Miriam shushes Jordan and grabs her arm so hard that her fingers make little dents. “Hey, stop. You guys have to stop, or—”
“I didn’t know,” I say. “I swear it was an accident. Don’t be mad—”
“I’m not mad! I’m just . . . oh man.” Jordan wipes tears of laugher from her eyes. “If you’d shown us the profile, none of this would’ve—”
“Stop,” Miriam says.
“She tried to show it to us,” Keiko says. “Beth took it down, remember?”
And that’s when we notice that Mir’s mom and my mom and Dad and Krishnan are all staring at us with matching confused creases between their eyebrows, and panic shows up to the feelings party in my chest. “Can we please talk about this over there?” I hiss. “Or, like, later? After we leave?”
“What’s Head Over Heels?” Dad asks. He doesn’t sound angry, exactly—just careful, like he’s starting to realize the ice he’s standing on might not be thick enough to hold him.
“Isn’t that a dating site?” Miriam’s mom asks.
“What?” my mom says. “Were you girls messing around on a dating site? I don’t want you anywhere near those things. You’re twelve! What were you thinking?”
“Oh my god, it wasn’t for us!” I choke.
“Eww!” Miriam and Keiko say together.
Dad looks absolutely horrified. “What possible reason could you have for—” he starts. And then his expression changes, and he stares at me like he’s never seen me before. The bottom drops out of my stomach.
“Ella,” he says, his voice low and very, very calm, “please tell me this has nothing to do with the way you’ve been bugging me to start dating again.”
It hurts to hear him call me plain old Ella. I can’t remember the last time he called me anything but Ellabee.
Some tiny, frantic part of my brain is screaming that I can still salvage things if I can find the right words—the right lie—to make everyone believe that there’s a reasonable explanation for what’s happening. But I’m so overwhelmed that I can barely form a sentence.
“I’m so sorry,” I manage. “I know I— We— I shouldn’t have done it that way. But I— I thought—”
“You thought what? That you had permission to force me into dating, even when I explicitly told you I wasn’t interested?”
“Are you saying—” Krishnan starts, but Dad rounds on him and snaps, “Please stay out of this!”
“I didn’t force you to date!” I say. “I couldn’t have forced you if you didn’t want—”
“I’m sorry, what is happening right now?” Mom asks. Her eyes are so wide I’m afraid they’re going to pop right out of her face. “You signed your dad up for a dating site? Without his permission?”
I’m starting to feel a little dizzy, and when I blindly reach out for something to hold onto, my hand connects with a furry head. Elvis leans hard against my side, and I start to feel more grounded—I don’t think I’ve ever been happier that he can instinctively read my emotions. When he gently licks my hand, the pure kindness of it almost makes me start crying, but I swallow hard and shove the tears back down.
Beth lays a gentle hand on my dad’s arm. “Don’t be mad at her, David. She was only trying to make you happy.”
Dad whips around. “Did you know about this?”
“No! Of course not. But I’m just saying . . . does it actually matter how we met? People get set up all the time on purpose, and they have great relationships. How is this any different? The universe wanted us to be together, and now we are. Ella was only playing her part in the grand plan.”
Dad stares at Beth like she’s grown three heads and a glow-in-the-dark tail. “Let me get this straight. You’re saying that you don’t see any problem with my daughter impersonating me on the internet in order to pick up women?”
Beth shrugs, her face perfectly serene. “The road to happiness takes unexpected turns sometimes.”
“I wasn’t picking up women,” I say desperately. “I was—”
“Ella, I need you to stop talking,” Dad says. “I know that you’re a child, and maybe you’re not mature enough to understand how absolutely, ridiculously wrong this was. But you—” He turns on Beth. “You are old enough to know better.”
“I understood what I was doing!” I say. “I’m not a baby!”
“Calm down, Ella,” Krishnan says.
“Don’t you tell her to calm down,” Dad says. “This discussion does not involve you.”
“Excuse me, but last time I checked, I’m Ella’s parent too, and—”
“I’m not calming down!” I shout. My family and friends all stare at me—everyone in this entire convention center is probably staring at me right now—but I don’t even care, and I wheel around to face Dad again. “You’re the one who’s acting immature, not me! You’re the one who refused to come see me compete even though this was obviously super important to me because you can’t be in the same room as Krishnan without getting all depressed!”
“What? That’s not—” Dad starts, but I keep talking right over him.
“I don’t need you guys to be besties or whatever! But he’s going to be around whether you like it or not, and you can’t stop showing up to support me because of him! When I asked you to come down to Philadelphia, you brushed me off like it wasn’t important at all, like you didn’t even care, and the only way I could think of to make you act like your old self was to trick you into falling in love again so you’d stop caring that Mom did!”
Everyone stares at me in silence, disbelief painted all over their faces, and then Mom says, “Oh my god, Ella,” in this gentle voice, and suddenly all the embarrassment I should’ve been feeling before crashes over me like a wave. I want to crouch down and bury my face in Elvis’s fur, but I’ve just gone on a rant about how I’m not immature, so I can’t very well pull the “you can’t see me if I can’t see you” trick. Miriam puts a hand on my back, and I suddenly wonder how I ever managed to stay upright without her.
When I glance at Dad, his face is bright red, and it has such a weird expression on it that I can’t even tell if he’s angry or upset or embarrassed or what. It makes me want to throw my arms around him and say I’m sorry, that I didn’t mean it. But I did mean it.
“I can’t have this discussion right now,” he finally says, and his voice comes out much quieter than I expect. “I need to get out of here.”
“David, I think what Ella is trying to say is—” Beth starts, but Dad holds up his hand, and she stops talking.
“You and I need to have a chat,” he says to her. “Come on. I’ll drive you home.”
And then he turns around and walks away from us.
Today, 4:11 p.m.
Me: OMG I can’t BELIEVE this whole Aunt Libby/Beth thing
Jordan: I KNOW
Me: SO CRAZY
Jordan: SO SO CRAZY
Jordan: Seems like they’re about to break up tho, thank god
Me: Yeah he seemed pretty freaked out by all that stuff about the universe bringing them together
Me: Here’s the thing, though . . . she doesn’t actually seem that bad?
Me: Like I know you really hate her but I guess I don’t really know WHY
Jordan: She just drives me NUTS with all her new-agey stuff
Jordan: She buys me those inspirational posters like the ones outside the principal’s office for my birthday
Me: She got me one of those too!
Jordan: And totally disgusting tea that tastes like dirt
Jordan: And she tries to get me to brush my teeth with baking soda instead of toothpaste, so gross
Jordan: And she’s always trying to make me quit tae kwon do cause it’s “too aggressive”
Jordan: Whenever I say anything negative she tells me to do yoga breathing and put good intentions out into the universe
Jordan: Like, come on, I’m a human! I’m gonna get mad sometimes! It’s fine!
Me: Totally
Me: Tbh sh
e did some weird stuff with us too
Me: I really wanted something to work out for my dad so I tried not to think about it
Me: When I fell off my bike, she twirled this crystal over my ankle to absorb bad energy
Me: And she tried to rearrange our furniture when she came over for dinner
Jordan: SHE DOES THAT TO US ALL THE TIME
Me: Like . . . she doesn’t seem like a bad person or anything . . .
Jordan: No, she’s not. We’re just . . . really different
Jordan: I hope she finds a guy with 17 ferrets who makes her very happy
Me: LOL
Jordan: EVGAP sometime this week?
Me: Definitely
Me: I seriously need it
Jordan:
20
Mom spends the first five minutes of the car ride home snapping at me to put my phone down and lecturing me about being irresponsible on the internet and trying to manipulate Dad and Beth and “who knows how many other people.” Then she spends the next five minutes reassuring me that Dad still loves me even though I messed up. I really can’t handle any more feelings right now, so I curl up into a tight ball in the back seat and repeat “I’m sorry,” and “I know,” and “I really don’t want to talk about this,” over and over and over. Finally Krishnan tells her to leave me alone, that I’ll talk when I’m ready, and she goes quiet and turns on the radio. I spend most of the drive slipping in and out of sleep, lulled by the voices on NPR, having dreams about crowds of people laughing at me.
We stop at a Chinese restaurant on the way, and I eat my pork lo mien in silence. Before we get back on the road, I go to the bathroom and toss my “lucky” watermelon lip gloss in the trash with all the dirty wet paper towels. I never want to see it again.
It’s past nine by the time we get home, but I’m wide awake from my car nap. I know the normal thing to do when you’ve had an awful day is to watch dumb TV or play a video game or read a fantasy book, something that lets you escape from real life. But the only thing I really feel like doing is working on my science fair project. It seems like what happened today with Dad and Beth and losing the dog show was all spectacularly bad luck, but analyzing my data will remind me that nothing is random. Everything in the world happens according to predictable patterns, and if I don’t understand something, it’s just because I haven’t figured out the logic behind it yet.
I hook Krishnan’s digital camera up to the computer in the study, and then I play the files one by one in slow motion, holding a protractor up to the screen so I can measure the angle of each tail wag. It takes much longer than I thought it would, but it’s soothing to do a straightforward task that doesn’t involve any feelings. By the time Krishnan tells me to get off the computer and go to bed, I’m actually pretty calm.
The minute I’m done with breakfast on Sunday morning, I get right back to it. Halfway through the afternoon, I finally pencil my very last number into my spreadsheet, and my heart speeds up. It’s possible I’m the first one to ever think about tail wag angles, and soon a piece of life that seemed chaotic and inexplicable to everyone will suddenly make sense.
There are no obvious patterns in the numbers, so I pull out my calculator—when your results hide, it makes it even more fun to dig them out. I average all the tail wag angles for each dog, then calculate what percent deviation each stimulus caused. It all looks pretty random still. I list the tail wag angles for each stimulus in order of the dogs’ ages, the owners’ ages, the dogs’ weights, but I still can’t find a pattern.
Mom pokes her head into the study and says Dad has a work emergency. She wants to know if I’d be okay with staying here tonight and there tomorrow instead, and I tell her it’s fine. I try not to think about how there’s no such thing as a detergent-advertising emergency. I try not to think about how furious Dad must be with me if he’s canceling Italian Food Sunday.
I sort the data by the kind of snack I held up, by the kind of toy, by what time I did the tests. I separate the dogs by sex and try everything again.
Hours later, I still haven’t found any sort of pattern at all.
Like everything else in my life, my data is a random, chaotic mess.
• • •
I’m barely able to pay attention the next day in science. When the bell rings, my friends throw their stuff into their bags, chattering about how excited they are for the pizza in the cafeteria. Keiko pokes me in the ribs as I’m zipping up my pencil case. “Hello? Anybody home?”
“What?” I say.
“I asked you three times what your bet is for what the topping will be today. Jordan and Mir say pepperoni. I say sausage.”
“Um . . .,” I say, but I can’t focus on pizza toppings right now. “I don’t know. Save me a seat, okay? I need to talk to Ms. McKinnon for a minute.”
“Okay, sure,” Keiko says. Mir shoots me an Are you okay? look over her shoulder as she follows everyone else out the door, and I give her a half shrug in reply.
I wait until everyone has left before I approach Ms. McKinnon. Today she’s wearing a shirt with two giraffes on it, their necks bent into the shape of a heart, and looking at it makes me feel better for some reason. “Hey, can I talk to you for a second?” I ask.
“Of course,” she says.
I pull out my spreadsheet and my notes and hand them to her. “I spent all day yesterday trying to analyze the data for my science fair project, and I can’t find any sort of pattern,” I tell her. “Will you take a look?”
Most of the other teachers I’ve had would give my numbers a quick skim and tell me not to give up, to keep on working until I found something. But Ms. McKinnon isn’t most teachers. We sit down together at one of the lab tables, and she asks me to talk her through every step of my work, since explaining things out loud can sometimes help you make connections. When I’m done, she takes my spreadsheet and my notes and goes through them carefully, recalculating a few of the percentages to make sure I did them right. Eventually she puts the papers down and turns to face me.
“I’m really proud of you, Ella,” she says. “This is some excellent experimental work. Your methods are great, and you’ve been incredibly thorough. You’re becoming such a great scientist.”
“What did I do wrong, though?” I ask. “Can you just tell me? I’ve spent so much time thinking about it, and I can’t figure it out.”
“What makes you think you did something wrong?”
“Because this data doesn’t show anything. I thought my procedure was good, but maybe it wasn’t, or maybe I messed up because I was distracted, or maybe—”
“Ella,” my teacher says gently, and I stop talking. “Your data does show something. It shows that there isn’t a pattern.”
I stare at her. “What?”
“I mean, we can’t say for sure—this is only one trial. To be totally certain, you’d have to test a much bigger sample of dogs, and you’d need to run the experiment a bunch of times. You’d have to make sure other people got the same results when they followed the same steps. But finding that there’s no pattern doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. Not every experiment shows how things work. Sometimes they show one of the many, many ways things don’t work, and that’s valuable information too.”
I feel like the firm, solid basis of everything I believe is tilting to the side, making it hard for me to stay upright. I grip the edge of the table to try to hold the world in place. “But everything has a pattern. There are laws of science, and everything has to follow them. It has to. You told us that.”
“That’s true,” Ms. McKinnon says. “There are laws about motion and thermodynamics and conservation of energy, and on the very smallest level, atoms tend to behave in predictable ways.”
I nod hard. “Right. And everything is made of atoms, so if each one of them follows set patterns, then shouldn’t everything else do that too? I’m not saying it’s easy to find all the patterns, but they’re still there, right? If we dig hard enough?”
 
; Ms. McKinnon leans back in her chair and props her feet up on the metal ring around the bottom. “It seems like it should work that way, doesn’t it? Some people do believe it should be theoretically possible to predict the future by predicting the movement of atoms. But a dog isn’t just a bunch of subatomic particles. Dogs are living creatures with millions and millions of neurons in their brains, and each of those neurons fires hundreds of times per second. Scientists know a ton more about how brains work than we used to know even ten years ago, but it’s still not even the tiniest fraction of everything there is to know. So the fact that you didn’t find a pattern doesn’t mean you did your experiment wrong. It just means that the ways in which animals express happiness are complicated. Imagine how difficult it is to figure out patterns in the human brain—we each have a hundred billion neurons.”
I think back through the past couple of months—the way I tried over and over to find the right variables that would make my dad fall in love, the way I pinpointed every problem I could possibly have at a dog show and nipped each one in the bud. I thought I had made things totally foolproof. But I still didn’t win the dog show, and my dad and Beth are over almost before they began, and now Ms. McKinnon’s basically telling me that even if I had worked much harder, I couldn’t have made things turn out any differently. I couldn’t have read Elvis correctly and adjusted my handling, because he wasn’t trying to tell me anything at all. The world doesn’t follow rules. It’s completely, totally random.
I really don’t want to cry in front of my teacher, but the tears spill down my cheeks before I can stop them.
Ms. McKinnon’s hand flies up to her mouth. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. If you base your science fair project on this data, you’re going to get a really good grade, I promise. You don’t have to get perfect results to get an A. It’s all about the process, and I can see how hard you’ve worked.”
“It’s not about the science fair,” I sniffle.
Ella Unleashed Page 14