He gave some to Parker, too, but he didn’t say a word. He didn’t even look at her. Parker took the feed and crouched down by the chickens.
That was a big mistake.
The chickens surrounded her, trying to peck at her hand to get the food. She panicked and dumped it all, but some of it fell onto her foot.
The chickens were closing in on her. They all began pecking at her feet. She couldn’t swat them away.
“ARGH!” Parker fell backward onto her behind as a chicken pooped on her favorite gold shoes.
Just as she seemed lost in a sea of crazed hens, Theo stepped in front of her and put his hand out. She took it and he pulled her up.
Theo had saved her from the evil chickens. For once, Parker was the one who didn’t know what to say.
“Um . . . th-thanks,” Parker sputtered out.
He glanced at her and even sort of smiled. “No problem,” he said.
Sure, she was covered in chicken crud. And she’d have to take a bath to end all baths that night. But Theo had just willingly talked to her.
Maybe her friendship experiment would work after all. Maybe he would start talking to her all the time now.
Which was good. Because they still had to face the Egg Drop, and they were going to have to work together to have a real chance at winning.
Chapter 7
Eureka!
Even though Parker slayed at building contraptions and gadgets, her teammates wouldn’t let her design the Egg Drop case on her own.
“We’re a team, so we have to come up with the idea together,” Cassie said. “Something fun and cool to look at. Like a really well-made video game.”
“We also have to make sure it’s safe,” Theo said.
“Safe?” Cassie asked.
Even though Theo turned a little red, he still answered. “Eggs are important,” he said. “We can’t let ours break.”
This was going nowhere fast. Cassie wanted a cool design. Theo had a thing about chickens. And now that Parker was being extra-super nice to him, he was even talking about his thing for chickens. She had to find a way to get the team to start working.
“Maybe designing something to keep the egg safe is kind of like designing online games,” Parker said. “Where do you start with making a game, Theo?”
“First you have to figure out what kind of game you want to make,” Theo replied. “Then you have to decide what the rules of the game are.”
“You also have to brainstorm how to find the best way to make the rules work,” Cassie added.
“Then you can start thinking about how to code it so that it all comes together,” Theo said. He was really talking now!
“So, in the trivia game, you had to figure out how to ask the questions and give out the prizes to build up Ultra-Megabot, right?”
Cassie’s eyes lighted up at the mention of her trivia game. “Right!” Cassie said. “But I had to try it lots of different ways before I got it to work.”
“We have to do the same thing here. That’s how science works too!” Parker said. “The Egg Drop is about velocity. The egg’ll fall off the school building fast because gravity pulls at it. So, to keep the egg safe”—she turned to Theo—“we have to slow it down as it drops off the school roof. And then make sure it lands as gently as possible.”
“Let’s come up with a list of possible ideas on how the tape and straws can slow the egg down,” Cassie said. “Then we can vote on which one to try.”
They looked at one of Theo’s chickens’ eggs to get ideas. They talked and made lists of how the materials they had to work with might slow down the egg’s velocity. They played around with the straws and duct tape to explore their properties.
What they didn’t do was come up with a single plan.
The doorbell rang, and Parker knew it was her mom here to pick up her and Cassie. Sure, Parker had thought they were doomed once or twice before. Now they really were. A whole afternoon was gone and they still didn’t even have any plan for their case.
Parker was starting to lose her cool. She took a deep breath. Sometimes the best scientific ideas came from the simplest of places. Like Alexander Fleming accidentally finding a mold that turned out to be penicillin. Or Archimedes stepping into his bathtub, watching the water rise, and yelling, “Eureka!” as he made a sudden discovery about water density.
Parker needed a eureka moment. She needed some inspiration!
What can slow down as it travels through the air? First she thought of an airplane, but that slowed down because of the engines and the wings.
The wings!
Looking up, she saw her backpack out of the corner of her eye. The same picture was on Theo’s wall, too: Ultra-Megabot soaring through the sky like an eagle.
“That’s it!” Parker said.
“What’s it?” Cassie asked.
Parker pointed to the poster on Theo’s wall. “Ultra-Megabot,” she said. “We should make an egg case that soars like an eagle!”
Cassie’s eyes widened. Theo smiled the biggest smile Parker had ever seen on his face.
“With wings?” he asked.
“Of course,” Parker said. “Duct tape–covered straw wings. The wings will slow down the velocity of the egg as it drops.”
“And we’ll need a box like an eagle’s body to keep the egg safe,” Cassie said, looking at Theo.
“That egg is never even going to come close to crashing on the ground,” Parker told him. She was being friendly, getting him to talk, and coming up with amazing scientific ideas. They were totally going to win the gold medal. She was going to be just like Jane and Mae!
Cassie called her dad to ask if she could stay longer, and Parker’s mom agreed to come back for the two girls later. The three teammates dug back in. There were straws everywhere. Duct tape stuck to every surface in Theo’s room. Like Cassie’s online trivia game, they had to think about what they wanted and how best to make it. Should the body of their eagle be round? Oval? Square? What shape should the wings be? Did the whole thing need a tail of straws like a real bird had a tail of feathers? Little by little, they had their case.
It was a tiny box made of straws cut in half, held together at the seams with duct tape so the case wasn’t too rigid and would keep the egg safe and sound. Attached were two wings made of full-length straws completely covered in duct tape.
The teammates even made a tiny eagle head and colored it in Ultra-Megabot’s red, purple, and blue.
“Fierce,” Parker and Cassie said at the same time.
Theo smiled. “Definitely.” He seemed happy and was talking so much more than Parker had ever expected when she’d begun her Theo experiment.
One question still nagged at Parker, though. Would Theo keep on talking if her idea for the egg case didn’t protect the very important egg inside? Or would their little scrap of a friendship crash-land along with the yolk? Since Theo’s dad wouldn’t let them climb up to the roof of the house to drop their creation as a trial run, Parker was going to have to wait until Egg Drop day to find out.
* * *
Egg Drop day was there before they knew it. Ms. Garcia was on the roof of Eleanor Roosevelt Elementary School, while Principal Warren hung out with the Science Triathlon teams on the ground.
Parker held her breath when Ms. Garcia held the first case over the edge of the roof and let go. The container looked like it had a duct tape parachute attached. At first, the taped-up chute even acted like a real one, slowing down the egg.
Then, disaster struck. One of the straps of the parachute broke and the whole contraption crashed to the ground. Egg guts oozed out onto the sidewalk.
“What do you call an egg that breaks its parachute?” Aidan asked. No one answered.
“Scrambled!” he said.
Jaidan and Braidan laughed as if it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Even Parker had to admit it was a pretty good joke. But it would have been much better if it wasn’t about someone’s scientific and design work.
Theo frowned and looked away from the smashed egg. He clearly didn’t enjoy egg jokes at all, even if they weren’t about his egg.
“Just ignore them,” Parker whispered to him.
The next egg case came flying down from the roof. It looked like there was almost no duct tape holding the little box of straws together. The whole thing hit the ground with a splat.
“What happened when the egg case hit the ground?” Aidan asked.
Cassie sighed. Parker shot him a nasty look. Aidan didn’t seem to notice.
“It egg-sploded!” he said. “Get it, Parker? Egg-sploded?”
“That’s just rude,” Parker said to him. “Don’t make fun of people’s egg cases.” Even if some of her fellow students clearly didn’t understand what it meant to slow down the egg’s velocity, no one deserved to get teased about it.
Aidan grinned at her. “You sound like you’re getting eggs-asperated with me, Parker,” he said.
Parker couldn’t argue with him there. She was getting exasperated. And she wasn’t even in the classroom, where she could calm herself down by watching Snodgrass devour crickets.
Instead, she focused on Ms. Garcia holding another egg case over the edge of the roof. The third-place Science Bee girls from Mr. Tanner’s class held on to one another’s arms as they watched their case fall.
This one seemed like a huge cube made out of lots of straws and duct tape. It looked strong.
It came down fast and hit the ground with a thud, but there was no egg ooze that Parker could see. The girls picked up their cube. The egg inside had a very small dent on its shell, but otherwise it had stayed together.
Parker was happy for them, of course. She was also worried about her team’s Egg Drop case. What if they smashed up Theo’s precious egg and then the Dempseys somehow were the ones to clinch the gold medal? What if losing the Triathlon made Theo stop talking to her again? And what would it say about her as a scientist if the Dempseys had made a better contraption than her own team had? Nothing good, she was afraid.
“That was almost an egg-cellent drop!” Aidan Dempsey called to the girls from Mr. Tanner’s class.
At least he was being nicer this time. It was more than could be said for his fellow triplets, who were making crunching, cracking noises. And the egg hadn’t even made a noise when its shell had dented.
Another disaster followed. “If we keep breaking eggs like this, they might go egg-stinct!” Aidan said with a guffaw. Jaidan and Braidan laughed so hard that they fell onto the ground.
Principal Warren asked them to behave, and about time!
They kept snickering to themselves, though. That is, until Ms. Garcia held up their egg case. It looked like a drinking straw porcupine. Hoards of straws came out like spines from a little straw box in the middle. It was a fierce design. This was too bad, as Parker had fully planned to lay an egg joke on the triplets when their case crashed on the ground.
When it dropped, the case worked perfectly. It slowed down the velocity of the egg and gave it a great cushion when the container hit the ground with all of its negative acceleration glory. Aidan rushed over to pick up the porcupine and held it gently in his hands.
Parker watched him as he took the egg out of its case. There wasn’t even a tiny crack on it. Aidan was clearly a secret science genius hiding under rude egg jokes and hand farts.
Then Ms. Garcia held Parker, Cassie, and Theo’s case over the edge of the roof and let go. It kicked right into gear, but not in the way Parker’s team had expected. Instead of soaring like Ultra-Megabot and slowly decelerating until the egg descended to the ground like an airplane, the wings made the whole contraption spin like a helicopter’s propeller. Sure, this slowed down the egg case’s fall. But it also made the container catch the wind and travel out of the schoolyard and into the hedges.
Were the wings the wrong length? This was what came of not testing their design ahead of time and being able to make tweaks to it, Parker realized.
“That was eggs-barrassing!” joked Jaidan.
Parker was not amused.
Just as she was about to tell him so, Aidan of all people beat her to it. “That doesn’t even make sense, Jaidan,” he told him.
Parker was so shocked, she didn’t know what to say.
“Your egg case was good,” he said to her. “But maybe it needed to be wider in the wingspan?” Parker couldn’t believe that he also thought it was a problem with the length of the wings.
“Um, yours was good too,” Parker replied. Better than her team’s case, even. She’d have to think more about the wingspan thing.
But first, Cassie was pulling her and Theo away to get their egg container.
While they were gone, the Dempsey Triplets were declared the winner of the Egg Drop. Parker, Cassie, and Theo didn’t even come in second.
“Technically, your contraption didn’t hit the ground,” Ms. Garcia told Parker. “So there was no way to prove that it would have offset the negative acceleration.”
Despite all their hard work, their case hadn’t worked properly. Sure, their egg was still in one piece, so at least Theo wouldn’t be mad about it breaking. But since the container never touched the ground, they’d never know if it really would have protected the egg or not. How was Parker ever going to be like Jane and Mae if she couldn’t even win an Egg Drop?
Chapter 8
Not Enough Data
They were down to the wire. Almost at the finish line. The Animal Adaptation Presentations were near.
Parker had one last chance to become an award-winning scientist like Jane and Mae. And she was also running out of time to test her predictions about Theo. There was surprisingly a lot on the line for the last Science Triathlon event.
Cassie and even Theo seemed to feel the same way. The whole team wanted to do their best science. First, they had to figure out a topic for their presentation. As they sat on the bus together, they talked it through.
Theo was still sitting in the sixth row on the left, in Parker and Cassie’s seat. Parker minded this a little bit less as the Science Triathlon went on. She and Cassie sat in front of him now. The fifth row wasn’t as bad as Parker had thought it would be, really. It was practically like sitting in the sixth.
Cassie had her notebook out to capture all of their good ideas.
“What about snakes?” Cassie said. “The ones that live in the desert don’t have to drink a lot of water to survive. I have a whole book about it.”
“But how could we do any science about desert snakes?” Parker asked. “We can’t get a desert snake to study on such short notice.”
“We could make a tri-fold poster,” Cassie said. “With pictures.”
“We could,” Parker replied. “But making a poster wouldn’t be real science. We lost the Egg Drop, so we have to step it up with our presentation. It can’t just be about science. It has to show our mad science skills.”
Theo opened his mouth but no words came out.
“What is it?” Parker asked him. She thought she was being friendly and involving him, but he winced when she asked.
He shook his head. The girls went back to brainstorming.
“I mean, we could do monarch butterflies,” Cassie said.
“I bet other teams will do monarchs,” Parker replied. “We need something different.”
“Unique!” Cassie added.
“Extraordinary!” Parker said with a smile.
Theo seemed like he wanted to say something again, but instead he looked out the window. Parker had thought he was warming up to her. She had even begun to think that together they might be like the three angles of a triangle, always adding up to a perfect 180 degrees. But when it came to their Animal Adaptation Presentation, Theo’s talking had come to a dead stop.
“What about emperor penguins living in Antarctica?” Cassie suggested. “And how they learned to huddle together to stay warm?”
Cassie loved penguins, so Parker had to think this one through. How could they make a
penguin presentation amazing and oozing with science?
She couldn’t come up with a single way.
“We’d still only have a tri-fold, though,” she told her BFF. “We need a topic that we can do real science with. Or even some engineering!” Engineering was what her dad called her robotic guinea pig feeder. And the book holder she’d built for her mom, to apologize for taking apart the toaster (and that she had made with the leftover toaster parts that she hadn’t used for her guinea pig feeder). Engineering probably also applied to the arm she’d made in her Mad Science Lab to swab gross things onto petri dishes.
Turned out that Parker had loved engineering for ages without even knowing it had a name.
But that still didn’t help her come up with a good idea for their presentation.
“You guys can’t even come up with a project, can you?” called Braidan from the back of the bus. “Too bad!”
“So sad!” Jaidan called.
“’Cause we’re going to win!” Braidan said. He and Jaidan burst out laughing. They weren’t laughing with Parker and her friends, though. They were laughing at them.
One of the many things that got Parker peeved was being laughed at. Especially when she was being laughed at by the two nonscientific Dempsey Triplets.
As Braidan and Jaidan went back to trying to make convincing pig noises, Parker tried to think. It was time to rally her team. They were smart. They were creative. They were maybe-kind-of-sort-of a perfect triangle.
They could do this.
“You guys, ignore them,” Parker told her friends. “They wouldn’t know a good animal adaptation if it hit them on the head.”
“All they think about is farts,” Cassie agreed.
“And they tell terrible jokes,” Theo said in a quiet voice. The jokes from Egg Drop day had clearly stayed with him. Theo did love eggs and chickens.
“So all we need to do is pick an animal and figure out how to wow Principal Warren with our science when she judges the presentations.”
Parker Bell and the Science of Friendship Page 4