Tj and the Rockets

by Hazel Hutchins

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “I’m sure!” said Seymour. “The trampoline was invented by a guy who used to jump up and down on the bed in the guest room when he was just a kid. The idea of colored car wax to cover scratches was invented by some girl who was twelve years old.”

  He rapped on the notebook.

  “It’s hardcover so it can’t be destroyed easily. It has pages that don’t pull out. There’s no place to add extra pages either. That’s important. I’m writing on every line so no one can claim I added something in later, and I’m writing in pen and I’m dating it and you’re going to sign it every day.

  “Why am I going to sign it?”

  “To prove I invented it before anyone else.”

  I looked at the first page. So far he had invented his name and address.

  “I know, I know,” he said. “I haven’t quite got started. That’s why I thought I’d walk you home. Your house is a good place for coming up with ideas.”

  Well it was a good place for the cats to come up with ideas. They’d come up with a lot of them lately. Mostly they were the kind of ideas that knocked things over or tore things apart. However Alaska also had another trick.

  “Is she there?” I called.

  I’d sent Seymour half a block ahead. Every time I came home, no matter what time of day it was, I always found Alaska sitting in the window looking out at me. She wasn’t there when Dad or Mom came home. She wasn’t there when the mailman came by or when Gran dropped over—I’d asked them. But somehow she knew when I was coming. I wanted to see if the way she knew was by spotting me coming down the street.

  “She’s already here,” called Seymour. “Green-eyed fur face at two o’clock.”

  Sure enough, when I got to our gate, there was Alaska looking out. How did she do that?

  As usual she watched us come up the walk, but when we reached the bottom step her face vanished from the window. I handed Seymour the front-door key.

  “You go first,” I said.

  “Is this another cat thing?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  Seymour opened the door and went inside.

  “Hello!” he called. “Alaska! T-Rex!”

  Not a cat in sight. Seymour shrugged and bent over to undo his runners.

  Tha-da–da-thump—wham!

  A gray blur came barreling down the stairs, threw itself against his shoes and hands and took off again.

  “Wow! Was that T-Rex or a jet plane?” Seymour said. “When did he start doing that?”

  “Sometime last week,” I said. “He seems to be getting better at it. Or worse.”

  “That’s the fastest thirty-one kilometers an hour I’ve ever seen,” said Seymour.

  Thirty-one kilometers an hour is top speed for a house cat.

  Two seconds later, T-Rex was back, mewing and purring and all friendly. He rubbed himself back and forth against Seymour’s ankles and wove in and around my legs. He was marking us with his scent glands. Mine. Mine. Mine. If they ever make infrared goggles that pick up cat scent, my legs are going to positively glow in the dark.

  “We’d better find Alaska right away,” I said.

  Seymour looked puzzled, but he followed me around the house. We found her on a shelf above the desk. She was sitting between a stack of books and a plastic cup full of pens. She was rubbing her furry face against the cup. It was moving closer to the brink and tipping, tipping, going, going…

  The pens spilled across the carpet. Alaska peered down at us as we crawled on our hands and knees to pick them up. I think she was laughing, but it’s hard to tell with a cat.

  I lifted her down before we went into the kitchen. Seymour crumpled a couple of pieces of scrap paper into balls and threw them around the floor to keep the cats busy while I made us a snack. After that I filled their food dishes to keep them out of our faces while we were eating.

  Seymour took out his notebook and spread it on the table. He stared at it.

  “Are you sure that’s what they mean by incubation? Staring at a blank page?”

  “I’m not staring,” said Seymour. “I’m thinking.”

  “Looks pretty much like staring to me.”

  T-Rex seemed to feel the same way. He gobbled the last of his crunchies, jumped onto the table beside Seymour and stared at the book too. He wasn’t supposed to be on the table, but Mom wasn’t home and I think he looks cute up there. Seymour looked across to see a “cat image” of himself staring at a blank page.

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Seymour. “I need inspiration. I need to think big like…like… Leonardo da Vinci.”

  “I thought he painted the Mona Lisa,” I said.

  “He did,” said Seymour. “But he was an inventor too. He patented all sorts of inventions, even way back then. He watched birds and came up with plans for flying machines. He watched fish swim and drew plans for submarines. They didn’t actually work, but he was on the right track.”

  Seymour scratched his head. Now his hair was standing up even more than usual. He actually looked the part of a mad inventor.

  “Come to think of it, other inventors have got their ideas from nature too,” said Seymour. “The idea for hot air balloons came from two brothers watching pieces of paper rise on the hot air above their factory. And Velcro—you know that sticky kind of cloth? Velcro was invented by a Swiss engineer who found cockleburs clinging to his jacket.”

  Seymour took his snack into the living room. For the next ten minutes, instead of staring at a blank page on our kitchen table, he stared out the window at our yard. I sat on the living room sofa and read through some of the rocket- building instructions I’d dug out of the bottom of the box. I was about halfway through the pages when I found some interesting information.

  The fin is the stabilizing and guiding unit of a model rocket. When a rocket is momentarily deflected by even a small gust of wind, the fins enable it to correct the flight and fly straight again.

  Aha! Illumination, as Seymour would say. The loose fin—that’s what had gone wrong with my rocket. I’d thought duct tape would hold it, but I hadn’t realized the kind of force that a launch would involve.

  Seymour had finished his snack and was headed back into the kitchen.

  “Any luck?” I asked him.

  “Naw,” said Seymour. “God already invented trees. Did a pretty good job too.”

  That’s when we heard the noise. Lap lap lap.

  I followed Seymour into the kitchen. T-Rex had knocked over Seymour’s half-full glass of milk. He was busy cleaning up the evidence.

  What really made us stop and stare, however, was Alaska. Alaska was sitting by my own glass of milk. She hadn’t knocked it over, and she wasn’t sticking her head inside either. Instead she was reaching into the glass with her lovely little paddy paw, delicately scooping out milk and daintily licking.

  “Hey!” said Seymour. “Alaska just invented the spoon!”

  Which was true, cat-style at least.

  Chapter 6

  It was Tuesday when Dad noticed that one of the expensive Swiss Army knives was missing from the lockup case.

  “Not again,” said Mom.

  “It was there on Saturday,” I said. “Mr. G. opened the case so Seymour could look at it. Seymour’s on an invention kick, and he thought it was pretty neat.”

  Dad nodded.

  “So it was stolen sometime between Saturday at noon and noon today,” he said. “Maybe Wilf left the case open by mistake.”

  Wilf Grogan is Mr. G.’s real name.

  “He might have,” I said. “He had to help a couple of other customers while Seymour was looking at it.”

  “You’ve got a good memory, TJ,” said Mom.

  “I was trying to watch who was in the store,” I said. “If I ever catch the person who’s stealing stuff, they’re really going to be sorry.”

  “Watch all you like, but don’t go chasing after them,” said Dad. “You never know what a person will do, and we don’t want
anyone getting hurt. Tell me or Mom or Mr. G. if you suspect someone.”

  That’s what parents always say.

  The next morning, Seymour and I took a detour when we got to school. We walked past Mr. Wilson’s room. Through the door we could glimpse what looked like an entire ocean of science projects— giant springs, long glass tubing, boards with electric wires, switches and lightbulbs.

  Our own room looked pretty much as usual—messy. Witches tend to have all sorts of different things lying around, and since kids had been bringing in their collections, it was worse than usual.

  The last person to bring in a collection was Gabe. He’d asked for an extra day to get organized. Since when did Gabe get anything organized except on the playing field?

  But when he arrived with his sports cards, everyone was surprised. The cards were all in plastic pages; the pages were tabbed and sorted into binders; the binders looked as if they had never been touched by unwashed hands.

  “I buy them with my paper-route money,” he said. “Most of what I earn has to go to hockey and baseball fees, but I save a little out for cards and it kind of adds up.”

  “I’ve never really looked at sports cards before,” said Ms. K. “Look at this. It says that this player’s pitch has been clocked at ninety three miles an hour. What do they mean ‘clocked at’ ?”

  “They aim a gun at it,” said Gabe.

  “A gun?”

  “A kind of a gun that measures speed. You see it in the stands when the scouts are out.”

  “But how does it work? Is it like the radar guns the police use?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”

  “Hmmm,” said Ms. K. “That makes me wonder something else. Is there a reason these athletes are so good? Is there a reason they can throw so hard? Or shoot a puck accurately? Is it because they try harder? Or have better equipment? Or because of the type of body they have— their muscle mass and their vision and things like that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gabe. “They’re just good.”

  But you could tell from the look on his face that he had begun to wonder himself.

  Mia had a collection of matchbooks. Ms. K. was interested in the places they’d come from. She also wondered if anyone knew how safety matches worked.

  “I know, I know, I know!” called Seymour.

  “Don’t tell us, Seymour, but do tell us one thing. Is there anything scientific about matches?”

  I could tell there must be quite a story behind matches because Seymour was just about to burst. He controlled himself, however.

  “Lots of science,” he said. “Chemistry. Physics. Invention.”

  It didn’t take long until we figured it out, of course. Ms. K. knew she couldn’t beat Mr. Wilson in terms of laboratory experiments, so she’d done it from a different angle. She was helping us to find the science in the everyday, the ordinary things that appealed to each of us.

  “Proving, once and for all, she’s a witch,” said Seymour. “Witches don’t need special equipment. They just use what’s lying around, frogs and toads and stuff like that.”

  Of course it didn’t work for everyone. Some kids didn’t really have collections or weren’t interested in them the way Gabe was, but it did get everyone thinking that maybe, just maybe, it was possible to do a science project after all.

  “I wish she’d let me tell people about safety matches,” said Seymour. “It’s a neat story. Some guy was trying to invent a new type of explosive. He stirred the chemicals with a stick, and a glob dried on the stick. He tried to get the glob off by rubbing the stick against the stone floor of his shop. Poof. It burst into flame.”

  “You mean he discovered it by accident?” I asked.

  “Yup,” said Seymour.

  “And was rubber really discovered by accident?” I asked.

  Seymour nodded.

  “It wasn’t completely an accident,” he said. “Mr. Goodyear—as in the tire guy— was doing experiments to find ways to keep rubber soft so people could use it. He was already mixing it with chemicals, but he didn’t know that heat was going to be the answer until a blob fell accidentally on the stove.”

  Seymour’s eyebrows began to separate. One went up, one went down.

  “But safety glass was an accident,” he said thoughtfully. “A glass container fell to the floor and shattered, but someone noticed that the pieces still hung together. It had held liquid plastic once upon a time.”

  A dreamy tone came into his voice.

  “And Ivory Soap was an accident—not the soap itself, but the fact that it floats, which is why people all of a sudden wanted to buy it.”

  He kept going.

  “And Scotchgard was an accident—a scientist dropped some chemical on her tennis shoe and noticed later that the spot never got dirty.

  “And cornflakes were an accident— that was the Kellog brothers and their three-day-old mixture that they didn’t throw out.

  “And chocolate chip cookies were an accident because someone didn’t realize that bakers chocolate melts in cookie dough, but a broken-up chocolate bar just stays in nice yummy chunks.

  “And Coca-Cola was an accident…”

  “Seymour, come back, Seymour,” I said. I was waving a hand in front of his face.

  “Nope, can’t stop yet,” said Seymour. “I’m saving the best for last. Some guy named Fleming accidentally left an experiment with bacteria sitting on a window-sill. It went moldy, but this Fleming guy was smart enough to look at it anyway. He saw that the mold had actually started to dissolve the bacteria. Ta-da! Penicillin.”

  Which was pretty amazing because even I knew that penicillin was a really important drug. I also had a strong suspicion where Seymour was going with all this.

  “Please tell me you’re not going to leave a bunch of food lying around,” I said.

  “Not lying around,” said Seymour, “but it is true that a bunch of accidental experiments have to do with food. Are your parents staying late at the store tonight?”

  Chapter 7

  “What are you and Seymour working on?”

  That’s what Amanda, smartest kid in class, asked me the next morning.

  “How do you know we’re working on anything?” I asked.

  “I can tell,” said Amanda. “First Seymour acts as if he’s got the greatest idea in the world. The next day he’s going around scowling. That’s how he gets when you two are working on a project together. Besides, his hands are purple.”

  It was true. Last night had not been a great success. Seymour had invented burnt peanut butter, but he couldn’t find a use for it. He’d invented stretched marshmallow raisin balls, but they took about three hours to chew. He’d invented health food made with squished tinned beets and oatmeal, but it tasted disgusting and he still couldn’t get the color from his hands.

  The cats had invented things too.

  T-Rex had invented throwing up in the middle of the kitchen table. That was after he ate a bunch of peanut butter when Seymour wasn’t looking. Maybe Mom was right about the kittens not sitting on the table.

  Alaska had invented a game called “High-Risk Obstacle Course.” She jumped on top of the china cabinet and walked between Mom’s special glass figurines. I didn’t think she could push them off, but then I hadn’t thought she could topple the hair gel either. I bribed her down with cat treats and gave her a long talking-to. I’m not entirely sure she was listening.

  I was the only one who made any real progress. I’d worked on a new rocket, just a little one this time. It was one kitten length instead of two, and I was going to make sure Seymour didn’t step on it.

  Amanda was still waiting for my answer.

  “I’m not allowed to say. You know how Seymour is. You might out-dinosaur him or out-haunted-house him.”

  I was talking about a couple of other projects our class had worked on.

  “I can’t not do a good job on something just to make him feel better,” said Amanda.

&nb
sp; “Why not?” I asked. “It would make my life a whole lot easier.”

  The look on Amanda’s face scared me for a moment.

  “I’m joking, Amanda. I really am. Seymour would be totally disgusted if you did something like that. So would I. It’s bad enough that we have to go against Mr. Wilson’s class. If the smartest kid in our class starts acting weird, then we’ll know we’re really in trouble.”

  “I’m only smart in some ways,” said Amanda. “There’s lots of ways to be smart.”

  There are lots of ways to be smart. I sure wish Seymour would figure out just one of them. Burnt peanut butter smells awful.

  It was Thursday, and after school Seymour followed me to the store.

  “I’ve got a new great idea,” said Seymour. “Another way people invent things is to take ordinary things and find new uses. Your store is full of ordinary things.”

  “Take the ice-cream cone,” he said, picking up an ice-cream scoop on our way through housewares. “A teenager at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair was selling ice cream in dishes. Right next door was a man selling waffles, a Persian kind of waffle that’s really thin. When the dishes ran out, they used rolled-up waffles. Presto—ice-cream cones.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said a voice behind us.

  “Hey, Mr. G.!” said Seymour.

  “Hi, guys,” said Mr. G. “Your dad’s in the back talking to that slick security salesman, TJ. I’m just going to let your mom know I’m on my way home.”

  He was carrying his jacket, but he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. He leaned back and listened to Seymour talk about inventions.

  “Frisbees started out as pie plates,” said Seymour. “A company that baked and delivered pies noticed that its customers were throwing the plates around for fun. Hair dryers came from women switching the hoses on their vacuums from the vacuuming-in side to the air-blowing-out side. Liquid Paper started out as plain old white paint. Slinky was a torsion spring from World War II. Tea bags were meant just as packaging, but people dropped the whole thing in their teapots and thought it was great.”

  Sometimes I don’t know whether to believe Seymour or not.

  “It’s true!” he said. “Look it up yourself.”