The Schernoff Discoveries

by Gary Paulsen

  Praise for

  The Schernoff Discoveries

  “A slapstick novel about friendship.… Paulsen captures adolescent feelings perfectly.… Simplicity of style, humor, and great characterization make this another winner from a popular author.”

  —School Library Journal

  “It’s all flat-out goofy and great fun, as well as an inspiring story of shared experiences that, weird as they are, form the basis of a strong and affectionate friendship.”

  —Kirkus Reviews, Pointer

  For more than forty years, Yearling has been the leading name in classic and award-winning literature for young readers.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1997 by Gary Paulsen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1997.

  Yearling and the jumping horse design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this work as follows:

  Paulsen, Gary. The Schernoff discoveries / Gary Paulsen. p. cm.

  Summary: Harold and his best friend, both hopeless geeks and social misfits, try to survive unusual science experiments, the attacks of the football team, and other dangers of junior high school.

  [1. Schools—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Humorous stories.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.P2843Sc 1997 [Fic]—dc21 96045390AC

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80418-1

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1. On Discovering the Benefits of Electricity

  2. Brain over Brawn

  3. On Discovering Interpersonal Relationships

  4. On Discovering Gravity

  5. On Making Friends

  6. On Angling

  7. On the Nature of Wealth

  Afterword

  About the Author

  1. On Discovering the Benefits of Electricity

  What is it anyway?

  —HAROLD ON SEX

  It’s wrong to say that Harold and I were best friends.

  We were each other’s only friend.

  The truth is that we were both geeks, easily the most unpopular boys in the entire demographic area encompassing Washington Junior High School to include (and Harold did all the calculations) the towns of Hillard and Peat, Minnesota, and the surrounding rural area in a twelve-mile radius. (Harold would have liked me to convert all the figures to metric but I choose to leave that to the reader.)

  It’s not true that even dogs didn’t like us, though Harold said so many times. I’ve had several dogs that didn’t bite me with any regularity. However, it was possible for us to be completely lonely and totally ignored in a crowd.

  I was isolated because of my looks and my family’s social standing, or lack thereof. I was skinny and nerdy-looking until the army started to fill me out. My family was best described as a disaster area. If there was a type of alcoholic beverage my parents didn’t consume I never saw it, and the consequence of this was that I was placed well over to the wrong side of the tracks into the undesirable areas where lived such notables as Dick Chimmer, who, it was said, ate small animals alive and once won a bet that involved a tire pump and dropping his pants … well, never mind.

  Harold suffered from being curious, from wanting to know all things, mixed with an apparent desire to look like a thirty-year-old accountant. Though we were fourteen, Harold wore a tight suit coat with a tie and combed his hair straight back with thick wads of hair grease and had enough ballpoints in his shirt pocket to supply an entire classroom and glasses so thick that when he turned to look straight at you it seemed that his eyes exploded … well, it was not a good look for Harold and it most definitely set him apart.

  On no other level were we alike, but the fact that we were outcasts meant that we gravitated toward each other like two marbles rolling toward the center of a bowl—bouncing apart now and again but generally getting closer and closer until we were friends.

  I don’t know what Harold derived from the friendship unless it was a sense of the outdoors. I spent a large part of my life outside of things—outside of home, outside of school—and so knew a little of the outdoors. Harold was a neophyte there but he was game and almost always tried to do what I was doing, and I like to think that he learned something from it.

  What I gained from Harold was help with schoolwork—I broke local records for flunking and might be the only boy who ever flunked shop—and somebody to talk with about Julie Hansen.

  Julie Hansen was a few months older and was mature for her age, head of the junior cheer-leader squad, destined to be Miss Peat and so beautiful she made my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth. She was completely, totally ignorant that we walked the planet. Consequently we loved her, Harold and I, and suffered from continually broken hearts. It helped to talk about it, and if that were all I had taken from Harold, it would have been enough.

  But because of our proximity I was made privy to the discoveries of Harold Schernoff.

  I was, for instance, present when Harold personally discovered a new use for electricity.

  Electricity had of course been around for a long time before Harold discovered it. Franklin did the kite, and Edison the bulb, and countless others added their inventions and improvements to bring it up to its present state as a functioning technology.

  But Harold found an even newer use for it one afternoon in Mrs. Johnson’s science class.

  Actually, had I been thinking, I could have seen it coming. The day before, we had learned about electrons and how they traveled through wires. On the way home we had stopped outside the school in some bushes as I avoided Dick Chimmer, who had said something about tying me in a square knot.

  Harold had said, “They’re alive.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Oh, you mean Chimmer. I’m not sure he’s human but I know he’s alive.…”

  “No. Electrons. They’re alive. They’re in everything, in all the atoms that make us up, so they must be alive.”

  I tried to get a mental picture but nothing came, just a diagram that Mrs. Johnson had put on the board with little spheres orbiting in circles.

  “I mean think of it,” he said, pushing his glasses back up his long nose. “If we’re alive, then they’re alive in us, whirling and spinning. We have the powe
r of the atom in us, the power of the electron.”

  “Uhhh … all right. So we have electrons in us and they’re alive. So what?”

  “Right inside us, all that power—if we just had a way to harness it.”

  “Harness it?”

  “Don’t you see? Mrs. Johnson said atoms and electrons are the power of the sun. If we could tap into it … think of it!”

  And I tried, but I was too limited. When Chimmer was gone and we were walking home, I might as well have been alone. He was already working on a way to do it, making calculations and formulas in his head.

  It happened the next day in Mrs. Johnson’s class. Harold had acted strange walking to school, not talking much. Usually he was animated, talking with a lowered voice (you half expected him to start smoking a pipe) and pointing when he wished to illustrate something important. (“It would be physically impossible for Chimmer to break you exactly in half with his bare hands—the tensile strength of the center of the human body is far too strong to allow it. Though the attempt would probably be painful.”)

  Gym had been the usual disaster. Wankle, the gym teacher-football coach-Nazi beast (as Harold called him), made me try to climb the rope, which I couldn’t. I hung in the middle like a sick bat while Wankle made Harold run laps, which he couldn’t, until his sinuses blew and his nose ran down onto his T-shirt.

  After gym we went to Mrs. Johnson’s class, and had I been prepared I could have watched more closely, but I know what time it happened—2:23—because the clock stopped.

  At that instant Mrs. Johnson turned her back on the room to write something on the board and there was an enormous cracking, buzzing sound, the whole room flashed in a white light—like a hundred flashbulbs going off—and the pungent smells of ozone and burned flesh and hair filled the room.

  I turned and saw Harold sitting straight up, his glasses fogged so you could barely see his eyes opened wide, every hair on his head standing straight out and his mouth in a frozen smile that went from ear to ear. The entire left side of his head was covered in some dark blue fluid.

  “Harold,” I whispered. “Are you all right?”

  There was no answer. Later I was to find out what he had done, that he had calculated that a dead short would provide almost infinite power to his personal electrons. He’d taken the metal cartridge of a ballpoint pen and a large paper clip he’d swiped from Mrs. Johnson’s desk on the way in and twisted them together. He’d wet his fingers with his mouth—an insane touch, that—waited until Mrs. Johnson turned her back on the room, and jammed the pen and paper clip, twisted together, into the outlet next to his desk.

  They said lights in the whole school dimmed and that they read a fluctuation in the power station in Fargo, North Dakota, but I don’t know if it’s true.

  I do know it blew ink all over the side of Harold’s head and that the school nurse, who came and took him to lie down for a bit—another benefit of the experiment—said he was lucky it didn’t kill him.

  But he didn’t care. Later, while we were walking home and he was trying to comb his hair back down, he was still smiling. His half-inked head made him look goofy.

  “Don’t you know how dangerous it is to stick something into a socket?” I said. “I can’t believe you’re still alive!”

  He walked on, smiling.

  “I understand the experiment,” I said, “or I think I do. You had to do it, right? But why the smile when I looked back, and why are you grinning like that?”

  “It was incredible,” he said, the grin widening. “I was looking at Julie Hansen at the exact moment that I made contact and my electrons fused with the electrons of the power station. It gave me X-ray vision. I saw through her clothes.”

  I stopped. “You really saw Julie Hansen naked?”

  “Well, it was just from the back and I only got through the outer layers. I think I need more power.…” He paused for a moment, thinking. “I wonder what would happen if I got better contact? Say if I stuck my tongue in a light socket …”

  I turned and started walking again.

  2. Brain over Brawn

  There is always a solution. For everything. Always. Sometimes it isn’t pretty and takes a little longer, but there is still a solution.

  —SCHERNOFF ON PROBLEMS

  “Very well.”

  “Very well what?” We were walking down the street headed home from school, having dodged Chimmer, walked past Julie Hansen’s house without seeing her, and stopped at Overholt’s grocery, where we bought two ice-pop push-ups, mine green, Harold’s yellow. Since we had not been talking about anything, but working on the push-ups, I didn’t have a clue as to what he meant.

  “I am talking about problem solving. I meant very well, we have taken care of the last most pressing problem, and now we shall move on to the next.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “What was our biggest problem last week?”

  That was easy. “The football team.”

  “Exactly. And didn’t we solve it?”

  “Actually I think it’s too soon to know. Seven had to go to the doctor and the rest of them are still too busy sitting to know for certain.”

  “Just the same, you’ll see the problem is solved. You’ll see.…”

  It had all been perfect Schernoff—turning a disaster into a solution. Harold had come up to me one morning before semester break. His eyes flashed wide behind his glasses the way they did when he had an idea, which was most of the time, and he said, “I know how we can meet girls.”

  “Meeting them isn’t the hard part,” I said. “It’s keeping them around long enough to talk to them. They practically run from us.”

  “Exactly. We must stay in proximity to them until our charms can become evident to them. That is why we’re going to take home economics.”

  “No.” I said it so fast I surprised even myself. “No we’re not.”

  “And why not?”

  “Only girls take home ec.”

  “Exactly. There we shall be, the only two boys locked in a room with all the girls for a whole period. None of the other boys to bother us. It’s classic. Simply classic.”

  And he talked me into it. Not right away, not even that day or the next, but by the third day I was not thinking of the difficulties but of the prospect of being with all those girls for a whole period. Shirley and Julie and Karen and Elaine and Devonne—just reeling their names off broke my resistance. Girls I hadn’t dared speak to, girls I hadn’t even dared think of, and we’d be with them.…

  So we did it.

  This was in a time long ago when there were some very stupid, very defining social rules about the differences between boys and girls. Girls did not play in what were called boys’ sports—baseball, basketball, football, hockey or anything else that required strenuous effort; women did not get equal pay for equal work (something still not remedied); girls waited for boys to open doors for them; boys took industrial arts (called shop) and made worthless letter openers and napkin holders, and, well …

  Boys did not take home economics.

  As soon as we signed up and went to the first class I knew we were in trouble. The teasing started immediately, and I thought at once of dropping the class. People who didn’t even know me, had never noticed me before, stopped me in the hall to tell me I was a candybutt or a sissy and even when I wore a pair of aviator sunglasses some bowler left at the alley, I was recognized and poked fun at. It was equally bad for Harold. We started walking home down back streets and bush-to-bush to avoid being seen.

  But we were there, and the girls were there, and some of them had even started to talk to me and Harold as well and this was so startling and wonderful that we stayed in the class.

  I can’t say we learned much, or that I learned much. I was too busy staring at the girls, listening to the girls, absorbing it all. To come from where I’d been socially—somewhere beneath a one-celled animal—to being immersed in a room full of girls so rapidly was, to say the leas
t, heady and I heard almost nothing the teacher said. This resulted in a largely failing grade and a set of baking-powder biscuits that could have been used for cannonballs.

  For Harold, of course, it was different.

  “It’s simply chemistry,” he said one morning while handing me a delicious apple tart that he’d just finished baking. “This whole thing of cooking. You mix ingredients and cause a chemical change. If you have even a rudimentary understanding of organic chemistry cooking is a snap.”

  “Well, there you go.” I shrugged. “I’m a little rusty on organic chemistry.”

  Before long it seemed our entire life had changed. Girls were actually talking to me—more important, I was talking back to them, something my shyness had kept me from doing before—and Harold was turning out pies and cakes and even whole three-course meals, knew how to do laundry better than a professional (the girls were having him do their ironing) and had become the center of a regular storm of feminine interest. It looked like he’d been right, that taking home economics had been a stroke of genius. I told him as much and was teetering on the edge of actually asking Clarissa Peterson (not Julie Hansen, I wasn’t ready for that yet) to go to a movie.

  Then the football team discovered us.

  Not the whole team. Not at first. But Duane Larsen, who played center and had been hit in the head way too many times, heard that his girl, Betty, was spending time talking to Harold. He decided he should investigate the situation. To Duane, this meant stopping Harold in the hall, picking him up off the floor with his hands around Harold’s neck and holding him that way until Harold’s face turned blue and he puked all over Duane.

  So Betty told Duane he was an unfeeling animal and that Harold was “sensitive” and “caring” and that Duane could just go jump in something cold and wet and slimy and that Harold and I, far from being geeks, were the hits of home economics.

  For a brief time I was happy to be included as a hit of anything, even home economics. But Duane told another football player, who told others.