Maybe I am a little bit mad after all.
The house is empty when we get home from school. My mom’s at the high school striking the set. My grandfather and I go our separate ways: me to the kitchen, him to the bathroom.
I’m full of nervous energy and decide to cook something. I flip through my grandmother’s recipe box and settle on quiche. I make sure we have all the ingredients: flour and butter for the crust, eggs, ham, cheese. There’s only one block of cheese, and it’s way in the back of the refrigerator. When I pull it out, I realize it must have been in there for a long time: there’s fuzzy blue-green mold growing on it. My first reaction is to be grossed out, but my second reaction is to be intrigued. I kind of want to see what it looks like under a microscope.
I get my microscope and set it up at the kitchen counter. I scrape off some of the mold, put it on a slide, and look at it through the eyepiece. It looks like delicate threads.
My grandfather walks into the kitchen, carrying The Catcher in the Rye.
“The toilet’s clogged again,” he tells me. “What are you looking at?”
I feel awkward explaining it to him. “I was making a quiche, but the cheese was all moldy, so I decided to observe the mold under the microscope.”
He gives me an unfathomable look and says, “Of course you did. That’s what a scientist would do.”
I don’t know what to say.
My grandfather holds up the book. “I finished it. It was good.”
My mouth drops open. “It was?”
“Yes. I judged it prematurely and I was wrong about it.” He hesitates. “About other things, too.”
He plucks an apple from the bowl of fruit. It’s red and bruised, almost starting to go.
“You were right,” he says with a lift of his shoulders.
I hold my breath, waiting. Hoping.
He looks at the apple. “The seed is planted, it grows into a tree, the fruit ripens, falls onto the ground.” He takes a bite. Juice drips down his chin. “And then it starts all over again. The cycle of life. I don’t need to be Galileo to make that observation.”
I swallow.
“Science is powerful. There are always consequences—wonderful and terrible. I suppose I lost my way for a moment in all the excitement and forgot what Salk said.”
“What did he say?”
His eyes meet mine. “Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.”
I nod.
Then he heaves a great sigh. “I guess this means I won’t be getting a Nobel.”
“Scientists don’t give up. You can still get a Nobel someday. For something even more important. Something that nobody’s ever done before!”
“And what would that be?” he asks, sounding skeptical.
I point to the pimple on my chin. “Finding a cure for acne.”
“Hmm. That would be revolutionary.” He shakes his head. “Enough about all this. Is the plunger in the garage? I need to use it to clear the toilet. It took a few tries to get the T. melvinus down.”
“You flushed it? Why didn’t you just put it in the trash?”
He scoffs. “The trash? Your mother would probably forget to put it out. Then raccoons would get into the cans and eat the T. melvinus, and who knows what would happen next? Vicious raccoons that never get old rampaging around the neighborhood?”
We laugh.
Nicole calls to tell my mom that she wants her old babysitting job back. The ear-piercing place is not turning out to be the great opportunity she thought it would be. My grandfather greets this news with enthusiasm.
“It’s time for me to move on anyway,” he informs us.
I look at him in horror. “You’re leaving?”
“I’ll be back. Don’t worry about that,” he says. “I have to make sure you get into a decent PhD program.”
“But who’s going to look after you?” my mother exclaims. “You’re thirteen years old!”
My grandfather gives my mother a steady look. “Melissa, we both know this isn’t working out. There are things I want to do—that I need to do. And I’ll look after myself. I’m a grown-up.”
She looks like she wants to disagree, but then she purses her lips.
“Where will you go?” I ask him.
“I’m not sure exactly. I thought I’d travel. Take a bus ride.” He pauses. “See the country.”
I remember my grandmother’s dream.
My mother arranges for movers to put everything from his apartment in storage. She also gets him a cell phone and puts him on our family plan so that he can stay in touch on the road.
On the day he’s leaving, we wait with him in the bus station. It’s bustling with people coming and going, rushing to catch buses leaving for everywhere. My grandfather’s not sure where he’s going. He says he has nothing but time and money.
“Will you be okay?” my mother asks him.
“Of course I will. I have two PhDs,” he says firmly.
I hand him my going-away present.
“What’s this?” he asks, surprised.
He opens the wrapped box and looks at what’s inside: my collection of ponytail holders.
Tears prick at my eyes. I don’t want him to leave. I grab him, hug him tight.
“I love you,” I say.
My grandfather hugs me back, whispers in my ear, “I believe in you, Ellie. You’re my possible.”
I watch him board the bus and know I will never look at a bowl of fruit or cheese, or anything ever, in the same way again. It turned out that what I needed to teach me about life was my grandfather.
He was the fourteenth goldfish.
Everything’s back to the way it was before, but it doesn’t feel the same. The house is oddly empty. Who knew you could miss the smell of teenage-boy socks?
I decide my room needs a makeover; I don’t want to look at all those little handprints anymore. My dad helps me one weekend when he’s home. We paint the walls a deep sea blue. We use glow-in-the-dark paint to add jellyfish near the ceiling. When I lie in bed at night, it feels like I’m on the bottom of the ocean.
Ananda has started his college search. Raj and I go with him the day he checks out Berkeley. The campus is beautiful, the lawns green and bustling with students. I can almost see Oppenheimer striding around, full of purpose.
Momo and I have been spending a lot of time together lately. She’s into scary films, too. We discover a whole category of old horror films about science gone wrong (Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Tarantula, Godzilla, The Fly). Our favorite is Them! It’s about a bunch of ants that turn into giant ant-monsters after being exposed to radiation during the New Mexico atomic bomb tests. We even convince Mr. Ham to do a class about monster movies and science. It’s fun hanging out with another girl again.
And there are other new beginnings. When Ben comes over to take my mother out to dinner, she meets him at the door, dressed and ready to go, waiting like a teenager on her first date.
She steps across the threshold and into his arms, startling him.
“Yes,” she says.
He looks confused, but I know what she’s saying.
“I’ll marry you.”
They have a small ceremony at City Hall, with me as their witness. Ben wears a blue tie to match my mother’s hair.
“I love happy endings,” the judge tells the newlyweds.
“It’s not a happy ending,” I correct her.
She looks at me quizzically.
“It’s a happy beginning.”
I pay twenty dollars to join the Official Melvin Sagarsky Fan Club. I’m the 232nd member. They mail me a welcoming kit from Helsinki, Finland. It includes a membership card and a T-shirt with a picture of my grandfather on the front. He’s staring at the camera, a Melvin-esque expression on his face.
I miss him.
And then the slippers start arriving. Bunny slippers. Fuzzy pink slippers. Thickly lined bootie slippers. Leopard-print slippers. Zebra slippers.
The latest packa
ge contains slippers that look like alligators and a postcard from St. Augustine, Florida. There’s a picture of an archway that says FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH. On the back, my grandfather has included a mailing address and has written:
HA!
P.S. My fan club has invited me to speak at their annual conference in Helsinki!
I send him a care package with hair bands and another book by the author of The Catcher in the Rye. It’s called Franny and Zooey.
I’m working on a new puzzle at the kitchen table when Nicole walks in. It’s Egyptian-themed, with a picture of the pyramids and King Tut’s sarcophagus. Raj got it for me.
“Your mom called,” Nicole tells me. “She and Ben are going to be late. She said we could order a pizza.”
My mother and Ben are meeting with a real estate agent about looking for a new house. Something bigger, with a toilet that doesn’t get clogged and a yard so I can get a dog.
We call for a pizza, and the doorbell rings five minutes later.
“That was fast,” I say.
When I answer the door, there’s no pizza-delivery kid. Instead, a courier van is pulling away from the curb.
“Looks like you got a package,” Nicole says.
There’s a box on the front porch. The label says CONTAINS DRY ICE.
“What is it?” she asks.
I look at the label. It’s addressed to my grandfather and is from somewhere in the Philippines. There’s an envelope taped to the package, and I open it. Inside is a handwritten note, and when I read it, my breath stops. It says:
Dear Dr. Sagarsky,
I found a jellyfish even stranger than the last one. Thought you might want it.
—Billy
The End Beginning
Author’s Note
I have always been inspired by science. As with Ellie, my connection was sparked by someone very close to me: my father.
My father, William Wendell Holm, MD, was involved in two wars in which scientists played a significant role: World War II and the War on Polio. He served in the navy during World War II, and later he became a pediatrician and vaccinated children against polio. When I was growing up, he kept petri dishes with blood agar in our refrigerator to grow bacteria cultures. They were usually on the same shelf as the cottage cheese.
All the scientists mentioned in this book were real people. The discoveries of Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Robert Oppenheimer, and Jonas Salk changed the world in ways that still echo today.
You, too, can be a scientist. Observe the world around you. Ask questions. Talk to your teachers. Don’t give up.
Be inspired by the scientists who came before you, and fall in love with discovery.
Most of all, believe in the possible.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Robert J. Malone, executive director of the History of Science Society
Recommended Resources for Continuing the Conversation
Marie Curie and the Nobel Prize
nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/themes/physics/curie/index.html
History of Science
hssonline.org
Manhattan Project
amnh.org/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/einstein/peace-and-war/the-manhattan-projecta
Isaac Newton
newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1
Louis Pasteur
accessexcellence.org/RC/AB/BC/Louis_Pasteur.php
Jonas Salk
salk.edu/about/jonas_salk.html
Scientists
Fortey, Jacqueline. DK Eyewitness: Great Scientists. London: DK Publishing, 2007.
JENNIFER L. HOLM grew up in a medical family. Her father was a pediatrician and her mother was a pediatric nurse. It wasn’t unusual for Jenni to open the kitchen refrigerator and find petri dishes of blood agar that her father was using to culture bacteria. She grew up listening to him talk about the wonder of antibiotics and Jonas Salk and how science could change the world.
Today, Jennifer is the New York Times bestselling author of three Newbery Honor Books, as well as the cocreator of the popular Babymouse series (an Eisner Award winner) and Squish series, which she collaborates on with her brother Matthew Holm. You can find out more about her by visiting jenniferholm.com.
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