The Nora Notebooks, Book 2

by Claudia Mills

  “Feelings aren’t scientific,” Nora insisted.

  “Who says they’re not?” Emma shot back. “Why can’t scientists study feelings the way they’d study anything else?”

  Emma had a point. But no science-fair judge would think that a sweater-trading project was worthy of selection for the regional science fair.

  And yet…Nora was curious to see what she and Emma would find out.

  And it wasn’t as if they had any better idea, or any other idea at all.

  And in the end, curiosity—the deep-down desire to figure something out—was what true science was all about.

  Nora’s mother noticed first.

  “Where did you get that sweater?” she asked Monday morning as she handed Nora a plate of scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast.

  “I borrowed it from Emma.”

  The puzzlement on her mother’s face gave way to good-natured amusement.

  “So that’s starting,” she said. “I remember sharing outfits with my best friend, but I don’t think we got into clothes that way until middle school.”

  Nora forced a smile. She had decided not to tell her parents about the new idea for the science-fair project; in fact, with all the commotion over Nellie’s arrival, she had never told them the curling-iron idea, either. The whole point of the new experiment was to see how people reacted when they didn’t know it was an experiment. But it was strange to have her very own mother treat her as the kind of girl who was “into” clothes.

  At school that morning, Nora expected pink fireworks to explode all around her, with the other girls crowding up to her to exclaim, “Nora! You’re wearing pink! Look, everybody! Nora is wearing pink!”

  That didn’t happen.

  Amy did say, “Nice sweater, Nora. Is it new?” And Nora thought she read a question in Amy’s eyes. Tamara nodded in agreement with the compliment, and that was that. Busy talking over every detail of Saturday’s party, the other girls didn’t seem to notice either Emma’s plain sweater or Nora’s pink-pink-pink one.

  Mason and Brody, sitting next to Nora in the huddle, said nothing about the unusual hue of her clothes. Dunk plopped himself down next to Emma the way he always did, showing her how he could make rude noises with a hand cupped under his armpit. Emma reacted as she always did: she giggled.

  “All right, team!” Coach Joe said, calling the huddle to order. “How have you all been making out on the Oregon Trail? Any Indian raids? Any outbreaks of cholera? Any snakebites to report? Who’s willing to share?”

  Nora had written a new diary entry last night, a long observation by Martha Talbot about moose, ending with her now-standard sign-off: “Baby crying! Must go!”

  Emma volunteered to read from her diary about Ann Whittaker, the independent woman off to seek her fortune on the trail, the plucky woman who would open the first school in the Oregon Territory, the person whose fate card should have been assigned to Nora instead.

  Dear Diary,

  We have reached Kansas. The trail only goes across a little corner of Kansas, but there are sunflowers everywhere. When I start my school in Oregon, I’m going to have my students write poems about sunflowers. If sunflowers grow in Oregon. If not, they can write poems about whatever flowers grow there. I will put all of the poems into a special class book.

  Emma stopped reading and said to Coach Joe, “If you want to borrow that idea, go right ahead.”

  “Thanks, Emma,” Coach Joe said with a grin. “Is there anything else happening to Ann right now in Kansas?”

  “Oh, yes,” Emma said. She resumed reading.

  There is a fellow on the trail named Dave Edwin. I think he’s sweet on me.

  Amy rolled her eyes at Nora as Bethy, Elise, and Tamara started giggling. The name Dave Edwin certainly sounded a lot like Dunk Edwards. Emma tried to shush the gigglers with a glare, but then she started giggling, too.

  He picked a bunch of sunflowers and gave them to me. I put them in a vase inside my wagon. I don’t think a fellow would give flowers to a girl if he didn’t like her, do you, dear Diary?

  Now Dave is waiting to go for a walk with me in the moonlight. So I’m going to put on my prettiest shawl and go.

  Bye for now.

  Love,

  Ann

  “The plot thickens,” Coach Joe said with another grin.

  “Coach Joe?” Emma asked now that she had gotten her giggles under control. “If Ann is a schoolteacher, can she still—well—get married?”

  Coach Joe thought for a moment before replying. “Back then, there were few professions open to women. Teaching was one of the only ones. And as far as I know, only single women taught school. They gave up teaching after they married.”

  Emma’s face fell. Nora could tell that Emma still didn’t like the future written on Ann’s fate card.

  “In any case,” Coach Joe said, “we’re looking forward to the next installment of Ann’s story, aren’t we, team?”

  Next Amy read her dramatic scene about saving her baby from the rattlesnake. Nora noticed she had some details wrong. The rattlesnake wouldn’t have been six feet long, more like three or four. And its rattling would not have been as loud as thunder! But she didn’t say anything. She had learned back in kindergarten that nobody liked a know-it-all, and Amy had definitely made the scene exciting.

  One more kid read. And then the huddle was over.

  “What are we supposed to be doing now?” Nora whispered to Emma as science time began. “We can’t talk about our project because no one is allowed to know about it. But we can’t spend science time doing absolutely nothing.”

  “We can still talk about curling irons,” Emma said, “and I can imagine how happy I would have been if my parents had let me get a bunch of new ones. Coach Joe doesn’t know yet that the project fell through.”

  “Coach Joe doesn’t know what?”

  Nora hadn’t heard the teacher come up behind them.

  “It’s a secret,” Emma said, “but it’s a good secret, and it has to do with the science fair, and you’ll find out on Friday when everybody else does.”

  Emma was definitely good at dealing with the unexpected.

  “Is everything all right in the land of curling irons?” he asked them.

  “Oh, yes!” Emma said. “We’re learning ever so much!”

  “Well,” Coach Joe said, with an approving smile, “I’m glad you two have managed to work so well together. Nora, I’m especially proud of you for being willing to take on a whole new ball game, really stretch and grow as a player.”

  He was about to head over to another pod when his eyes fell again on Nora in her pink sweater. “New uniform?” he asked, with another smile—amused this time, as her mother’s smile had been that morning.

  Coach Joe was a very noticing teacher.

  Nora didn’t say anything, but she felt herself flushing. It was odd to have her clothes commented on. Did Coach Joe think it was a good thing that she had not only a whole new ball game but a new uniform to go with it?

  She wasn’t used to wondering what people thought of her based on what she had decided to wear.

  At home that evening, washing her hands before another hastily assembled dinner of leftover takeout, Nora caught a glimpse in the bathroom mirror of a pretty girl in a soft pink sweater that matched her glowing pink cheeks.

  Was that her?

  Apparently, it was.

  On Tuesday, Nora wore a different pink sweater of Emma’s. This one was puffier and rufflier, with bows on the sleeves. No one in her family made any further comments about her choice of clothing, because Sarah’s husband, Jeff, had gotten his leave approved and would be home to meet his brand-new daughter that afternoon. The color of Nora’s sweater was the last thing on anybody’s mind.

  And at lunch, the girls were talking about how unfair it was that Dunk was getting away with doing nothing on the science-fair project he was supposed to be working on with Sheng. Poor Sheng had to do everything. Even Emma agreed that Dunk
was lazy.

  “You know, I’m just as glad I’m not Martha Talbot,” Emma said, looking sympathetically at Nora. “I’m not sure I’d want to be married to Tom Talbot. Not when Dave Edwin is bringing me flowers all the time to decorate my covered wagon.”

  That got everyone talking about the Oregon Trail documentary that was going to be filmed on Friday, the same day as the science fair.

  “For my prop, I’m going to bring in sunflowers, of course,” Emma said. “The ones from Dave Edwin.”

  “I’m going to bring in my grandmother’s butter churn,” Elise said. “She has a real old-time butter churn, not that she’s ever churned butter in it. It’s just for show. She said I could borrow it for the movie.”

  “Nora, you’re bringing Nellie, right?” Emma remembered to ask.

  This produced a chorus of pleading.

  “Bring her!”

  “Bring her!”

  “Bring her!”

  But this time, Nora wasn’t going to make any promises she didn’t know for a fact she could keep.

  “Maybe” was all Nora said. “I’ll try.”

  During that afternoon’s huddle, Mason read his latest diary entry as Jake Smith.

  Dear Diary,

  Do you want to know what’s not fun?

  I’ll tell you what’s not fun.

  Gathering a couple of bushels of dried buffalo dung is not fun.

  In case you didn’t know, dung is another word for poop.

  Why, you may ask, am I collecting buffalo poop? Because here in the middle of Nowhere, Wyoming, it’s all we have for fuel. No trees. No sticks. No anything. So we burn dried buffalo dung.

  Did I mention that dung doesn’t smell so great when it burns? And it burns fast, which is why we have to gather so much of it.

  Oh, and guess what we cook with all this dung? Beans, bacon, and biscuits. Every single day.

  Now, I happen to like eating the same things every single day.

  Just not these things.

  Yours truly,

  Jake Smith

  Coach Joe’s class hooted and hollered for that one. They always laughed at any mention of bodily waste products, which Nora thought was silly. But it was Mason’s melancholy tone of voice when he read that made her laugh, too.

  “Cheer up, Jake,” Coach Joe said. He pointed to the large map of the Oregon Trail route hanging on the wall in the huddle corner of the room. “You’re almost to Oregon, where you’ll live off the fat of the land in peace and prosperity.”

  “But I haven’t even crossed the mountains yet,” Mason protested. “Or reached the Snake River—nice name. Or met up with the really enormous mosquitoes. Believe me, the worst is yet to come.”

  Nora laughed again. “The worst is yet to come” was definitely Mason’s motto.

  “Well, keep us all posted,” Coach Joe said with a chuckle.

  After the huddle, Nora had time to ask Mason and Brody, “So does it? Does toast fall more often butter-side down?”

  “Maybe a little bit more often,” Brody said. “We dropped thirty pieces of toast, and seventeen times it fell butter-side down and thirteen times it fell butter-side up. So I guess we proved something.”

  “But not a very big something,” Mason put in. “What we really proved is that if a dog eats thirty pieces of buttered toast, he’ll throw up all over the family-room carpet, and the kids who dropped the toast are the ones who get stuck cleaning it up.”

  Nora burst out laughing, and Mason and Brody both laughed with her.

  When Nora arrived home from school, a tall, smiling man with close-cropped light hair met her at the door and swung her up into a hug.

  “Auntie Nora!” he greeted her. “Aunt to the cutest, sweetest niece in the world!”

  Nora grinned at Jeff, and Jeff grinned back. Then he looked at her again, puzzled. “Did you do something different to your hair?”

  Nora shook her head. She would never do anything different to her hair. Maybe the pink sweater made everything about her seem altered somehow.

  From the couch, nursing Nellie, Sarah beamed the biggest smile Nora had seen from her sister since before Nellie was born.

  “I can stay for a week,” Jeff said. “Not long enough to teach Nellie to throw my famous curveball, but enough to warm up her pitching arm, at least. And then, come June, I’ll be home for good.”

  Sarah radiated so much happiness at Jeff’s return that it seemed a good time for Nora to ask her question.

  “Some of the girls are wondering—” she began.

  “Not another party!” Sarah said, but she sounded amused, not annoyed.

  “No, but on Friday we’re having the science fair in the morning—”

  Sarah’s face darkened. “Nora, I already said that you’re not using Nellie for the science fair.”

  Nora glared at Sarah for not letting her finish.

  “And we’re making this documentary about the Oregon Trail in the afternoon. We each play an Oregon Trail person, and my person is named Martha Talbot. She’s a mom with three kids, and one of them is a newborn baby. Everyone is bringing in props for the movie, and so I thought maybe Nellie—”

  “Nellie is not a prop!” Sarah said.

  “Well, not a prop, exactly, but—”

  “A co-star!” Jeff helped her out. “You want to know if Nellie can co-star in her first movie, is that right? Will Sarah and I get a share of the profits? So we can afford to send her to baseball camp when she’s older?”

  Nora knew Jeff was joking.

  “What do you say, Sarah?” Jeff asked. “Sounds okay to me, if one of us is there with her.”

  “Okay,” Sarah said. “Nellie may come to school on Friday.”

  “Thanks!” Nora said to both of them, but especially to Jeff.

  Now was not the time to tell Jeff that Nellie wasn’t going to baseball camp someday, but to science camp. Anyway, there was no reason Nellie couldn’t do both. Nora herself liked science and basketball. Nellie could also like more than one thing.

  Nellie might even be a baseball-playing scientist who—sometimes—wore pink?

  On Thursday, Coach Joe let Nora and Emma hand out a survey in the afternoon. The survey had only one question on it: “Did you notice anything different about Emma and Nora this week?” They had deliberately not mentioned clothes in the question to avoid biasing the answers.

  Nora pounced on the collected surveys right before the dismissal bell.

  Of the thirteen boys in the class, not one had noticed anything about their clothes. Only one boy had noticed anything to do with them at all. Dunk had noticed that Emma was being mean to him!

  Nora wondered if Dunk had any clue why Emma had stopped giggling every time he burped during a huddle or jostled her in the lunch line. Had he figured out that Emma preferred the attentions of a male who would bring her prairie sunflowers and help yoke up the oxen that pulled her covered wagon? Even if that male had the drawback of being imaginary?

  Of the eleven other girls in their class, most had noticed nothing at all. Amy and Tamara both wrote, “Nora got some new sweaters”; neither commented that the sweaters were pink. Not a single girl said anything about Emma’s having worn Nora’s plain, dark sweaters for four days in a row, except for Bethy, who wrote, “Something seemed a little strange about Emma this week, but I’m not sure what.”

  That was all! So did that prove nobody knew or cared whether you wore pink or blue? Was Nora right that clothes didn’t matter? The survey somehow didn’t capture how strange Nora had felt when her mother thought she was “into” clothes, and Jeff asked if she had a new hairdo, and Coach Joe praised her new “uniform,” and she saw her pink self in the mirror.

  It was hard to study feelings.

  Nora stuffed the surveys in her backpack and hurried to join Amy in the dismissal line. Amy’s mother was picking them up for their volunteer work at the animal shelter. Then, after supper, Nora was going to Emma’s house to spend the evening doing what they could to salvag
e the science fair, which was tomorrow.

  Tomorrow!

  All they had was some scribbled surveys and random feelings. What kind of science-fair experiment was that?

  Nora knew the answer: not much of one at all.

  At the shelter, Brad gave them a friendly hello. He was busy chatting with a co-worker at the front desk, an older man whose name tag identified him as Bob.

  Brad brought out the first pair of dogs for the girls to walk: a frisky Lab named Bailey and a smaller dog of uncertain breed named Taffy. It was an unseasonably warm day, so warm that Nora shed her jacket.

  “Be careful with Bailey,” Brad told Amy. “He can be a handful.” He reached past Nora to hand Bailey’s leash to Amy.

  “Taffy’s a little sweetheart,” he told Nora.

  As the girls led the dogs outdoors, Mrs. Talia trailing behind, Nora asked Amy, “So which color seed do parakeets like best?”

  “The brighter the better! They definitely went straight for orange and yellow, because those were the brightest,” Amy said. “Maybe because their feathers are so bright, it makes them want to eat foods that match?”

  That seemed far-fetched to Nora, but she could believe that bright colors might catch a bird’s eye.

  “What was the point of the survey?” Amy asked Nora then. “Asking if anybody noticed anything different about you and Emma?”

  Nora hadn’t yet told Amy anything about the curling-iron fiasco and Emma’s new idea; there was no reason not to tell her now, as the survey results were already in. But she still felt too discouraged about the whole thing to admit what had happened, even to Amy.

  “All will be revealed tomorrow!” Nora said, with more enthusiasm than she felt. “It has to do with the science fair.” Then she added, “With our very bad and awful project.”