The Odd 1s Out

by James Rallison

  I landed a hit. I knew I’d hit one of them because we got to make up names for ourselves before we started. And, well, no one took that seriously. We all came up with joke names like Buttfart or Big Wiener or ShootyMcShootface. But the name I chose was—

  Let me explain. When you get shot, a screen on your gun says who shot you, so whenever I shot someone, their screen would say, “A girl shot your chest,” or, “A girl shot your back.” Sure, it’s sexist, but at the time I thought it was the pinnacle of my comedy career.

  I don’t know if any of you guys have been in this situation, but let me tell you, it’s very hard to keep a straight face when halfway across a laser tag arena an almost adult man screams with 100 percent seriousness,

  That was how I knew I’d hit someone. I was only a little intimidated by that threat. The rest of me was trying not to laugh. After I hit one of the Hunters, I ran away from my spot. (Another rule broken!)

  So everything went on normally after that. We finished playing the game, and the lights turned on. While I was walking to the exit, I saw each of the Hunters holding a wad of black electrical tape. I’m not saying they put black tape over their sensors so you couldn’t hit them,

  but they totally put black electrical tape over their sensors so you couldn’t hit them.

  Luckily, though, their team didn’t win, so ha!

  Neither did my team, but that’s not important. Can you imagine them in their car driving to the laser tag arena? Hunter is driving and he looks over and says, “Hunter, did you bring the strobe lights?”

  “Yeah, Hunter. I brought them.”

  “Hunter, you got the tape, right?”

  “Yeah, Hunter. It’s right here.”

  “Hey, Hunter, where’s your hat?”

  “Hunter said he was going to bring me one.”

  “Oh, sorry, Hunter. I forgot.”

  “Here, Hunter, take my hat. My hair is already black.”

  “Thanks, Hunter.”

  I bet the ride home wasn’t nearly as happy.

  What I’m trying to tell you is, sometimes it doesn’t matter who you are in life. You can plan. You can prepare. But A_Girl will always end up sniping you.

  Chapter 8

  Science Fair

  I think we can all agree that schools make you learn a lot of useless stuff. People’s usual go-to complaint about school is that we have to learn math. They’ll say things like,

  But why do so many people immediately point their finger at math? (I’m guessing because they’re bad at algebra/geometry/calculus.) When will I ever have to use the things I learned in English class, like Shakespeare or iambic pentameter?

  Once in fifth grade, my teacher called me to her desk, pointed to a spot in my homework, and said, “I asked you to write four methods the Hopi Indians used to dry farm their fields. You only wrote two.”

  My first thought was, Well, thank goodness I’m not a Hopi Indian dry farmer. I only know 50 percent of what they did.

  And why does it even matter anymore? We have technology now. I bet the Hopi farmers today use sprinklers. So this isn’t a problem I worry about.

  I didn’t actually say all that. And to tell you the truth, I’ve forgotten the two ways of dry farming I did put down, so that just shows how much I learned. I’m guessing water and some type of soil was involved.

  But this chapter is about the school assignment that I hated the most:

  Once I was talking to my friend Jaiden about how much school science fairs suck. And she said, “Oh, at my school we didn’t do the science fair.”

  That got me wondering whether other people had suffered through a science fair before. So I did my own science experiment: I ran a Twitter poll and asked if people had to do the science fair during school and whether they enjoyed doing it.

  Of the 8,500 people who responded, 58 percent said that they didn’t have to do a science fair. Which was way more than I’d expected. I’ve renamed this group the Lucky Ones.

  Of those who did do the science fair, when asked whether they enjoyed it, 21 percent said they did—I’ll call these people the Nerds—and 21 percent said they didn’t. I know Twitter polls aren’t the most accurate sources of data, but I think it’s safe to say this issue is pretty evenly split.

  I’m in the 21 percent of people who didn’t enjoy the science fair. Don’t get me wrong, I love science! Well, that may not be completely true. I really hated biology. It was just memorizing vocabulary words.

  And chemistry, that was just a mess. Chemistry added even more vocabulary words and then tried to throw in math on top of everything else, and for some reason the periodic table was there too.

  Fun fact about my AP chemistry class: At the start of the year, there was an even amount of boys and girls in the class, but then as the year went on, all the boys dropped the class until at the end of the year I was the only boy left. Which just goes to show you that chemistry is totally a ladies’ club.

  The only reason I passed chemistry was because I got some extra-credit points, which just meant the teacher didn’t want to have to teach me again.

  The only useful thing I did in that class was come up with the name for the comic I was going to create that summer: “theodd1sout.”

  I thought physics was okay. It was a good balance of math and vocabulary words. It really made me think about serious stuff, like:

  On second thought, maybe I don’t like science; maybe I just liked watching The Magic School Bus and Bill Nye the Science Guy.

  Anyway, let me briefly go over what the science fair is for you Lucky Ones who didn’t have to do it. We started working on science fair projects around fourth grade, and did them every year up until tenth grade. Everyone in the class would spend a lot of time researching a topic that interested them, and then we all had to come up with a question about the topic that we could base an experiment on.

  Here are the sorts of questions we chose:

  Does the temperature of a battery affect how long it will last?

  What color light produces the most heat?

  How does the shape of a rocket’s fins affect its travel?

  All of these were projects I did. The science fair was supposed to teach us about the scientific method, but all it really taught me was to procrastinate and make up data. (Sorry, scientists.)

  You might think, “Oh, but the science fair sounds like fun. I wish my school did them!”

  Here were some of the flaws of the science fair:

  First, we got the option to work with a partner. Working with a partner sounds like a good idea because you can split up the work and not do as much. Now, since I didn’t have any friends, in fourth grade I partnered up with someone no one else wanted to be with. Unfortunately, he didn’t do any of the work. He just blew off his part of the assignment.

  That was enough to keep me from wanting to partner with anyone on anything ever again.

  The second problem with the science fair was that we had to come up with a question to investigate all on our own. And you have to understand, we were just kids. We didn’t exactly have the cognitive abilities that scientists have.

  Just a couple of years before, we all still believed in Santa Claus (except for me—my family didn’t do Santa Claus). Adults didn’t even trust us with lockers in high school. And now teachers wanted us to wonder if the ratio of a cylinder would affect its buoyancy? Come on.

  I think maybe it would have been better if we were assigned a question, at least in elementary school. I know the whole point of the project is to help us learn about the process of discovery, but we’re all stupid when we’re kids, all right?

  Plus, we didn’t have access to any research resources. The science fair is a lot like an episode of MythBusters, but what sets the MythBusters apart from your average fourth grader is that they have access to high-end explosives and TV production mone
y, while we have to ask our parents to drive us to Walmart for art supplies.

  One time I wanted to do an experiment on a certain type of soil, so I did research and came up with a question, but then when my mom and I went to Home Depot, they didn’t have the correct soil, so I had to start over and make up a whole new question. I bet the MythBusters never have to do that. Their moms would take them to a different Home Depot.

  Which shows you that if you choose a crappy question for your project, you will automatically have a bad experience. For my very first science fair, after spending a day researching possible questions, my partner and I came up with this:

  Now, I already know the answer to this question, and in fourth grade, I’m sure I knew the answer too. It’s noon. (Editor’s note: Actually, it’s around three p.m.) I don’t need to run an experiment on that. In fact, I can go to Google, type in “weather,” and—boom—there are my results right there. No need for an experiment.

  But the science fair isn’t about just finding the answer to your question, like regular science. No, no, no, no. After you research the topic, you have to write a hypothesis. A hypothesis is basically you guessing what you think the results of the experiment will be, but instead of writing, “I think this will happen,” you have to write it like you know what the answer is. So basically the science fair is teaching you to lie.

  The formula for a perfect hypothesis is “If [blank] then [blank] because [blank].”

  Let’s use this formula for the battery experiment I did in sixth grade.

  I asked, “Does the temperature of a battery affect how long it will last?” After doing research about how batteries work, and feeling confident about what the results should be, we’d write a hypothesis for this experiment like this: “If two double A batteries are used at differing temperatures then the battery in the hot temperature will not last as long because the battery’s fluid will evaporate, which damages the internal structure of the battery.”

  Oh, and spoiler alert, no, no, it doesn’t. I put two batteries outside on a hot day and two in the freezer, let them sit, and when I plugged them into my Game Boy Advance they lasted the exact same amount of time.

  The upside of this experiment was that I got to play my Game Boy Advance and call it homework.

  For the science fair report, you also have to write up the materials used, the steps to do your experiment (the “procedures”), and an introduction. The introduction is basically you writing about what you’re going to do.

  Then you do the experiment, a.k.a. the fun part. Make sure you write down your results (the not fun part), because you have to graph them. How do you make a graph to show that your batteries at different temperatures lasted the same amount of time?

  You think you’re done, right? But you’re not. Now you have to write up your results as if your graph didn’t already perfectly depict the results and write a conclusion. The conclusion is the most insulting part of the science fair. You basically answer this list of questions:

  Was your hypothesis correct?

  No, my hypothesis was not correct.

  What mistakes might you have made in your experiment?

  I don’t know! Maybe I took the batteries out of the cold and hot places too soon and I put them in a room-temperature Game Boy so that in a couple minutes they both were at room temperature again.

  How can others use the information you found?

  What do you mean? All the batteries lasted the same amount of time! I don’t think anyone is going to put their batteries in their freezer to have literally no effect.

  Another year, I wanted to do a project to see if plants could grow from reflected light. I never ended up doing this one because of one simple problem: This is a project that can’t be procrastinated. Plants take a while to grow. I’m going to guess (“hypothesize”) and say, yeah, they probably can grow from reflected light. I don’t think plants check to see if light has bounced off a mirror first before photosynthesizing it. I mean, I’ve seen potatoes sprout to life in the darkness of a pantry cupboard.

  Anyway, after you’re done writing down your data, you take everything you wrote, print it out, and then slap it onto a poster board. And everyone, and I mean everyone, used construction paper as a border around the text to give the poster board a good aesthetic.

  The second most fun part of the science fair was choosing what Word Art font to use for your title.

  The teachers told us to have a creative title to catch people’s attention—like that was part of the assignment. Basically, they were grading us on our ability to come up with puns. If you were doing a project about measuring plant growth, “Ready, Set, Grow” was a very popular choice.

  And then everyone took their poster board to the front of the class and gave a presentation. Those were the three most boring days of science class ever. Except for the day you yourself presented. That was the most stressful day.

  In all my years of listening to other kids talk about their science fair projects, I only remember one of them. There was this kid who did his project on water cleanliness, so he had a water meter that read the amount of total dissolved solids, or TDS, in the water. He must have had dyslexia, because during his presentation he talked about the STDs in the water. You really don’t want to know how many STDs there were in the school drinking fountain.

  Anyway, after presentations were finished, everyone in the school put their poster boards in the cafeteria and walked around to judge what people in other classes had done and how they’d decorated their poster boards.

  And you could always tell whose mom had helped.

  Overall, I did not have a good time. To those 21 percent of people who did enjoy the science fair, I’m glad you liked it, but me and the other 21 percent of people think you’re huge nerds.

  After I ran that Twitter poll, I had some people message me saying, “Yeah, I got third place and all I had was a cup of dirt, ha-ha!”

  I think the key to a good science fair is to come up with a good question and also to do it on a topic you actually enjoy. One of my science fair projects was on rockets and I had a blast. (That would have been a good poster board title.) I actually chose that topic after I procrastinated on the “Can plants grow from reflected light?” idea. I had to come up with something that could be done fast, and “How does the shape of a rocket’s fins affect its travel?” was easy because my older sister had already done this exact project.

  And also my older brother did that project too.

  You’d think I’d know a lot about rockets now, since my whole family has been around them, but all I really remember is that you shouldn’t mess with a rocket’s fins. They were probably designed by, I don’t know, rocket scientists.

  And no, I didn’t just reuse my siblings’ poster boards and data. My dad made me actually launch rockets.

  Basically, working on the science fair is a lot like life. Choose your partner carefully, ask the right questions, and after you procrastinate, just launch model rockets.

  Chapter 9

  Son, It’s Time We Talk About the Crickets and the Worms

  After the traumatic kindergarten moth incident, I decided I wasn’t a fan of insects anymore. But sometimes you can’t avoid them.

  Like, one time, I volunteered to watch a friend’s pet frogs while he was away on vacation. Along with a frog habitat, he gave me a box of feeder crickets. Sadly, after the first day, I didn’t put the lid securely onto the box and all the crickets escaped. Yeah.

  Look, I never claimed to be super responsible.

  This was bad for two reasons:

  Now we had nothing to feed the frogs; and

  There were a bunch of rogue crickets in my bedroom.

  Luckily, crickets make a loud noise at all times for no reason, so you’ll always know that, yes, you do indeed have crickets in your bedroom. It was like they were taunting
me.

  We tried to put the crickets back in their prison, but it turns out, they didn’t want to be eaten.

  So we ended up using the vacuum.

  But even with that method, we didn’t catch all of them. After the loud vacuum turned off, the crickets seemed to think it was their turn to be as loud as possible. Those were tough nights.

  Hopefully they all starved to death.

  Don’t feel sorry for those crickets, though. Their one and only purpose in life was to be food for amphibians, and they got to survive. Since all of the food had escaped, my family caught wild crickets outside to keep the frogs from starving.

  That way, the frogs got only free-range crickets.

  But I don’t want to talk about insects anymore. Instead, I’m going to tell you another rescue and release story. About worms. Which is only a small step up from insects. They’re pretty much pink caterpillars that don’t have a cool final evolution.

  Has anyone ever told you that if a worm gets cut in half, it turns into two worms? Well, it turns out that’s a myth. The only worms that have that superpower are planarian flatworms, which don’t even look like worms.