by Morgan Rice
Oliver stood there gawking at the factory in all its former glory. But just like in real life, there was no Armando there to greet him. No ally. No friend. Even in his imagination, he was completely alone.
*
Only once everyone had gone to bed and the house was in complete darkness did Oliver feel able to work on fixing his inventions. He wanted to be optimistic as he fiddled with all the pieces, trying to get them to fit back together. But it was useless. The whole thing had been destroyed. All his coils and wires were damaged beyond hope. He’d have to start all over again.
He threw the pieces into his suitcase and slammed it shut. With both the locks now broken, the lid bounced up before falling back again and standing ajar. Oliver sighed heavily and slumped back against his mattress. He pulled the blanket all the way up over his head.
It must only have been from sheer exhaustion that Oliver was even able to fall asleep that night. But sleep he did. And as he drifted off into his dreams, Oliver found himself standing at the window looking out at the spindly tree across the road. There stood the man and woman he’d seen just last night, holding hands.
Oliver banged on the window.
“Who are you?” he cried.
The woman smiled knowingly. Her smile was kind; nicer, even, than Ms. Belfry’s.
But neither of them spoke. They just stared at him, smiling.
Oliver heaved the window open. “Who are you?” he shouted again, but this time his voice was drowned out by the wind.
The man and woman just stood there, mute, their hands clasped, their smiles warm and inviting.
Oliver began to crawl through the window. But as he did, the figures flickered and juddered, as if they were holograms and the lightbulbs were flickering out. They were starting to disappear.
“Wait!” he cried. “Don’t go!”
He fell through the window and hurried across the street. They faded more and more with every step he took.
As he drew up ahead of them, they were barely visible. He reached forward for the woman’s hand, but his went straight through hers, like she was a ghost.
“Please tell me who you are!” he pleaded.
The man opened his mouth to speak, but his voice was drowned out by the roaring wind. Oliver grew desperate.
“Who are you?” he asked again, shouting to be heard over the wind. “Why are you watching me?”
The man and woman were rapidly fading. The man spoke again, and this time Oliver heard a small whisper.
“You have a destiny…”
“What?” Oliver stammered. “What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
But before either of them had a chance to speak again, they faded out entirely. They’d gone.
“Come back!” Oliver yelled into the emptiness.
Then, as if speaking into his ear, he heard the wispy voice of the woman say, “You will save mankind.”
Oliver’s eyes fluttered open. He was back in his alcove bed, bathed in the pale, blue light coming in through the window. It was morning. He could feel his heart thrumming.
The dream had shaken him to the core. What had they meant about him having a destiny? About saving mankind? And who were the man and woman anyway? Figments of his imagination, or something else? It was all too much to fathom.
As the initial shock of the dream began to wear off, Oliver felt a new sensation take over. Hope. Somewhere, deep inside of him, he felt that he was about to experience a momentous day, that everything was about to change.
CHAPTER FOUR
Oliver’s good mood was elevated further when he realized his first class of the day was science, and that meant he’d get to see Ms. Belfry again. Even as he crossed the playground, ducking beneath basketballs that he suspected were deliberately being aimed at his head, Oliver’s sense of excitement only grew.
He reached the staircase and succumbed to the force of the children, who pushed him like a surfer all the way up to the fourth floor. Then he pushed his way out onto the landing and headed for the classroom.
He was first. Ms. Belfry was inside already, in a gray linen dress, setting up a row of small models across the front of her desk. Oliver saw there was a little biplane, a hot air balloon, a space rocket, and a modern airplane.
“Is today’s lesson about flight?” he asked.
Ms. Belfry startled, clearly not having realized one of her students had entered.
“Oh, Oliver,” she said, beaming. “Good morning. Yes, it is. Now, I suspect you know a thing or two about these kinds of inventions.”
Oliver nodded. His inventors book had a whole section on flight, from the first balloons invented by the French Montgolfier brothers, through to the Wright Brothers’ early airplane design, and all the way up to rocket science. Like the rest of the pages of the book, he’d read this section so many times he had most of it committed to memory.
Ms. Belfry smiled like she’d already guessed Oliver would be a fountain of knowledge on this particular subject.
“You might have to help me explain some of the physics to the others,” she told him.
Oliver blushed as he took his seat. He hated speaking out loud in front of his classmates, especially since he was already a suspected nerd and confirming it felt like he was flaunting more than he really wanted to. But Ms. Belfry did have a very calming way about her, as though she thought Oliver’s knowledge was something to be celebrated rather than ridiculed.
Oliver chose a seat near the front of the class. If he was going to be forced to speak aloud, he’d prefer not to have thirty pairs of eyes gawking at him over their shoulders as he did. At least this way he’d only be aware of the four other kids in the front row looking at him.
Just then, Oliver’s classmates started filing in and taking their seats. The noise in the room began to swell. Oliver never understood how other people had so much to talk about. Though he could talk about inventors and inventions forever, there wasn’t much else he felt the need to chat about. It always baffled him how other people managed such easy conversation, and how they shared so many words on what, in his mind, sounded like next to nothing of importance.
Ms. Belfry began her class, waving her arms in an attempt to get everyone to shut up. Oliver felt terrible for her. It always seemed like a battle just to get the kids to listen. And she was so gentle and soft-spoken that she never resorted to raising her voice or shouting, so her attempts to quiet everyone took ages to work. But eventually, the chatter began to die away.
“Today, children,” Ms. Belfry began, “I have a problem that needs solving.” She held up a popsicle stick. “I wonder if anyone can tell me how to make this fly.”
A ripple of hubbub went around the room. Someone shouted out.
“Just throw it!”
Ms. Belfry did as was suggested. The popsicle stick traveled less than two feet before falling to the ground.
“Hmm, I don’t know about you guys,” Ms. Belfry said, “but to me that just looked like falling. I want it to fly. To soar through the air, not just plummet to the ground.”
Paul, Oliver’s taunter from last class, called out the next suggestion. “Why don’t you just ping it on an elastic band? Like a slingshot.”
“That’s a good idea,” Ms. Belfry said with a nod. “But I haven’t told you something. This stick is actually ten feet long.”
“Then make a ten-foot-wide catapult!” someone shouted.
“Or put rocket launchers on it!” another voice chimed in.
The class started to laugh. Oliver shifted in his seat. He knew exactly how the popsicle stick could fly. It all came down to physics.
Ms. Belfry managed to get the class to settle down again.
“This was the exact problem facing the Wright brothers when they were trying to create the first airplane. How to mimic the flight of birds. How to turn this”—she held up the stick horizontally—“into wings that could sustain flight. So, does anyone know how they did it?”
Her gaze flicked immediately to O
liver. He swallowed. As much as he didn’t want to speak aloud, another part of him desperately wanted to prove to Ms. Belfry how smart he was.
“You need to create lift,” he said, quietly.
“What was that?” Ms. Belfry said, although Oliver knew full well she’d heard him perfectly.
Reticently, he spoke a little louder. “You need to create lift.”
No sooner had he finished speaking than Oliver felt a blush creep into his cheeks. He felt the change in the room, the tenseness of the other students around him. So much for not having thirty pairs of eyes gawking at him; Oliver could practically feel them burning into his back.
“And what is lift?” Ms. Belfry continued.
Oliver wet his dry lips and swallowed his anguish. “Lift is the name of the force that counters gravity. Gravity is always pulling objects down to the center of the earth. Lift is the force that counteracts it.”
From somewhere behind, he heard Paul’s whispered voice in a mock whine, mimicking, “Lift counteracts it.”
A tittering of laughter rippled amongst the students behind him. Oliver felt his muscles stiffen defensively in response.
Ms. Belfry was clearly oblivious to the quiet mocking Oliver was experiencing.
“Hmm,” she said, as if this was all news to her. “Sounds complicated. Countering gravity? Isn’t that impossible?”
Oliver shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. He really wanted to stop speaking, to have a small respite from the whispers. But clearly no one else knew the answer, and Ms. Belfry was watching him with her sparkling, encouraging eyes.
“Not at all,” Oliver replied, finally taking the bait. “To create lift all you have to do is change how fast air flows around something, which you can do just by changing the shape of the object. So with your popsicle stick, you just need a ridge on the top side. That means that as the stick moves forward the air flowing above and below it have different-shaped paths. Over the humped side of the wing the path is curved, whereas beneath the wing, the path is flat and uninterrupted.”
Oliver finished speaking and immediately pressed his lips together. Not only had he answered her question, he’d gone above and beyond in explaining it. He’d gotten carried away with himself and now he was going to be mocked mercilessly. He braced himself.
“Could you draw it for us?” Ms. Belfry asked.
She held out a board pen for Oliver. He looked at it, wide-eyed. Speaking was one thing, but standing in front of everyone like a target was a whole other!
“I’d prefer not to,” he muttered out the side of his mouth.
He saw the flicker of understanding in Ms. Belfry’s expression. She must have realized she’d pushed him to the edge of his comfort zone, beyond it even, and what she was asking him now was an impossibility.
“Actually,” she said, withdrawing the pen and stepping backward, “maybe someone else would like to try drawing what Oliver’s explained?”
Samantha, one of the brash kids who craved attention, leapt up and snatched the pen from Ms. Belfry. Together they went over to the board and Ms. Belfry helped Samantha draw a diagram of what Oliver was describing.
But as soon as Ms. Belfry’s back was turned, Oliver felt something hit the back of his head. He turned and saw a ball of screwed up paper at his feet. He reached down and picked it up, not wanting to open it, knowing there’d be a cruel note inside.
“Hey…” Paul hissed. “Don’t ignore me. Read the note!”
Tensing, Oliver opened up the paper ball in his hands. He smoothed it on the desk before him. Written in terrible spider-crawl handwriting were the words Guess what else can fly?
Just then, he felt something else hit his head. Another paper ball. It was followed by another, and another and another.
“HEY!” Oliver cried, leaping up and turning around angrily.
Ms. Belfry turned too. She frowned at the scene before her.
“What’s going on?” she demanded.
“We’re just trying to find things that fly,” Paul said innocently. “One must have hit Oliver by accident.”
Ms. Belfry looked skeptical. “Oliver?” she asked, turning her gaze to him.
Oliver sat back down in his seat, hunkering down. “It’s true,” he mumbled.
By now, the boisterous Samantha had finished her diagram, and Ms. Belfry was able to turn her attention back to the class. She pointed at the board, where there was now a diagram of a wing, not straight but curved like a sideways stretched teardrop. Two dotted lines indicated the paths of air passing above the wing and below it. The flow of air going over the humped wing looked different in comparison to the flow going directly under it.
“Like this?” Ms. Belfry said. “But I still don’t understand how that produces lift.”
Oliver knew all too well that Ms. Belfry knew all this, but having just been pelted by paper balls had made him reluctant to speak again.
Then he realized something. Nothing he did was going to stop the teasing. Either he sat there silently and got picked on for doing nothing, or he spoke up and got picked on for his intelligence. He realized then which he’d prefer.
“Because with the air following in different paths like that, it creates a downward force,” he explained. “And if we take Isaac Newton’s third law of motion—that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction—you can see how the resulting reaction to that force, to the downward force, is that the air traveling under the wing creates lift.”
He folded his arms and sat back against the chair.
Ms. Belfry looked triumphant. “That’s quite right, Oliver.”
She turned back to the drawing and added arrows. Oliver felt a paper ball hit his head but this time he didn’t even react. He didn’t care anymore what his classmates thought of him. In fact, they were probably just jealous that he had brains and knew cool stuff like Isaac Newton’s laws of physics when all they could manage was screwing up a ball of paper and aiming it at someone’s head.
He folded his arms more tightly and, ignoring the paper balls smacking him in the head, focused on Ms. Belfry’s image. She was drawing an arrow pointing down. Beside it she wrote downward force. The other arrow she’d drawn pointed up with the word lift.
“What about hot air balloons?” a voice challenged from behind. “They don’t work that way at all, but they still fly.”
Oliver turned in his seat, searching for the owner of the voice. It was a grumpy-looking kid—dark, bushy eyebrows, dimpled chin—who had joined Paul in throwing the paper balls.
“Well, that’s a completely different law at play,” Oliver explained. “That works because hot air rises. The Montgolfier brothers, who invented the hot air balloon, realized that if you trap the air inside some kind of envelope, like a balloon, it becomes buoyant due to the lower density of hot air inside compared to cold air outside.”
The boy just looked more angry at Oliver’s explanation. “Well, what about rockets?” he challenged further. “They’re not buoyant or whatever you just said. They go up, though. And they fly. How does that work, smarty pants?”
Oliver just smiled. “That comes back to Isaac Newton’s third law of motion again. Only this time the force involved is propulsion, not lift. Propulsion is the same thing that moves a steam train. A big blast out one end produces an opposite reaction of propulsion. Only with a rocket it’s got to get all the way to space, so the blast has to be really massive.”
Oliver could feel himself growing excited as he spoke about these things. Even though all the kids were staring at him like he was a freak, he didn’t care.
He turned back in his seat to face the front. There, smiling proudly, stood Ms. Belfry.
“And do you know what all these inventors had in common?” she said. “The Montgolfiers and the Wrights and Robert Goddard, who launched the first liquid-propellant-fueled rocket? I’ll tell you what. They did things they’d been told were impossible! Their inventions were crazy. Imagine someone saying that we could use the same princi
ples of ancient Chinese catapults to launch a man into space! And yet they became groundbreaking inventors, whose inventions have changed the world, and the whole trajectory of humankind!”
Oliver knew she was speaking to him, telling him that no matter what people did or said, he should never be cowed into silence.
Then something remarkable happened. In response to Ms. Belfry’s passion and enthusiasm, the class fell into stunned silence. It wasn’t the tense silence of a poised attack, but the humbled silence of having learned something inspiring.
Oliver felt a swell in his stomach. Ms. Belfry really was the most awesome teacher. She was the only person who’d shown anywhere near the level of excitement he had for physics and science and inventors, and her excitement even managed to silence his rowdy classmates, if only temporarily.
Just then, a huge gust of wind made the window panes rattle. Everyone jumped in unison and turned their eyes toward the gray skies outside.
“Looks like the storm is going to hit soon,” Ms. Belfry said.
No sooner had she spoken, than the voice of the principal came over the speaker.
“Students, we’ve just received a warning from the National Weather Service. This is going to be the storm of the century, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. We really don’t know what to expect. So to be on the safe side, the mayor is canceling classes for the day.”
Everyone started shouting excitedly and Oliver strained to hear the final words of the principal’s announcement.
“The storm is due to hit within the next hour. There are buses outside. Please head straight home. The official warning is to not be outside when the storm hits in approximately one hour. This is a city-wide warning so your parents will be expecting you home. Anyone caught truanting will face suspension.”
Around Oliver, no one seemed to care. All they’d heard was that school was out and they were going to make the most of it. They grabbed their books and hurried out of the classroom like a stampede of buffaloes.
Oliver collected his own things more slowly.