by Karen Karbo
“I’ve gone ahead and signed you up for a class at Kid-academy,” said Mark Clark.
“What kind of a class?” I asked. I couldn’t believe these words were coming out of the mouth of my most cool brother. He signed me up for a class. In summer. Mark Clark didn’t play bass guitar in a rock band like Quills, nor was he a junk food vegetarian college student and philosopher like Morgan, but nestled deep inside Mark Clark, next to the nerd and ultra-responsible almost-dad, was the person who truly remembered what it was like to be my age.
“What class!” I squawked.
“You might enjoy it,” said Morgan, who had been quiet during the entire meal. He was wearing his orange and black ear flap hat and eating the radishes out of his salad. He was always in favor of taking some dweeby class.
“How do you know?”
“I said you might,” said Morgan. “There’s no law that says that your brain has to shut down for the summer.”
“I’ve signed you up for basic electronics,” said Mark Clark. “Have an open mind.”
“Basic electronics! Basic electronics!” Having an open mind was exactly what I was not going to do. I intended keeping it shut as tight as an unopened pickle jar. I was mad. My scalp was getting all hot underneath my hair.
I wasn’t sure what you might learn in a basic electronics class, but it sounded too geeky, even for me. And I am a geek. I have a ferret named Jupiter. I collect rebuses. I don’t care too much about clothes or makeup. (Although I don’t mind a little dark blue eyeliner now and again. I also have been known to paint my toenails.)
I put my hands together and begged Mark Clark. I whined like I’m not supposed to. I could smell the spicy bad body odor of the boys in the class already, see their smeary glasses and mossy teeth.
“Please,” I said. “I am not going to lie around all summer IMing. I promise. Most of my friends won’t be around to IM anyway. They’re going to summer school and stuff. I’ll sign up for the library read-a-thon program. I’ll … I’ll eat broccoli for every meal. I’ll take out the garbage without being asked. Please.” The more I begged, the more frantic I got.
Mark Clark carefully cut his enchilada with the side of his fork. He shoveled up a bite and placed it in his mouth. He chewed slowly. I could tell there was no way I was going to get out of this. “It won’t kill you. And I think you might—”
“Dude, do not say ‘get a charge out of it,’” said Quills.
Mark Clark shrugged and kept eating without looking up.
“All right. When is it?” I asked, pushing away my plate. I’d hardly eaten anything.
“Saturday mornings. It won’t kill you.” Mark Clark didn’t tell me to eat my enchiladas, which prevented me from totally despising him.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” I said.
“It’s from nine to noon,” he said. “Downtown.”
I sighed long and loud and slumped in my chair. It wasn’t as if I had any big ideas about how to find Chelsea’s missing red diamond, but now I would have to waste my morning learning about switches and circuits and whatever.
“There’s something else,” said Mark Clark.
“What?” I said. What could it be? Some new and awful chore?
“It’s no big deal,” he said. “Mom’s coming home.”
“Just for MC’s birthday,” Quills added quickly. Even though we were all technically MCs in our house—Quills’s real name was Michael—MC was what we called Mark Clark.
I must have had a weird look on my face, because Mark Clark added, “Not for good. She’s not moving back or anything. Just visiting for a few days.”
I didn’t know what to think. I took a sip of milk just for something to do. It was nonfat. Yuck yuck yuck. There were other kids in our class whose parents were divorced, but I was the only kid who didn’t live with her mom. We all said we wanted Mom to be happy, but we said it too much. We said it all the time. Once, I overheard Morgan and Quills talking about how sucky it was that she’d left while I was still such a kid. It was better to hate them for saying that than to hate her for leaving. I didn’t like being called a kid, is what I told myself.
“May I be excused to start the dishes?” When I added this part about the dishes the brothers never said I had to sit and wait until everyone was finished eating. I needed to get away and think.
I took my time unloading the clean dishes from the dishwasher. I made extra sure to put them away with care. Every dinner plate had a chip on the edge from when I hurried, which was most of the time. I had a stomachache, but not from the chicken enchiladas. It was as if someone was inside of me sitting on my guts.
Normally I loved it when Mom came home. We went shopping, first for underwear and socks and necessary things, then funny T-shirts (last time I got one that said THERE BETTER BE SOME CHEESE AT THE END OF THIS MAZE), CDs, and silly jewelry. That’s how I knew about the cheap rings at Claire’s. My mom loved to go there. She said it made her feel festive. I could just see her trying on a charm bracelet and calling across the store to me, “Minnow, come check these out. Aren’t they cute?” She was the only one who got away with calling me Minnow. But I realized I didn’t want her to call me Minnow anymore. Since I’d last seen her I’d suffered an electric shock and solved a mystery and had my first kiss and I was nobody’s Minnow anymore.
I looked into the window over the sink. Since the time I was tall enough to do the dinner dishes, I loved to look at my reflection. I thought it was magic, that the window turned into a mirror at night. I stared at myself. Maybe that was the reason I needed to help Chelsea solve the mystery of the missing red diamond. Why I had to help her. If I solved another good mystery, I would know for sure that the new Minerva was still around, that my confidence hadn’t worn off. I felt sure of this. But if Mom came home, I wouldn’t be able to slip out and sleuth around. She would want to Do Things Together. All my time would be taken up with bonding.
Plus, there was also the chance that Mom would like the old insecure Minnow better.
I went to my room. I tried to IM Reggie, but he had logged off. I tried to call Reggie, but he wasn’t answering. I took out my rebus notebook and wrote ECNALG, backward glance, and felt my spirits lift for the first time since I’d been home.
I went to bed. It was hot in my room. My stomach had a fist in it from not enough dinner and too much worry. Then I did what I always did to make myself go to sleep these days. I remembered the last dance of the year, and dancing with Kevin to “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” which is so lame and sappy, but I didn’t care. Even though everyone was sweaty from dancing, he still smelled like soap and chlorine, like all swimmers do. Then I thought about how he kissed me outside in the parking lot before Mark Clark showed up to pick up Hannah and me. It was cold outside, and the wind was coming in off the river. What I tried hard not to think about was that Kevin had been late to the dance, so late that I thought he wasn’t going to make it. He apologized as soon as he arrived, said he’d just broken up with his girlfriend and she hadn’t taken it very well. I didn’t like thinking he’d just had a girlfriend three hours before he was kissing me. He didn’t tell me the girlfriend’s name, and I didn’t ask.
Then, suddenly, it was 8:00 A.M. and the sun was blasting through my curtainless windows. Mark Clark was standing in the doorway telling me it was time to get up. It was already warm in my room. Summer was here, and it seemed, suddenly, as if mine was going to be as cursed as the Hope diamond.
5
Basic electronics was held downtown in a building near Portland State University, in the middle of a grove of tall glass office buildings and more importantly, half a block from MAX. Mark Clark said he would drop me off, but that I could take MAX home. The day was dark-glasses bright, so different from yesterday it was as if the days of late June weren’t even in the same season. I wore a pair of Bermudas, a T-shirt with tiny yellow and pink flowers, and my turquoise Chuck Taylors.
The classroom for basic electronics didn’t have any windows. A white boa
rd ran along the front, and a name was written on it in big blue letters: Mr. Lawndale. This was obviously the teacher, who was standing at the front of the room behind a long, tall table with a bunch of electronic equipment on it, colorful wires, meters, gauges, and I don’t know what all. It looked as if a toaster had exploded up there.
As we wandered in he said, “Find a workbench and sit down, please, please sit down.”
Our workbenches were long desks of pale wood that sat three people each. A long, low cubby that held a collection of electronic equipment studded with fancy dials and meters rose up on one side. The classroom filled up slowly.
There were thirteen boys and two girls. The other girl besides me was one of those girls who boys paid attention to, even though if you looked at each of her features they were nothing special. In the Chelsea de Guzman mode, she was skinny and had long dark blond hair, round blue eyes, and a snub nose. She wore extra low-rise jeans and an oversized newsboy hat that engulfed her head. Like most of us, she might as well have been wearing a sign that said: I AM HERE AGAINST MY WILL. She sat down at the workbench in front of me and started text-messaging someone.
The teacher, Mr. Lawndale, wore a red and blue plaid shirt that already had dark sweat rings in the armpits. He was talking to some mom at the front of the room. He had his hand on one hip and kept shoving his glasses up on his nose with the other. The mom was explaining something, and Mr. Lawndale frowned. Then he said, a little too loud: “Look, if your kid doesn’t want to be here, I don’t want him here either. I don’t need it, I simply don’t need it!”
Aren’t teachers supposed to be happy and full of love for their profession on the first day of class?
I traded glances with the boy sitting next to me. He must have been having the same sort of thought. He was a little taller than me, with long dark bangs that hung in his eyes and freckles all over his nose. When Mr. Lawndale took roll call, shouting out our first and last names, I learned his name was Bryce Duncan. If I didn’t already think Kevin was the cutest boy I knew, I might think that way about Bryce Duncan.
Mr. Lawndale stood behind the exploded toaster table at the front of the room and began with a speech on the importance of learning the fundamentals, but then he went off on resistors and transistors and the ubiquitous NE555 timer integrated circuit and the PIC microcontrollers. He talked about commonplace components, LEDs and switches and batteries. I don’t know what he was talking about, but I don’t think they were fundamentals, I think they were topics meant to make him look smart and us look dirt-dumb. He had an impatient tone, as if we were all asking one stupid question after the next, even though no one had said a word. The air-conditioning whirred on. I was relieved, because Mr. Lawndale was perspiring like a man about to be found guilty.
“The only way you can possibly possibly have a chance at understanding electricity is to think of it as water in a pipe,” he said. “Voltage is the water and the amplitude is the water pressure.”
My glance wandered over to Bryce Duncan. I noticed he had small moles dotting his arms. He was wearing a black AC/DC T-shirt that had been washed so often it had turned dark gray. I wondered why he was here, whether basic electronics was something he had an interest in, or whether his parents were worried that he would become a juvenile delinquent over the summer unless he had Something To Do.
He reached into his front jeans pocket and fished out a pack of Big Red gum. He looked over just at that moment and saw me watching. “Now longer lasting fresh breath.”
“I don’t have bad breath!” I said. Mark Clark was an Altoid freak. He ate—and offered—so many Altoids the dentist told him if he didn’t lay off he would have fresh breath but no teeth.
Bryce Duncan blushed beneath his freckles. “Naw, I just … that’s what the stupid ads say.”
“Oh, right.” I laughed.
The pretty girl, who sat kitty-corner from us, turned around and looked at Bryce Duncan.
Suddenly, I noticed that Mr. Lawndale had fallen silent. He stood at the front of the room with his hands on his hips, glaring around the classroom. At first I thought Bryce Duncan and I were going to get busted for talking, but I looked around the classroom and saw that my classmates were all either stealth text-messaging beneath the desk, or dozing, or fiddling with the electronic equipment. We were one large fifteen-headed organism of Not Paying Attention.
“All right,” said Mr. Lawndale. “Fine. I am here to meet your needs, am I not? You need to see what electricity can do, am I right? This is all just boring twaddle, am I right?”
We glanced around. He was being phony nice, that was for sure.
“Take out your breadboards.”
Breadboards?
He sighed, reached over into the cubby on the desk nearest the front and pulled out a flat white rectangle the size of a paperback book. Rows of tiny holes ran down each side, with a blank strip in between. Someone asked why they called it a breadboard.
Mr. Lawndale sighed again. “Well, what does it look like to you?”
No one said anything.
“Why, it holds the components,” said Mr. Lawndale. “You do know what components are, right? Without our handy breadboards, you’d be forced to wrap the wires around each of the capacitor’s legs. How inconvenient is that?”
There was a small storage cabinet on each bench, and from that we were told to find something called a capacitor. It looked like a flattened pencil eraser with two wires sticking out from under it, like legs. Bryce Duncan made his walk around the table a little, as if it was a little alien bug.
Mr. Lawndale then instructed us to plug our capacitor into the breadboard, followed by the red wire and the black wire issuing from the power supply box on our workbench.
“Keep in mind what I said earlier about the important rules of positive and negative electricity,” brayed Mr. Lawndale.
Just as I was thinking that maybe basic electronics wasn’t so bad, there was the first big snap, followed by another and another. Crack! Crack! It was the sound of firecrackers going off, but there were no firecrackers. The sleepiest, most distracted kids jumped, startled. The newsboy hat girl shrieked.
Each and every one of our alien bug capacitors was exploding. They weren’t big explosions, but they were loud. The room filled with a strange smell: melted plastic and peanut butter–scented smoke. The moment after the last capacitor blew there was a half second of silence, during which one boy with an Afro said, “Now that rocks.”
Mr. Lawndale said, “That rocks? That rocks? No, my friend, that does not rock. That is called an exploding capacitor. That is called a sure way to blow your empty heads clean off. That is called what happens when you’re not listening. Did even one of you pay attention to the rules of positive and negative electricity? Was anyone at all listening when I said that you must always place the long leg of the capacitor into the positive side of the breadboard, which would be the side with the red wire?”
Even though the exploding capacitors were sort of cool, we got the point. The fifteen-headed organism figured that it would be good to pay attention after all, but then irritable Mr. Lawndale, who clearly hated us and needed to find a new career, maybe one in which he does not work with children, threw away his chance at gaining our respect.
He said, “When it comes to electricity, you need to focus or someone will lose an eye.”
Then, if Bryce Duncan didn’t pipe up: “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Then it’s just fun!”
Even though it’s an old joke, we started laughing. I felt sorry for Mr. Lawndale, even though he was sort of awful. He had no choice but to stand at the front of the room and push his glasses up on his nose over and over again until we decided to calm down.
The moment class was dismissed I popped on my Bluetooth and phoned Chelsea. Kids streamed out of the building around me into the sunlight. The newsboy hat girl swung off down the street in the direction of Pioneer Place, a fancy downtown mall that Chelsea favors. Bryce Duncan’s mom p
icked him up right out front, in one of those MINI Coopers, red with a black top. I stood on the sidewalk and watched them roar away, waiting for Chelsea to pick up.
“Hey, Minerva,” said Chelsea. There was so much noise I could hardly hear her.
“Listen, do you remember whether Sylvia was on the plane with you?”
In the background, I could hear a man’s voice and a woman’s voice, and the sound of something sliding.
“I didn’t see her. But we were in first class, so you don’t really see the other people on the plane. They’re like all in the back.”
“During the flight did your dad mention the diamond?”
“I thought I told you, I didn’t know until after we got back that he’d replaced the glass stone with the diamond. It was news to me. So like duh, Minerva.”
“No need to go all attitude on me, Chelsea. I was just trying to figure out how Sylvia knew to ask to see the ring. It wasn’t just a coincidence, you know?”
“Plus, she was in line ahead of me at Coffee People. How did she know I’d get in line there?”
“Exactly,” I said. “So, did you notice her after you got off the plane? She must have heard you tell your mom you wanted a latte.”
“We were in the bathroom when I told my mom I wanted to stop at Coffee People.”
“And you said those words? You said, ‘Can we stop at Coffee People?’ Not like, ‘I’d like to get a latte’?”
“No, I said I wanted to stop at Coffee People. We were at the sinks washing our hands. I remember. And there were lots of people around us, people coming in and out. She could have been in there, easily. She could have heard me tell my mom I wanted to go to Coffee People, then gotten a head start and slipped in line before me.”
Now we were getting somewhere. I was walking faster and faster, not sure where I was going. I could feel the day warming up, the sun beating down on my head. I passed a store that specialized in clothes from Ireland, then a jewelry store. I stopped and looked into the window at a diamond ring on display. It was just a plain old white diamond, not a rare red one like ours. I felt a twirl of excitement, wondering what would happen next.