I reached into my backpack and pulled out the science fair booklet. I said, “It doesn’t say anywhere in here that you have to pick partners by a special time. It just says that you have to sign up on time, and it says you can work by yourself or with one partner. And Willie and I both signed up before Christmas.”
Mrs. Snavin was still frowning. “Why has it taken this long to decide you want to work together?”
I said, “That’s my fault. Willie wanted to be partners right at the start, but I said no. But now I want to. So will it be okay?”
Mrs. Snavin took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She was looking through my booklet. “Well… it doesn’t seem to be against the rules. So, it’ll be all right. I’ll get the master list from the office and change it later today.”
I said, “Thanks, Mrs. Snavin.” Then I went back to the side doors to wait for the buses.
Willie was on bus four, but it was a while before he got off.
“Hey, Willie! Over here!”
He saw me and waved. He moved through the crowd of kids to where I was waiting. “Hi, Jake!”
We walked into the gym, and I said, “Guess what?”
“What?” he said.
“I’ve got a new partner for the science fair.”
Willie looked at me and squinted. “What do you mean? Who?”
I grinned. “You! You’re back in the science fair. You’re my partner!”
Willie said, “No way!”
And I said, “Way! I talked with Mrs. Snavin already, and it’s not against the rules or anything.”
Willie smiled this smile that almost covered his whole face.
Then the smile stopped, and he squinted again. “But you said you wanted to work by yourself.”
I said, “Yeah, but now I don’t. I wasn’t having much fun, either.”
The first bell rang, and everyone began to move for the doors.
I said, “Tell you what. Get a pass to go to the library for lunch recess, and we can talk about it, okay?”
Willie said, “Yeah… okay. See you in the library.” And then he smiled his big smile again. It’s a great smile.
When you have a partner to work with, and it’s a good partner, everything is more fun. It just is.
After Willie and I talked at the library we decided to work on the magnets. He had been making a project about how different balls bounce. It’s because Willie loves basketball and almost every sport. He’s not very good at sports, but he still loves them. So he wanted to observe Ping-Pong balls, golf balls, tennis balls, and basketballs bouncing. Then he wanted to guess why they bounced in different ways, and then try to prove it.
It was kind of an interesting idea, but Willie hadn’t done much with it.
When I told him about the electromagnets, he got all excited. “You mean a regular nail turns into a magnet?”
I said, “Yeah, only I’ve got two giant nails this long! And you know at a junkyard? They have electromagnets on the end of a crane that can pick up whole cars, and when they shut off the power, BAM, the whole car falls to the ground!”
Then I told him about everything we had to do. And Willie got more and more excited. He said he would ask his mom if he could come over on Saturday. Then we could work all day on it.
“That’ll be great. And there’s one more thing,” I said. “I’ve been keeping the project a secret. Especially from Kevin and Marsha.”
Willie nodded slowly and began to grin. “Yeah. I like it. That means we know something that they don’t know, right?”
See what I mean? How Willie got the idea right away?
Me and Willie are like that. We’re good partners. We laugh at the same kinds of stuff, and when he needs help or I need help, we stick together.
Like magnets.
CHAPTER TEN
Teamwork
You know how people say “two heads are better than one”? Well, it’s true, especially if the other head is Willie’s head.
When he came over to my house on Saturday morning, we got right to work. First, I showed Willie what I had written down. And I told him how it was my idea to see what made a magnet more powerful: more wire or more batteries. I had the idea, but I hadn’t a guess about it yet. In the scientific method, that’s called the hypothesis.
Willie looked at the stuff, and he looked at my notes. Then he said, “More electricity makes an electromagnet stronger than more wire.”
I said, “How do you know that?”
Willie shook his head. “I don’t. That’s our hypothesis. ‘More electricity makes an electromagnet stronger than more wire.’ We have to prove whether that’s true or false.”
See what I mean about two heads? In a minute, Willie had a big part of the problem all worked out. I wrote the hypothesis in our notebook. Then came the fun part. I know that might sound weird, but making those electromagnets was really fun.
We talked and we argued about stuff, and we tried six different ways of winding wire on the nails. And Willie figured out a great way to keep track of how much wire we were using.
We decided to put 150 feet of red wire onto one of the nails. We would put 300 feet of blue wire onto the other nail. That was Willie’s idea, too, to put twice as much wire onto the second nail. That way, if more wire makes a stronger magnet, maybe the blue magnet would be twice as strong.
We started winding wire onto one of the nails. We kept the wire pulled really tight. It was harder than I thought it would be. And if I’d had to do it all by myself, it would have been really boring.
By lunchtime we had only finished the nail with the red wire, the short wire.
For lunch we had chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Dad made lunch because Mom and Abby were at the mall taking some clothes back. Gram had given Abby a sweater that went all the way down to her knees. It made her look like a Munchkin.
Dad said, “It’s been pretty quiet up there. How’s it going?”
Willie said, “We’ve been winding wire around a nail.”
Dad said, “If it’s taking too long, you could bring your things down to the workshop. I bet I could figure out how to make the nail spin around. That way, you could just hold the spool of wire and it would almost wind itself. Sound good?”
Willie started to nod his head, but I said, “That sounds great, Dad, but we’d better do the second nail like we did the first one. They should look the same way.”
I felt a little sorry for my dad. He really wanted to help. It was hard for him to keep out of the way.
Then I said, “But when we’re done winding the second nail, would you look at them for us?”
Dad said, “You bet. Just give a holler when you need me.”
And I could tell it made my dad feel good to be invited.
When Willie and I finished winding the wire, we looked in one of the books to see how to hook the batteries together. And that’s when I called my dad. Because if you hook big batteries together wrong, it can start a fire. And it said in the rules that if anything might be dangerous, “… an adult should be present.”
Dad was great. He didn’t try to change anything we were doing. He didn’t say we should wind the wire some other way. And instead of being a K-I-A/D-I-A and telling us how to hook up the batteries, he made us think about it. Then we had to tell him how we wanted to do it.
We told him, and Dad said, “That’s exactly right. You guys have got it all figured out.” And then he left. Mom would have been proud of him.
Willie and I decided our first trial should be with just one battery. So we hooked the wire from each end of the red magnet onto the battery—one wire to the positive terminal and the other to the negative terminal.
But we didn’t have anything to lift with the magnet. So we unhooked the wires and went downstairs and into the kitchen.
I said, “We need something that’s made of iron or steel.”
And Willie said, “And we have to know how much it weighs. Because it said in the science fair booklet to m
easure everything. So we have to measure the weight of what we pick up.”
I opened the door to the basement, but Willie said, “Wait a minute.”
Willie’s been to my house so many times, he knows where everything is. He opened the pantry, and right away I knew what he was doing. He was going to get some cookies. But instead he grabbed a can off a shelf and said, “Tuna!”
“Tuna?” I said.
“Yeah,” said Willie. “Tuna. This can of tuna weighs one hundred and seventy grams. And this can of soup weighs three hundred and five grams. And the cans are made of steel! Here, take some.”
So I grabbed eight cans of soup, and he grabbed four cans of tuna.
If I told you every step of our experiment, it would make you crazy. About how we tried two batteries on the red magnet. And then tried to see if we could pick up a can of soup with the flat end of the nail. And how we used duct tape to stack two cans on top of each other so we could try to pick up two cans. And how we hooked the two batteries up to the blue magnet and then tried to lift soup again. And how we wrote down everything we tried. And then how we hooked up all four batteries and… but like I said, if I just told it all, you’d go nuts. Because me telling it wouldn’t be as fun as really doing all this stuff with Willie, and he was cracking jokes and making faces, and coming up with all these good ideas.
It was a great afternoon. And when Willie’s dad showed up to take him home, our science fair experiment was practically finished. I mean, we still had a ton of work to do. And posters to make. And conclusions to write.
But Willie and I knew what we knew, and we knew why we knew it.
And the best part? The best part was that all afternoon, I didn’t think about Kevin or Marsha or Mr. Lenny Cordo or his Bluntium Twelve computer system. Not once. It had been an afternoon of pure fun.
Which is what science is supposed to be in the first place, right?
Right.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Winners
Then came the weekend before the science fair. Willie and I spent all Saturday and Sunday finishing our posters. We planned what we would say to the judges. We planned how to explain our conclusion.
We also had to be ready to explain our method. That’s the part where we tested our idea. Judges can ask any questions they want about any part of the project. So you know what you have to be? You have to be a know-it-all, at least about your own project. Unless you have a good partner like Willie. Then you can be a know-about-half.
Willie and I were ready. We even remembered to buy four new batteries so the magnets would work just right.
• • •
On the Tuesday of the science fair, we brought our project to the school gym at five o’clock in the afternoon. That was part of the rules. We had an hour and a half to get everything ready. Then the judging would start at six thirty.
The gym was like a pot of water on a stove. The whole place felt like it was humming and bubbling, getting ready to boil over.
Kids were everywhere. And so were parents. Both my dad and Willie’s dad came along to help us hang up our posters. Willie’s dad had gone to an office store for us. He got one of those tall cardboard fold-up things. It was just the right size to hold our three posters.
There were numbered tables in rows up and down the floor, and there was a list of names by the door. Next to every name there was a number, and ours was forty-five.
Table number forty-five was a good one, right along the back wall. Except that it was next to table number forty-six. And table number forty-six was Kevin Young’s table.
It was hard not to look at Kevin’s stuff. He had three posters, just like ours. Except his didn’t look like ours.
We had used markers to write the biggest words on our posters. We had used colored pencils and crayons to make our drawings. We had written out our words by hand.
Not Kevin. All the writing on his posters had been printed out from a computer. And so had his pictures. All the papers and letters and pictures had been glued onto Kevin’s posters.
We had glued some things onto our posters, too. We had some drawings, and a great picture of a junkyard electromagnet holding up a crushed car. It’s hard to glue stuff right, so some of our pictures had some little bumps and ridges in them. And so did our writing papers.
Not Kevin’s. I don’t know how he did it, but every picture and all his writing was glued down perfectly flat.
My dad looked at Kevin’s posters. He nodded at Kevin’s dad and said, “Great posters.”
Kevin’s dad looked a lot like Kevin. He had the same red hair and blue eyes. He smiled at my dad and said, “Thanks. We worked pretty hard on them.”
See that? How Kevin’s dad said “we”? I looked around at the other projects near us. And most of them looked like grown-ups had helped, too. It didn’t seem very fair. All of a sudden I wished that I had let my dad help us. Because deep down, I still thought it would be nice to win that Bluntium Twelve computer.
Kevin looked over at our stuff once or twice. And I thought I saw him smile a little, but it wasn’t a nice smile. It was a put-down smile.
But we had too much to do to think about Kevin for very long. We got our magnets wired up. We got our cans of soup and tuna stacked up. We laid out our notebooks and our method records.
And when everything was set up, we had forty minutes left over, so our dads took us out for hamburgers and chocolate shakes. The food was good, but Willie and I were pretty nervous.
At six thirty, the judges started. There were six of them, science and math teachers from the junior high school. First, they all just walked together up and down the rows of tables. Then they started at table number seventy-two, the last table. And we had to wait. And wait. And wait.
It took a long time for the judges to get to our row. Then it was another ten minutes before they got to Kevin at table forty-six.
It was good to hear the judges ask questions before it was our turn. And Kevin was good at answering them. He really was. He had done this experiment making ants learn how to go through a maze. He wanted to show that if ants can’t smell, they get lost.
Ants leave something like an odor where they walk. And if one ant goes through the maze, it leaves a trail so others can follow. So after one ant went through the maze, Kevin let another one go, and it followed the same path. Then he painted the maze with lemon juice, let it dry, and let another ant go. The second ant got lost, so Kevin proved his hypothesis was right.
It was a good project. Even if Kevin did get help from his dad.
Then it was our turn. This lady judge started. She asked Willie to explain what we wanted to prove. Willie pointed at our posters and told how electromagnets work, and how we wanted to see what made the bigger difference, more wire or more power. He was great. Willie smiled, and he sounded like he was having fun. Because he was. And I could tell the judges liked that.
Then it was my turn. I had to explain our method. I took it slow, step by step. And while I talked, Willie hooked up the red magnet to two batteries and lifted up two cans of tuna. Then he added two more batteries and picked up four cans.
Then Willie took over talking. I hooked up two batteries to the blue magnet, the one that had more wire on it. And with two batteries, the blue magnet would pick up four cans! And with four batteries, it picked up eight cans of tuna.
I could tell that the judges liked what we were doing. Our results were different from what we had thought they would be, but we explained it all in our conclusion just right. We used the scientific method. It was a good experiment.
Kevin was watching, too. But I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He didn’t smile or frown. And he hardly even blinked.
Then it was over. And it felt great. I looked at Willie, and he had that smile on his face, the really big one. And right then, I knew I didn’t care if we won anything or not.
The judges moved on. Then it was time for more waiting, a lot more waiting. So Willie and I went to look around.
We found Marsha’s table, but we didn’t go over. That’s because she looked sad, and kind of mad, too, like she might start crying or yelling or something. Her posters looked great. There was this upside-down cake pan inside a box with a window cut in one side. The pan was hanging above a little lightbulb. I could tell from the posters that the pan had some grass growing from it.
Willie said, “What’s wrong with her?”
I shrugged and didn’t say anything. But I thought I knew why. Maybe it was because if you always feel like you have to be the best, it’s hard. Because a lot of the time, someone else does just as well or even better.
Anyway, we kept walking. We looked at all the third-grade projects. And after I saw them all, I knew which one was going to win. There wasn’t any question about it.
About a half hour later, it was time for the announcements. Everyone went into the auditorium. Willie and I sat in the tenth row, and our dads sat behind us. Mr. Lenny Cordo was there, and all the computer boxes were stacked up on the stage. It was pretty exciting.
The judges announced the fifth-grade winners first. Ellen Stone won the grand prize. She’d done the project about the electric guitar sounds. And second place went to Mark Nixon for a project about temperature and soap bubbles.
The fourth-grade winner was Charles LeClerc. He had studied the hardness of different kinds of rocks. And second place went to Amy Martin’s project about veins in leaves.
Then it was time for the third grade. My dad put his hand on my shoulder and gave a little squeeze. And the winner was… Pete Morris. Just like I knew it would be.
Pete had done this project about insect eggs and how different daylight hours make the eggs hatch. He had found some praying mantis eggs. He’d put some lights on a timer and had made the eggs hatch two months early. It was like he’d tricked them with the light. And there was this big glass box with about twenty baby praying mantises walking around on their little green legs.
Jake Drake, Know-It-All Page 4