Ninjas, Piranhas, and Galileo

by Greg Leitich Smith

  “You’re sending Admirer letters to him too, aren’t you? That was your plan, right?”

  Not my plan. Shohei’s. “I didn’t have a plan,” I said. “It’s not me.”

  “Hold on, though,” she went on. “How could you let me make a fool of myself with Goliath? You knew I thought it was him!”

  “It wasn’t me!” I said.

  This was bad, I figured, taking a deep breath, but it was fixable. She had it all backward. I just had to tell her the truth — that Shohei was impersonating me. Anonymously.

  “No, wait!” I said. “You’ve got it all —”

  “Well, don’t you dare tell Shohei I know. I want it to be a surprise for him.”

  Click

  “— wrong.”

  Shohei

  So I was trying to figure out how to handle Elias and my project when my dad opened my bedroom door. “We’re having the Eichbaums over for dinner Saturday night,” Dad said from the doorway of my room. “So no Illini game.”

  “Do I have to?” I asked. My parents’ dinner parties are not that exciting. Okay, I wasn’t hugely disappointed about the game. Illinois was playing Michigan, so they’d probably lose. Besides, mid-November would be cold and probably rainy. Maybe even snow. But it was fun going with Dad, even though he sometimes got a bit too into the game.

  My dad laughed. “Yes,” he said. “Do you good.”

  I sighed, but marked the event in my Palm Pilot. The Eichbaums had just moved into our building a couple weeks ago. They had two daughters — Megan and Mallory — adopted from China. I’d seen them in the elevators with their parents, but never spoken to them. Megan was my age, and was going to the local public elementary school until she heard back from the Peshtigo School. Mallory was a couple years older, in high school at Lane Tech.

  Normally, I might’ve wanted to meet them. But I knew the only reason they’d been invited was because my parents wanted me to bond on an adopted-Asian-American-kid level with Megan and Mallory. Don’t believe for a second Mom and Dad threw dinner parties for every new building resident. No, this was for my benefit.

  I was just deciding I couldn’t take any more when my dad popped back in.

  “Sorry, I forgot,” he said. “Starting this Saturday afternoon — your mother’s signed you up for bonsai classes.”

  “I’m not going,” I said.

  “You’re going,” Dad replied, shutting the door again.

  18

  Affairs of Science

  Honoria

  The science fair was organized as a morning-to-evening event, which Eli called a waste of a perfectly good day of television (even though it was a school day and he didn’t really watch much TV anyway), while Shohei said he’d take any excuse to avoid going to classes, even if it wasn’t the best one ever. In the morning, participants set up their projects and got to check out the competition. In the afternoon, the judges would circulate and, finally, in the evening, parents and the rest of the public would attend to view and, sometimes, be educated.

  My mother, who had driven both Eli and me because Eli had offered his old red wagon to help with my fish tank, dropped us off in front of the gym and then, in the first sign that it was going to be a very long day, we found out that nobody had unlocked the gym doors. Seven or eight people in jackets or raincoats snaked in a line with their projects from the top of the stairs of the gym to the sidewalk. I didn’t see Shohei, but Freddie and a couple of the Murchettes were marching around, carrying placards telling us to SAVE THE BUNNIES!

  “Don’t they have classes?” my mother asked.

  “Mr. Fresnel signed them out,” I guessed. “Freddie’s his pet.”

  With my mother making disapproving noises behind the wheel, Eli and I unloaded the minivan, lining our projects up on the sidewalk.

  My mother waved good-bye and drove off, cutting in front of a honking trolley-bus, and we headed into line behind Goliath Reed and his stuffed Energizer bunny.

  “Watch my stuff,” Goliath ordered as he went off around the building. I will say this for him — he was the only one there smart enough to try to find someone with a key.

  I grabbed our poster boards and display materials, and Eli pulled the wagon with my travel fish tank. I’d only brought Spot, because I didn’t want to crowd both him and Fluffy in the small carrier.

  As we got in line, Freddie blocked our way. “Save the bunnies!” she shouted. “Be nice to mice! Germs are people, too!”

  I was not in the mood for a debate. “Move,” I told her, gesturing with the poster boards.

  “Are you running an animal experiment?” Freddie asked. “Killing frogs or something?”

  “Training piranhas,” I said, “to prefer bananas. The cattle were already dead.”

  “How,” Freddie said, waving her placard, “do you justify cruelty to poor, defenseless creatures?”

  I laughed and pulled the towel off the tank. “Stick your hand in,” I said, smiling, “but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” I clicked my teeth.

  That was when Freddie and the Murchettes pulled out balloons filled with red paint. “This,” Freddie proclaimed, holding one high, “represents the blood of every animal sacrificed in inhumane experiments!” She spun around and threw it at Dionne Johnson and her rat-versus-guinea pig maze project. Other Murchettes flung paint balloons everywhere, even toward people with projects that didn’t involve animals. Projecteers began yelling as paint splattered them and their science projects. Suzanne Sverdlov, whose mom was a federal judge, threatened to sue.

  Freddie grabbed another paint balloon from her backpack and raised it toward me.

  “Try it,” I said.

  As Freddie drew back to throw, Eli grabbed at her arm, knocking the balloon out of her hand and making her lose her balance. Some of the paint splashed onto our poster boards, but most of it drenched Goliath Reed’s boxes. Freddie followed it, flailing, and landed on a box of Goliath’s batteries.

  That was when Goliath Reed himself came back.

  “Hi,” I said. “Did you find a key?”

  Elias

  The Union of Students Concerned About Cruelty to Animals scattered before Goliath, which allowed the rest of us to get into the gym to set up our projects. The science fair was in the second biggest gym, the one the size of a couple basket-ball courts side-by-side and used mostly for volleyball and wrestling.

  A twenty-foot-tall mural of Phlogiston, the Warrior Penguin, loomed over everything. There were about sixty projects, each getting about twelve square feet of display space. The projects would all be judged on appearance, execution, clarity, and methodology.

  I was nervous, which sort of surprised me. Dad had forced me into doing the project but it had been — not fun, exactly — but better than I expected. And, there was the chance I’d win. A good chance, I thought, which would also really help my chem grade.

  Because my dad and who-knows-how-many-other parents had refused to take on the job, Mr. Eden himself was to be the chief judge. His two sub-judges were from the advanced placement classes at the Peshtigo School’s College Preparatory High School Division. The guy was sort of skinny, with a beige sweater vest and matching trousers that made him look like a bratwurst with arms. The girl, on the other hand, wore faded overalls with a long-sleeve tie-dyed T-shirt, rose-tinted glasses, and carried a leather day planner over her shoulder like a weapon.

  Shohei wasn’t there yet.

  The pair of sub-judges were walking around with clipboards and asking Honoria pointed questions about her experimental procedure.

  “Then,” Honoria said, “I tried to wean them from the beef hearts to the banana, exclusively.” She pointed to one of her photographs of the training. It was the one with the six blobs of banana resting in the tank gravel while the fish swam above.

  She never had been able to persuade Spot and Fluffy to embrace vegetarianism.

  “Why didn’t you simply stop feeding one of the piranhas altogether?” Mr. Eden asked, peering into the tank
and tapping the glass.

  “Yeah,” Bratwurst guy chimed in, “if they’d been hungry enough, they’d have eaten the banana.”

  “First,” Honoria said, straightening to glare at the guy, “I was not about to starve Spot and Fluffy. Second: we already know that P. nattereri are omnivores. Third: I wasn’t trying to just get them to eat bananas, but to prefer bananas over meat.” She referred them back to her Statement of Inquiry, and then started talking something about limited sample sizes and replied to a question on whether her hypothesis was properly falsifiable.

  “Why did you do it in the first place?” the girl asked. “Who cares whether piranhas want to eat bananas?”

  I didn’t hear Honoria’s answer, because I’d just spotted Shohei at the end of the aisle.

  “Sorry I’m late.” Shohei rushed up, carrying a length of poster board, his laptop computer slung over one shoulder, and a brown expandable file folder. “Can you help me get set up?”

  “Sure,” I said, glancing up to see Mr. Eden lifting the lid off the tank. “Where are your plants?”

  “Umm,” Shohei said, sort of grimacing, “about that. I don’t have any. Tim killed them all to make an ikebana project and —”

  “What?” I asked, stunned. “When? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Well,” he began.

  “Never mind right now,” I said, trying not to freak out too much. “Let’s get set up fast.”

  We hurried to set up his poster board, arrange his records, and boot up his computer.

  “Mr. Brandenburg,” Mr. Eden said. “You are next. Do enlighten us.”

  I gave Shohei a glare, then calmly launched into my explanation, without even glancing at my notes.

  As soon as I had finished the background, Mr. Eden started questioning, “You essentially copied your brother Johann Christoph’s experiment?”

  “Only the apparatus,” I said, trying to ignore the other judges hovering behind Mr. Eden, and feeling a bit disoriented and a bit angry. I mean, I had told him that before he’d approved the project. If he’d had a problem with it, why didn’t he bring it up then? “But, I conducted the actual experiment independently in an attempt to verify —”

  “Yet you failed to obtain the same results as Christoph?” Mr. Eden asked.

  I swallowed. Johann Michael claimed Mr. Eden was the best teacher at the Peshtigo School because he was impossible and demanding, but Johann Michael didn’t say that until after he’d graduated and moved thousands of miles away to go to college in Hawaii.

  “I was unable to confirm that music will affect the growth rate of the Wisconsin Fast Plant,” I finally managed to say, standing straight.

  “And to what do you attribute your failure?” Mr. Eden asked.

  “There are three possibilities,” I said, taking a breath and dabbing at a spot of red paint on a corner of my poster board. “First, Christoph’s process was flawed. Second, my process was flawed. Third, neither was flawed, but these particular plants are tone-deaf.”

  Okay, it was a bad joke.

  “And which possibility do you think is most likely?” Mr. Eden asked, while the laptop monitor displayed a slide show of the progress of the experiment. “Mr. Brandenburg,” he continued, too quickly for me to answer, “your display is very stylish. I think you will find, however, that in science, we prize substance over style.”

  Then he walked over to bother Shohei. He turned to the last page of Shohei’s final report. One glance.

  “Even Mr. O’Leary thinks you got it wrong,” Mr. Eden declared, leading his minions away to the next aisle of projects.

  Mr. O’Leary thinks I got it wrong, I thought. The same Mr. O’Leary who killed his plants and didn’t bother to bring them to the fair. I leaned back on my project table and looked over at Shohei. He was looking cornered and trapped, and a little like a small rodent.

  “Oh, no,” he said.

  “What?” I asked, confused.

  “Um,” he glanced at his feet. “I did something wrong, too. Before Tim killed the plants, there was no difference in how my groups did.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “What about your data? The pictures?”

  “I copied from Christoph’s final report.” He looked at me, waiting for me to say something.

  “Are you insane?” I asked.

  It was cheating.

  It meant his “official” results were bogus, and his real results confirmed mine, and — most of all — that probably meant Christoph’s results were off. It meant my supposedly genius brother, who was Mr. Eden’s ultimate teacher’s pet of all time, had somehow done the experiment wrong.

  Shohei started to say something, then paused. My tone, maybe. Or expression.

  I’d gone out of my way to let Shohei do part of my project. Killing the plants was one thing. As long as he had the data, it wasn’t fatal. But he hadn’t even told me. And then, he completely undercut me in front of Mr. Eden. And Shohei knew I wasn’t getting a difference in my plant growth either, and what made him decide Christoph got it right and I didn’t?

  I stormed off, leaving Shohei standing in front of his project.

  19

  Scores

  Honoria

  The rest of the day between the end of the judging and the evening session and medal announcements seemed to take about a week, even though I thought I’d aced Mr. Eden’s questioning. The other two judges hadn’t asked anything difficult, and they seemed to like my display and think that my project was innovative and that piranhas were way cooler than Goliath Reed’s batteries. So I was feeling pretty optimistic about my chances.

  An hour before we were supposed to leave to see the science fair results, my mother got an emergency call from the bug lab about some new samples. She was very apologetic about not being able to go to the fair, but I didn’t mind too much, because if I won, we could celebrate later. If not, I didn’t want her there, trying to cheer me up. I ended up going with Elias and his father instead.

  I was a little nervous about it, and not just because of the science fair. Dr. Brandenburg isn’t very talkative and doesn’t really speak so much as make pronouncements. I don’t think he likes me much. Eli says he just hasn’t gotten over the time I played the Cats soundtrack on the Brandenburg house speakers when Dr. Brandenburg was working on his annual budget report.

  But when he and Eli picked me up, Dr. Brandenburg said “hello” and helped me load the tank, with Fluffy this time because it only seemed fair, into the backseat of the Mercedes. After that, we were silent the rest of the way to school. Eli was a lot more quiet than usual. I wondered how his morning judging had gone. It seemed best not to ask until his father wasn’t around.

  As soon as we got out of the Mercedes in the school parking lot, we heard singing. “We Shall Overcome” rose into the autumn night from the steps of the West Gym. The singers — Freddie and the Murchettes — were dressed in furry costumes: a gorilla, a raccoon, a couple of mice, and an elephant, even though elephants aren’t furry. Freddie herself was dressed as a cat and carrying an I’M NICE TO MICE sign.

  “They’re a little flat,” Dr. Brandenburg remarked, a few minutes later, as we approached the protesters.

  A couple of the Murchettes stepped in front of us, shouting, “Free the fish!”

  “Remove yourselves,” Dr. Brandenburg said, in what Eli calls his dad’s “scare-the-undergraduates” tone.

  They removed themselves.

  “Clearly,” Dr. Brandenburg added, “the Peshtigo School is not what it once was.”

  When we reached the gym, I restrained myself from rushing ahead to check my score, and let Eli pull the wagon with Fluffy’s tank to my project display. When we got there, the medal was hanging from my display cardboard. Silver. Second place.

  “Hey,” Eli said. “Second place is good, too.”

  I grabbed my medal and walked up the aisle to where Goliath Reed’s project sat, looking like it had corporate sponsorship. Attached to the red-paint-dabbed Energiz
er bunny was the gold medal. When I turned around, I bumped into Goliath Reed himself. He smiled and held up four fingers. Four science fairs in a row.

  I walked past him without saying a word.

  Elias

  Honoria ran off. I would’ve followed, but she ran into the girls’ locker room. I waited a bit, hoping she’d come out, hoping there was something I could do to make her feel better.

  After I’d read all the announcements on the bulletin board outside the locker room, and she still hadn’t come out, I wandered back over to my project, where Mrs. O’Leary was looking back and forth between Shohei’s display and mine. I didn’t see Shohei anywhere, but I didn’t want to see him anyway.

  Neither of us had medaled, but after the morning inquisition, I wasn’t expecting to. White participation certificates sat on the table in front of our projects.

  Then I saw my score sheet. It was worse than I’d thought possible. With my lab grade, my F on the exam, and now this, I was probably looking at a D+. I’d never gotten even a C before. It was humiliating. Brandenburgs did not get D’s. I folded the sheet and pocketed it before Dad saw it, I hoped.

  He didn’t seem to notice. He was busy playing with my time-lapse display of the plant growth process. “I may need you to work on my next grant proposal,” he said.

  It was a compliment, I think.

  As Dad continued his examination of my project, I stood still, waiting for his final assessment. With a forefinger, he touched one of the red paint splotches the Murchettes had left.

  Then I felt a tug on my pants leg and jumped about thirty feet in the air. Tim O’Leary was under the table, peering up from between the crepe paper ruffles and bunting.

  “Shh,” he said, finger to his lips, before disappearing back under the table.

  “Elias, could you watch Tim for me?” Mrs. O’Leary asked. “I can’t seem to find Shohei.”