepmom would’ve had you cleaning the bathrooms with your toothbrush.”
“Yeah, and then made me brush my teeth with it.” He laughed. “Just fooling. Still, she shouldn’t have ratted him out like that.”
I grabbed the water bottle and pumped a few squirts into the tank. “Why would you want to take a hit for him, anyway? He’s a clown.”
“Exactly. He’s funny. Plus, he’s really good at building things.”
Khal and Dwight David were building a pneumatic launcher for the contest. They would video themselves launching it and submit that as part of their entry. I’d questioned him about how a launcher would make the world better exactly. “I’m not sure yet,” he’d said. “But I know it will make the world a whole lot cooler!” I assumed he wasn’t referring to global warming.
When Dad had heard about Khal’s project earlier that evening, he’d gotten excited—and given Khal an answer to my question. “Our department just purchased some pneumatic launchers for search and rescue. You can shoot grappling hooks almost a hundred yards, set climbing ropes to scale buildings, launch buoys and life preservers to people stranded in deep waters—it’s like something right out of Batman!” He’d slapped Khal on the back. “Let me know how it turns out, buddy.”
I’d stood by silently.
I put the water bottle back under the table. Einstein still hadn’t appeared. I’d thought the water droplets might get him moving around.
“You should come with me to Dwight David’s house sometime. His grandma makes these egg roll things called lumpia. They’re awesome. I could eat a hundred of them. Did you know his family’s Filipino?”
I shook my head. Actually, I had wondered if Dwight David was mixed like me. Not black and white, but some kind of mix. His skin was just as brown, but his jet-black hair was totally straight. Even with his buzz cut, you could tell that. I’d never asked him, though, because I know how it feels to get asked that question—like being an unknown species someone’s trying to classify.
“They’re the best. They totally make you feel like you’re part of the family. And they’re loud and crazy. There’s always people at their house whenever I go over there, and they act like they’re all related, even if they’re not.” Khal sat in my desk chair and spun around. “His dad’s been fighting in Afghanistan for the last two years.”
“Two years?” And I thought my dad had been gone a lot lately.
“Yeah. Being a military kid, he’s moved around a lot. I think when he acts goofy he’s just trying to get people to like him.”
Maybe Khal was right. I supposed I could try to be a little nicer.
Khal pointed to the tank. “There’s no lizard in there, man. You’re just messing with me.”
“I’m not! He’s in there. He’s just shy. And arboreal.”
“Ar-boree-what?”
“He likes to hang out in trees and bushes. Hide behind leaves. Come back tomorrow morning at eight. Feeding time. He always comes out then.”
“Can’t we feed him now?”
“He’s not supposed to get fed too much. Besides, I’m training him. I feed him at the same time, every other …” I glanced at the clock on my desk: 7:03! Shoot. I was three minutes late. Our two weeks of measuring the balloons would be over tomorrow night—I couldn’t mess things up now. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said, squeezing between Khal and my desk and opening the top drawer.
“Where are you going?”
“To measure my gas production.” I grabbed a pen, my science notebook, the string I wrapped around the balloons to mark their circumferences, and my ruler.
“Gas production? Oh, yeah.”
I hurried out the door.
“You should see a doctor about that!” Khal shouted. “It sounds kind of serious! You want me to get you some Rolaids?”
I rushed downstairs into the rec room and started to measure. Morgan had come over a couple of times to check the experiment’s progress and take pictures with her camera. The last time, we had moved the bottles apart—very carefully—to allow for the balloon growth. The first bottle was now only a few feet from the door.
I wrapped the string around the last balloon and recorded the measurement. Then I scanned the chart, looking for patterns. The balloons on the manure-banana and manure-veggie bottles had slowed in their production, but the balloons on the manure-only bottles were bigger than ever. The biggest one had a diameter of thirty-four centimeters. (Mr. H had shown us how to calculate diameters from circumferences.) It was as big as a watermelon!
When I was done, I stood back and admired the bottles one last time. We had done it. We had made methane. Blue ribbon, here we come. I turned off the light and closed the door.
A huge scream came from somewhere above me. “Aaahhhh!”
I bounded up the stairs. Around the corner. Down the hall.
Khal burst from my room and slammed into me. We both fell to the ground. “He bit me! He bit me!” He sat up, clutching his hand.
Mom appeared from her room. “What happened? What’s wrong?” She sounded panicked.
“You took Einstein out?” I yelled.
I heard Dad’s footsteps behind me. “What’s going on?”
Mom pulled Khal up and started down the hall. I pushed past them into my room. The tank lid was on the ground. “Einstein!” I moved leaves. I lifted his fake bark. He was gone! If anything happened to my lizard, Khal would be finding himself a new best friend, pronto. Dwight David could have him.
A small brown streak shot past me out the door. “Einstein!” I ran down the hall after him.
Mom and Khal sat on the love seat, where she was inspecting his finger. He pointed with his free hand. “Over there!”
Einstein perched on the ledge that separated the living room from the stairwell, as if he were looking to see who was coming in the front door.
I froze. Einstein wouldn’t jump, would he?
Khal inched his way toward my lizard.
“Wait,” I said. “He’s really stressed. That’s what it means when he turns brown.”
Dad came up behind me holding a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “Brendan, you had better get that thing back in its tank,” he said. “It can’t just be running around our house.”
“They run around people’s houses in Florida,” I said, trying to move my mouth as little as possible. I didn’t want to startle Ein
stein into bolting again.
“Brendan, we could have a baby any day,” Mom said. “We can’t have a lizard on the loose!”
Dad started toward the stairs. “I think I’ve still got some traps in the garage from that time we had a mouse.”
“No!” I shouted, holding him back.
Einstein darted over the ledge, down the wall, and across the top of the doorframe. “He’s headed to the basement!”
Khal caught up to me on the stairs. He grabbed my shoulder. “I’m really sorry, man. I didn’t know they were so fast.”
I shrugged him off and kept moving. “You shouldn’t have tried to take him out.”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry.” Khal’s feet pounded down the stairs behind me.
I headed toward Dad’s makeshift study. Maybe Einstein would be drawn to the light of the computer screen.
“I’ll look this way,” Khal said. He ran in the opposite direction—toward the rec room, where the space heater had been on for the last two weeks. That was where Einstein would go. Not to the light. To the heat!
I turned the corner as Khal plowed into the dark room.
“Where’s the light switch in here, man? It’s pitch—”
Thud.
The bottles!
I lunged for the light switch. Khal had run right into the two-liters! One bottle crashed into the next, setting off a chain reaction. They looked like dominoes falling in slow motion, one after the other. The liquid sloshed against the sides. The balloons bounced on the ground. I held my breath, hoping, hoping, HOPING, that the duct tape would hold.
“Don’t just stand there!” I yelled. I grabbed the first one and set it upright. The balloon no longer stood straight but lolled to the side. Dang it, Khal!
Khal scrambled to reach another tipping bottle before it fell, but his feet got caught in the tangle of our ruined experiment and he stumbled. His knee landed, hard, right in the middle of one of the fallen two-liters. The balloon shot from the end. Brown, chunky water spewed everywhere. A much stronger stench than before filled the room. We could have been standing in a cattle pen at the state fair, it smelled so bad. Except it was worse.
“I think it got on me!” Khal’s face was frozen in a grimace. He held his arms stiffly in front of him. He looked like a Neolithic caveman discovered in some ice.
Dad appeared in the doorway. His eyes scanned the room as if he were seeing a crime scene for the first time. His jaw bulged. His biceps strained against his sleeves. “Clean it up.”
“But I still haven’t found—”
“Clean it all up. And get it out of here. Tonight.” He turned and walked out.
The blood behind my eyes pulsed so hard that the room pulsed, too.
Khal started putting the bottles on their ends.
I crouched near the portable space heater. There he was, my anole, sitting on the carpet between the heater’s wheels. His green color was returning in patches.
I knew I only had one chance. I barely breathed as my hand shot beneath the heater. I felt his fragile body in my grasp. I hoped I hadn’t squeezed him too hard. I held him between my thumb and first finger, as Morgan had done, and talked to him quietly. “I got you, boy. It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”
But really, I wasn’t so sure.
It had taken Khal and me a solid three hours to clean up the rec room after the disaster. We’d found specks of manure as far away as the dartboard on the opposite wall from where the two-liter had fired, which, after I got over being mad, I admitted to Khal had been pretty awesome. We’d dubbed it the “poop cannon.” He’d called his parents to explain and ended up spending the night. So he got to watch Einstein eat crickets after all.
Mom had turned the crisis into an opportunity, as she liked to say, by convincing Dad it was the perfect chance to get rid of the old, shaggy green carpet and replace it with fake wood flooring.
We’d taken the bottles outside and dumped the contents into the flower beds, just like the last time we’d done an experiment in two-liters. Only this time, I was confident that what we were dumping would help the plants grow and not turn them brown.
All in all, everything had turned out all right in the end.
Even things with the experiment were going to be okay. That Monday, in science, Mr. Hammond assured Morgan and me that thirteen days of measurements were enough to qualify as a valid experiment and we should go ahead and write up our report for submission to the contest. Applications were due the first week of November, just a couple of weeks away.
“That’s great!” Morgan said. I breathed a sigh of relief.
We left Mr. H’s class, headed toward the lunchroom. Morgan was being unusually quiet, and it was starting to feel awkward. I was about to say “See you later” when she blurted out, “Do you want to write up the final report together? You could come over to my house this time. For dinner, maybe.”
My face scrunched, as involuntarily as my heart jumping around in my chest.
Morgan’s cheeks turned hot pink. She spoke quickly and her eyes darted around. “Never mind. Dumb idea. Uh … I’ll write something up and email it. We can discuss it over the phone. Bye!”
I grabbed her arm. “No. Wait. I want …”
She turned and looked at me hopefully.
I just couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. “I mean, that would be great if you wrote up a preliminary report. I can give you my notebook with all the measurements.”
“Oh. Okay.” Her smile drooped, like the balloons after they’d gotten knocked to the ground.
“It’s just, the only extra thing I really have time for in the next couple of weeks is Tae Kwon Do,” I said, trying to cover for myself. “I’ve got a promotion test this Saturday, and our big annual tournament is the Saturday after that.” I didn’t tell her that I had to be ready so I could prove I wasn’t a science-nerd wimp. “I’ll definitely help with the final report.”
“Sure. No problem. You did all the measurements, after all. And the cleanup.” She smiled a little. “Sorry about that.”
I shrugged. “Wasn’t your fault.”
“I know. But still …” Her face perked up. “Hey, could I come to your tournament?”
My heart started jumping around again. “I guess. If you really want to.”
“I do! Get me the data before school’s out, okay? See you later!” She bounced off toward the lunchroom. I hung back, trying to get my pulse to chill out.
Morgan was coming to see me compete in the annual tournament. I had better be ready. I no longer had just Dad to impress.
Log Entry—Saturday, October 20
Khal and I got our brown stripes today. Big relief. Brown stands for the color of the ground and is supposed to mean that we are “rooted firmly” in our practice of Tae Kwon Do.
Dad got to the dojang just in time to see me perform. He had to rush from work to make it. Dad seemed happy, and he and Mom took me to Dairy Queen afterward to celebrate.
Master Rickman told us once that when martial arts first started, there was only one color of belt—white. Over many years of hard training, a student’s belt would get darker from all the sweat, dirt, and blood until it turned black. That’s how the whole idea of black belts got started. Black is for the ones who have suffered the most. After this past week, my belt is definitely sweatier and dirtier. No blood yet, though.
Can’t write any more—my arms are killing me from all the punches I’ve been doing.
The morning of the Friendship Tournament, I got up early. Kids and adults from studios all over Washington and Oregon would be at the Tacoma Y to compete.
Over breakfast, Dad gave me pointers for the tournament. I nodded a bunch and said yeah a few times, but what I was really thinking was how Dad was showing way more interest in this competition than the other one I was in.
I chugged my orange juice, then headed to my room to give Einstein his two crickets and one of the wax worms Grandpa Ed had brought over the other day.
&
nbsp; The last thing I did was put on my do bok. My purple belt now had a nice brown stripe on it. I had thought a lot about the argument I’d heard my parents having and I’d decided: Getting my black belt was important to me. It wasn’t just my dad’s goal. It was my own—for myself. I had worked hard for my brown stripe and I had earned it. At the tournament, I would prove I deserved it.
On our way to picking up Gladys, we passed Shari’s Restaurant. After the tournament, we’d go there to have breakfast for dinner, like always. Only this time, Grandpa Ed would be with us. He was even skipping a rock club expedition to be there. He said he couldn’t miss his grandson doing kung fu. I didn’t tell him kung fu is Chinese and what I do is Korean. I was just glad he was coming. It was going to be a great day.
We pulled into Gladys’s parking lot, past the sign that read WELCOME TO BRIGHTON FIELDS—WHERE LIFE IS IN FULL BLOOM. “But withering quickly,” Gladys liked to add. It was a nice day, not too cold. Red and orange leaves glowed like fire against the gray sky.
Gladys waited on the bench out front. Oh, brother. She waved her big foam finger. We pulled up and Mom got in the backseat. Gladys got in front. “Ready to crack some skulls?” She snapped her seat belt into place.
“Brendan’s school of Tae Kwon Do is noncontact, Mama.” Dad waited while Gladys took a swig of bright blue drink from one of her two Gatorade bottles.
“I say we liven things up a bit. What do you say, Brendan?” She looked at me over her shoulder.
I glanced at Dad. “I … uh …”
“Oh, lighten up, you two! I’m just having a little fun.” Gladys passed me the neon yellow Gatorade. “To keep those electro-thingamajigs balanced for peak performance. But I’m sure you know all about that, Mr. Science Genius.”
I shrugged and looked out the window. I didn’t need Gladys highlighting my nerdy science side right now, especially in front of Dad. Today, I was Brendan Buckley, Tae Kwon Do brown-stripe warrior.
The gym was already swarming with people. Most of them wore do boks just like mine. The cool thing about tournaments is that you see people of all ages wearing all the different colors of belts. There are adults wearing white belts and kids, some even younger than me, wearing black belts.
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