The Science of Breakable Things

by Tae Keller

  I’d hoped to spend all of science class today doodling up ideas for the new designs, and dreaming up travel plans for Mom and me—but Mr. Neely surprised us.

  Because it’s the last week of school before winter break, and because it snowed for the first time today, he decided to actually be the coolest teacher ever and let us skip class to play outside.*1

  We were supposed to be wrapping up our magnets-and-electricity unit, but really, there’s not much more to learn about magnets after you’ve been talking about them for almost a month straight. Just to make sure everything was still “educational,” he gave us a twenty-minute lecture about the science of snow before he set us free for the rest of the hour. (Cold temperatures, frozen water, ice, hail, snow, yes, yes, blah, blah.)

  The weather was freezing, obviously, so we all pulled on our coats and scarves and bundled up up up, and Mikayla complained to infinity about how she would literally get frostbite, so Mr. Neely said anybody who didn’t want to go outside was welcome to stay inside and finish an extra-fun science worksheet. He didn’t even intend this as a punishment. He honestly thought it would be just as fun.

  And that was how our whole seventh-grade science class ended up on the playground behind the school at the end of day on a Monday afternoon. At first nobody knew what to do, because we weren’t exactly all friends, and we also weren’t in second grade, so we weren’t going to start spontaneously running around and playing tag. Also, Mr. Neely was standing there watching us, which was kind of weird.

  Then Tom K. threw a snowball, because that’s just the kind of kid he is.*2 The snowball flew fast and hit Nick Henner right in the face, and we all kind of held our breath because Nick used to be a big crybaby about that stuff, and who knew if he’d outgrown it?

  But Nick started laughing, and he threw his own snowball, which hit George, and just like that, everyone was throwing snowballs. Even Mikayla and Janie threw some, before they went and sat on a bench to watch, because they don’t like fun or something.

  Twig tackled me into the snow, and I wriggled to get up, but she deadweighted on top of me until I said, “I give up, I give up!” Twig rolled off me, onto her back, and started making a snow angel, right in the middle of the snowball fight. And, of course, I started making one, too. This day was a beautiful good day in the middle of so many bad ones, and I felt like if I didn’t laugh I would cry. And I don’t even know what came over me—but I started laughing and laughing and I couldn’t stop.

  Dari ran over and hovered above us with an armload of snow.

  “No!” I shrieked, struggling to get up, but he dumped the snow over Twig and me before we could squirm away.

  “Dari, you big nerd!” Twig yelled, but she said it nicely, if you can believe it. Dari’s cheeks were flushed with the cold, but he was grinning so wide. It felt good to see him having fun instead of sitting outside classrooms doing homework.

  Twig reached down and started throwing fistfuls of snow at Dari, because she couldn’t be bothered to make snowballs. George threw a snowball, and it hit Dari in the back of the head, but he ignored it. He was too busy happy-awkward-nervous-laughing and looking at Twig. And then he took off in a sprint, and Twig chased him, stumbling and picking up handfuls of snow as she went.

  I felt very awkward all of a sudden, like I wasn’t in on the joke. And I didn’t know what to do with my hands or my legs or my whole body, really, so I went over to stand by Mr. Neely.

  “Are you having fun, Natalie?” he asked.

  I wanted to tell him he looked like a snowman in his puffy white coat and black hat, but of course I didn’t, because he is my teacher. I nodded instead. “Are you?”

  He laughed and looked at me like I’d said something surprising. “I am. I really am.” The boys had attacked him earlier, but he never threw any snowballs back—probably because he was an adult who didn’t feel the need to do that, and also probably because he didn’t want to get sued.

  “Thank you, Mr. Neely,” I said. This time I didn’t say it because I should, or because I had nothing else to say. This time I meant it. I really meant it.

  *1 Granted, he insisted on referring to this as #MrNeelysSnowDay, but still.

  *2 Tom K. was also the kid who started the whole “gorilla warfare” business last year, just saying.

  Dad woke me up early this morning. “Get dressed,” he said, grinning like he’d lost his mind. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.”

  I tugged the crusty bits of sleep out of my eyes and managed a mumbly “Fine.”

  “Oh, and by the way,” Dad added, “you aren’t going to school today.”

  I woke up real quick at that, sitting straight up in bed. “What do you mean?” Dad and I hadn’t really spoken since my whole Dr. Doris tantrum, and I knew he was pretty much handing me a gift-wrapped chance to make things better.

  But Dad just said, “Come on, get dressed. We’re going somewhere fun.”

  One glance at my phone explained everything.*1 Turns out, after #MrNeelysSnowDay, we ended up with a real snow day. This was the best kind of snow day, too, where the weather channel predicts a huge snowstorm, but it doesn’t end up snowing that much, and you can still do stuff.

  Dad was waiting in the car, windows fogged with the heater running, but Mom wasn’t in the passenger seat. I shouldn’t have been surprised anymore by Mom’s absence, but I still was—every single time. I got into the passenger seat, in her place, running my hand across the leather before I sat, as if I were brushing away her ghost.

  When Dad started driving and told me about the snow day, I pretended to act surprised. For one panic-second I thought Dad was taking me to another therapist appointment this week. I’d managed to avoid most of Dr. Doris’s Therapist Tricks, but she was definitely onto me, and I didn’t know how much longer I could avoid talking about Mom.

  But then I realized, no, this wasn’t the way to Dr. Doris’s. And anyway, this was supposed to be an adventure. We were supposed to be having fun.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Dad’s grin became his Big Surprise smile, and without even meaning to, I came up with a list of all the wonderful places he could be taking me.*2

  “We’re going Christmas shopping!” he said.

  “Oh.” I tried not to be disappointed, and failed.

  Dad noticed and he looked disappointed, and the whole car ride felt like one big disappointment, even though neither of us wanted it to be.

  “Come on, it’ll be fun,” Dad said. “We haven’t done something fun together in a while.” If Dad wanted to do something fun, I could have provided a whole list of ideas.*3 I guess our lives had gotten pretty sad if Dad’s idea of fun was running errands.

  He looked hopeful, though—so sad and so hopeful—and he was trying, so I told him, “That does sound like fun.”

  I decided to make that true, too, because if you want something to come true badly enough, sometimes it does.

  Christmas was less than a week away, so naturally the mall would be a supremely unfun place to be, especially since everyone else seemed to have the same snow day idea. But we decided to make a game of it by pretending we were warriors marching into battle.

  “Take my hand,” Dad said after we got out of the car, sticking his hand out with mock seriousness. I took his hand, even though it was really embarrassing and I was secretly afraid of seeing someone from school. But to tell you the truth, I kind of liked it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d held a parent’s hand, and even if we were just being goofy about it, it still felt nice.

  By the time we got to the center of the mall, the crowd became too thick. A herd of baby strollers parted the mass of bodies and ripped our hands apart. “Go on, Dad, save yourself!” I said, reaching one hand out and clutching my chest with the other.

  Dad laughed, and he came over and bear-hugged me, an
d people stared but I didn’t care. I was too happy. Then we had to get down to business, and it took us one whole hour to buy fancy dinner plates for Grandma.

  When we left the kitchenware store, Dad asked, “What would you like to get your mother for Christmas?” I think he meant to sound casual about it, but his words came out wrong. I couldn’t blame him. Before, shopping for Mom had been hard because she loved everything. Now it was hard because she didn’t love anything at all.

  “I don’t want to get her something.” The words just popped out of my mouth.

  Dad’s forehead got wrinkly and I could tell he was stepping into Therapist Dad mode in five, four, three—

  “Or,” I began, and Dad got that hopeful look in his eyes again. “Or I guess we could get her another plant.”

  One crisis averted, another incoming, because Dad’s wild want to be happy smile was back. “That would be great,” he said, as if Mom would care. As if she hadn’t killed all her other plants.

  I nodded, and looked around awkwardly because we were standing outside Kitchen Kapers, in the middle of the mall, having a Moment.

  “Okay, let’s go to the plant nursery,” I said.

  I shoved through the crowds, making my way to the nursery. Mom and I had visited it so many times together that the way to the plants was mapped onto my heart. And despite the crowd and the chaos, I didn’t even turn around to make sure Dad was still behind me. I was curling into myself, closing up like sleeping grass, and then someone shouted my name and it took me a second to place the voice, and then—and then.

  “John! Natalie!” the voice repeated, and I turned to see Mikayla’s mom, shouldering her way through the masses, eyes trained on me. She wore her usual jeans and black button-down, with her brown curls loose around her shoulders. The sight of her was so familiar that my heart opened up. And then I remembered what she’d done to my family, and it slammed shut again.

  Just that one moment, that split second of happiness, felt like a betrayal of Mom. I curled my hands into fists and dug my fingernails into my palms.

  It took me a moment to spot Mikayla, trailing behind her mother. Because of course. Of course this was my luck. Like I couldn’t ever get away from her and just forget about everything.

  “Dana! Mikayla!” Dad said, his voice slipping a few notches lower into the tone he uses with Not Our Family.

  “John, how are you?” Mikayla said in her wannabe-adult way. She didn’t acknowledge me. I didn’t acknowledge her. It was as if the whole weirdness last week hadn’t happened, as if she hadn’t come over to talk to us for no apparent reason at all.

  The three of them launched into small talk about the crowd and Christmas and the weather and school—and their words felt like tiny droplets of rain, like the drizzle that says, Watch out. It’s going to pour.

  Finally, Mikayla’s mom leaned forward and her eyebrows knitted and she said, “How’s Alice?” She said it as if she cared, as if all of this weren’t her fault. “We miss her.” I’d never hated anyone more than I hated her at that second, and I wished the Christmas crowd would eat her up and carry her far, far away from our family.

  Dad hesitated, and I knew I couldn’t bear to hear him talk about it, not here, not in front of Mikayla and her mom.

  “I’ll meet you at the nursery,” I said in that tiny moment of hesitation, without looking at any of them. And I was gone before Dad could respond.

  I quickly made my way to the plants, slipping through the crowd like a ghost, like I didn’t exist at all. And perhaps not too many people buy plants for Christmas, because the store was quiet and nearly empty. I read the descriptions of all the plants on display, because that was better than thinking, but it was that fake kind of reading, where your eyes move and your brain swallows the words without processing them.

  Until CAMELLIA JAPONICA ‘KOREAN FIRE.’ I almost didn’t pay attention to the description until I read: BLOOMS THROUGH WINTER, EVEN IN THE SNOW. I read further: THIS HARDY FLOWER CAN SURVIVE IN NEARLY ANY CONDITION.

  The Korean Fire. The tiny red flower was not spectacular—not nearly as stunning as a blue orchid—but it seemed right. Maybe we didn’t have our miracle plant—yet—but at least we’d have a plant that survives through the winter. A plant that keeps going.

  When Dad arrived, we bought the plant. He read the plant name, and then opened and closed his mouth like he wasn’t sure what to say. And then, finally, “Natalie, maybe we should talk about—”

  But I cut him off. “Can we not do this right now?”

  Dad’s lips pressed into a straight line, but he nodded. Sometimes when he gets quiet like this, I can tell he’s pulling a Therapist Trick, waiting for me to talk and fill the silence with truth. But at that moment, he was just quiet because there was nothing left to say.

  We did not talk. We did not hold hands. We just went home.

  *1 Text from Twig: SNOW DAYYYYY with a bunch of snowflake emojis.

  *2 In order of least exciting to most exciting: the movies, the aquarium, the arboretum, Six Flags, Disneyland.

  *3 See footnote 39.

  The snowstorm actually hit today, so we got another snow day. But somehow I still had to see Dr. Doris. Because in Dad’s mind, nothing can stop him from pursuing Mental Health. Not even a blizzard.

  Anyway, I think Mr. Neely has managed to brainwash me with his hashtags and experiments, because I kept thinking about the scientific process during therapy. Dr. Doris was talking, and I was trying to listen—really, I was—but in my head I was turning her into an experiment.

  Dr. Doris said, “Today I want us to talk about your mother.”

  And my brain went: Observations!

  • Dr. Doris is wearing bright red lipstick.

  • It’s snowing so hard today that when we drove here, Dad’s windshield wipers had to work overtime, and Dr. Doris’s office window is just a wall of white.

  • What if the roads shut down and Dad and I get trapped here?

  • Dr. Doris asks, “What’s on your mind, Natalie?”

  • My hands pick up a Slinky on the coffee table, and I watch it go back and forth as if my hands don’t even belong to me.

  • The plants in this office could use some watering.

  • Dr. Doris asks her question again, carefully rewording it because—whoops—I forgot to answer.

  • I say, “Nothing.”

  • Outside, the wind is crying.

  Dr. Doris was worried that I wasn’t focused during our session, but really, I was just trying to answer my own scientific question: How many questions can I get Dr. Doris to ask?* Naturally, as the success of my experiment depended on getting her to talk, I couldn’t talk much myself. I think Mr. Neely would be proud. Dad, not so much.

  “Okay,” Dr. Doris said about halfway through our session. She was probably frustrated. She was probably trying to hide it. “We don’t need to talk about your mother if you’re not comfortable doing that yet. We can talk about anything you want. What’s on your mind, Natalie?”

  That was Question Number Twenty-Four. I was busy tallying that question on my mental scoreboard, so that was what was on my mind.

  But my secret thought was about how Dad had talked to Mikayla and her mom about the “situation,” and I didn’t know what he’d said and I didn’t want anybody else to know about Mom. I felt like maybe it made her look bad, and I didn’t want her to look bad, especially in front of the Menzers. Maybe I was embarrassed by her. I didn’t want to be.

  What I wanted was to stop caring about Mikayla, to shut her out completely. But then I would remember when we were little, hanging out in the lab or the arboretum while our mothers worked. We collected ferns and sticks to run our own “scientific experiments,” which always resulted in incredible cures: Cure for Hiccups! Cure for Homework! Cure for Bedtime!

  Cure for S
adness.

  And of course our cures always worked, because there was never any other option. We were magic. We were unstoppable. We were scientists.

  But now Mikayla is a Cool Girl and I’m not, and it’s like Mikayla doesn’t even remember the way we used to be. Somewhere along the line, she changed. She turned evil. And I guess Mrs. Menzer must be evil, too, because why else would she fire Mom?

  The funny part, though, is that Mikayla’s mom was the one who gave me my very own Cobalt Blue Orchid in the first place. She and Mom had been studying the orchid in their lab, trying to figure out how it survived the cobalt and aluminum, trying to apply the findings to other plants, maybe even extend the research beyond plants.

  This was in fourth grade, right when Mikayla had just stopped being my friend, and I’d been following Mom around, watching her work, all serious with my hair clipped up, taking notes in my composition book.

  “It’s pretty,” I’d said, admiring the orchid behind its protective glass, trying to describe its papery leaves in my notes, trying to capture the way it looked like any other orchid until the light hit it, and then the flower became so blue it hurt to look at it. I stood there, scribbling and describing and wishing I had one of my very own. And, like a mind reader, Mikayla’s mom had gone into their cabinets and pulled out a seed, just for me.

  I’d expected Mom to protest—she always talked about how delicate the orchid was, how rare and precious—but she didn’t. She just smiled at Mikayla’s mom, and something passed between them that I couldn’t understand, and then Mom and I had this beautiful, magical plant for our greenhouse.

  “Here’s a miracle plant of your very own, Natalie,” Mrs. Menzer had said. “Study it. Watch it grow.”

  And we had that orchid until we didn’t—until Mom let it die.

  Dr. Doris asked another question, and I nodded, even though I hadn’t quite heard what she’d asked. In my head, I said: Twenty-five questions. And I repeated, twenty-five, twenty-five, twenty-five, because I didn’t want to think about anything else. And I didn’t want to forget my scientific data. If you don’t repeat the answers, if you don’t hold tight and turn them over and over in your head, one day you’ll forget, and then they’re lost forever.