The Nora Notebooks, Book 2

by Claudia Mills

  “I told you the curling-iron idea isn’t bad and awful!”

  “Well, something happened with the curling irons. So we had to switch ideas. And the new idea is really bad. I mean, really bad. But all will be revealed tomorrow,” Nora said again, this time with a sigh.

  “Okay,” Amy said, sounding hurt.

  The next two dogs were a Chihuahua for Nora and a husky for Amy, and then Nora walked a sweet, half-blind sheepdog while Amy strained to hold on to the leash of a sleek greyhound.

  The girls had fallen silent, Amy apparently miffed at being left out of Nora’s science-fair secrets, Nora still trying to figure out how to turn Emma’s idea into something that wouldn’t be the lamest science-fair project in the whole fourth grade.

  Did clothes matter?

  The surveys, for the most part, said no. That meant Nora had been right.

  But there was something about how everyone had treated Nora all week that might mean Emma was right.

  “Harley, slow down!” Amy called to her dog as Nora’s old, gentle dog continued to lumber along a few steps behind.

  A thought popped into Nora’s always-curious brain.

  And then another thought.

  And another.

  Thoughts that might lead to a science-fair breakthrough.

  Or not.

  “Amy,” she said, “do you think we can stay a little bit longer today, or does your mom have to pick up Sheridan right away?”

  “My dad’s getting Sheridan. Why?”

  “Would you be willing to do an experiment with me? It’s connected with the science fair, and I’ll tell you about everything in a minute, I promise I will, but first I have to see if I’m right about something.”

  “Um, sure,” Amy said, already starting to tug on her braid, fastened with plain rubber bands today.

  Nora looked down at Amy’s army camouflage jacket, as different as could be from the flouncy pink sweater of Emma’s that Nora was wearing.

  “And will you trade clothes with me? Wear my sweater for a little while and let me wear your jacket?”

  “Nora, now you’re being weird,” Amy said.

  “I’m not being weird,” Nora told Amy, her heart beating as fast as a newborn baby’s. “I’m being scientific.”

  The Plainfield Elementary science fair was held all over the school, with projects on display in the gym, in the library, and along the hallway leading from one to the other.

  Coach Joe’s students, their projects arrayed atop the low bookcases in the library, were the oddest-looking group of scientists Nora had ever seen. In her day, she had definitely seen some peculiar astrophysicists at her mother’s conferences and strange biochemists at conferences she tagged along to with her father. But she had never seen female scientists wearing gingham pioneer dresses complete with aprons and sunbonnets. Or male scientists who looked like they had dressed up as cowboys for Halloween.

  Maybe it hadn’t been the best idea to film the Oregon Trail documentary on the same day as the science fair.

  Nora owned one faded pioneer-looking dress and one droopy sunbonnet. She’d left the sunbonnet in Coach Joe’s classroom, but there was nothing she could do about the dress.

  Emma had on a bright pink Southern-belle dress with a hoopskirt and a matching pink parasol. In Nora’s opinion, Emma’s outfit was completely ridiculous for a pioneer woman traveling on her own over a thousand miles of wilderness, from Missouri to Oregon, who had to do all the same backbreaking chores as any man on the trail.

  On the other hand, Nora could see how Emma’s outfit might well make a fellow feel like bringing her some flowers and then sticking around to chop her firewood and haul her water from the nearest creek. The big bunch of sunflowers Emma had brought to school was back on Emma’s desk.

  What would the science-fair judges think when they came by to question them about their project?

  Oh well. The whole point of the project was to figure out how people reacted to other people’s choice of clothing. And if Nora was right, they had now proved something, they really had.

  Standing next to Emma, Nora read over the information on their three-panel display board once again. “The Power of Pink” was the title Emma had come up with. Nora thought it was a dumb title. But she didn’t think the results were dumb.

  On the board, she and Emma had displayed a blue pie chart showing that 100 percent of the boys had noticed nothing, and a pink pie chart showing that only two and a half out of eleven girls (they counted Bethy as half), or 23 percent, had noticed anything. The girls had also mounted a picture of Nora, unsmiling, in Emma’s pink sweater, and a picture of Emma, smiling, in Nora’s dark blue one. They’d also posted a few of the responses to the survey question, “Did you notice anything different about Emma and Nora this week?”:

  “No.”

  “Nope.”

  “Like what?”

  “No.”

  “No.”

  “No.”

  But then they’d added the results that Nora and Amy had found out the day before. On their two visits to the animal shelter, they had each walked a total of ten dogs, three on the first day and seven yesterday, to test Nora’s new hypothesis. The first day, when Amy had worn a pink jacket and pink ribbons on her braids and Nora had worn her usual dark sweater, Brad had given bigger dogs to Nora and smaller dogs to Amy. The next time, when Nora had worn Emma’s sweater and Amy had worn her army jacket, Brad had given bigger dogs to Amy and smaller dogs to Nora. Later on, when they had switched clothes and Bob had taken over at the desk to hand out leashes, three out of four times he gave the girl wearing pink a smaller, easier dog to walk.

  Nora knew it wasn’t a big sample. And there were so many other variables to consider. But they had still found out something. People (at least two different people making dog-walking assignments) gave smaller and easier dogs (at least most of the time on those two days) to girls wearing pink.

  Sheng and Dunk’s project—well, Sheng’s project—was displayed right next to Nora and Emma’s. Mason and Brody’s falling-toast exhibit (they had managed to include a cute picture of Dog grabbing one piece) was far away, by the little-kid picture books. Amy and Anthony were practically out in the hall, with their dyed birdseed arrayed in front of their poster in little bowls.

  Nora studied Sheng’s display board: “Turning Potential Energy into Kinetic Energy.” It had graphs galore. It had equations. No pictures of girls wearing sweaters, no fancy Emma stenciling, no pink-flower decals that Emma had added when Nora wasn’t paying attention.

  But maybe graphs and equations weren’t everything?

  Nora’s parents both had to work, but a few parents stopped by to admire or ask questions, as well as lots of kids from other grades, who seemed more interested in Emma’s parasol than in reading the content of their display.

  Dunk abandoned his own project to come look at theirs, except that he didn’t seem to be looking at theirs at all. He had gone back to Coach Joe’s classroom and returned with something held behind his back that he didn’t seem to want them to see.

  “What do you want?” Emma asked him, in the same cool tone she had been using for the past few days.

  “Nothing,” Dunk said.

  “What are you hiding there?”

  “Nothing,” Dunk said again.

  Then he held out a tin can filled with sunflowers.

  As Emma stared, Dunk plopped the sunflowers on the table next to Nora and Emma’s science-fair display and hurried away to the other side of the library.

  Emma gave a romantic sigh.

  So maybe boys gave flowers more often to girls who wore pink? That would be a science-fair project for another day.

  A moment later, Dunk was back, with a hopeful look on his face. Emma welcomed him with a smile.

  Encouraged, Dunk snatched her parasol. She tussled with him to get it back.

  He grunted. She giggled.

  Apparently, Dave Edwin’s sunflowers were forgotten, wilting in a faraway
imaginary wagon.

  Ten minutes later, the judges appeared, a man and a woman carrying clipboards. Sometimes the judges were somebody’s mom or dad, but sometimes they were real scientists. And of course, sometimes they were both. Nora’s dad had been a judge last year.

  “Tell us about your project,” the female judge prompted.

  “The first thing you need to know is that Nora and I didn’t want to be partners,” Emma said. “Coach Joe made us all keep our regular science partners, whether we wanted to or not. I’m not being mean. I’m just stating a fact.”

  Nora believed in stating facts. But this particular fact was a strange one to share with the judges.

  “And Nora and I could not come up with an idea!” Emma went on. “Nora likes ants! And batteries! And I don’t even like science at all! But then I went to Nora’s house because she has the cutest new baby niece, and Nora was mad because everybody kept buying Nellie pink things, and I said that I felt prettier when I wore pink, and that other people thought I looked prettier, too, and Nora said that was dumb—”

  “I didn’t say it was dumb,” Nora put in. Well, now that she thought back to the day of the party, that was exactly what she had said.

  “You did, Nora, and we got into this big discussion of whether clothes mattered or not, and we decided to test it. Scientifically. And we were both right. Nora was right that when we changed clothes for a week, and she wore pink and I wore not-pink, hardly anybody noticed.”

  Emma finally paused, in evident amazement at these findings, and Nora took over.

  “But then when another friend and I were volunteering to walk dogs at the animal shelter, the people in charge kept giving bigger, rougher dogs to whichever one of us wasn’t wearing pink. I started tabulating the data, and this is what we found.” She pointed to the chart that displayed the dog-walking results. “So maybe Emma was right that people react differently to clothes color, even if they don’t realize that’s what they’re doing.”

  Both the man judge and the woman judge were busy scribbling notes.

  “Do you think your classmates would have noticed if you had come to school wearing…that?” the man asked, gesturing toward Emma’s dress.

  “Maybe,” Emma said. “But both Nora and I wore normal-looking clothes, except that Nora wore normal-looking clothes for me, and I wore normal-looking clothes for her. But they were still normal.”

  “Do you think your project gives a reason for girls to avoid wearing pink?” the woman asked.

  “No!” Emma said. “Who cares what kind of dog you walk? I don’t.”

  “No,” Nora echoed, more tentatively. “We didn’t have time to show anything that definite. But maybe we showed that it’s good for all of us to pay attention to whether we judge other people on things that don’t really matter.”

  Were what colors you wore a part of your fate? When people reacted to you differently because of those colors, did it make you start to be someone different?

  If Nora had worn pink every day of her life, would she now act more like Emma? If Emma had never worn pink, would she now act more like Nora?

  Maybe there were some things even science would have a hard time figuring out.

  The judges moved on to Sheng and Dunk. Nora could hear Sheng’s long, detailed description of “their” experiment. Dunk said nothing. Instead, as Sheng talked on, he grabbed Emma’s parasol and opened it over his own head.

  “Dunk,” the man judge interrupted him. “Tell us about why the two of you decided to study kinetic energy.”

  Dunk shrugged, but he did shut Emma’s parasol.

  “Do you think your experiment suggested any other questions you might want to explore next?” the woman judge asked.

  “Not really,” Dunk replied, still holding on to Emma’s parasol as she fake-glared at him to give it back.

  “Thanks, boys,” both judges said to Dunk and Sheng, and went on to the next exhibit.

  “I think they liked ours!” Emma said to Nora, once the judges were out of earshot.

  Nora hoped Emma was right.

  “But we only had two charts,” Nora couldn’t help pointing out.

  “Graphs, schmaphs!” Emma returned. “Ours was interesting! Ours showed something that people really want to know. Dunk, give me my parasol!”

  Emma reached for it.

  Dunk held it high over his head.

  Emma giggled.

  Coach Joe gave out instructions for the filming of the class Oregon Trail documentary in an after-lunch huddle. He was dressed in an Oregon Trail outfit himself, or at least a cowboy outfit, complete with leather chaps, a bright red bandanna around his neck, and a ten-gallon hat.

  “We’re going to film the interviews right here in our classroom,” he said. “I had hoped for a quiet corner of the library, but with the science fair going on all day, there’s no quiet corner anywhere. I’ll be the interviewer, asking each of you a couple of questions for you to answer in character. So this afternoon, I’m not Coach Joe; I’m Ace Reporter Joe, covering the Oregon Trail for the Westward-Bound Times. Tamara’s dad volunteered to film us and edit the tapes into our final project; he’s made a few indie films himself. And I’ll need all of you to be a quiet, respectful audience while we film. Got it?”

  Everyone nodded. Nora wasn’t sure Dunk could manage being quiet and respectful, but the thought of being in a real film made by a real filmmaker had caused a hush to fall over everyone, Dunk included.

  “Okay, team,” Coach Joe said, concluding the huddle. “Lights! Camera! Action!”

  Seated at her desk, Nora tuned out during some of the interviews, quietly reading her new library book on the scientist Marie Curie, but she tuned back in for the kids she knew best.

  Ace Reporter Joe to Emma Averill/Ann Whittaker: What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced on the trail so far?

  Emma/Ann: Maybe this sounds dumb, but I have to wash my hair in cold water from a nasty creek, and that wouldn’t matter so much except that there’s this fellow who’s sweet on me. Well, actually two fellows. It’s sort of complicated. Anyway, they both brought me sunflowers. Aren’t they pretty? So I want to look halfway decent! And you try looking halfway decent when you have to wash your hair in a creek five hundred miles from anywhere!

  Ace Reporter Joe to Brody Baxter/Bill Breeden: What hardships have you been encountering on your journey?

  Brody/Bill: It’s been great! My dog, Pup, loves chasing prairie dogs and rabbits. He’s probably the best prairie-dog-and-rabbit chaser ever in the history of the Oregon Trail. A lot of the people on the trip are complaining about the weather, you know, because of the tornado and the hailstorm. But the tornado missed us! It went right by! And the hailstorm was exciting, except that Pup got scared, and the hail punched a bunch of holes in the cover of my wagon. But I like the holes because I get more of a breeze that way!

  Ace Reporter Joe to Mason Dixon/Jake Smith: So a little bird told me things have been going pretty well for you. Is that correct?

  Mason/Jake: It’s been going great if you like bouncing along in a boiling-hot wagon over huge ruts all day long. And cooking all your food—or what the people around here call food—over stinky buffalo chips. And did the little bird tell you about the tornado? And the hailstorm? And don’t even get me started on the mosquitoes!

  Ace Reporter Joe to Amy Talia/Sally Hamilton: You’re the heroine of the trail, Mrs. Hamilton, for your quick thinking about that rattlesnake. Can you tell me about it?

  Amy/Sally: Well, it was definitely a huge, scary snake. Four feet long! And it had this really quiet, deadly rattle. But all I could think about was my poor little baby, so I ran over to the rattler with my hatchet, and whack-whack-whack, that was the last time that snake was going to bother anybody!

  Nora had been unable to resist correcting Amy’s rattlesnake facts. She was glad Amy could still make a thrilling story with a shorter, quieter snake. Facts didn’t spoil stories, in her opinion; they made them even better.

  N
ora saw Sarah, Jeff, and Nellie standing in the doorway of the classroom.

  “Nora, let’s film you next,” Coach Joe said; Nora had told him Nellie was on her way.

  Slowly Nora walked to the corner where Coach Joe sat on one stool, leaving a second stool for his interviewee. She adjusted her sunbonnet to stall for time.

  In less than a minute—in thirty seconds—she was going to have to hold Nellie again, on camera this time, filmed for posterity.

  Nellie was dressed not in a twenty-first-century stretchy sleeper, but in a little cotton dress that could have been worn by a pioneer baby. On Nellie’s head was a little sunbonnet that matched Nora’s.

  “Here.” Jeff held Nellie out to Nora.

  Nora hesitated.

  “What?” Jeff asked.

  Sarah flushed.

  “Nora,” she said in a low voice. “I shouldn’t have freaked out at the party. It’s just been…so hard. I’ve always been good at being a geologist, and I thought, How hard can it be to be a mom? But it’s much harder than I thought it would be; there’s so much that you can’t learn in advance, however many books you read. Being a mom is scary! But I shouldn’t have acted the way I did with you.”

  Sarah gathered her into a hug; gratefully, Nora hugged her back.

  Being an aunt was scary, too.

  She still felt nervous about holding Nellie.

  But then she thought: Nora Alpers might not know how to hold a baby.

  But Martha Talbot does.

  Perched on her stool, she let Sarah settle Nellie into her arms. She held Nellie close against her chest, the way Martha Talbot would, careful to support Nellie’s little neck.

  She could hear the girls give a collective sigh of envy. What was a butter churn as a prop—or even a double bunch of sunflowers—compared to an actual baby?

  Don’t cry, Nora/Martha silently pleaded with Nellie.

  Nellie didn’t. She snuggled deeper.

  Ace Reporter Joe to Nora Alpers/Martha Talbot: How are you faring on the Oregon Trail?