Ruby Goldberg’s Bright Idea

by Anna Humphrey

  I was expecting Mr. Petrecelli to mutter something then about how much Tomato had also liked to pee on his poppies, but instead he looked down at the cross and said, “I lost my cat, Firenze, a little over a year ago. She died of cancer. She liked tomatoes too. Very unusual for a cat.” He was quiet for a minute, and just when I thought he was about to turn and go, he went on. “We named her after the city we honeymooned in. Firenze, Italy. She was my wife’s cat, really. She was never quite the same after Margaret died. I think she never stopped missing her mother.”

  Mr. Petrecelli had had a wife? She must have died a long time ago. I couldn’t remember anyone else ever living with him. Although, now that I thought about it, there did used to be an old cat that slept on his porch. A brown tabby with black ear tips. Sometimes Tomato used to bark at it, but I hadn’t seen it around in a long, long time.

  “I’m sorry your cat died,” I said.

  “So am I,” the old man answered. “And I’m sorry about your dog. I left your grandfather a plant on his front porch. I don’t suppose he ever brought it in. Gardening helped me when I lost Firenze.”

  So it had been Mr. Petrecelli who’d left the little houseplant for Grandpa—the one with the blue wrapping the same exact color as Tomato’s collar! Maybe Dominic had been right. It was possible Mr. Petrecelli wasn’t so horrible after all. He was just kind of sad, a lot like Grandpa had been lately. Suddenly I had an idea.

  “You know,” I said cautiously, “if you ever have time, maybe you and my grandpa could hang out together. You could start a dead pets club.” The second the words had left my mouth, I knew how awful they sounded. “Or not,” I added quickly. “But Grandpa was just saying that he should start going for walks again. Maybe you could go with him sometime.”

  “What? With my bad knee?” Mr. Petrecelli tapped his cane on the grass.

  “Oh. Right. Well, you don’t have to walk. Maybe you and Grandpa could sit on your front porch and kill some flies together.”

  I felt a little sorry for the flies, of course, but if it meant Grandpa would have someone to talk to . . .

  “Hmm,” Mr. Petrecelli said, examining a branch on Grandpa’s hedge. “I haven’t seen much of Alfred except in passing, out in the yard, since your grandmother died. She and Margaret used to be the best of friends. They were always sitting out here doing their crochet, yakking away.”

  I looked toward the patio where Mr. Petrecelli was pointing, and I tried to imagine my grandmother sitting there laughing with Mr. Petrecelli’s wife, Firenze the cat curled at their feet. My grandmother had died before I was born, and Grandpa didn’t talk about her very often. I think it made him too sad. I only knew what she looked like from a picture he had up in the hall.

  Mr. Petrecelli picked a tiny bug off a leaf and flicked it to the ground. “I suppose I could go walking. Not every day, mind you. But sometimes a walk in the morning is pleasant enough. Before the worst of this heat sets in. It gets the digestion going. I’ll talk to your grandfather about it next time I see him.”

  I smiled, but because I wasn’t sure exactly how much I wanted to know about Mr. Petrecelli’s digestion, I was thankful when he changed the subject

  “What is it you’re doing back there with your boyfriend, anyway, making all that noise?” he asked.

  “Dominic is NOT my boyfriend,” I almost shouted, nearly shuddering at the thought.

  It was the first time I’d ever seen Mr. Petrecelli actually smile.

  “He’s just my science fair partner. We’re making a Rube Goldberg machine that fetches a paper and slippers.”

  “Ah!” he said. “Rube Goldberg. I used to enjoy his cartoons.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Who knew? Maybe Mr. Petrecelli and Grandpa were going to have even more in common than I thought.

  “Well. Best of luck with that endeavor, I suppose,” Mr. Petrecelli grumbled. Then he turned and walked back to his house, but this time he didn’t slam the screen door behind him. I could hardly believe it. He was like a completely different person!

  “And mind you keep off my flowers,” he added, sticking his head back out.

  Well, maybe not completely different . . . but it was progress, at least.

  Chapter 9

  On the first day of the science fair, the air is always thick with excitement, and the halls are always filled with weird stuff. Heather Greenbelt came in with some kind of enormous Ferris wheel with wires sticking out of it, Supeng and Eleni had a big poster board with pictures of bald people glued to it, and Mike Reynolds. was carrying an extremely stinky tray of what looked like rotting mangoes—except they were green and fuzzy, so it was hard to tell for sure.

  “We’ll head down to the gym to set up right after morning announcements,” Ms. Slate said. She wrinkled her nose slightly. “Mike,” she added, “maybe you can leave your decomposition-of-foods project in the hallway until then.”

  It took me and Dominic four trips from the classroom to the gym to move the pieces of the Tomato-Matic 2000, and nearly all of first period to set it up—and that was with Penny helping us. Her project was just a simple display board, so luckily she had extra time. Otherwise we might still be working.

  Even though we’d put a ton of thought into the different parts of our Rube Goldberg machine, one thing we hadn’t remembered to think about was how, exactly, we were going to set it up someplace other than Grandpa’s shed. It had been easy enough to bolt the clothesline into the wooden beams there, but we weren’t allowed to drill into the school walls, and anyway, they were made of cement blocks. It took a lot of duct tape and some serious patience to get the job done. When we’d finally finished, we had only a few minutes left to walk around the gym to check out the competition.

  There were the projects you’d expect, like a model solar system made of golf balls and wire, a demonstration on the oxidization of metals, and even a basic vinegar-and-baking-soda volcano or two . . . but even those were well done, with tidy graphs and neatly written observations.

  “Nice job on the rings of Saturn,” I said to Toby Jones. “What did you make them out of?”

  “Different colors of telephone wire,” he answered, eyeing me uncertainly.

  “Great idea!” I said. “Hey. Cool pie chart!” I told Brianne. She’d obviously made it on the computer. It had a 3-D effect to it and looked awesome.

  “Thanks,” she said, giving me a strange look.

  “Did Ruby just say ‘nice job’?” I overheard Toby whispering to Brianne as I walked away from their projects.

  “I know!” Brianne answered.

  I smiled to myself. Maybe if I just kept following my sister’s advice and paying attention to other people and their accomplishments, the kids in my class would eventually forgive me for the Hershey’s Kisses incident . . . and the honey field trip fiasco . . . and all the other times I’d been a little less than considerate.

  Dominic and I kept walking and checked out some of the really impressive projects on the other side of the gym, like Aaron Smith’s study about how Egyptian mummies were made, complete with a semi-gross demonstration of the way they used to pull people’s brains out through their noses. (He’d made it using a plastic baby doll with a hollow head, a ball of wool, and a crochet hook.) Then there was Peter’s optical illusions display, where he was marking down whether boys or girls were better at seeing hidden shapes in different pictures. (So far, girls were winning by a landslide.) And there was Heather’s solar-powered Ferris wheel.

  “This is really cool,” Dominic said when we came to Penny’s project. She smiled shyly.

  Her poster board said dance power at the top in rainbow bubble letters. Then there were lots of colorful graphs and photos of kids, with quotes written underneath. I recognized a few of the kids in the pictures as the bumblebees from the hair salon and dance recital. Underneath the title, Penny had written her investigation question: Which snack foods give dancers the most long-lasting energy? Sitting beside the poster board was a big cookie tin full of the sa
me kind of granola snacks Penny’s mom had given me at the hair salon. Penny passed us both the tin.

  “Can I have one too?” Supeng asked, leaving her project to come over.

  “These are so good!” said Samantha, taking a bite. “What’s in them, Penny?”

  Before long a small line of people had started to form. I took another bite. They were delicious, and I wanted to know what was in them too, but just then I heard a faint ripping sound, and Dominic and I both gasped and ran over to our project just in time to stop the pulley system from coming un-taped from the wall. We added half a roll of duct tape, which seemed to work for the moment, but clearly we were going to have to come up with a better solution . . . and we didn’t have long to do it either. Parents’ Night and the judging and awards ceremony were the next day!

  • • •

  Penny and Dominic both came to Grandpa’s after school, and, using two old stepladders and a lot of rope, we managed to build a pretty solid stand for the pulley system. Dominic had a dentist appointment the next morning, but Penny came to school early to help me set it up, proving yet again that she’s definitely the world’s best best friend.

  It was strange to be there on our own in the gym between the rows and rows of projects. “Who do you think is going to win?” I asked after we’d finished. We were walking up and down the aisles, getting one last look at the projects before the bell rang.

  “Definitely you and Dominic,” Penny said without hesitating. “I mean, look around! These projects are great, but who else built an entire machine, plus a working model helicopter? What you guys did is amazing.” I hoped that the judges would agree, but more than anything, I was ready for it to be over. My stomach was so tied up in knots that I hadn’t even been able to eat my cereal that morning. I didn’t manage to eat much lunch, either. I also couldn’t seem to sit still for dinner that night.

  By the time my parents, my sister, Grandpa, and I got to the gym at six thirty for the judging and awards ceremony, I was so starving that even Mike’s rotting mangoes were looking pretty good.

  “Here,” Penny said, handing me one of her granola bars. She’d had to bake a fresh batch the night before, and she was already running low. “Don’t even go near those mangoes.”

  I took the granola bar gratefully.

  “Ruby!” Dominic called, his voice squeaking in anticipation. “It’s almost time!” The science fair judges were making notes on their clipboards as Aaron did his demonstration of the mummy brains. That meant we were up next.

  “Looks like the big moment has finally arrived,” Grandpa said as he joined us beside our project.

  “I can’t wait to see it!” my mom agreed.

  “It does look pretty cool,” Sarah admitted.

  Kick bottom, Penny signed, grinning.

  “And here we have Ruby Goldberg and Dominic Robinson’s Rube Goldberg machine,” Ms. Slate told the judges as she led them over. “Ruby, do you want to tell us a little bit about it?”

  A small crowd had gathered, waiting to see the machine in action.

  “Well,” I said, clearing my throat. I’d been planning to talk about the gravitational forces that were at work, and how the levers and weights and motor propelled the machine, but suddenly something about the speech I’d planned felt wrong.

  “Ruby?” Dominic said softly. And that was when I realized what it was. I mean, yeah, the science was impressive, but it wasn’t the most important part.

  “Sorry,” I said. Then I gave the judges a smile. “This is the Tomato-Matic 2000. Like Ms. Slate said, it’s a Rube Goldberg machine, which means that it uses a lot of steps to perform a simple task. And, trust me, it was a real team effort. Not only did my family and my best friend help me,” I said, “but Dominic and I combined the usual forces at work in a Rube Goldberg machine—like gravity and friction—with electronics, which is Dominic’s specialty. And that’s what makes our project unique.” I glanced over and saw that Dominic was beaming. “And now,” I said, building up the suspense, “without further ado . . . Dominic will show you how it works.”

  Dominic looked at me in surprise. To tell the truth I was a little shocked myself. After all, the project had been my idea. I’d always pictured myself taking the spotlight when it was time to show the machine to the judges, but somehow it felt like the right thing to do. I handed him the rolled up newspaper and gave a little nod for him to go on.

  “In essence,” Dominic said, his voice shaking a bit, “the Tomato-Matic 2000 fetches the paper and gets your slippers, just like a pet dog might do. It’s dedicated to the memory of Ruby’s grandpa’s dog, whose name was Tomato . . . which is why the machine also harnesses the power of tomatoes to do its work.”

  Everyone laughed as he picked up a ripe tomato and set it at the top of the ramp to prepare the machine. I glanced over at Grandpa to see if he was upset about Dominic mentioning Tomato, but he was smiling along with everyone else, watching intently as Dominic threw the newspaper onto the teeter-totter and the machine came to life.

  The crowd oohed as the wooden plank tipped, releasing the bowling ball into the ice cream container that launched the newspaper into the basket. They aahed as the motor whirred and carried the basket down the clothesline. Everyone smiled as the newspaper tipped out and landed on the coffee table. Then the tomato was released down the ramp. Some people laughed, and others jumped back in surprise (and to avoid getting splattered) when the mannequin hand wacked the ripe tomato. Then the bucket filled just enough and, BOOM, dropped, landing on the sensor, where the brace made from bricks and coat hangers held it steady. “Watch out!” Dominic warned as the tiny helicopter lifted off, carrying the slippers. When it deposited them right beside the chair we’d set up, everyone broke into applause.

  “That was amazing, Ruby!” Sarah said.

  “Great job, honey,” Mom added, tucking a stray strand of hair behind my ear.

  “That part with the arm and the tomato,” Dad said, still laughing. “Genius!”

  “Quite an accomplishment.” Grandpa grinned. “You should be very proud of yourself.” And you know what? I was. Dominic extended his hand, and I shook it. I was proud of both of us.

  • • •

  Even though I knew we’d done the best we could do, the next half hour, while we waited for the other projects to be judged, was still agony. The only thing that made it bearable was that my appetite seemed to have come back, and Penny had saved me the last of her granola snacks. Finally Ms. Slate climbed up onto the stage and tapped the microphone.

  “Excuse me. Could I have your attention please?” A hush fell over the gym, and everyone turned to look at the stage. “Hello, friends and family, and welcome to the Scott Elementary science fair. By now you’ve all had the chance to walk around and see the truly impressive projects our students have done this year. I’m sure you can tell it was no easy task, but the judges have come to a decision.” One of the other teachers handed Ms. Slate an envelope. She opened it oh so slowly and pulled out the paper inside. “In third place,” she read, “taking the bronze medal, we have a true engineering marvel.” I felt my heart start to sink. Was she talking about our project? Bronze? Bronze wasn’t even silver! Still, it was possible Ms. Slate was talking about another project—Heather’s Ferris wheel, maybe.

  “Ruby Goldberg and Dominic Robinson showed us how forces at work can be combined with electronics to complete a series of steps and perform simple tasks,” she said.

  Everyone applauded. I knew I was supposed to do something, but my feet seemed glued to the spot. “Come on, Ruby!” Dominic was tugging on my sleeve. I followed him up to accept our bronze medals, feeling like I was about to cry.

  “Well done, Ruby. Well done, Dominic,” Ms. Slate said as she put the medals around our necks. “Your machine was a wonder to behold.”

  From up on the stage I could see my whole family—plus Penny, who was standing with her mom, looking like she was about to cry too. I knew she was worried about me, so I tried to sm
ile. She twirled her hair around her finger nervously and smiled back.

  “In second place, for the silver medal . . .”—Ms. Slate paused for dramatic effect—“is a young scientist who gathered quantitative data to solve a real-world problem in a tasty way. Penny Parker’s Dance Power project showed us that snacks made from whole grains and natural substances like honey do a better job of giving dancers long-term energy than sugary snacks or energy drinks.” Everyone started to applaud even louder now. Somebody put their fingers in their mouth and gave a shrill whistle, and Penny started up the steps to the stage, looking even more stunned than I felt. She came to stand beside me and Dominic, her mouth partly open.

  “Congratulations, Penny!” Ms. Slate said as she put the silver medal around Penny’s neck. “You did an excellent job of using science to help athletes and to promote a healthy lifestyle.”

  As I watched Penny blush, I realized with a shock that what I felt wasn’t jealousy. At least not entirely. I also felt proud. What Ms. Slate had just said was true. The energy bars Penny had come up with did solve a real problem by helping athletes to eat healthier. They’d made every bee in her dance recital buzz just a little bit better, and every peacock prance just a little more proudly. I could also tell from her graphs that she’d collected a ton of data. Not to mention that nobody could seem to stop eating her treats!

  “And finally,” Ms. Slate went on, “the moment you’ve all been waiting for. For the gold medal we have a project that looked into the science behind some ancient customs and brought them to life for us right here in our very own gym. Mummy Mayhem, by Aaron Smith.” Everyone cheered, and Aaron ran up onto the stage to accept his medal. He was carrying his mummy baby doll, with the yarn brains trailing out its nose behind him. He accepted his medal, then strung it around the doll’s neck, and everyone laughed and clapped louder than ever.

  Finally the applause died down and we walked off the stage. The second we were out of the spotlight, I hugged my best friend.