Ninjas, Piranhas, and Galileo

by Greg Leitich Smith

  Ninjas, Piranhas, and Galileo

  Ninjas, Piranhas, and Galileo

  BY GREG LEITICH SMITH

  IntoPrint Publishing

  Copyright © 2003 by Greg Leitich Smith.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. For more information, contact: IntoPrint Publishing LLC, 4322 Harding Pike, Suite 417, POM # 78, Nashville, TN 37205. www.intoprintpublishing.com

  ISBN 978-162352-030-4 (Paperback)

  ISBN 978-162352-029-8 (ebook)

  Originally published in 2003 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Smith, Greg Leitich.

  Ninjas, piranhas, and Galileo / by Greg Leitich Smith.

  Science projects --Fiction. Japanese Americans --Fiction. Schools --Fiction. Family life --Illinois --Chicago --Fiction. Chicago (Ill.) --Fiction.

  PZ7.S6488 [Fic] 2003047629

  For Cyn

  Contents

  1: Can You Teach a Piranha to Eat a Banana?

  2: Plants, Music, and Sushi

  3: Planning Ahead

  4: The Garden

  5: Tatami Ninjas

  6: Secret Messages

  7: Plagues

  8: The Easy Way Out

  9: Test Anxiety

  10: E-mail

  11: Oops

  12: The Rites of Grading

  13: Turning Japanese

  14: Garden in the Sky

  15: Life and Death

  16: Not Goliath Reed

  17: Not Me

  18: Affairs of Science

  19: Scores

  20: Bad News

  21: Troubles

  22: Ninja Acts

  23: Meeting the Vice Principal

  24: The Justic System

  25: She Likes Me

  26: Emergency E-mail

  27: Pretrial Procedure

  28: Opening Statements

  29: Mr. eden to the Stand

  30: Shohei to the Stand

  31: Verdicts

  32: Decisions

  33: Apologies

  34: Plans

  35: Sentencing

  36: Back in the Garden

  Ninjas, Piranhas, and Galileo

  1

  Can You Teach a Piranha to Eat a Banana?

  Elias

  I knew I was in trouble when I heard the cello.

  Bach. The Suite for Unaccompanied Cello No.6, in D Major, BWV 1012.

  In my family, you learn music young and you learn it classical. I was five before I realized there was any other kind. Iwas seven before I figured out not everybody thought country music was “a gross and diabolical assault on the senses.”

  Anyway, Dad almost never practices the Suites unless he’s working on a grant proposal, trying to avoid editing a paper for the American Journal of Articles About Physics that No One Can Understand, or unless he just wants to torture our purebred weimaraner, Beastmaster VII.

  At the time, I was sprawled across my bed, supposedly doing algebra homework. I may only be in the seventh grade, but at the Peshtigo School of Chicago, they believe in “All Math, All the Time.” That’s why I was on the phone, going over problems (well, answers) with my friend Shohei. He’d called twenty minutes earlier (“Quick, Elias, what’s the answer to number seven?”).

  We’d been friends since halfway through second grade when Shohei transferred in from Palo Alto. He’d marched in, took the seat next to me, and introduced himself: “Hi, my name’s Shohei.” Then he’d reached into his backpack. “This is Mathilda.”

  It was his pet boa constrictor.

  A couple of minutes later, Shohei introduced himself to the principal.

  Now, we were on speakerphone, discussing how old Billy was if two years ago he was twice the square of his sister’s age, when I heard Dad’s cello playing through the air ducts. Beastmaster VII sat up, baying in counterpoint.

  “You’re in trouble now,” Shohei said. He knew the signs, too.

  I hung up the phone and ran upstairs. My dad was in his third-floor tower den, attacking his cello with the bow, looking like he was trying to slice its strings in two.

  When I knocked on the door frame and walked in, Dad pointed at me, his bow’s tip touching my chest.

  “You,” he announced, “will be participating in your school science fair this year.”

  Dad pulled a sheet of paper off his music stand and thrust it at me. “That school of yours,” he added, “to which I pay more in tuition than my undergraduates pay at the University of Chicago, once again has asked me to be the chief judge.”

  “Everyone else’s parents are lawyers,” I said. Not quite, but my dad, Dr. Erich Brandenburg, was, in fact, the only parent of a Peshtigo Warrior Penguin with a Ph.D. in physics. And, music, of course. But I didn’t think the Science Fair Committee would have been interested in that. I made the obvious connection: “You’re going to use me to get out of it.”

  “Smart boy,” Dad replied, smiling with just his teeth. “Couldn’t be too fair, could I, with my own son participating?”

  I knew better than to say anything further when Dad was being decisive. He returned to his Bach, and Beastmaster VII began howling again. Dismissed, I dragged the dog with me back downstairs.

  The thing was, I didn’t do science fairs. Ever. And Dad knew it. My oldest brother (of four), Johann Christoph — the one who’d finally finished his Ph.D. dissertation and had just started his postdoc at Cambridge University — had been the one who always did math and science for fun and profit. And my only sister, Anna. But she had left for West Point last summer, and her twin, Johann Jakob, was off to the University of Texas, leaving me the only one still at home. As for my other brothers, Johann Michael’s been busy doing whatever he does at college in Hawaii, and no one’s seen Johann Ambrosius since he went to work for the government. So, with Mom gone until Christmas on a concert tour of Australia, there was nothing to stop Dad from being all … Dad.

  I walked back into my room as the phone rang. Shohei, I figured, trying to scam the solution to the extra-credit problem. Instead, it was Honoria, my best friend who happens to be a girl. As opposed to my girlfriend.

  At least that’s what I told people.

  “Two questions, Eli,” she said. “Number one: Can you teach a piranha to eat a banana? Number two: Do you think Shohei would go out with me?”

  The Peshtigo School of Chicago has a reputation for being highly intense. We have to take at least one foreign language, all kinds of math and science, a musical instrument, a fall or spring sport, and at least one nonathletic extracurricular activity.

  The Gloriana Biddulph Memorial Science Fair Gold Medal is considered one of the Peshtigo School’s “prestige” awards. It’s also extremely geeky, and it’s very weird that so many people take it seriously, but then, you could say the same about the Super Bowl. What all that means, though, is that if you do a project for the science fair, you have to do something spectacular. Worse, it counts extra toward your science grade, even though it’s almost impossible to get an A, and has even been known to bring your grade down.

  Don’t get me wrong. Honoria and I are considered two of the Smart Ones. It’s expected.

  That’s why I spent five unsuccessful hours Saturday afternoon trying to come up with a sufficiently grand project of my own. I even considered calling Honoria to see if she had a suggestion. She always does a project for the science fair, and she’s been out to win the gold medal for years.

  But after some thought, I decided that calling her wouldn’t be such a good idea. Honoria can get very competitive. So I didn’t think she’d be too happy to just ha
nd over, free of charge, an entire project. Besides, her science fair projects can be unusual, even by the standards of the Peshtigo School.

  Sunday morning, I finally had an inspiration. As soon as Dad and I got home from church, I headed down to the Brandenburg Archives. They’re located in our finished basement, and are the repository of everything Brandenburg. They’re made up of about twenty, four-drawer legal-sized file cabinets housing report cards; homework, exam, and dissertation files; birth certificates and pedigree papers; fingerprints; the opera Dad wrote; a collection of post-op wisdom teeth; and, most importantly, each and every science project ever committed by a Brandenburg.

  I started with Christoph’s and Anna’s files of school science projects. I wasn’t (just) trying to find an easy way out. My idea came from one of the prime commandments of modern science: Thou shalt obtain experimental confirmation. Like how Galileo is supposed to have dropped cannonballs of different weights off the Leaning Tower of Pisa to see if he could prove Aristotle’s theory that they would hit the ground at different times.

  I figured I could play Galileo to Christoph’s or Anna’s Aristotle and redo one of their projects to see if I could confirm their results.

  I scanned a few of the subjects: “Is Coca-Cola a corrosive?” “Do duck quacks echo?” “Will a three-headed planaria learn to navigate a maze more quickly than a single-headed one?” (Note: They’re not born with three heads.)

  I pulled the experiment that looked easiest.

  2

  Plants, Music, and Sushi

  Honoria

  I became friends with Eli because of the naked mole rat, Heterocephalus glaber, a small, wrinkled, communal, and oddly insectlike rodent, and because the Peshtigo School offers its kindergartners the chance to spend a night, with “appropriate adult supervision,” at the Lincoln Park Zoo.

  Even though Eli and I had both enrolled for kindergarten the same year, we didn’t actually meet until the zoo outing that November because Eli was in the morning session and I went in the afternoon.

  As was usual, there was some yelling and screaming about which of the animal pavilions we were to see before dark. A majority of my classmates wanted to see the chimpanzees at the Great Ape House. When I said that I preferred to go to the Small Mammal and Reptile House, because small mammals and reptiles were less creepy than great apes, the only person who agreed with me or, perhaps more accurately, didn’t mock me, was this kid in black plastic-framed glasses, whose mother, a large woman with a large voice, was one of the chaperones.

  While I wouldn’t have minded going alone, I remember being grateful someone wanted to come with me. Later that night, though, after we’d had our fill of naked mole rats, Eli’s mother embarrassed us both by brushing his brown bangs out of his eyes and telling him, in front of everyone, that he had been “the perfect little gentleman.”

  At the moment, he was being less than perfect, though he didn’t have that bangs problem anymore. We were in the hall between classes in front of my locker, and Eli was telling me that he intended to copy his brother Christoph’s old experiment on whether music affects plant growth.

  “How is it not cheating?” I asked Eli, locking directly onto his blue-gray eyes. His newest oval wire-framed glasses were a significant improvement.

  He didn’t blink. But he didn’t answer right away, either. A second later, I handed Eli a pair of double-sided glue pads that I was going to use for attaching an ant farm to my locker door. It would replace my tattered poster, ARACHNIDS OF NORTH AMERICA.

  “It’s valid,” Eli replied, finally. “Like Galileo and the Leaning Tower. Third party experimental confirmation —”

  “True enough,” I said, fixing the glue pads in place on the back of the ant farm. “I can quote Intro to History of Science, too. But the fact of the matter is, you don’t really want to confirm Christoph’s results, you want to do as little work as possible. Including, I might add, having to come up with an idea of your own.”

  “So?” Eli said, leaning against the edge of my locker door. “You’re the one who likes the science fair. I’m only doing it because my dad’s making me. Besides, the science fair judges don’t score for originality.”

  That much was true. Christopher Robin Reed —“Goliath Reed” to both friends and enemies — had won the science fair three years running with really stupid consumer-product related experiments and somewhat awesome multimedia presentations. Last year, his project was about which brand of paper towel was the most absorbent. The specific gravity calculations were impressive, but still.

  “Well,” I replied, sticking the ant farm in place, “what do you think Mr. Eden will say?”

  Mr. Ethan Eden was a science teacher and the sponsor of the science fair. He had been teaching at the Peshtigo School long enough to have outlasted three deans of the elementary school, six mayors of Chicago, and seven presidents of the United States. And he had taught everyone of Eli’s brothers and sisters. He’s not a bad teacher, just dull, humorless, bitter, and sometimes mean.

  “Already taken care of,” Eli said, crossing his arms, looking a little too smug.

  I raised an eyebrow. “He approved it?” I asked.

  Eli nodded, then asked, not subtly, “What do you think Goliath Reed is going to do his project on this year?”

  “I don’t care,” I said, letting Eli change the subject. “He’s not going to win.” I smiled. “And neither are you.”

  Shohei

  It was lunch, it was Friday, and Elias and I were sitting at our usual table in the school cafeteria. That meant that I was trading the sushi my mom had made for Elias’s roast beef sandwich.

  Since the beginning of the school year, my mom had been getting up two and a half hours early every day to make and roll a fresh batch. This probably wouldn’t be all that unusual if we were living in, say, Nagasaki, and our name was Morimoto. But we live in Chicago, and our name is O’Leary. As in the cow and the fire.

  See, I’m adopted and am actually Japanese American. My parents are Irish American. It’s why my name is Shohei O’Leary and why my parents have started doing things like preparing the food of the Land of the Shogun every day of the week.

  Seaweed, fish, and rice.

  Don’t get me wrong: I like sushi sometimes — and my mom’s has gotten much better — but occasionally, like any red-blooded American, crave something cooked, like a hot dog. Or baby-back ribs.

  Being a Chicagoan, I’d worked out a system. A couple times a week, I’d trade the sushi for whatever Honoria or Elias brought from home, or for a trip through the award-winning Peshtigo School cafeteria line. It usually isn’t as bad as Elias makes it out to be. Sure, the place smells a bit like ammonia, the stuff’s a little greasy, and the hamburgers are mostly soy, but at least the Jell-O isn’t too soupy, and there’s always the Tater Tots.

  “What’s today’s choice?” Elias asked, peering into the Tupperware container.

  “Guess,” I said, through a mouthful of roast beef and sourdough.

  “Tekka, kappa, futomaki,” Elias pointed with his chopsticks, glancing at me to see if he’d gotten it right.

  I swallowed, then nodded, deciding not to correct his pronunciation.

  “But what’s this?” He held up the roll of nori filled with a clump of what looked like brown paste.

  “That’s the special,” I said. He turned it over, stared at it like he was scared it would bite, and sniffed.

  “Uni,” I told him.

  He put it in his mouth, then made a face.

  “Sea urchin,” I translated.

  He spit it out, then quickly wiped his tongue with a napkin.

  “It’s a delicacy,” I said, which was what my mom had told me.

  Honoria

  Back when Eli introduced me to Shohei the first time, I complimented his English.

  “That’s very nice of you,” he replied after a moment. “Yours is good, too. You’ve got kind of a funny accent, though.”

  To this day, he claims I
have a Chicago accent.

  Yes, I felt less than intelligent. But Frederika Murchison-Kowalski had told me that the new transfer student was Japanese and that he was the son of someone from the consulate and that’s why he’d brought a boa constrictor —Lichanura trivirgata — to school. It made more sense at the time.

  From then on, though, Shohei, Eli, and I had been sort of a gang of three, united together against That Which Is the Peshtigo School. I didn’t want to be the one responsible for breaking it up, which is what I was afraid would happen ıf I told Shohei I thought he looked like Keanu Reeves, but less vapid, and all he said in response was “That’s very nice of you.”

  We would still probably be friends, but there would always be that awkwardness that comes from deep and eternal humiliation, which was why I was hoping that Eli would find out for me if Shohei was interested, but Eli became a little disturbed when I brought it up the other night. So I decided I had to get Shohei to notice me on my own. Or his.

  3

  Planning Ahead

  Shohei

  It was after soccer practice, and Elias and I were at a window booth at Eisenberg’s, a diner and ice cream joint across the street from the Peshtigo School. It’s a great place, if you can get over the fact that every other song has words like “boogedy” and “shoop” in it. It’s got a lot of chrome and neon and mirrors and is supposed to be an “authentic” 1950s-style diner. It even has the front and rear ends of a ‘57 Chevy sticking out of different walls. The banana splits and cheese fries are killer, though.

  We were talking about Honoria. Aside from being a Smart One, she’s not bad to look at. Shoulder-length brown hair, eyes almost the same shade, in decent shape from the swim team. Her nose is a little big, though.

  “I’m telling you, she likes you,” I said, gesturing with a fry. Elias had been mooning over her since last year’s science fair. By now, I was ready to have him do something or shut up about it. Besides, I didn’t see what the big deal was. The two of them spent a ton of time together already.