Ruby Goldberg’s Bright Idea

by Anna Humphrey

  In a lot of ways I had to agree with Peter. It was dumb that Ms. Slate and the other teachers had decided to ban projects that used live animals just because of a few escaped rats. I mean, there’s so much we can learn from watching small mammals and reptiles! Still, I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. Now that the cuddly baby chicks had been banned, there was nothing standing in my way of the gold medal. That is, if I could just get the catapult part of the machine right. Half the time when the newspaper landed on one side of the catapult, it triggered the bowling ball to release, which launched the newspaper into the waiting basket. But the other half of the time, the Somerville Times missed the basket completely and knocked over the rake Grandpa kept in the corner, which bounced against the stack of snow tires, tipped over some empty paint cans, and scared the squirrels that were stealing sunflower seeds from the bird feeder outside the window—hardly the chain reaction I’d been going for!

  “I’m really starting to get nervous now,” Penny said. “But you’ll be there next Saturday afternoon for the dress rehearsal, right? And then next Sunday night for the show? I need you right in the front row where I can see you.”

  What? Be where? I realized all of a sudden that Penny, who was standing in line behind me, had been talking for a while, but I’d been so busy eavesdropping on Dominic and Peter and thinking about my machine that I’d managed to miss most of what she’d said.

  “Of course!” I said, even though I wasn’t exactly sure what I was agreeing to. “Front row.”

  “Thanks.” Penny smiled. “I’ll dance so much better if I can see a friendly face. Plus, that way you’ll have a close-up view of my costume. My mom’s almost finished with the peacock feather headband. It looks pretty cool.”

  “The peacock dance!” I exclaimed, finally figuring out what we were talking about. “Where you make peacock hands. Of course. I can’t wait to see it. Does it look kind of like this?” I made pointy beak shapes with both my hands and waved them around over my head.

  “No.” Penny laughed. “Sorry . . . but that looks more like the drowning chicken dance.”

  “No way! This is the drowning chicken dance.” I stuck my hands into my armpits and flapped my elbows as fast as possible, like I was trying to stay afloat. Then I added a panicked pecking motion with my neck and started to bend my knees, sinking to the floor like I was going underwater. “Bok, bok, bok, bok, BOOOOOK.” I added freaked-out chicken sounds to make it extra realistic.

  “Um . . . ,” Penny said, then she burst out laughing. “It’s unique . . . but I don’t think you’re ready for a recital yet.”

  “Oh, please. You’re just jealous of my style,” I teased. Brianne, Ally, and a couple of other girls were leaning out of the line and giving me weird looks, so I stopped dancing. I was glad I’d made Penny smile, but most of the kids in the class were still mad at me about the Hershey’s Kisses incident. They already didn’t like me very much, and I didn’t need to give them more of a reason to talk about me.

  The line moved up again. We were five people from the beginning, and now that I was done chicken dancing, I started to wonder how on earth I was going to get past Mr. Trellis, the gym teacher, and manage to land a long jump with no laces in my shoes. My sneakers had been falling off all day just from regular walking.

  “Hey,” I said, eyeing Penny’s shoelaces. They were nice strong thick ones with happy-face designs on them. She’d just gotten them a few weeks before too, so they were clean and strong. Come to think of it, they’d be perfect for suspending the newspaper basket in my Rube Goldberg machine! “Do you think I could borrow one of your shoelaces for the long jump?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said, bending down and starting to unlace it.

  “Thanks!” I said. Then I added, “And maybe I could keep it for a few weeks? It’s for my science project,” I explained quickly when she raised her eyebrows. “I was going to borrow Sarah’s, but my family doesn’t want me using their stuff anymore.”

  Penny sighed a little. It wasn’t the first time I’d asked to borrow her things for science-related reasons. There was the time I’d needed her sandwich container to collect worms in . . . the time she’d lent me her favorite sparkly ponytail elastic to build a high-powered slingshot . . . the day I’d accidentally sunk her Thermos to the bottom of the pond while doing a floatability experiment. For a second I thought I might be out of luck, but then Penny laughed and held the shoelace up to me. “Of course. If you need it.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem.” She shrugged. “You know I’ll do anything I can do to help you.” I could have hugged her. Even if my family didn’t seem to want to help me out much, at least I knew I could always count on my best friend.

  • • •

  And I was even more grateful for Penny and her happy-face shoelace that day after school when I got to the hardware store. You can say what you want about scientific work, but it sure isn’t cheap! Did you know that a clothesline kit alone costs $14.49 plus tax? With my mom’s twenty dollars and some loose change I found in my backpack, I barely had enough to cover that, some wood screws, a small tin of floor wax, and a little key chain with a pig on it that was on sale for $2.99. When you pressed a button on its back, it oinked at you and its nose lit up. And, okay, maybe I didn’t technically need it for my machine, but it was so cute! How was I supposed to resist?

  Now I just had to hope that Grandpa would let me borrow a plastic mat to put underneath the catapult to hold it steady, and that he had some spare binder clips lying around.

  I was at the checkout, counting out my last few cents, when I saw Dominic and his dad. They were walking toward the cash register with a basket brimming with stuff. Gears, wires, carbon rods, ball bearings, and epoxy glue. I gulped. Baby chicks would have been worse, don’t get me wrong, but this still looked serious.

  “You might want some crazy glue for the rotor head,” Dominic’s dad said. “Wait in line. I’ll be right back.”

  For a second I thought I might be able to slip out the door undetected, but just as I was about to make a run for it, Dominic turned and saw me.

  “Oh, hey, Ruby,” he said. “Just stocking up on a few things for my science project.” That was an understatement. He was buying half the store! “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Oh, you know,” I tried to act casual. “Same.”

  He gave me a strange look. “Why do you need a clothesline for a giant volcano?”

  “Oh, this?” I hugged the package I was holding against my chest. “This is for my . . . clothes. To, ummm . . .”

  “You’re not building a model of Mount Saint Helens, are you?” he said. “I knew it! I knew you were just keeping your idea secret. You’re probably doing something way cooler. I’m not allowed to do the baby chicks anymore,” he went on. “Ms. Slate says live animals are against the rules this year. So I’m just building an RC helicopter instead.” He held up his basket to show me the parts.

  Just a remote controlled helicopter? Building something that was actually going to fly, completely from scratch, was totally amazing.

  “That sounds kind of cool,” I said, remaining aloof.

  “I guess. It just doesn’t seem that important, you know? Lots of people have done it before.” Dominic shrugged. “But who knows. Maybe I’ll discover something new along the way. Like how the chemist who invented Post-it notes was trying to make a superstrong glue, but he messed up the batch and made something cooler. That’s the great thing about science, right? You never know when you might discover something.”

  I wasn’t about to admit it out loud, but I actually agreed with Dominic there. (Also, I’d never heard that story about Post-it notes before. I was definitely going to look it up online when I got home.) It really was true. The next big scientific breakthrough could always be right around the corner. It was exactly that possibility that made me keep filling the fridge with balloons, experimenting with the fizzy antibacterial tablets my sister used to clean her ret
ainer, and hiding old potatoes around my room to see if I could find the optimal level of darkness to make them grow more eyes. (My mom had yet to discover that little experiment . . . but it was starting to smell a little funny, so it wouldn’t be long.)

  I could hardly believe that—for once—Dominic and I actually had the same opinion on something. But wait a second . . . I stopped myself. Was he serious, or was he just trying to act friendly to get my defenses down? And why was he telling me his new project idea, anyway? If I hadn’t been able to see the helicopter parts, right there in his basket, I might have suspected he was lying to me, like I’d lied to him about the volcano. I narrowed my eyes at him, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “For a while I was thinking about making a Rube Goldberg machine—like the ones you’re always making at your desk, but I didn’t know if I’d be very good at it. I’ve never tried before.”

  Was this Dominic’s way of hinting that he already knew my idea? The only person I’d told, besides my family, was Penny, and I knew she’d never tell. Unless Dominic had been sneaking around, listening in on our conversations!

  “How did you know?” I said. I hadn’t meant to say it, but the words came out anyway, angry and accusing.

  Dominic looked confused.

  “How did you know I was making a Rube Goldberg machine?” I added.

  “You are?” Dominic’s face brightened. “I didn’t know that! I can’t believe we almost had the same idea. That’s so great!”

  “Great” wasn’t exactly the word I would have used. I could have kicked myself. Now that Dominic knew what I was doing, it would be that much easier for him to beat me—or worse, copy me again.

  “You always come up with awesome ideas, Ruby. I don’t think I ever told you, but when I heard you were making a citrus clock, that’s what inspired me to build my potato-powered grandfather clock last year, so I kind of owe you. . . .”

  Oh! I’d inspired him! Well, that was a fancy way of admitting that he’d stolen my idea.

  “Hey . . . if you need any help . . .” He trailed off. “I’ve always wanted to try making a Rube Goldberg machine.”

  Dominic’s help was the last thing I needed. Let him in to see my entire project so he could learn all the details and use them against me? No, thanks!

  “My dad knows the owner here, so he gets a discount. I could chip in for supplies. And we could even use my helicopter as part of your machine if you want.”

  So now he was trying to bribe me with free stuff? I knew better than to fall for that trick. Still, an RC helicopter would open up a whole world of possibilities. Like, maybe when the newspaper landed on the coffee table near Grandpa’s chair, it could trigger a second sensor that would launch the helicopter, which could pick up Grandpa’s slippers and carry them across the room. We could even paint the words “Tomato Copter” on the side of it. I could already imagine it whizzing efficiently across the room. I shook my head, trying to snap myself out of it. Helicopter or no helicopter, I was not going to let Dominic help with my project. It wasn’t worth the risk. Anyway, my parents would help me buy supplies if I really needed them.

  Dominic smiled innocently, pushed his overgrown hair out of his eyes, and set his basket down near the cash register. “Think about it, okay?” he said, emptying all the stuff onto the counter. There must have been a hundred dollars’ worth of supplies! “If you want,” he went on, “we could even pair up. Supeng and Eleni asked if they could do a group project this year, and Ms. Slate said it was okay. Plus, you’ve won bronze and silver and I’ve won gold. We’d make a pretty unstoppable team,” he added.

  A team? Yeah, right! That was the craziest thing I’d ever heard.

  But then it hit me: If we did work together on a single project, there was no way that Dominic could beat me, was there? Plus, wasn’t there an expression . . . keep your friends close, but your enemies closer? I didn’t love the idea of having Dominic by my side, but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. At least that way I could watch his every move.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, eyeing Dominic suspiciously. “But no promises.”

  Dominic grinned like I’d just promised him the moon. “Okay,” he said.

  The whole way to Grandpa’s house, I wondered if, by even just agreeing to think it over, I’d made the biggest mistake ever.

  Chapter 6

  T hat afternoon and evening I didn’t watch cartoons or read a single chapter of my Roald Dahl book. I didn’t start any new inventions or experiments at home (even though after I confirmed my hypothesis about how to grow a potato with maximum eyes, I was dying to find out if I’d get the same results with yams). Instead I spent all my time in Grandpa’s shed, working on the Tomato-Matic 2000, and one thing started to become painfully obvious: I needed help.

  “Ouch!” I said, for what felt like the millionth time, as the basket holding the newspaper rolled partway up the clothesline, stopped, swung around wildly, and hit me on the head. I’d tried greasing the clothesline with floor wax, then I’d tried making the line shorter . . . then tighter, but no matter what I did, the newspaper was just too heavy to go the whole distance.

  Finally I got the idea to attach one end of the clothesline way up high on the garage wall so that it angled down sharply, letting gravity do the work. That did the trick! The only problem was that it worked too well. On my first trial the basket went flying down the clothesline at high speed. When it reached the end, the newspaper shot out, sailed straight through the shed window, which was—thankfully—open, and landed smack in the middle of Grandpa’s birdbath, nearly giving a cardinal a heart attack. I felt so bad that I went outside and tried to feed the bird a snack that Penny had given me to taste test—some kind of sticky granola and raisin stuff in a baggy. It was pretty delicious, but I think the poor thing was too much in shock to eat. To sum it up, things were not going well.

  “That looks like it’s coming along,” my dad said that night as he peered over my shoulder. It was past bedtime, but I was still working on sketches at the dining room table, trying to figure out a way to keep the newspaper in the basket. So far I’d thought of wrapping it in Saran wrap or securing it with Velcro fasteners. Both ideas would keep the paper out of the birdbath, but they’d make it next to impossible to dump it when it reached the end of the line—and getting the newspaper onto Grandpa’s coffee table was the whole point.

  “Not really,” I said miserably, rubbing out the Velcro fasteners with my eraser. “I can’t make this part work.” I explained the flying newspaper problem to my dad.

  “What if you didn’t angle the clothesline so much?” he suggested.

  “I’ve tried that. But the newspaper is too heavy. If I don’t use the force of gravity, it won’t work.” I rubbed at my forehead and stared at the drawing again, trying to see it with fresh eyes. “Maybe I should just give up and build a stupid baking soda volcano after all,” I said.

  “Come on. You don’t mean that,” Dad said. “The Ruby Goldberg I know never gives up that easily.”

  He was right, of course. I didn’t mean it. I was just frustrated, and tired.

  “You know . . .” he said, pulling up a chair. “When gravity alone won’t do the trick, a little horsepower often comes in handy. Why don’t you put in a motor?” He took the pencil from me and started to sketch a coil sort of thing near the top of the clothesline. “Kind of like this,” he said.

  It looked simple enough on paper.

  “But I don’t know anything about motors,” I pointed out. “And the science fair is barely two weeks away. I don’t think I have time to learn.”

  “You know . . . it’s funny,” Dad said. “I was having that same problem at work today. Bonnie asked me to turn in a report on acquisitions and our new profit sharing model.” I nodded, trying to pretend like I wasn’t about to fall asleep. “It’s due next week, and I’m no expert on profit sharing—so you know what I did?”

  I shrugged and looked up from my sketch quickly, trying to act sli
ghtly interested so I wouldn’t hurt my dad’s feelings.

  “I got Tanya in accounting to do it for me.”

  “DAD!” I shouted. “You got someone else to do your work for you? That’s cheating!”

  Dad laughed. “It’s not cheating. It’s working together. I’m still writing the part about acquisitions, since that’s what I know best, and Tanya’s writing about the new model, since she’s the expert. In the end we’ll have a better report than if I’d done it alone. It’s the same as when your mom and I help each other with the Sunday crossword. Two minds are better than one, don’t you think? And that’s especially true when it comes to scientific discovery.”

  He had my attention now.

  “Have you heard of Banting and Best? They invented insulin together, and that saved the lives of thousands of people with diabetes. Or how about the Wright brothers? It took two great minds to get that plane off the ground!” He paused. “Or take Ben & Jerry. Do you think one person alone could have dreamed up something as delicious as triple chocolate brownie fudge explosion ice cream?”

  “Dad!” I said, rolling my eyes at his silly example. Then I bit at my thumbnail while I gave the matter some thought. I hated to admit it, but maybe he was right. I still didn’t trust Dominic . . . but I could definitely use his skills—and there was no telling how great the machine could be if we worked together. Plus, like I’d said before, if he was my partner, at least I could keep a close eye on him. “Well . . . ,” I admitted. “There’s this one person in my class who wants to work with me. And he is pretty good at things like motors.”

  “There you go, then!” My dad grinned, as if the solution were that simple. “Now let’s get your great scientific mind off to bed.”

  • • •

  But even though I slept on the decision, I didn’t wake up feeling any more certain. If we did work as partners, could I trust Dominic to do his best and not sabotage the project? Would his helicopter be strong enough to lift Grandpa’s slippers? Would I be able to stand the turtlelike look of him peering out from underneath his bangs every single afternoon until the science fair started?