Brendan Buckley's Sixth-Grade Experiment

by Sundee T. Frazier

  Talking to Grandpa Ed had helped me feel better about things, but I still had a hard time imagining that Dad would ever see it the way my grandpa did, no matter how much I wanted him to.

  A few days before Christmas, Mom and Dad held a party at our house. Khalfani’s family had been on the invite list from the beginning. When Mom suggested adding Morgan and her parents, I didn’t try to change her mind.

  I had told my parents about not winning the national prize, of course. Mom had made a big deal about how winning wasn’t the most important thing—it was the experience, what I’d learned, and all that. She was still very proud of me, she said. Dad had pointed out that only one team could win top prize and the odds of that happening for anyone were very slim. I hadn’t tried to talk to him any more about it.

  “The grandparents here yet?” Dad asked, coming into the dining area, where Mom had arranged a bunch of food on the table. She started to light the candles.

  “Can I do it?” I loved using the lighter.

  Mom handed it to me. “Dad said they’d be here by four.”

  Grandpa Ed was bringing Gladys. They’d been doing more together lately, ever since a recent Sunday dinner when he’d invited her to a movie. “No need for us both to be sitting home alone,” he’d said.

  “Speak for yourself. I like being alone.” Gladys had sat up tall and thrust out her chin. “But I’ll go. Maybe that pest Bernard will finally leave me alone if he sees you hanging around.”

  “I doubt it.” Grandpa Ed had chuckled. “You’re a hot item, Gladys. You know that.”

  “And you’re full of it, Rock Hudson.”

  I lit the final candle as Grandpa Ed’s truck pulled up outside. I would’ve recognized that sputtering sound anywhere. I ran to the window. “They’re here!” I called.

  My jaw dropped. Gladys was getting out on the driver’s side! Gladys didn’t drive. She was always bragging about being “all bus, all the time.”

  “Mom! Dad! Gladys drove Grandpa Ed’s truck!”

  Dad came up behind me. “God help us all.”

  Gladys and Grandpa Ed were laughing and carrying on as if they were best friends.

  Mom opened the door. “I see you’ve decided to take up driving again.”

  “I sure have!” Gladys said. She practically hopped up the stairs. “Thanks to Ed here.” She turned and smiled down at him. Then she waved her hands in the air and did a little dance around the living room. “Get ready, everybody, ’cause here I come!”

  “Watch out, everybody, is more like it.” Dad shook his head. “Ed, I thought you were more sensible than that. Don’t you know a car can be considered a lethal weapon in a court of law?”

  Gladys scowled.

  Grandpa Ed appeared at the top of the stairs. “Your mom did just fine. Handled my old truck the way she handles everything—she let it know who was boss right from the start.”

  Gladys smiled again. “Thank you, Edwin.”

  “Just remember, I warned you,” Dad said.

  “Grandpa Ed’s a good teacher,” I said, thinking of the time he’d let me drive his truck on a deserted back road this past summer. Mom looked at me funny. “At least when it comes to things like geology and chess,” I added quickly. I’d never told my parents about Grandpa Ed putting me behind the wheel. “So he’s probably good at teaching driving, too.”

  “You pick out your science kit for winning that contest yet?” Grandpa Ed handed Mom his coat. I had been given a choice of over twenty kits from an online company.

  “There’s one on genetics and DNA that looks cool. I think I might get that one.”

  “We don’t need to do any DNA tests to know where you got your science smarts,” Gladys said, putting her arm around me.

  “That’s right!” Grandpa Ed said. “Like I’ve said before, Brendan’s a chip off this old rock.” He knocked my shoulder with his fist.

  Gladys scoffed. “That may be so, Rock, but it wasn’t you I was referring to. My Clem had dreams of being a surgeon one day.”

  “He did?” I said, astonished. “Grampa Clem never told me that.”

  Dad’s forehead creased. “I never heard that, either.”

  “You didn’t know everything about the man.” Gladys looked at Dad over the rims of her pointy glasses; then she turned back to me. “Circumstances beyond his control landed him in X-rays. But your grandpa had a keen scientific mind. So you got it from both sides, Mr. Science Genius!”

  The doorbell rang. I went to answer it, still pondering this new information I’d been given about my family tree. Khal and his stepmom were at the door. Khal’s dad was helping Dori out of the car.

  “Hey, Brendan.” Khal came inside and took off his shoes.

  Khal’s stepmom held a casserole dish covered in foil.

  “Hello, Brendan.”

  “Peach cobbler?” I asked, taking the warm bowl in my hands and inhaling the delicious, sweet smell.

  “Don’t you know it,” she said.

  I licked my lips. Mrs. Jones’s peach cobbler was incredible.

  Dori pushed her way inside. “Look at what I got, Brendan!” She held up a brown-skinned doll with three thick braids exactly like hers. The doll wore a red and black dress with white tights and black shoes just like Dori, too. “A My Twinn doll!” She ran up the stairs and started telling Mom about the doll.

  Khal rolled his eyes. “She’s been wearing that same outfit since her birthday eight days ago. I think she’s going for a world record.”

  “Khalfani Omar,” Mrs. Jones said with a warning tone in her voice. Mr. Jones came in carrying a bag of wrapped gifts. He and Mrs. Jones headed upstairs. Khal and I went down to the rec room to play Nintendo baseball.

  A little while later, the doorbell rang again. I heard Mom open the door and greet Morgan and her parents.

  Khal made a face. “Of course you’d invite your girlfriend.”

  I ran my player around the bases. “My mom invited them.” Khal didn’t need to know I’d been glad about it. “You could give her a chance, you know.” Saying that made me think of Grandpa Ed’s words to me about Dad. I pushed the thought away.

  “Me being friends with the Belcher is about as likely as my sister never bugging me again.”

  I glanced up just as Morgan appeared in the doorway.

  “Hi, Brendan. Hi, Khalfani.” She came and stood nearby.

  I said hi, but I kept my eyes on the TV. What was Morgan to me, anyway? Was she my girlfriend? We’d never said anything about being boyfriend and girlfriend. We’d just spent a whole lot of time together, maybe even more than Khal and I had so far this year. Did that make us an official couple?

  What about the fact that I looked forward to seeing her at our lockers first thing in the morning, or that I hoped when the phone rang after school that it was her, or that I had started to worry that we wouldn’t see each other as much now that the contest was over?

  What about the flutters I had in my stomach right then as I looked up and saw her big brown eyes and the cute freckles on her nose and the dimple in her cheek? What about that?

  I quickly put my eyes back on the game. “Ohh!” I shouted as Khal tagged my runner out at home plate.

  “I guess I’ll see you upstairs,” Morgan said, turning toward the door.

  I glanced up. “Okay,” I said, even though I’d been hoping she would stay to watch me play.

  A while later, Dad came in. He started shoveling through boxes in the corner of the room. “Khal, would you believe your dad’s not buying that I have a baseball signed by all the Griffeys—Ken Senior, Ken Junior, and the younger one, Craig, the one who played for the Rainiers?”

  Khal jumped up and ran to the corner. “You do?”

  “I’m going to get something to eat,” I said, even though Khal wasn’t listening and I wasn’t actually hungry.

  Upstairs, Christmas music played on the stereo. The living room had gotten crowded with all the guests, people I recognized but didn’t really know from both Mom
’s and Dad’s workplaces, and some of their friends from the neighborhood. I wound around the small groups of people standing and eating off small paper plates. No Morgan. She wasn’t in the dining area or the kitchen, either.

  I started down the hall. My bedroom door, which I remembered having closed on purpose, was cracked. Was Morgan in my room? A bunch of thoughts flooded my mind at once: She can’t just go into my room without me! Did I pick up my dirty underwear? But if she feels comfortable enough to go into my room, then we must be pretty good friends. Maybe even best friends. You can’t be best friends with a girl! My thoughts made me feel all jumbled up inside, like a scrambled radio signal.

  I peered through the opened door. Morgan stood looking down at my desk, on top of which sat my logbook!

  I burst into the room. “That’s private!” I cried.

  She spun around, eyes wide. Her face turned pinker by the second. “I—I didn’t look. I would never look.” She started to rush past me out the door.

  “Wait.” I pulled her back inside and shut the door. When I turned around, we were about a centimeter from each other’s faces. I cleared my throat and stepped back.

  She looked down. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come into your room without asking. I just wanted to see Einstein’s tank … one last time.” She looked at me earnestly. “I swear I would never look at your journal.”

  “It’s a logbook,” I said.

  “Right. Your logbook.”

  This is it, I thought. My chance. I would make it official. Right then. I would ask Morgan if she wanted to be my girlfriend. It didn’t matter what Khal thought.

  “Mor—”

  “I’ve been—”

  “Would you—”

  “Maybe we—”

  If we had been at a dance we would’ve been stepping all over each other’s feet.

  “You can go first,” I said, trying to be gentlemanly, like Gladys had told me to be after sitting next to Morgan at the tournament. “Here.” I gestured toward my outer space bedspread.

  Morgan pulled in her bottom lip. She went and sat on Jupiter. “I’m really glad we got partnered together for the science contest,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, sitting on the sun. I held on to the bedpost as if I were afraid a black hole might open between us and suck us in. I kept hearing the sentence Mr. H had taught us to help us memorize the order of the planets: Mary’s violet eyes make John stay up nights permanently. (Pluto is no longer considered the ninth planet, of course, but he still wanted us to learn it as a dwarf planet.)

  Instead of hearing Mary’s, though, I heard Morgan’s, and I wasn’t just thinking about her eyes, like that John guy. I was staring into them.

  Morgan’s velvet eyes make Jupiter silly.…

  I shook my head, which had clouded over like a Puget Sound fog. What was wrong with me? Pull yourself together, man!

  “I’ve been wondering,” Morgan continued. “I mean … we’ve been spending a lot of time together.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Maybe this wouldn’t be so hard after all. It sounded as if she was headed in the same direction I’d been planning to go.

  “I was thinking …”

  “Me too!” I said.

  She blinked a few times. “Really? You were wondering if we should spend less time together so we don’t end up not having any other friends?”

  “Oh.” The disappointed sound came out before I could stop it. It felt as if someone had hammer-fisted me on the head this time.

  Morgan’s eyes got even rounder than usual. “That’s not what you were thinking, was it?”

  I nodded quickly. “No—I mean, yes! You’re exactly right.” I rubbed my sweaty palms on my pants, trying to think of what to say. “I’ve been thinking I need to start hanging more with my friends. You know, Khal and Oscar and Marcus. They’re my crew, after all.” I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, then back at my hands.

  “Right. Your crew.” She traced Saturn’s rings with her finger. “Do you consider me a friend, too?”

  “Um …” I had a sick feeling in my stomach. This was not going well at all.

  “That’s okay. I understand. You were just being nice because I was new and all that. You probably only spent time with me because you wanted to win the competition. And on the boat”—it was the first time either of us had mentioned that day since it’d happened—“we were just caught up in the excitement of learning we’d been chosen as finalists, right?” She stood as if she was planning to leave.

  I grabbed her wrist. “Wait! That’s not it at all.”

  She pulled her hand away and crossed her arms over her stomach.

  “I mean, maybe at first I was just being nice. And of course I wanted to win. But I do like you. You’re smart and funny … and, and …”

  I heard Khal’s voice in my head. Where’s your baekjul boolgool, man?

  “And I liked holding your hand.” I said it quickly, then looked over at Einstein’s tank. It was so quiet I thought I could hear the beads of sweat popping from my forehead.

  Morgan sat again—on Venus this time. “I liked holding your hand, too.”

  “Do you want to hold hands now?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  We reached across Mercury. Our fingers had just touched when someone knocked on the door. We jerked our hands back into our laps, as if we’d been burned by the planet’s hot gases.

  “Brendan, you in there?” Dad called.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to sound as casual as possible, even though every molecule in my body was ricocheting around from the heat of the last few moments.

  “It’s time to play the game,” Dad said. “You and your friends going to join us?”

  “Sure. Be there in a minute.”

  I looked at Morgan, then took her hand again, hoping mine didn’t feel too sweaty. “I have something for you,” I said. Grandpa Ed and I had spent some extra time in the lapidary shop over the past few weeks. He’d shown me how to cut and polish a cabochon—or cab, as they were called in the rock club world. I hadn’t been exactly sure who I was making it for, but right then, I knew.

  “Ooh, a surprise. I love surprises.”

  “Me too,” I said, thinking about how surprising it was to be sitting on my bed holding a girl’s hand.

  “Soooo?” she said, glancing around.

  “Oh, right.” I jumped up and went to my desk. I pulled out the middle drawer and found the rose quartz cab—flat on the bottom, concave across the top, and shaped like a heart.

  When I turned she was standing in the middle of the room.

  “Here,” I said, thrusting it at her before I lost my nerve. “This is for you.”

  Her eyes opened wide. She beamed and grasped the pink stone to her chest. Then she pecked me on the cheek. “It’s beautiful! I love it. Thank you.” She gazed at the heart again, smiling.

  I had a feeling there would be more hand-holding in Morgan’s and my future, and that made me smile, too.

  Christmas morning, I woke up with a strange feeling in my stomach. It wasn’t hunger, even though Mom’s sticky buns already filled the air with a fantastic cinnamony smell. And it wasn’t eagerness to get to the presents.

  It was sadness.

  December 25 was Grampa Clem’s birthday. He’d always taken pride in being born on the same day as Jesus.

  I’d known it was coming, of course. Dad had been talking to Gladys for a while about visiting the cemetery on Christmas Day. I didn’t know if they were going or not, but if they did, I wasn’t going with them. That filled-in hole just held some old skin and bones—not my Grampa Clem.

  There was a knock on my door. I pushed myself up in bed and rubbed my eyes. “Come in,” I said.

  Dad poked his head in. “You up?” he asked. A few years back, I would have been up at the crack of dawn, bouncing on my parents’ bed, begging to open presents. But not anymore.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just thinking.”

  “Oh yeah? ’Bout what?
” Dad stepped into the room and flipped on the light. He held something long and skinny wrapped in garbage bags.

  “Grampa Clem.”

  “Mmm.” He glanced at the shelf over Einstein’s tank. “That’s quite a collection you’ve got going.”

  “Twenty-two specimens,” I said. “Nothing close to Grandpa Ed’s, though.”

  Dad picked up a quartz crystal from the dig back in August. “Is this one of the rocks I found in the garbage?”

  I felt my face scrunch. “You put those back on my desk?”

  “Who’d you think did?”

  I shrugged. “Mom.”

  Dad nodded. “I can see why you might think that.” He looked at the crystal more closely. “I found them when I was emptying your trash can. Didn’t think they belonged there.” He put the quartz back on the shelf. “So, you ready to open your first present?” He held out the long, skinny whatever-it-was.

  As soon as I grasped it in my hand, I knew. A fishing pole.

  I pulled off the top bag and shook the rod free. “Grampa Clem’s pole,” I said, my heart starting to thump. “I wondered what Gladys had done with it … I didn’t want to ask.”

  “It’s yours now,” Dad said. He put his hands on my shoulders. They didn’t feel like weights this time. More like Khal’s football pads. “My dad might not have been a very large man, but he sure left a large hole.”

  My heart squeezed. “Yeah,” I said.

  Dad pulled me into his chest. My eyes started to sting, but I swallowed it all back down.

  He made space between us again. “Every day I find myself thinking about what he’d say about this or that, wishing he could see me finishing my degree.…”

  I’d heard Dad say that all sons wanted their dads’ approval, but I’d never thought about that including him.

  I looked for the scratch on the soft handle from when Grampa Clem almost lost his pole off the pier. The big fish that had nearly pulled the pole—and Grampa Clem—over the railing had gotten away, of course.

  “How’d you like to go fishing this morning, before we open the rest of the presents?”

  I smiled. “Really? That would be great.”

  “All right. Get yourself ready and we’ll get out of here.” He slapped me on the back and started to leave the room.