The Next Level

by Jackson Pearce

  Also by Jackson Pearce

  The Doublecross

  The Inside Job

  Ellie, Engineer

  For my mom, who never said “girls can’t”

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Pulley

  Wheel and Axle

  Lever

  Wedge

  Incline Plane

  Screw

  Ellie Bell was building something new.

  This wasn’t weird or anything, because Ellie was basically always building something new. It was pretty much her favorite thing to do, especially during the summer: come up with a new project, design it, then build it with her friends Kit and Toby.

  What was weird about this particular something new was the fact that it involved twenty-four jars of bread-and-butter pickles.

  “Does it still look flat to you?” Ellie called out to Toby. Toby was in Ellie’s playhouse, which doubled as her workshop—it was full of tools and bits of wood and loose screws she’d collected in peanut butter jars. Right now, Toby was staring out the playhouse window, narrowing his eyes at the scuffed-up tabletop they’d found in someone’s trash a few days ago. Kit didn’t like it so much when Ellie got excited about something from the trash—Kit was a very tidy person—but Ellie knew sometimes people threw away really, really useful stuff.

  The tabletop had two ropes—one on each end—that were knotted together in the middle. Right now, it was hovering just an inch or so off the ground, so Ellie could make sure it stayed nice and flat in the air.

  “It looks flat to me,” Toby called back down, putting his hands around his mouth to make his voice louder.

  “What about from there?” Ellie asked Kit, who was standing on the porch, looking at the tabletop through pink binoculars, even though she wasn’t really that far away from the workshop. Kit was wearing a T-shirt that had a dog wearing heart-shaped sunglasses on it. Ellie was wearing the same one—they’d decided the T-shirts were lucky, since whenever they were wearing them, they built something really good, or the ice-cream truck came around the neighborhood, or they wrote a really funny joke together.

  “We’re go for flat!” Kit answered, waving a thumbs-up in the air.

  “Great!” Ellie said. She climbed the ladder up to her workshop and nudged Toby over a little bit. Right by the door, there was a chain from Toby’s old swing set. It went out the playhouse door and to a piece of the workshop roof, where Ellie had it looped around a back wheel from her old tricycle—one without the tire—then down to the tabletop. The tricycle wheel with the rope made a pulley! Pulleys were machines, just very simple ones—but that didn’t make them any less cool, because they made it way easier to lift super-heavy things up into the air.

  “Most elevators don’t use swing-set chains,” Toby said, shaking his head. That’s what this build was—an elevator for the workshop. Once it was done, Ellie wouldn’t need to make a billion trips up and down the ladder to take things into her workshop. And it would be a way for people who couldn’t climb the ladder, like her grandma or Lacey from school (who had a glittery pink wheelchair), to get up into the workshop if they wanted to come visit.

  “Well, most elevators are for much taller buildings,” Ellie pointed out. “And they do use pulleys, like we’re using. Just lots of really giant pulleys instead of one made out of a tricycle wheel.”

  Toby nodded, looking thoughtful. “That’s true. I looked it up last night, and most elevators have to be inspected. Do you have an inspector coming? You can schedule an inspector on weekdays, according to the website I saw.”

  Toby got like this now and then. People in class sometimes called him a know-it-all—Ellie, in fact, used to call him that a lot. She didn’t really anymore, though, because now she knew that Toby was just Toby, just like she was just Ellie and Kit was just Kit. It didn’t seem right to be friends with Toby but still call him a name behind his back, even if he did still make her sigh a little here and there.

  “Maybe you can be the inspector,” Ellie suggested, taking hold of the chain.

  “I do know a lot about elevators, now,” Toby said, looking pleased. He folded his arms and pulled in his eyebrows, and Ellie had to admit, he did look very inspector-y.

  “Perfect!” Ellie said, then looked out the workshop door to Kit, who was watching birds through her binoculars. “Keep an eye on it, Kit!” Ellie yelled. “Ready? One, two, three!”

  On three, she pulled back on the chain. It slid through the tricycle-wheel-pulley and tightened all the way down to the tabletop. She pulled some more, and the tabletop began to rise off the ground, inching up toward the workshop. When it was level with the floor, Ellie stopped, then wrapped the chain around a high-heeled shoe she’d nailed to the floor (it made a handy doorstop and didn’t hurt your toes when you stepped on it barefoot).

  “Woohoo!” Kit cheered from below.

  “Inspection part one, passed!” Toby said, and high-fived Ellie. She grinned. Building projects were always better when Toby and Kit were with her.

  “Are we ready for these?” Kit asked, nudging a thick-sided cardboard box with her toe. It was stacked two rows high with glass jars of pickles that said In a Pickle in swirly writing on the side. They’d found the box and the pickles in Kit’s garage, and Ellie had done a little math: Each jar of pickles weighed two and a half pounds. She, Kit, and Toby all weighed about sixty pounds each. So, if the elevator was strong enough to lift twenty-four jars of pickles—which was every single jar—it could definitely lift a person. Ellie thought it was pretty lucky how quickly they’d found something to test the elevator with. Sometimes engineering just worked out like that!

  “Sure, let’s do it!” Ellie answered Kit’s question. Really, she knew they ought to test the elevator with one jar of pickles at a time, just to be safe . . . ​but the first test had gone so well! Besides, the sooner they proved all the pickles could be lifted, the sooner they could start riding up and down on the elevator themselves.

  Ellie and Toby hurried down the workshop ladder. The three of them began to haul the jars of pickles out of the box and onto the tabletop—onto the elevator—stacking them up neatly. Toby even made sure all the labels were facing the same way, like they do at the grocery store. When they were done, and the summer sunshine was hitting the pickles just right, it looked like the jars were filled with magical green potion.

  Well, pickles in magical green potion, anyway.

  Ellie checked the knots, then pulled her hammer from her tool belt and tap-tap-tapped on the nails holding the tabletop together, just to double-check they were all good. Yep—all the knots were so tight, they were like little rocks made of rope.

  It was elevator time.

  The three of them scrambled back up the workshop ladder, Kit and Toby poking their heads out the windows on either side of the door so they could get a good view of the build in action. Ellie took a deep breath—the excited kind, with just a little bit of the nervous kind way in the back of her throat—and grabbed hold of the chain.

  “Oof,” she said, pulling back.

  Pickles were really heavy when there were twenty-four jars of them stacked together. The elevator had barely moved an inch off the ground.

  “Ooooooof,” Ellie said, pulling back even harder.

  “I thought the pulley was supposed to make it easy to lift,” Kit said
, frowning. “Here, let me try.”

  Kit was pretty strong, so Ellie handed over the chain. She pulled with her whole body, but the elevator hardly moved. Toby didn’t have any luck either.

  “Maybe we ought to try together?” Kit said thoughtfully, and took the chain from Toby’s hands. Kit, Toby, and Ellie all grabbed hold of a different section of the chain. Ellie took a breath and gripped it so tightly that it pinched her fingers.

  “One, two, pull!” she said, and together, they hauled back on the chain. The tabletop lifted! The elevator was working!

  For a second, anyway.

  Then things went . . . well, sideways. Literally.

  The tabletop suddenly tilted just a teeny bit, but that was all it took—because before Ellie or her friends could react, the pickle jars began to slide down the tabletop. Ellie yelped, Kit squealed, and Toby said, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no” so fast it sounded more like he was humming than speaking.

  Twenty-four pickle jars slid off the end of the tabletop. They crashed to the ground, but Ellie didn’t see it happen, because as soon as they fell, the rope became light, and she and her friends tumbled backward into a heap of elbows and knees.

  “This isn’t good,” Ellie said, rubbing the spot where she’d smacked her head on Kit’s kneecap.

  “Pickle juice is sometimes called brine. It’s very acidic. It might kill the grass,” Toby answered.

  “Do you think they all broke? Do you think my mom will notice?” Kit said worriedly, sticking out her hands to help Ellie and Toby up. Her fingernails still had baby chicks painted on them from when she and Ellie had played nail salon the day before. Okay, they mostly looked like yellow blobs, but they were supposed to be chicks. Ellie just didn’t understand how the people on the videos they’d watched were so good at painting pictures on such a tiny little nail.

  They winced and hobbled over to the edge of the workshop and looked down.

  Twenty-four jars of pickles, all cracked open, pickles strewn across the grass. The tabletop was flipped over, the ropes were tossed around like spaghetti noodles, and the pickle juice smell was extra strong and sting-y sweet in the summer air. It didn’t look like a single jar of In a Pickle pickles had survived the fall.

  “Maybe we should have started with pillows instead of glass jars?” Ellie suggested a little weakly, and pulled out her notebook, flipping to the page where she’d sketched out the elevator. “Or maybe if we . . . hmm . . . I wonder if there’s a way to keep the stuff on the elevator from wobbling—”

  “Um, Ellie? I think before we fix this build, we’d better fix . . . well . . . this,” Kit said, motioning to the pile of pickles with one hand and biting the nails of the other.

  “I don’t think we can fix this,” Toby said, shaking his head.

  “Well, at least clean it up?” Kit replied.

  “You can’t really clean it up. The brine is soaked into the dirt now. The grass is doomed.”

  Ellie wanted to glare at Toby because he was totally not helping, but the truth was, she felt like a lot more than the grass was doomed—especially once Kit’s mom found out. She thought about the back of her notepad, where she always wrote down projects once they were finished and working and great.

  She definitely would not be adding Project 63: Workshop Elevator to that list today.

  It was bad enough that they’d broken twenty-four jars of pickles, which it turned out Kit’s mom had bought to dice up and put in egg salad sandwiches for a fancy luncheon. Ellie didn’t really understand the difference between a luncheon and just regular lunch, but she knew this was not the time to ask. To make matters worse, however, it turned out that pickle juice attracts gnats, flies, mosquitos, wasps, and yellow jackets. Ellie’s dad was outside cleaning up all the broken glass, wearing long sleeves to keep from being bitten or stung, even though it was about a billion degrees.

  Ellie was sitting on the kitchen barstool, hoping that if she stayed very, very still, her dad wouldn’t even notice her when he came back inside. Her mom was over at Kit’s house, trying to help Kit’s mother find replacement pickles. (“You can’t just replace In a Pickle pickles! They’re special order!” Kit’s mom had wailed.) Ellie felt badly but still thought it seemed very strange to special-order pickles—though that was exactly the sort of thing Kit’s mom would do.

  Outside, Ellie heard the jingle of the ice-cream truck’s bell. She sighed and looked down at her lucky dog-in-sunglasses T-shirt. She wished the luck could have gone toward the project today, instead of the ice-cream truck’s showing up. She couldn’t stop herself from wondering, though, what went so wrong with the elevator. Maybe she should have put more ropes on the platform? Oh, or maybe the platform needed to be bigger! Or—­

  “Well,” Ellie’s dad said, interrupting her thoughts when he walked back inside. There were some gnats stuck to the pickle-juice-sweat on his head. He took a big breath of the air-conditioned air, then shut the door behind him. “Ellie, what should we do about this?”

  Ellie rubbed the back of her neck. “It seemed so stable! I didn’t mean for it to crash,” she said. “What did I do wrong in the build?”

  Ellie’s dad frowned. “Well, you probably didn’t account for the sloshing—wait, no, this isn’t about the build!” Ellie’s dad said, cutting himself off. He went on, “It’s not about the build—it’s about the fact that you took something that belonged to Kit’s mother without permission and broke it. And apparently those are some very fancy pickles,” he said, and shook his head—he seemed to think it was as strange to special-order pickles as Ellie did.

  “We didn’t know they would break. We just wanted something that weighed about the same as a person. It didn’t seem smart to use an actual person to test the elevator,” Ellie protested.

  “No, that wouldn’t have been smart at all—but that doesn’t make what happened okay. Engineering is supposed to help people, Ellie, and a good engineer should always put that first, even when she’s very excited about a build. It’s good that you thought to not use a person to test the elevator, but it would have been better if you’d taken your time, thought through the build, and tested it without someone else’s things.”

  Ellie felt very small and very sad about this. She sniffed as her dad sat down on the barstool next to her, then clapped his hands on his knees. “So, what do you suppose we ought to do about this?”

  Ellie chewed her lip. “Maybe . . . ​you could help me build the elevator the right way?” she said. She hated just to give up on a project, after all, and her dad usually had good suggestions.

  “That’s a great idea,” Ellie’s dad said, and she brightened. “But what do you suppose we ought to do about your punishment?” he added, lifting an eyebrow.

  “Right,” Ellie said, sighing. She swung her legs back and forth hard on the barstool, thinking it over. Ellie’s parents were big fans of her thinking up her own punishments—they said she had “such a good imagination, after all.” Ellie had tried plenty of times before to suggest punishments like “only cinnamon buns to eat for a week!” or “real tracing paper to make blueprints!” but her parents never fell for it. Ellie told them it was because they lacked imagination.

  “Maybe . . . I’m grounded?” Ellie suggested.

  “That’s not very interesting,” Ellie’s dad said, running his hand over his chin as if he had a beard (he didn’t). “Hmm, what if—ah!” he said, putting a finger in the air. This is the same motion he made when he had a great engineering idea, but Ellie suspected that wasn’t the case just now. “Ellie Bell, since your elevator project was very not helpful, for the next week your projects need to be very helpful.”

  Ellie’s eyes widened. “That’s it? I can do that!” she said.

  “I know you can,” Ellie’s dad said. “And I know Mrs. Curran will really appreciate it.”

  Ellie stared. “Mrs. Curran?”

  “You know—our neighbor at the end of the cul-de-sac,” her dad said.

  Ellie nodded. She knew who Mrs
. Curran was but had never actually met her. She was a grandma-age lady who had a very proper garden out front. Grandma-age people were usually nice, Ellie knew, and they usually made cookies or lemonade and smelled like fabric softener. Helping out Mrs. Curran for a week sounded easy-peasy.

  “She asked me to recommend someone to do a few small tasks around the house for her. I think you’ll do a great job,” Ellie’s dad said, smiling some more. “You’ll help out Mrs. Curran till Friday. And you won’t eat pickles for the rest of the summer.”

  “No pickles is part of my punishment?” Ellie asked.

  Her dad shook his head. “No—it’s just that I don’t think I can stand the smell of pickle juice ever again after today.”

  The next morning, Ellie put on a tidy shirt, one with three buttons at the collar, and shoes with laces instead of flip-flops—grandma-age people always liked it when she wore tidy clothes. She brushed her hair straight (or tried to, anyway) and put it into a tight ponytail, then buckled on her tool belt. She’d spent all night thinking about things Mrs. Curran might need, like a lotion-bottle squeezer or a spinning tray that organized different sorts of cookies (she already had an idea for those things) or maybe something that automatically organized jewelry. Ellie didn’t have enough jewelry to even have an idea for that one, but grandma-age ladies always did.

  “Oh, you look very nice!” Kit said when Ellie met her at their fence. She’d told Kit about the punishment last night via walkie-talkie—they each had one in their bedroom. Kit was, of course, going to help Ellie at Mrs. Curran’s—that’s what best friends did. Kit had also dressed up in a very tidy outfit: she was wearing a pink fluffy skirt and shoes with little heels and giant heart-shaped rhinestones on the top.

  “Thank you,” Ellie said, and held out her notepad so Kit could see what she’d drawn that morning—ideas for the lotion squeezer and cookie organizer. Ellie always drew new ideas in her notepad before she started building them so she could figure out all the tricky parts beforehand.