by David Yoo
“You just added and subtracted the numbers!” Sunny laughed.
“I know.” I jumped on this factoid. “So shouldn’t I have gotten half credit on all the answers, then?”
“How are we possibly related?” she replied, staring at me.
“Sunny, you’re going to have to teach your brother how to do this kind of math. I have to finish up some work tonight,” Dad said.
“I don’t have time for this!” she cried.
“And I don’t need her help!” I said.
“Yes, you do,” he replied.
“But it never works,” I complained. “You tried to get her to help me practice the recorder, remember?”
“Sunny said you refused to practice,” Mom pointed out.
“Exactly, some teacher, huh?” I replied. It suddenly dawned on me for the first time that maybe I intentionally didn’t practice the recorder because I didn’t want Sunny to ever be praised for rescuing me. I didn’t mention this to them, though, because it would only get me in more trouble.
Dad turned to Sunny.
“Sit with your brother and teach him what he did wrong. I’ll sign this once you figure out all the right answers.”
“This isn’t fair!” Sunny groaned. “Why can’t you just accept that he’s hopeless? It’ll make life easier for the rest of us.”
“You’re referring to yourself as ‘us,’ which is plural,” I said, winking at my dad. “See, I’m more of an English guy than a math guy, really.”
He stared at me like I was an alien with a solid grasp of the English language.
“No arguing,” he said. “That’s final.”
After dinner I had to sit with Sunny in the dining room, and she tried to teach me how to do the math.
“So what do you actually know?” she asked.
I took out a piece of paper and wrote my name in big letters:
P E T E R
“That’s not funny,” she said.
“I don’t consider four points a laughing matter, either,” I replied.
She sighed, and pointed at the parentheses in the first problem. “What are these?”
“It means the numbers inside are secret?”
She rolled her eyes.
“Do you pay any attention in class?”
“I’m not being serious,” I pointed out to her.
“That’s exactly your problem, you don’t take it seriously, and that’s why you’re failing.”
“But I’m never going to use this math in real life, so what difference does it make?”
“It doesn’t matter. If you don’t do well, you won’t get into college.”
“That’s in, like, thirty years, and I’ll be a millionaire by the time I graduate high school because of my inventions.”
“Thirty years?” she gaped at me. “You can’t even do basic addition!”
“Again, I think you’re not getting my humor,” I said.
“You don’t get it. Plus, you’ll get kicked out of the T.A.G. program if you don’t maintain at least a B average.”
“That’s ridiculous, what do my grades have to do with inventing?”
“It’s called The Academically Gifted program, you idiot! Of course your grades matter,” she said. My stomach fell. “You don’t belong in there, anyway.”
“Ms. Schoonmaker would never allow it,” I said softly, but I had a sinking feeling Sunny was right. “It’s not fair, you’re the one who thought the oval looked like a spider!”
“How’s it going in here?” Mom asked, entering the room.
“He’s hopeless, can I go now?” Sunny asked.
“Not until he figures it out.”
“But that’ll take forever!” Sunny cried. Mom just ignored her and went back into the living room. My sister and I resumed glaring at each other.
“Look,” I finally said. “We both want to get out of here, and the only way is if you answer the questions correctly for me and say I learned it.”
She considered it for a couple of seconds.
“Fine,” she replied, and started filling in the answers.
I watched her race through the quiz. She kept shaking her head and rolling her eyes to show how easy it was for her, and I started daydreaming about one day having to tutor her for something and making a big fuss out of how dumb she was, just so she could see how lame it is for someone to do that. But then she’d probably point out that if I was the bigger man, I wouldn’t have stooped to her level in the first place, in which case I’d have to explain that—
“It’s really creepy when you just sit there with your mouth open, staring into space,” she said. “Now come on, just copy it over in your handwriting and we can be done here.”
I started copying her answers onto a fresh piece of paper, but then I got the feeling she was sabotaging me or something. “Are you sure these are all right?” I eyed her suspiciously.
“Most of them.”
“That’s what I thought! Come on, they all have to be right.”
“Mrs. Ryder would never buy that you could go from getting a zero to a perfect score just like that. It has to be realistic.”
“Actually, it was a fourteen percent, remember?” I corrected her.
She rolled her eyes.
“Just hurry up and finish copying the answers, I have homework to do.”
When I was finished, I showed it to Dad, and he finally signed the quiz.
“I don’t want to see another one of these again,” he said.
“I tried not to show you in the first place,” I said.
“This isn’t a joke.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
“Oh, Peter,” he said, and took off his reading glasses and started rubbing his eyes.
By the time he opened them, I was long gone. I went back to my room to call Drew, and told him what Sunny had said. “She’s lying, right?”
“Your sister wouldn’t lie,” he said. “You’re going to have to pull up your grade in math class.”
“It’s too late, I’m too far behind because I haven’t been paying attention in class. What we need to do is make an amazing prototype for the invention contest.”
Drew sighed into the phone.
“I thought we were focusing on making people believe we’re popular in other towns?” he asked.
“This is way easier, because I already know I’m the best inventor. We need to focus on the inventions contest. They wouldn’t kick out the star of the class, right?”
“I guess not,” Drew said, but he didn’t sound nearly as excited about my new plan as I figured he’d be.
Chapter Seventeen
I MET UP WITH DREW AT Corbett Canyon after school the next day, and we tried to figure out which invention to make a prototype for. The mini cats idea, unfortunately, was still in “development stage,” according to Ms. Schoonmaker. The Mr. Home Security was a no-go, too; I felt like I needed to be an electrician to even begin to know how to rig that up. And the Urban Sound Machine idea had already gotten shot down. I whimpered. Even though I had three-quarters of my inventor’s notebook filled, I didn’t have a single idea I could possibly take to the prototype stage!
“Maybe we could tape-record construction sounds and glass breaking, and play it during the competition to see if Carson conks out?” Drew suggested.
“He’ll just force himself to stay awake,” I replied, feverishly flipping through the pages. “I guess that leaves the self-lighting cigarette.”
“I don’t know about that one—smoking’s really bad for you.”
“I can’t get smokers to stop smoking, but at least I can get them to stop killing so many trees and wasting so much precious fuel lighting them,” I said, but he frowned. “I don’t have a choice—it’s my only doable idea!”
“I don’t know . . . ,” Drew said. “Besides, you can’t make a prototype of that without the real thing.”
“Huh?”
“You’d need cigarettes to make a prototype, right?”
He was right. Great, I thought, another wrinkle.
Since none of our parents smoked, we biked over to the 7-Eleven. We spotted a high-school kid smoking a cigarette in the parking lot by the green Dumpster.
“Jackpot!” I said to Drew, and we rolled up to him. “Hey, guy, could you buy me a pack of cigarettes? I have money.”
“Smoking’s bad for you!” the high schooler said.
At first I thought it was kinda touching how this older kid was looking out for my general health like this, but then I realized he was lying a second later when he took out a pack of gum and Drew asked him for a piece.
“Sorry, dude, gum’s bad for you,” he muttered, then walked away.
“It was sugar-free gum, though,” Drew said sadly to nobody in particular.
“I guess we’re going to have to buy cigarettes on our own,” I said. “But I don’t look even close to eighteen.”
“You don’t even look like you’re twelve,” Drew said.
“You’re only four pounds heavier than me!” I shouted.
“Hey, I didn’t say I looked any older.”
I sighed.
“Well, those four pounds don’t lie. I guess you just have to go in and see if they’ll sell cigarettes to you, and then we take it from there,” I said.
“No way, it’s your invention!”
“But we’re partners, Drew.”
He pursed his lips and shook his head. My legs started shaking, as if I was at a sleepover at Drew’s house and we’d just run out of candy. We parked our bikes by the air pumps in the back in case we needed a quick getaway. I was tempted to pop some quarters into the air pumps so I could blow mulch all over the place for fun, but I forced myself to focus on the mission. I took out the emergency twenty-dollar bill that my parents make me keep in my wallet in case I ever get abducted and manage to escape and need to catch a bus home or something.
I pulled open the glass door and headed inside. As I entered the store, there was a fake bell sound and I winced. The cashier, a middle-aged woman reading a newspaper, looked over at me and nodded before returning to her reading. This gave me a little confidence—I figured maybe she’d be so into whatever she was reading that she wouldn’t even notice that I was actually twelve. I went up to the counter. Then I had to back up a step so she could see me. I cleared my throat.
“Can I help you?” she said, not looking away from her paper. Excellent!
“Oh—hey there, I just got off work,” I said, fake-yawning. “Uh, I just need a pack of smokes and a lottery ticket. Wait, scratch that, I forgot, the city doesn’t pay me till Thursday, just get me the smokes and I’ll come back tomorrow for the lottery ticket.”
She finally looked at me. Her eyes were half-lidded, which didn’t look promising; it’s the same expression Fluffy gives me right before she tries to claw my eyes out.
“How old are you?” she asked.
I tried to smile at her in a flirty way, but I probably looked like I was having a double hernia or something.
“How old do you want me to be?” I replied, because that’s something I heard a lady say to a guy in an R-rated movie once, only in the movie the lady’s voice didn’t crack when she said it. I think they were both drunk, and even though I didn’t see the end of it, I’m pretty sure the guy shot the lady at the end.
“Do you want me to call the police or your parents?” she asked, picking up the phone, and I sprinted out of the store to the air pumps, where Drew was waiting. He must have guessed it was going to go badly, because he was already on his bike, holding mine up next to him as if we were riding horses in an old Western. We peeled out of the parking lot and didn’t stop until we got back to Corbett Canyon. For the first time, I looked behind us, positive that police cars would be chasing us, but the road was empty.
“Back to the drawing board,” Drew sighed.
“That was stressful. I could really use a cigarette right about now,” I said, and Drew slapped me! “I was kidding.”
“Don’t kid. Smoking’s bad for you. Maybe this is good, we shouldn’t be messing with those things.”
“You just aren’t seeing the big picture, Drew.”
“Well, at least I’m no longer in that box.”
“Oh brother,” I said.
That night during study hours I sat there thinking about my idea for self-lighting cigarettes. Drew was right, how could I possibly make a prototype if I didn’t actually have any cigarettes to work with? I was completely stuck, but the next day at school I had a stroke of luck in science class—we were burning chemicals over a Bunsen burner to record the reactions. The chemicals lit up in different colors when you held them over the flame. Mr. Reardon picked out random partners for lab, and I ended up working with Angie! I figured I’d impress her somehow and maybe that would get me on the invite list for her next party. I started burning chemicals and she seemed impressed.
“You know, this would make for a really cool display at, say, a social event, um . . . on the weekend,” I suggested.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.
I sighed. She started recording results in her lab notebook, but all was not lost, because for once I actually enjoyed science class. I just mindlessly burned stuff over the Bunsen burners for a few minutes until Angie started complaining.
“You’re wasting the phosphorous, we need more of it,” she said. “Come on, we have to burn seven more chemicals before class is over.”
“But I like the yellow color this one makes,” I said.
Mr. Reardon stopped by our station.
“Do you know what phosphorous is used for?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said, scorching another piece over the Bunsen burner.
“It’s used in making matches.”
“That’s really interesting,” I said, not really paying attention at first, but then a second later something clicked. “Wait—what?”
“Basically when combined with friction, it causes the flame to spark on the tip of a match,” he explained.
That was it! The key to my prototype was to simply glue some phosphorous to the end of a cigarette, then you could just rub the tip of it against a matchbook surface. I could get hold of an empty cigarette pack and glue the striking surface of a matchbook onto the side. Then I could just make a substitute cigarette by finding something roughly the same size and shape as a real one, and glue phosphorous to the tip. That would be my self-lighting cigarette for the competition!
Which meant that I was going to have to steal some phosphorous from the class in order to build my prototype. I’d never stolen anything before. But it wasn’t really stealing, I reasoned, because I was planning on returning the vial when I was done. Besides, if I got busted, I could just say I did it in the name of science, and who would appreciate that more than a science teacher?
The period was almost over, and Mr. Reardon returned to his desk. I waited for Angie to start talking to Heidi sitting next to her, and then when the coast seemed clear, I casually grabbed two vials of chemicals and slipped them into my pocket. The bell rang. Mr. Reardon announced the homework assignment, and then we all poured out the door.
When I got home, I found some matches in the living room, grabbed a spoon from the kitchen, then ran up to my room and shut the door. I opened up the vial of phosphorous. I even put on an old pair of sunglasses for protection, just like in science class. All I had to do was glue some phosphorous to the end of the eraser, but since I’m addicted to fireworks, I really wanted to light up the crystals and see that bright yellow color one more time before working on the prototype.
The phosphorous crystals were like chunks of rock salt, and I tapped out a spoonful into my hand. I smelled them. I licked them. They tasted salty. Very interesting. I jiggled most of them back into the vial; some fell onto the carpet. I took a single crystal and placed it on the spoon. Usually in lab we’d use metal pincers to pick up a single crystal and hold it over the Bunsen flame. I carefully lifted up the spoon, l
it a match with my other hand and held the flame under the spoon. Five seconds passed. Ten. I knew it would take longer because I had to first heat up the spoon, but the match went out. I lit another, and stared at the crystal like it was a kernel of popping corn. The match burned down to the nub and singed my fingers. Why wasn’t this working? Maybe I needed to light more than one crystal at once. I sprinkled more phosphorous onto the spoon, but it still wouldn’t light up like it had in science class.
“It smells like matches,” Sunny said, coming into my room.
“Get out of my room, you know the rules,” I said without looking up.
“There’s no rule that I can’t enter your room! What are you doing?”
“I’m working on my prototype for T.A.G. class.”
“Are those chemicals from the science lab?”
“I have special permission, because I got to class late and he said to do it at home,” I lied. “I think these chemicals are defective, anyhow.”
“You moron, a match won’t produce nearly enough heat to ignite them.”
I really have to pay more attention in school, I thought.
“Did you steal those from the lab?” she asked.
“I said I’m only borrowing them for an experiment. I’m going to return them tomorrow.”
Eventually she left. I kept messing around with the chemicals, and when I heard the garage door open ten minutes later, I placed everything in my desk drawer and closed it. A minute later my mom came charging into the room with Sunny right behind her.
“What are you doing in here? Sunny says you’re burning chemicals?”
“I’m testing out stuff for inventor’s class, but no, I didn’t actually succeed in burning chemicals, so you can relax,” I said.
“It’s for a school experiment?”
I wanted to say yes, but I couldn’t lie to my mom’s face.
“I’m returning them tomorrow,” I said quietly, which was the truth.
“I’m calling your science teacher to see why I never heard about this before. It seems dangerous,” Mom said, leaving the room.
Sunny shook her head at me.
“How’s it going, narc?” I asked her.
