The Smartest Kid in the Universe

by Chris Grabenstein

  “What for?” asked Jake.

  “You’re Subject One!”

  “No, I’m not. I’m just Jake McQuade. I want to go back to being who I was.”

  “You mean the laziest dude in seventh grade?” said Kojo.

  “I’m not lazy,” said Jake defensively. “I prefer to think of myself as exertion-challenged.” He turned to Farooqi. “Look, if you have the formulas for those jelly beans, you should be able to figure out some way to stop them from doing whatever they’re doing inside my brain.”

  “Yeah. You’d think,” said Farooqi. “Hey, I have an idea. Maybe you can design the antidote.”

  “What?”

  “You’re way smarter than me right now. I bet your IQ is off the charts. You want to take a test?”

  “No. I want you to give me the formulas…or the formulae. Either is correct as the plural of formula.”

  “Oooh,” said Kojo. “One of those jelly beans definitely had some grammar in it.”

  “I don’t have the formulas or the formulae,” said Farooqi.

  “What?”

  “I’m like the world’s finest chefs. I improvise. A little bit of this. A dash of that. Oh, sure, like every good scientist, I eventually write my recipes down on three-by-five index cards and store them in a tin box, but I can’t be constrained by rigid formulas or formulae. I’m an artist, not an automaton!” He took a moment to compose himself. “Of course, before I publish, I’ll have to make certain I can replicate the results. Those are the rules of science. I didn’t write them. I believe Sir Isaac Newton did. So, for now, let’s not worry about an antidote. Let’s think of all the incredible things we can do together. You’re the smartest kid in the universe, Jake McQuade. Maybe you’re the one who invents the warp drive engines for Star Trek. Or you could, you know, cure diseases. You could probably use your math skills to make a killing on Wall Street.”

  “I’ve got to go,” said Jake.

  “You’ll allow me to follow you?” said Farooqi. “Take notes?”

  “No!” said Jake. His head was spinning. “Not now. My mom has another banquet at the hotel tonight, and I have to fix dinner for my little sister because we are not going back to the Imperial Marquis to eat. That hotel has too many highly dangerous snack-food items lying around!”

  Jake and Kojo retraced their bus routes back uptown.

  Jake didn’t help anyone with their homework. He didn’t speak French, Swahili, or Mandarin to any tourists. He just pouted. And felt sorry for himself.

  On the third bus, a man boarded with an open cardboard container of, judging by the aroma, Chinese food. Even though it was against all the posted rules and regulations, he started eating it. Fast.

  And then the bus hit a bump.

  The man started choking.

  His face flushed red as both of his hands flew up to his neck. The open container tumbled out of his lap and hit the floor.

  Jake saw it was chicken and cashews.

  He sprang from his seat and raced to the gasping man, who couldn’t talk but was making squeaky noises. Jake got behind the man, wrapped his arms around his belly, and gave five fist thrusts to the abdomen, pulling up as he yanked in to engage the diaphragmatic muscle.

  Finally, a cashew popped out of the man’s mouth. He started breathing again.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Good thing you know the Heimlich maneuver.”

  “Yeah,” said Jake. “I guess so.”

  Jake went back to his seat.

  Kojo was staring at him in astonished admiration.

  “Dude, you’re like Spider-Man.”

  “What?”

  “For real. He got bit by a radioactive spider. You ate jelly beans. You both ended up with superpowers.”

  “But why me?”

  “Because you ate the jelly beans! Fate put them there and you gobbled down your destiny.”

  “You think this is my destiny? To be super smart?”

  Kojo shrugged. “I guess. Until the jelly beans wear off, anyway. But until they do, I think you need to use your Spidey powers to do whatever smart stuff needs doing.”

  Jake thought about what Kojo had just said.

  And since he was suddenly super intelligent, he knew Kojo was right.

  He’d been given a rare gift.

  It was time to use it.

  The next morning, on his way to school, Jake noticed a long line snaking out of the corner bodega, a small grocery and convenience store where people bought their coffee, bagels, and egg sandwiches.

  Jake wanted to grab a doughnut, but he’d never seen a line so long.

  “Is it the Mega Millions lotto?” Jake asked a woman at the end of the line. The bodega also sold lottery tickets.

  “Nah,” said the woman. “Their cash register is broken. They have to ring everybody up the old-fashioned way: figuring it out on paper.”

  “It’s taking forever,” groused a man, checking his watch.

  “Excuse me,” said Jake, making his way down the sidewalk.

  “Hey, kid,” someone shouted. “There’s a line here. Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Inside to help,” he replied. “Turns out, I’m pretty good at math.”

  Jake said a quick “Hi!” to Oliver, the store’s cat, who was lying on his fuzzy blanket underneath the produce rack while scratching at his neck and jingling his collar.

  Dominic, the guy who usually worked the register in the mornings, was pushing a pencil across the back of a brown paper bag. Jake went up on tiptoe so he could see Dominic’s math scrawls.

  “Okay, there’s sales tax on the stuff that’s not food….Uh, eight times eight, carry the six…”

  “The total is fifteen seventy-four,” Jake told Dominic. “He has a twenty. You owe him four dollars and twenty-six cents.”

  Dominic gave Jake a quizzical look, then took the man’s twenty and gave him the correct change.

  Meanwhile, Jake scanned the next customer’s items and did the math in his head, remembering to add sales tax to all non-food items.

  “She’s four thirty-two,” Jake announced.

  “I’d like a buttered roll,” said the next person in line.

  Surprise. It was Grace.

  Jake smiled at her.

  She gave him a puzzled look. “You work here?”

  “Nah,” said Jake. “Just trying to help out.”

  “So how much is a buttered roll and a juice?” Grace asked.

  “Four twenty-five.”

  “And I want a pack of gum.”

  “Six thirty-three.”

  “No, make that a tin of mints.”

  “Seven eighteen.”

  “Forget the mints and the gum,” said Grace. “Just the juice and buttered roll, but with extra butter.”

  “We’re back to four twenty-five. They don’t charge for extra butter.”

  “It’s true,” said Dominic. “We don’t.”

  Grace paid, stepped aside, and waited for the lady behind the deli counter to slice, butter, and wrap her roll.

  Jake went back to work as a human cash register. Grace sipped her juice, nibbled her roll, and, amazed, watched Jake blaze through a lightning round of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

  After two dozen more ring-ups, the morning rush was over. A repair person arrived to fix the store’s cash register. Jake’s job at the bodega was done.

  “So tell me, Jake,” said Dominic. “How’d you get so good at math?”

  “Yeah,” said Grace, finishing her buttered roll. “I was going to ask the same question.”

  Jake shrugged. “I dunno. Guess I’ve just been eating right.”

  Dominic and Grace both gave that answer a confused nod.

  “Oh, and, Dom? You might want to take Oliver to the
vet. Judging by the way he’s scratching his neck and biting at his legs in a fast, frantic manner, I suspect he might need a flea bath.”

  Now Grace was squinting at Jake. “How’d you know that?”

  “Easy. The cat was scratching his neck and biting his legs.”

  “Riiiight.”

  Grace and Jake walked to school together.

  They didn’t really talk. Grace said something like “Nice weather.” Jake gave her the extended five-day forecast complete with information about the fluctuating barometric pressure. Grace didn’t say anything after that.

  Jake wondered if Haazim Farooqi might be able to create a jelly bean for talking to girls.

  “See you later, Jake,” said Grace when they hit the front doors. She was studying Jake’s eyes. “There might be something we should talk about. We’ll see.”

  “Um, okay.”

  Jake started sweating profusely and immediately knew why: when emotional stress causes a reaction from your sympathetic nervous system, it primarily affects the eccrine sweat glands on your face, your palms, and the soles of your feet, and in your armpits.

  In other words, you get BO.

  He wished he didn’t know that, but he did.

  Grace bopped up the hall to Mr. Lyons’s homeroom. Jake tucked in his arms so no one could see his sweat balloons and went into Mr. Keeney’s class.

  As usual, the teacher was snoozing in his chair with his feet up on the desk. He was wearing a black T-shirt with bold white letters proclaiming 5 OUT OF 4 PEOPLE HAVE TROUBLE WITH MATH. Jake noticed a sci-fi paperback open in his lap. It rose up and down in time with his snores. There was also a Star Wars Yoda poster on the wall. Yoda was doing a math problem: SOLVE OR SOLVE NOT. THERE IS NO TRY IN MATH.

  Jake wondered if the reason Mr. Keeney was so bored all the time was because no one ever asked him any interesting or challenging questions. Jake also wondered if boredom with everyday, humdrum things might be a curse that came with superintelligence. If so, he hoped the jelly beans wore off before it happened to him.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Keeney,” said Jake, gently waking him.

  “What?” growled the groggy teacher.

  “Is that book about aliens?”

  “Yes. It’s science fiction.”

  “Fascinating. What do you think would be humanity’s reaction if we ever really discovered extraterrestrial life?”

  Mr. Keeney sat up in his chair. He looked stunned. He shook his head, wiped some sleep out of his eyes, reached for his giant Battlestar Galactica travel mug, took a sip, and led his homeroom class in a fifteen-minute discussion on what he called the “philosophical ramifications of knowing that we’re not alone in the universe.”

  Everyone agreed: it was the best homeroom period ever.

  In social studies, in a unit on basic economics, Jake helped Mr. Lyons by describing the difference between satisfying wants and meeting needs to a group that just couldn’t grasp the concept.

  “A need is something a person has to have in order to thrive,” he explained. “A want is a choice. For instance, we need to eat in order to live. So I need to eat breakfast every morning. But I might want to eat pizza for breakfast, even though I don’t need to!”

  After school, Jake and Kojo led the Riverview Pirates to their second basketball victory.

  “Look at me, Jake,” shouted Kojo right before he shot the buzzer beater to seal the game. “I’m putting up parabolas!”

  Grace was in the bleachers, watching and cheering. She might’ve been taking notes, too.

  That night, Jake cooked dinner for Emma because their mom had to work another banquet at the hotel. He whipped up a very colorful taco pizza based on a recipe he just seemed to know.

  But later, when Emma asked him to help her with her Spanish homework, Jake drew a blank.

  “Everybody says you’re so smart at school all of a sudden,” said his frustrated sister. “Why are you so dumb here at home?

  Jake still no habla español.

  If he wanted to help Emma, he would need another jelly bean.

  On Saturday, Jake and Kojo rode the bus back to Warwick College.

  “What’s the use of being smart if I can’t help Emma?” said Jake. “I need another jelly bean. For Spanish.”

  “To help Emma with her homework?” said Kojo, arching his eyebrows above the thick frames of his glasses. “Not so you can chat with Grace and drop some Spanish love bombs on her? Some more of that ‘amo, amas, amat’ action?”

  “Grace and I are just friends, Kojo. And ‘amo, amas, amat’ is Latin, not Spanish, although Spanish is considered one of the romance languages.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s what I’m talking about. Romance.”

  “We call Spanish a romance language, Kojo, because it, like Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian, originated from Latin, the language spoken in the western Roman Empire.”

  “Um-hmmm. Well, I call Spanish a romance language because that’s what Grace speaks when she’s making goo-goo eyes at you. Did you see her in the bleachers yesterday? She never used to come to our basketball games.”

  “Yes. That did strike me as a bit odd. I can’t quite surmise why she was there.”

  “Dude?”

  “Yes, Kojo?”

  “You’re starting to sound like a robot.”

  “Sorry. I just seem to precipitously have this capacious and voluminous vocabulary at my disposal.”

  “Doesn’t mean you have to use it.”

  “Point taken.”

  “I figure Grace was at the game because she has a crush on you.”

  “A crush?”

  “I’ve seen the way she’s been looking at you ever since you jelly-beaned your way into superintelligence. She’s super smart. Now you’re even smarter than me. You two are a match made in nerd heaven.”

  When they reached Warwick College and, once again, made their way across campus to Haazim Farooqi’s cluttered chemistry lab, Jake got right to the point.

  “I need to speak Spanish, Mr. Farooqi. My little sister goes to a Spanish-immersion school. I want to be able to help her with her homework. I need a Spanish-language jelly bean.”

  “He also needs it to communicate with Grace Garcia,” added Kojo, “if you know what I mean by communicate.” Kojo gave the wild-looking scientist a wink and a nudge.

  “It’s not for Grace,” said Jake.

  “Is too.”

  “Is not.”

  “Too.”

  “Not.”

  Suddenly, the smartest kid in the universe and his superintelligent best friend sounded like kindergartners.

  “Enough,” said Farooqi, throwing up his arms in exasperation. “Fine. You want a Spanish-language jelly bean? I’ll make you one. Because”—he put on a singsongy voice—“ ‘that’s what Jake wants.’ Well, what about what I want?”

  Farooqi whipped off his safety glasses, trying to look tough.

  “Are you trying to look tough?” asked Kojo.

  “Yes,” Farooqi replied sheepishly.

  “Not working, dude.”

  “I know. It never does. Anyway, what I want, Jake, is your full cooperation. We must become true partners in this enterprise so I can refine and replicate my formulas.”

  “Or formulae,” said Jake.

  “Right. Both are acceptable. You told me. This is one big step for you, Jake, but one giant leap for mankind.”

  “You’re incorrectly paraphrasing Neil Armstrong,” said Jake. “The first human to set foot on the moon.”

  “Indeed I am,” said Farooqi. “But you only knew that’s what I was doing because of my jelly beans!”

  “Which one?” asked Kojo. “Because I wouldn’t mind bumping up my trivia game…”

  “We may never know which bean did what to your friend,
” Farooqi explained.

  “I ate them all at once,” added Jake. “It wasn’t what is known as a controlled experiment. You see, Kojo, whenever possible, scientists like to test their hypotheses with a scientific test done under controlled conditions, meaning that just one or a few factors are changed at a time, while all others are kept constant.”

  “Which one gave him that last mouthful of gibberish?” asked Kojo. “Because I don’t need that jelly bean. Probably the nasty-tasting licorice one…”

  Farooqi didn’t answer. He was too busy beaming at Jake. “Look what I hath wrought!”

  Jake shook his head. “Now you’re misquoting the Bible phrase that became the first Morse code message transmitted in the United States on May twenty-fourth, 1844!”

  “Okay,” said Kojo. “Now we’re back to the trivia bean. That’s the one I want. Was that the pink one? The red?”

  “It doesn’t matter which jelly bean did what,” said Farooqi. “I don’t have any more prototypes left. Jake ate them all! Wiped out my entire supply. But I will attempt to craft more—including one that’ll ensure your mastery of the Spanish language—if, Jake, you agree to let me study you. If you’ll become Subject One in the scholarly paper I plan to start writing, as soon as I find my pen and a blank piece of paper.”

  Jake nodded and extended his hand.

  He and Farooqi shook on it.

  They had a deal.

  “It might take me a little while to concoct this new chemical confection,” said the scientist. “In the meantime, Jake, you should go to the library.”

  “Why? I already know everything I need to know.”

  “Except Spanish,” said Kojo.

  “Right. But Dr. Farooqi’s going to make a pill for that.”

  “I’m not a doctor,” said Haazim. “Not yet, anyway. But one day. Maybe. After I find that pen and write my paper. Plus there’s no guarantee that my Spanish pill will perform as requested. However, Jake, if my theories are correct, your jelly bean–primed brain is ready to receive much more information—especially in the categories you’ve already begun to master. Even with the booster shot of my Ingestible Knowledge capsules, you haven’t pushed your intelligence to the max, my young friend. To do that, you need to crack open a few books!”