Kate the Chemist: Dragons vs. Unicorns

by Kate Biberdorf

  “Uh-uh.” I shook my head. “Too much sitting. It’s break. It has to be fun.” I popped up and did a front flip, landing next to my friends. “Something cool.”

  “How about cheer club?” said Birdie.

  “Veto!” Elijah gave a thumbs-down. “I can’t do a very good cartwheel. Or a backflip.”

  “Me either,” I said. “Hey, what about the LEGO camp? That might be okay.”

  “Agreed,” said Elijah.

  “Not agreed.” Birdie crossed her arms. “I don’t want to sit around and watch you two fight it out. With Kate obsessed with following the directions and Elijah tossing them.”

  I laughed at a recent memory. “Yeah, remember when Elijah built some space station using random parts from the rain forest kit?”

  “And you had a meltdown,” Elijah reminded me.

  “Ugh. A definite no!” Birdie rolled her eyes.

  “What about drama?” Elijah spread out his arms like he was about to give a monologue.

  “Not you, too!” I groaned.

  “It’s not just about acting and dancing and singing,” said Birdie. “They need people to paint the sets, run the spotlights, and open the curtains. Oh, and one really organized fifth grader to be the assistant director. That could be you, Kate! You’re the most organized fifth grader ever!”

  “I am?” Okay, suddenly I was, maybe, just a little intrigued.

  “So it’s a deal!” shouted Elijah. “We’re all going to go out for the musical?”

  Birdie squealed. “The show is sooo good! This one unicorn meets a dragon, and they become friends. But the other unicorns don’t like that, and neither do the dragons. In the end, the unicorn and dragon BFFs show everyone that they have more in common than they thought, and the rest of the dragons and unicorns all do a final number together.”

  It did actually sound a little cool.

  “I want to be the lead unicorn,” said Birdie, tossing her hair like it was a mane.

  “I want to be in charge of lights,” said Elijah. “If I flash them back and forth, I can make it look like a lightning storm.”

  “Maybe I could be director,” I said.

  “Assistant director,” corrected Birdie. “Mrs. Hansberry is the director.”

  “Right.” I suddenly felt a little glimmer of hope that maybe there was something about drama that might suit me.

  “It’s a perfect plan,” said Birdie.

  It was . . . as long as we all got the positions we wanted.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE

  Law (noun). In science, a law explains a cause and effect that is always the same under the same conditions. It is accepted as true. So if someone makes a goal every time they play soccer—that could be a law!

  “WHAT IF I DON’T GET assistant director?” I said.

  Birdie squinted at me as we sat together in the school auditorium a little over a week after we had decided to do drama camp. It was Monday morning and the first day of fall break. “You not get assistant director? Um. That’s not possible. You really are the best one for the job.” While Mrs. Hansberry had everyone audition for a speaking role on Friday, we wrote down our info on a sheet if we wanted to be part of the stage crew and what our qualifications were. I ended up needing a second sheet to explain why I thought I’d be a good assistant director.

  “I’m sure when Mrs. Hansberry heard me sing during auditions, she knew I couldn’t be in the cast,” I said, “but maybe she could just give me a different crew job.” I was worried. “Nothing is for certain.” In science, laws are widely accepted as true. And there was no law saying that I was going to be assistant director.

  “Look, Kate. It has to be someone organized. Check. Someone who doesn’t mind telling other people what to do. Check. Someone who can keep track of many things at once. Check. The assistant director position has your name all over it. And you submitted such a good application!”

  “Seriously. What if I don’t get it?”

  “Then you’ll do something else,” said Birdie, who sat next to me in the second row. In front of us sat Avery and Phoenix while Elijah sat with his friend Jeremy Rowe in the aisle across the way. We were all waiting for Mrs. Hansberry to announce who got what part or position for the musical. About two dozen other kids sat in the seats also waiting.

  I guess being prop master could be okay. That was my second choice. But it wasn’t as good as assistant director. I glanced at the sleek leather backpack by my feet. My mom let me borrow her leather bag. I had packed an emergency theater supply kit so big I couldn’t get my regular backpack to close. My emergency kit included thick rope, two bottles of water, tape, glue, a measuring tape, and scissors. I wanted to be prepared.

  “I really hope we both get what we want,” Birdie whispered.

  “You will,” I told her. “You’re an amazing singer. Even when you’re upside down!”

  Birdie blushed. She’s not very good at compliments. “Uh, thanks.”

  “You deserve the lead unicorn. Seriously. There is nobody in the entire fifth grade who knows more about them. And if—”

  “Shhh,” said Birdie, pointing to the stage, which was completely empty. “Mrs. Hansberry’s coming. I heard her voice.”

  “Right.” Birdie has super good hearing. She can hear my dad snoring when she spends the night, even when we spread out in sleeping bags downstairs in the basement.

  “Hey,” I said, leaning over to look at Birdie’s drawing. “Can I see?”

  She snapped shut her drawing pad.

  “Aw, c’mon, Birdie.” All I caught a glimpse of was where she had signed her name—Brinda Bhatt. She always signed her art with her real name. Birdie was just a nickname. “I’m sure it’s fantabulous and could be framed in a museum.”

  She stuffed the pad into her backpack. “Another time.”

  She was such an amazing artist. Every year since we were five, she had drawn me a handmade birthday card. I kept them all in a box under my bed. But sometimes she was private about her artwork.

  Kids murmured and pointed as Mrs. Hansberry made her way to the front of the stage. Like always, she was dressed dramatically. This afternoon, she wore a bright green shawl and long dangly earrings in the shape of theater masks.

  “I’m going to announce roles and positions,” said Mrs. Hansberry, “so if I could please have your attention.”

  Actually, Mrs. Hansberry didn’t need to say that last part. The place was as silent as outer space. I couldn’t wait to hear what she was about to say.

  CHAPTER NINE

  STUCK ON YOU

  Polymers (noun). Big molecules made from a bunch of smaller molecules. They’re like a soccer team that sticks together.

  “THANK YOU, BOYS AND GIRLS,” said Mrs. Hansberry. “I was so impressed with your auditions. You all showed quite a bit of enthusiasm. And, frankly, this decision was not an easy one. In truth, any one of you could have played any of the innumerable roles, large or small.” Her eyes swept the auditorium, and, for a moment, they landed on mine.

  No. No. Please. I don’t want a part. Or innumerable roles. Sheesh. Mrs. Hansberry loved to use big words. She said if you don’t know what something means, then go look it up.

  Suddenly, someone was shaking me. It was Birdie. “Did you hear? I got the part! I’m the lead unicorn!”

  I hugged her and gave a high five and a big loud yay.

  Then Birdie was shushing me. “Some other people wanted that part, too,” she said, lowering her voice. “We don’t want them to feel bad. Since we all have to work together as a cast and crew.”

  Right. Kind of like a polymer. A giant molecule made up of a bunch of smaller ones. Of course, there was nothing wrong with showing my happiness for my BFF. My dad the therapist said if you deny your emotions, it meant you could get messed up. “Own it,” I s
aid.

  Mrs. Hansberry announced a bunch of other parts, as well as all of the tech positions. When she explained that Elijah would do the lights, he hooted. And Jeremy slapped him hard on the back and whispered something to him.

  “And Kate’s going to be our assistant director.”

  “Yes!” I whooped. In front of me, Avery sniffed as if I were being too rambunctious, but I didn’t care.

  Anyway, Mrs. Hansberry didn’t seem to mind. She motioned me forward. “Kate, can you stand up?”

  I bounced out of my seat and gave a quick wave.

  “Kate will be assisting me and generally helping to keep rehearsal running smoothly,” said Mrs. Hansberry. “She will be my second pair of eyes. So that’s it, children. However, I’m going to need some volunteers to help pass out the scripts.”

  Mrs. Hansberry handed me a small stack of scripts. “We’re going to have great fun working together,” she said with a wide smile.

  “Definitely! Do you have a list of my duties?” I asked.

  “You’re just going to have to follow my lead, and we’ll make it up as we go along. I’ve never used a student assistant director before, so this is a first.” She winked. “I think you’ll do a terrific job.”

  As I passed out the scripts, my stomach twisted. The actors had scripts and lines to follow. They had a set of directions as clear as steps to an experiment posted by Dr. Caroline. What did I get? I was supposed to make things up as I went along.

  What if I didn’t know what to do? What if my making it up was all wrong?

  As I handed a script to some of the kids who were cast as dragons, Elijah put out his hand. “Hello. I need a script, too!”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Not just unicorns and dragons get scripts. I need to follow the script for the light cues.”

  “Of course.” I handed Elijah a script. “I knew that.”

  “Yeah, right.” Elijah squinted at me. “And unicorns are real. Along with singing dragons. They live in the land of happy rainbows.”

  “Ha-ha,” I admitted. Then I whispered, “Okay, I seriously didn’t know about the lighting cues.”

  “I know,” said Elijah.

  “I’m making this up as I go.”

  “We can tell,” said Jeremy, who had one of the lead dragon roles, along with Julia and Rory Workman.

  “Just don’t make up lines,” I warned. “I’ll be checking the script.”

  “Now I’m scared,” said Jeremy in a mock quivery voice.

  “Good,” I said, then marched away, wondering, Could I do this? Could I make this up as I went along? I really didn’t know.

  During a break, after doing a read-through, I hurried to Birdie to see how she was doing. “I don’t think Avery is very happy,” she said, pointing over to where she was frowning at her script. “She’s only got three lines. Bet she was hoping to be lead dragon. Even though she’s great as dance captain. They say she’s the best in her jazz class at Dance Academy.” Avery was always saying how her dance class helped her soccer skills. She was definitely sure-footed on the field.

  “She’s so perfect as one of the dancing dragons,” I said. Those were the dragons without big speaking parts. They sang a couple of songs and had two dance numbers.

  After the morning break, we sat around in a circle on the stage and talked about how the read-through went.

  I noticed that Birdie’s voice wasn’t loud enough. But I figured it was too early to say something. It’s not like there was an audience yet.

  Jeremy said that we should work hard on keeping it realistic.

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked.

  “The dragons need to be intimidating,” he said. “If we do it just for laughs, it won’t be as much fun. We’ve got to scare the first graders a little bit.” He snarled and roared.

  And a few kids screamed.

  “Like that,” said Jeremy.

  “He has a point,” said Mrs. Hansberry. “That can be something for us to work on.”

  That gives me an idea. “We can have the dragons breathe real fire!”

  “Did you say real live fire, my dear?” asked Mrs. Hansberry.

  “Yeah! Like Jeremy says, it will make it more realistic and scare people. A lot.”

  Mrs. Hansberry swept her arms dramatically over her face. “I’m afraid it will be too much of a real scare for the audience—and for your director.”

  My mind sifted through all the shows I’ve watched on Dr. Caroline’s YouTube channel where she made stuff explode. “Hey, what about lycopodium powder?”

  “Oh, well, that sounds vaguely familiar,” said Mrs. Hansberry. “Please tell me more.”

  “It’s what circus performers use to blow fire. It looks like the dust on my dad’s workbench. And it’s supposed to work really well.”

  “Aha! I’m not so sure I know enough about it. The circus performer part sounds a bit intimidating. So for now, I’m going to give you a conditional no. But I promise to look it up when I get home. We need a very safe yet exciting solution.”

  “What if we use smoke instead of fire? We could project a video of smoke onto a screen . . .”

  “Hmm.” Mrs. Hansberry squinted her eyes. “Now, that’s a creative solution. What if our dragons exhale blizzards instead of fire?”

  “Is that scary enough?” asked Elijah almost to himself.

  Avery shot up her hand. “My parents use special effects all of the time at their theater. At Brookside, we have a theatrical fog machine.”

  “That’s an excellent idea,” said Mrs. Hansberry. “What do you think, Kate?”

  “You know how in winter your breath looks like smoke because it is cold? I think it should look like that. But I don’t think this will look enough like that,” I admitted, feeling bad about vetoing Avery’s idea but also wanting to tell the truth and make the show look the best it could be.

  “You don’t know how the special effects will look.” Avery turned around and rolled her eyes.

  “We may have some other options,” I said. “Let me think on this.”

  “Good luck with that,” said Avery.

  I didn’t need luck. I just needed my brain. And Dr. Caroline’s list of experiments.

  Tomorrow we would go over blocking. Those were the directions for where everyone needed to be onstage and when they moved. Honestly, before this afternoon I had never heard that word. Mrs. Hansberry told me that it would be my job to take notes into the director’s script. “I’ve marked it up pretty well, but I always like to make some in-the-moment adjustments,” she told me.

  “Got it!”

  “I know you will,” she said.

  After we had a lunch break and completed some group bonding exercises (we had to do tongue twisters together), I went to pick up my mom’s leather backpack. Immediately, I noticed that my zipper was open.

  “That’s funny,” I said to Birdie. “I remember zipping it.”

  Curiously, I peered inside my bag. Globs of something waxy and blobby dotted the inside. “What’s that?” I screeched.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A SCIENCE SPELL

  Liquid (noun). The molecules are waving their arms and sidestepping because they have more space than they do when they’re a solid. Like the difference between chocolate milk and brownies, sort of.

  IT WAS MY FAULT. I hadn’t tightened the cap on the bottle of glue in Mom’s bag. I had checked, and it had been loose. Now I had to deal with a sticky mess. In the family room after play rehearsal, Liam and I watched Dr. Caroline.

  Normally, I love Dr. Caroline. Normally, I binge-watch it. But today, my mind was completely stuck on the globs of glue wedged inside Mom’s bag.

  To make things worse, Mom clanked around the kitchen, scrubbing the sink. Which meant she was stressed.

  Which me
ant I had to wait until she was gone before digging under the sink to find something to clean her bag.

  “Look! Dr. Caroline is doing something dangerous,” cried Liam, waving at a tub of boiling liquid nitrogen on the computer screen.

  This was one of my favorite experiments. Basically, Dr. Caroline dunked balloon animals into chilly liquid nitrogen. Actually, super-freezing—as in four times colder than the North Pole in the middle of a blizzard.

  “Will she get hurt?” asked Liam, a little too enthusiastically.

  “Don’t worry. She’s got extra-special gloves. Plus, she’s wearing goggles and a lab coat.”

  In the kitchen, Mom rinsed out all of the soap in the sink. Hopefully, she would scoot into her office really soon.

  “Hey, Dr. Caroline’s doing a spell!” said Liam, fixing his eyes on the computer screen. The balloon animals shriveled like raisins when they hit the sizzling liquid nitrogen. When Dr. Caroline scooped them out of the tub, they blew back up again.

  “It looks like magic, but it’s just science.” Charles’ Law to be specific. As the temperature dropped, the volume went down, causing the balloons to shrink. As temperature rose, the volume increased, causing the balloons to plump back up again.

  Mom stopped running the water. “Kids,” she called out, glancing down at her phone. “Good news. I just found out that the school’s a finalist for that community grant I applied for.”

  “Yay!” cried out Liam.

  “I knew it!” I said.

  Humming happily, Mom polished the sink with a soft dry cloth. “They’re going to interview me tomorrow. I want to bring in those scrapbooks showing off the school garden. The grant committee can visualize our farm-to-table lunch program.”

  “Our school’s turning into a farm?” asked Liam, bouncing off the couch.

  “Well, sort of.” Mom folded up the cloth. “Kids can harvest veggies. In the fall, the plan is to eat lunch from the garden once a week. That is, if we win the grant.”