Ninjas, Piranhas, and Galileo

by Greg Leitich Smith

  Then he continued, “Whatever weird psych-out game you and your friends are playing, it’s not going to work. I know you really want to win the science fair.”

  He was totally, completely serious.

  “Sure,” I replied. “Whatever you say.”

  He shrugged, then turned to leave.

  As he was opening the door, I called, “Wait.” When Goliath glanced back, I asked, “What is your science project on this year?”

  He smirked. “Which brand of battery lasts the longest.”

  Another commercial, consumer project.

  I did not scream.

  “It was the most peculiar conversation I’ve ever had,” I told Eli. I’d called him later that night and filled him in on my talk with Goliath Reed. “So what do you think I should do? I mean, he was all ‘You’re getting all underhanded and everything’ but he didn’t actually say he wasn’t the admirer.”

  “Why do you have to do anything?” Eli asked. “Sounds like he’s giving up.”

  “That’s just it,” I said. “I don’t know that he is. That whole big dumb ‘Let’s not play games’ could just be an act.”

  “Yeah,” Eli said, but it didn’t sound like he meant it.

  12

  The Rites of Grading

  Elias

  The Returning of the Exams is an exercise in public humiliation. Usually, though, I am not the humiliated. On paper, it sounds harmless: the instructors call names and read scores. Aloud. To the whole class. It’s a Peshtigo School tradition. Some of the psycho alum parents even insist on it, especially the lawyers. It’s supposed to build character, or something.

  Most of the teachers don’t do it anymore. Others just post the grades on the bulletin board in the cafeteria hallway, also known as the “Wailing Wall.”

  Mr. Eden really gets into it. He spends the first half of class reciting names and scores, from high to low, usually with some sarcastic remarks. He spends the rest of the class going over answers, explaining in detail why you were an idiot for not having gotten them right.

  The particular rite in question took place in one of the chem lecture rooms, connected to the lab. Each is the same: four tiers of those chairs with the one-sided desk platforms that — according to Honoria — discriminate against lefthanded people. A table with a lectern for the speaker was up front, along with four of those liftable whiteboards.

  When I got to class, Mr. Eden was writing the class grade distribution on one of the whiteboards. After the bell rang, Mr. Eden took up his place behind the lectern.

  I knew I had done badly on the chem test. When I sat down to take it, twenty minutes late, everything I’d studied the night before, which wasn’t much, had leaked out. I’d hoped I hadn’t gotten the lowest score on the exam. What I had not expected was —

  “Mr. Brandenburg,” enunciated Mr. Eden, smoothing his fringe of hair. “Do you know what the ‘Monkey Score’ is?”

  “Yes,” I said quietly, feeling my face turn red and glancing toward the exit. Five seats separated me from the door. Two rows in front, one in back, and no easy way out.

  Mr. Eden continued, “It’s the score you get on a multiple-choice test if the distribution of answers is truly randomized and if you fill in C for every question.”

  Those who were glad to be free from Mr. Eden’s attention, and those were just jerks, laughed. Goliath Reed, who was in the seat in front of Honoria and me, laughed the loudest.

  Honoria kicked him. Part of me was glad she was on my side. The other part of me was remembering how she’d said “It’s just you” in her library.

  Mr. Eden went on, “There were one hundred questions on your exam, each with four possible answers. Your score,” he paused, enjoying himself way too much, “was a twenty-four.” As Mr. Eden flipped the exam paper toward me, Goliath ducked.

  The exam paper landed in my lap.

  “Try to study next time,” Mr. Eden said, “or hie thee to the Lincoln Park Zoo for a monkey to take the test for you.”

  13

  Turning Japanese

  Shohei

  Wednesday night, Tim and I were on stools at the kitchen island while my mom was at the sink deveining shrimp for the tempura. It was a family favorite, even before the Japan effort. I was shredding carrots while Tim fidgeted and grabbed at the carrot pile.

  “Tim!” I yelled at him as he stuffed a third handful into his mouth.

  “Tim, don’t eat the carrots,” my mom said without looking our way.

  Slowly, Tim spit out the carrots, to splotch onto the countertop.

  “Gross,” I said.

  “Tim, clean that up,” my mom said, again without turning around.

  Before she got any further, we heard the key in the lock.

  “Daddy’s home!” Tim shouted and ran off.

  I looked at the clock on the microwave: 6:30. He was home early. My dad’s a lawyer at a big firm on LaSalle Street. He almost never got home by 6:30.

  “Umph,” we heard from down the hall, a sign that Tim had connected.

  A moment later, my dad walked in, carrying Tim piggyback. After he said “hi” and my parents smooched, he took off with Tim down the hall.

  When my dad came back, he had changed into one of his Chicago Triathlon T-shirts and orange and blue University of Illinois shorts.

  “Hey, kid,” Dad said as he took off my Cubs hat. “When’s the game Saturday?” My parents have had season tickets and have been making day trips down to Champaign for Illini football since they graduated. U of I loses a lot, but it’s kind of fun.

  I shook my head. “They’re at Minnesota.”

  “Saturday we open the patio,” Mom reminded my dad. Our patio had been redone as part of the same remodeling that had taken over my room, but it took a while longer. “And,” Mom continued, “I was going to show Shohei how to do ikebana.”

  “Oh, right,” Dad said, before he focused on me. “What’s this Tim says about him watering the plants for your project?”

  That could be trouble. I didn’t think Tim would tell. “Um, he wanted to,” I said. “I didn’t make him or anything.”

  Dad looked at Tim. “Tim,” Dad asked, “do you want to water Shohei’s plants?”

  Tim nodded and said proudly, “For the honor of the family.”

  My parents traded some silent communication.

  “He can do it as long as he wants to,” Mom said. She pointed at me, “but only as long as he wants to. He is not your slave.”

  “Of course not,” I replied, innocent-like.

  “Just make sure you remember that,” Mom said. “Now, the only other thing is, who do you want over for the patio celebration?”

  I was kind of puzzled. “Are we talking big party, here, ‘cause I thought those were out after last year with the carpet and all …”

  “We were thinking maybe Elias and Honoria,” Dad said in a hurry.

  “‘Kay,” I replied. They, at least, would be on my side.

  So, later that night, I called Elias and conferenced in Honoria.

  “I need your help,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” Honoria asked.

  “Saturday is the unveiling of the new patio,” I replied, “and —”

  “You want us to cut the ribbon?” Elias asked.

  “Funny. No. I need you guys there for the ikebana.”

  “Is that a type of food?” Honoria wanted to know. I heard Elias laughing.

  “It’s the art of Japanese flower arranging,” I replied. My mother, it turned out, had been taking university extension lessons. “My mom wants to demonstrate. It’s supposed to be, I don’t know, Zen or something, which is weird because last time I checked, we were Catholic.”

  “You want us there to protect you,” Elias asked. He was still laughing.

  “I’ll be there,” Honoria answered.

  “Me, too,” Elias said.

  14

  Garden in the Sky

  Honoria

  I hadn’t been over to the O
’Learys’ since Shohei’s last birthday party and the incident with the chunky peanut butter and the Berber carpeting, which could have been a lot worse if we hadn’t found out on the Internet how to clean it up without leaving a permanent stain before Mrs. O’Leary noticed. We would have gotten away with it, too, if Tim hadn’t blabbed.

  When I got up to their elevator foyer, Mrs. O’Leary was there, wearing a gorgeous black-and-gold kimono. She looked like something out of Madama Butterfly.

  As soon as Eli arrived, Mrs. O’Leary took us all out to see their new rooftop patio.

  Last year, there had been four neatly tended beds of flowers and native prairie grasses, and a small greenhouse Mrs. O’Leary called an orangerie, for orange and lime trees, “inspired by the one at Versailles itself.” These had been removed, donated, I found out later, to the Lincoln Park Conservatory, and had been replaced with several yards of raked pea gravel and three large, gray boulders.

  “How did you get the rocks all the way up here?” Eli asked.

  Shohei knocked on one. “Fiberglass,” he said.

  “It’s a Zen rock garden,” Mrs. O’Leary explained, “modeled after the one at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, Japan. It’s for Shohei to have a place to meditate.”

  An icy breeze blew in from the lake.

  “Not today,” Shohei muttered.

  Mrs. O’Leary led the way back inside. When she was out of earshot, I turned to Eli. “Pay up,” I said, holding out my hand.

  He handed me a five. At Shohei’s puzzled look, he explained, “I bet her your parents were putting in a koi pond.”

  “I’m so glad,” Shohei said, “you guys think it’s funny.”

  “I think it’s sweet,” I said. Eli did a double take.

  Shohei grabbed me by the arms, “Okay, you evil space alien,” he said, “return the real Honoria immediately!”

  I blushed. “Well, I do,” I said, trying not to be flustered that he was touching me. “And your parents are Peshtigo alums, after all. You can’t not expect some insanity.”

  Shohei let go, shaking his head.

  When we got to the O’Leary dining room, we found the table covered in newspapers and ikebana vases, both tall and short; a bunch of stem holders that resembled miniature beds of nails and which we were informed were called kenzan; several pairs of scissors; and at least a dozen chunks of Styrofoam. Also piled in the center of the table was an assortment of branches and flowers and stems that looked like they had been culled from the Atrium Garden, and which Mrs. O’Leary identified for us as including alocasia, anthurium, lady’s mantle, blue fantasy, glory lily, and smokegrass.

  Mrs. O’Leary sat at the head of the table. I sat next to Shohei, with Eli across from us. Tim was there too, even though he was supposed to be getting ready to go out for pizza with a friend from kindergarten and his mother, I think, but he was hovering around and, every time Shohei would place a branch, Tim would try to steal it. Eli and I thought it was pretty hysterical, especially since Tim was still in his ninja cape. We kept glancing across the table and trying not to laugh at each other or Shohei.

  Every now and then, Mrs. O’Leary would tell Tim not to play with the scissors.

  There were, Mrs. O’Leary told us, two kinds of ikebana, moribana and nageire, and we were doing the moribana, the kind where you fix the stems in place in the needle holders, the other variety apparently being too advanced for us, or requiring a more contemplative spirit, or some such. The branch of pear brush I put together with some baby’s breath and anthurium were praised by Mrs. O’Leary as “suggesting the feel of a boisterous, warm breeze.” Eli’s greenbrier, smokegrass, and spray mums had “a bold chicness, evocative of a sweet scent.”

  Shohei’s orange flare cosmos, glory lily, blazing star, and fennel were just a mess. It wasn’t his fault, though; Tim kept running off with the smilax.

  Finally, Tim reached for a yellow oncidium flower as Shohei was trying to place one in his needle holder. Shohei showed some good reflexes, though, and caught Tim’s arm, as Tim was making a break for it.

  “Hey, ninja-boy,” Shohei said, “Don’t you have someplace to be?”

  Mrs. O’Leary nodded, looking at the grandfather clock. “Mrs. Alpert should be here with Isaac in a few minutes.”

  She got up, took Tim by the hand and led him away.

  As she was taking him down the hall, Tim said, “Mom, how come Shohei gets to do all the cool stuff?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’d like to know,” Shohei muttered, but his mom was out of earshot.

  15

  Life and Death

  Shohei

  Each night, at 6:15, Tim had been coming to my room and announcing, “Sensei, the plants have been watered. For the honor of the family.” After that, he’d bow and back out of my room. The night after the ikebana fest, he didn’t appear. At around a quarter to seven, I went into the guest bedroom for the first time in a while.

  The plants were gone.

  The pots were still there, and the bases of the stems, and probably the roots. But everything else was gone. Chopped off. Taken away. Ruined. Elias was going to kill me.

  “Tim!” I yelled. No answer. “Tim!” I ran to his bedroom and threw open the door. Tim was lying on his stomach on his twin bed, watching a Batman video.

  “What happened to the plants?” I demanded.

  “Ikebana!” He pointed to his windowsill.

  I walked over. The dried plant corpses were sculpted into a freakish display, stuck together with glue and pipe cleaners. Every last one of them.

  “You,” I whispered to Tim, “are in so much trouble.”

  He ran.

  After I duct-taped Tim to his bed, I went back to the guest bedroom, and sat down to think.

  It wasn’t that bad, I decided. I still had, more or less, the entire project on MPEG video.

  I grabbed the video camera from the nightstand, and hit “Play.” The video of the project swept by on the little LCD display. It was okay until about a couple weeks ago, with one or two other gaps. Maybe more. I’d only taken the video about three or four times a week. If that. The thing that caught my eye, though, was that there was no difference in the heights of any of the plants. They all looked about the same. Slightly wilted.

  Something was wrong.

  I grabbed a tape measure and opened the door to Tim’s room. He was still stuck to the bed, though he’d gotten a foot free. I measured the dead plants Tim still had on his windowsill. Yep, they were all about the same size.

  Very weird.

  I went back to my room and opened Elias’s Big Book of Experimental Procedures to the appendix that had a copy of his brother Christoph’s final report, to double-check. Christoph had had four sets of plants, same as us: a control group that got no music; Group A that got baroque; Group B that got the Niagara Falls (Christoph’s report called it “therapeutic white noise”); and Group C that got the bagpipes. According to Christoph, the Group A baroque plants should have shown about a twenty to twenty-five percent improvement in growth compared to the control group that got none, and about twelve percent more than the others. In other words, music helped plants grow. Especially the baroque stuff.

  I’d been telling Elias I was getting the same results that Christoph had. But as far as I could tell, my experiment had been going wrong from the start.

  16

  Not Goliath Reed

  Honoria

  I pulled my bedroom drapes closed so the sun wouldn’t glare on my computer screen and logged on to check messages. There was only one that wasn’t spam, with “Not Goliath Reed” in the subject heading.

  Honoria —

  I am not Goliath Reed.

  Still Your Admirer.

  I grabbed my phone and began to dial.

  “This is getting ridiculous,” I said when Eli picked up on his cell phone. “Either my admirer is an idiot or thinks I am.” If he was an idiot, I wouldn’t want to date him. If he thought I was an idiot, I still wouldn’t want to date him.r />
  “What’s wrong?” Eli asked.

  I read him the message. A roaring sound came out of the handset.

  “Sorry — the El just went by. I’m outside on Eastwood walking Beastmaster VII. All I caught was ‘I am not Goliath Reed.’”

  “That’s all there is,” I told him, leaning back and adjusting the cushion on my wooden swivel chair.

  “Maybe that’s all he had to say,” Eli said.

  “Why would Goliath tell me it wasn’t him in an e-mail if he didn’t tell me it wasn’t him in person?”

  “What?”

  I put my feet up on my bed. “It doesn’t make sense for Goliath to send me this.” I picked up a pen and began doodling circles on a notepad. “Maybe it’s not him.”

  “That’s what I’ve been —”

  “Wait a minute!” I sat up. It had to be someone who knew I thought it might be Goliath Reed. Plus, I had only told one person. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. “It’s you, Eli, isn’t it?”

  17

  Not Me

  Elias

  I nearly dropped the phone. It was sort of good that she didn’t seem grossed out by the idea it was me, but I was also sort of horrified she thought I wrote those messages.

  “I … I …,” I just stuttered.

  “You’re the only one I told I still thought it was Goliath Reed.”

  I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Beastmaster VII pulled on his end of the leash. I tried to think of something to say. She couldn’t find out this way. “I would never write that bad. Badly. Whatever.” Aaagh!

  “No,” Honoria agreed. “Unless you were pretending …”

  “Pretending …”

  Before I could process where that was going, she said, “Wait a second! You’re doing this for Shohei aren’t you? That’s so sweet!”

  “No!” I said. “I’m not doing it for Shohei. I’m not doing it for anyone.” This was not going at all the way I wanted it to.