“I heard the dog, but I just thought the Petersons’ neighbors had gotten another dog. They’ve got two dogs already, so I just never thought about it.” Calvin pulls his PSP from his pocket and finds a comfortable spot on the floor. He fires it up.
Four
The Numbers Don’t Lie
“I’ll be in the car,” Calvin says to his dad the next morning as he gets up from the table.
“Hold on.” His father takes the poster out of his hands, rolls it up, and puts a rubber band around it. “There. Now you can carry it without messing it up.”
The night before, Calvin had spent hours working on the materials he’d be using to collect his data. Now he runs through a mental checklist: illusion cards, stopwatch, data-collection worksheet . . . check.
He stuffs everything into his backpack. He’s pleased with the poster board he decorated for the table he’s going to use. He did a good job. First he wrote in pencil: Who’s Faster—Boys or Girls? (You can find out by taking part in a little experiment.) Then he went over his lettering with red marker. The red letters against his yellow board look really good.
He thinks of the data-collection sheet that his father helped him make. It has columns and rows, with the columns labeled NAMES, ILLUSION, and TIME. It looks pretty professional. It looks great.
“Thanks, Dad.” Calvin takes a bite out of his cinnamon toast as he heads for the door with the poster under his arm.
“Hold up there,” his father says.
Calvin stops short with his hand just about to touch the doorknob. He’s not surprised. He’s been expecting to get quizzed by his dad. He turns and faces him.
“What’s the hurry all of a sudden? What’s going on?”
“Uh . . . nothing. I’m just anxious to get to school,” Calvin says. “ ’Cause I’m asking Ms. Shelby-Ortiz if I can collect my data today.” He turns and eases out the door calmly, pretending he’s not in a hurry.
From the car, scrunched down in the back seat, he listens for the sound of Harper’s front door opening and closing. When he hears it, he peeks out and sees Harper jump off his porch and head up the street with his backpack slung over one shoulder. Calvin eases back up to a normal sitting position. He wonders what’s in the backpack, since Harper is all the time getting benched for not turning in his homework. Just before Harper gets to the corner, he starts punching the air again.
Calvin shows Ms. Shelby-Ortiz his hypothesis. It looks like she’s trying to keep from smiling. His father had the same reaction. Is there something funny about his hypothesis? He can’t imagine what. He shows her his poster board and his data-collection form. She seems really pleased.
“I’m impressed,” she says. “And, the results should be interesting.”
“Can I set up on the playground at recess so I can collect my data? And can Richard or Carlos or Gavin help me?”
Ms. Shelby-Ortiz gives him permission, and he finishes his morning work as fast as possible. Just before recess Carlos helps Calvin carry a small table, two chairs, the poster, the chart, tape, and a stopwatch out to the yard. They finish setting up everything just as the bell rings and students start streaming out of the building.
Calvin takes his place at the card table. Naturally, kids come over and crowd around him, curious about his setup.
“Don’t push,” Calvin says. “I’m only picking subjects from Room Ten.”
He puts five optical-illusion cards on the table, face-down so no one can see them until he’s ready. He looks up and begins to point to kids from his class. He chooses Antonia, Leslie, Nikki, Alyssa, and Beverly. They’re the girls who Ms. Shelby-Ortiz never has to ask to stop talking or get back to work. Well, Leslie can sometimes be a problem, but she’s still better than most, he thinks. They’ll probably be really cooperative. Then he chooses Erik, Gerald, Richard, Gavin, and Carlos.
Carlton cries out, “He’s choosing his friends! He’s choosing his friends!”
“So?” Richard says.
“That doesn’t matter,” Antonia says.
“Not to you,” Carlton protests.
“I can only choose ten total,” Calvin explains, “because each kid has to look at five optical illusions, and I have only room for ten on my data sheet.”
Carlton frowns. “What’s an optical illusion?”
“I can’t explain it,” Calvin says. “Everybody except Erik, go play! Carlos will come and get you when it’s your turn.”
He hadn’t thought of how he’d handle getting kids to his table. It’s a good thing Ms. Shelby-Ortiz allowed him to have a helper.
After the group reluctantly disperses, Erik takes the seat across from him.
For a moment Calvin doesn’t know exactly what to do. He should have practiced with his friends, but then maybe that would have been cheating, in a way.
“Okay,” he says. He takes one card from the stack and puts it in front of Erik. He keeps it face-down. They both look at the back of the card for a few seconds. Then Calvin fiddles with the stopwatch he borrowed from his father. He doesn’t remember what his father told him about how to work it. Erik takes it out of his hand and shows him which buttons to press and when.
Calvin picks up his clipboard with the data sheet attached. He writes Erik’s name on the first line. “My name is spelled with a k,” Erik says.
Calvin erases the c and puts a k. “All right, when I say go, you’re going to turn the card over, and you’ll see ten words in different colors spelling out names of colors, but the name is not going to match the color of the word. You have to say the actual color and ignore the word. As fast as you can. Got it?”
“I get it.”
“And do it as fast as you can, like I said. See, the left side of your brain’s gonna make you want to say the word. It’s going to be hard for the right side of your brain to work and say the color. You ready?”
Erik nods, looking confident.
Calvin sets the stopwatch and says, “Go!”
Erik turns the card over and just stares at it. “Um,” he says while Calvin checks the ticking stopwatch and tries to mentally push him along. “Um . . .” Three long seconds go by, and Erik is still struggling. Finally he finishes and Calvin gets to press stop.
Thirty-five seconds to go through ten color words. Calvin can’t believe it.
“I just want to say,” Erik protests, “that’s not an optical illusion.”
“It’s one of my tests anyway,” Calvin says, and puts a new card on the table face-down. “When I tell you go, turn over the card and tell me the word hidden in the picture.”
Erik puts his hand on the card and waits. Calvin pushes the button on the stopwatch and says, “Go.”
Erik just stares at the card.
“What do you see?” Calvin asks, to hurry him along. “It’s a word. Come on, what do you see?” Calvin knows he isn’t supposed to say anything except the instructions, but this is frustrating. Erik is smart. Why is he acting so dumb?
“Um. I maybe think I see a face,” Erik says.
“There is no face,” Calvin hisses. “Look for a word.” Calvin isn’t supposed to say that, but he can’t help it. The stopwatch ticks on.
“A word?”
“A word, a word,” Calvin says, looking at the watch.
“Liar?”
Calvin stops the watch. He sighs. He writes down the time: eighteen seconds.
Next he puts the card with five wolves hidden in the picture face-down and resets the stopwatch. “When I say go, I want you to turn the card over and tell me how many wolves are in the picture. Any questions?”
Erik shakes his head and Calvin frowns. Erik’s not very good at this. He should have picked someone else.
Calvin starts the stopwatch and says, “Go!”
Erik says he see one wolf and stays with one wolf as twenty seconds tick away. Then he points out a second wolf. Calvin tries to will him to see three more, but he doesn’t. He just stares and stares. “I just see two,” he says finally.
Calvin makes a note on the data sheet and puts a two next to it. Then he places the next card face-down in front of Erik. It’s a picture with many faces.
“When I say go, look at the picture and tell me what you see—how many objects or people and what they are.”
“What they are?”
“Yeah, like men, women, old people.” He’s giving too much information, he knows. Calvin pushes the button on the stopwatch and says, “Go.”
Erik turns the card over and stares at it. “I see an old woman.”
“Uh-huh.” Calvin keeps his eyes on the stopwatch.
“And an old man.”
“Keep going.”
Silence. Calvin checks the stopwatch again.
“And a young woman.”
Calvin stops the watch. Eleven seconds. Not good. He puts the final picture in front of Erik. It’s the one that’s a trick question: How many black dots do you see? The answer is zero. The white dots only look black when your eyes are moving around the page. But if you keep your eyes still, you see only white dots.
Calvin waits for Erik to say zero. He looks at the stopwatch. The seconds are ticking away. Say zero! Calvin thinks. Zero! But Erik is silent. Finally he looks up. “I think there aren’t any black dots,” he says. Calvin stops the watch. Fourteen seconds.
Richard doesn’t do any better. His times are slower than Erik’s, and Carlos’s and Gavin’s are almost identically slow. Gerald has a hard time following directions. He keeps starting before Calvin even says go, making Calvin wonder, How are you going to get along in life if you can’t even follow the simplest directions? Gerald is super slow on the color words and only sees one wolf.
Calvin forges ahead. After the boys have had their turns, Calvin sends Carlos off to get Antonia. She comes over and sits in front of him. She looks at him with one eyebrow raised as if to say, What are you waiting for?
Calvin explains the procedure, and Antonia looks a little bit bored. They start with the color cards. Antonia goes through them in fourteen seconds and then gives him a look that says, What else you got?
Calvin puts the card with the hidden word face-down. With a tiny, confident smirk on her face, Antonia sits back and crosses her arms.
“When I say go, turn the card over and say the word hidden in the picture.”
She sighs. Calvin starts the stopwatch and says, “Go.”
Antonia turns over the card and says, “Liar.”
“What?” Calvin asks.
“The card says liar.”
Calvin writes down the time: three seconds.
She leans back even further, stretches out her legs, and waits for the next card.
The one where you count the wolves in the picture is no challenge for Antonia either. Calvin watches with dismay as she places a finger with pink nail polish on each of the five wolves in seven seconds. “Five,” she says, looking up at Calvin. “There are five wolves.”
As soon as the three-faces card is turned over, she states that there are three people: an old man, an old woman, and a young woman. For the black-dots card, she announces the answer is zero in three seconds.
Calvin frowns. It’s almost as if she’s seen all the cards before. Maybe the illusions were in some magazine she reads—Highlights or some Brownies magazine. She couldn’t be that fast.
Next comes Nikki. She sits down smiling, as if taunting him. She does just okay on the color cards, but sees the word liar on the hidden-word card almost immediately after he puts it down. On the wolves card, he barely gets the question out and she says, “Five. There are five wolves on that card.”
That cinches it. The girls must have seen that one before. But of course he can’t prove it.
Though they don’t do as well as Antonia and Nikki, Beverly, Alyssa, and Leslie do better than all the boys. Calvin doesn’t understand how this happened. His experiment is a complete failure. The results don’t match his prediction even a little bit. What went wrong? It must have been his subjects. He chose the wrong subjects. He needs new ones. He looks around the schoolyard just as the bell rings, signaling the end of recess—and the end of his data collection.
Five
It’s Not Nice to Eavesdrop
Calvin is still thinking about the disappointing results the next day when Ms. Shelby-Ortiz passes out blue construction paper and lined white paper to the class. It’s for the invitations they’re making to formally invite their parents to the science fair.
Deja, who now sits across from Calvin and next to Richard at Table Three, grabs four markers—though she knows she can only use one at a time—and slips them into her desk.
Ms. Shelby-Ortiz doesn’t allow them to hoard markers in their desks. All the markers that aren’t being used have to remain in the marker can that sits in the middle of the table. And Deja knows that, Calvin thinks.
Plus, Deja hasn’t even bothered copying, in her neatest handwriting, the paragraph inviting parents to Carver Elementary School’s annual science fair, nor has she written down the pertinent details, such as the date, location, and time. Her parents won’t even know that the science fair is next Friday after school if she doesn’t bother to include that information. She’s trying to jump to the fun part—drawing flowers all over and coloring them—before doing the work.
Calvin is about to point out all the things she’s doing wrong when Ms. Shelby-Ortiz says, “I don’t want to see anyone using markers before I’ve approved their actual invitation. In other words, if I see anyone decorating their invitation before I’ve approved it, that person will be starting over.”
Calvin looks at Deja pointedly. She rolls her eyes at him but doesn’t return the markers. Calvin’s hand shoots up. Slowly, with her eyes on Calvin the whole time and her mouth poked out, Deja puts the markers back in the can. Calvin lowers his hand, looks at the board, and sighs. He feels such pressure when he’s ordered to write in his best handwriting.
“Oh,” Ms. Shelby-Ortiz says, “there’s one other really exciting thing about this year’s science fair.” She pauses for dramatic effect.
Calvin thinks that sometimes what Ms. Shelby-Ortiz says is exciting is only exciting to her. He waits politely but doesn’t expect much.
“This year we’re going to have a panel of parents judging your projects. Each parent on the panel will have a scorecard to judge each project and will give points based on hypothesis, interest level, display, results, conclusion, etc. I’ll go over it in more detail later.”
“But Ms. Shelby-Ortiz,” Rosario says without raising her hand and waiting to be recognized, “parents will give their own kids extra points.”
Ms. Shelby-Ortiz overlooks this infraction. “That’s where Mrs. Marker from the front office comes in handy. She’s going to serve as a kind of roaming substitute for the parent who needs to excuse himself or herself because his or her child is being scored.”
Rosario squints as if she’s mulling over this news. Ms. Shelby-Ortiz goes on. “It’s possible that the first-place winner is right here in Room Ten,” she says with a big smile on her face. “Fingers crossed.”
The good thing about doing extra stuff that’s not part of the morning routine is that it takes time away from the regular schedule. When the invitations are finished, the class only has time to do a little reading before recess.
“There’s Monster Boy,” Richard says, pointing at Harper making his way to the benches. “Your neighbor.”
“Don’t point,” Calvin says quickly.
“Why? He doesn’t even know he lives next door to you.”
Calvin watches Harper take his usual seat on the bench. He puts his elbows on the table behind him and surveys the playground. Calvin wonders about him. Why is he so angry? Why doesn’t he care that he gets benched every few days?
“So Harper lives with his grandmother?” Carlos asks.
“I guess she’s his grandmother,” Calvin answers.
“And she’s mean?”
“She sounds mean.”
“Maybe that’s what makes him mad,” Richard says.
“Maybe,” Calvin agrees. Then he hurries ahead to be the first in line at the handball court.
“Let’s go by Delvecchio’s and get some snacks,” Carlos suggests as the group heads down the street when school lets out. Calvin managed to get permission to go with his friends to Richard’s after school for an hour to continue work on his science-fair project. Richard has the new PSP, and Calvin just wants to preview it a little bit so he’ll know whether to start bugging his parents for it or not.
It isn’t until they’re almost at Mr. D.’s store that Calvin remembers he left the invitation to the science fair in his desk at school. Ms. Shelby-Ortiz is giving points for returning it in a timely manner, which means tomorrow.
“Shoot,” he says as everyone turns toward Ashby and Mr. D.’s. “I forgot my invitation. It’s in my desk.”
“So bring it home tomorrow,” Richard says.
“Our table needs the points, and I don’t want to be the one who gets blamed when we don’t have a one hundred percent responsible table.” Calvin sighs and turns back toward Carver Elementary.
Through the classroom door’s small window, Calvin can see his teacher at her desk. It looks like she’s correcting the spelling test they took the previous Friday. He taps on the window, and she looks up and smiles.
“Ms. Shelby-Ortiz,” he says, entering the room, “I just have to get my invitation to the science fair out of my desk.”
“What’s it doing in your desk?”
“I accidentally left it there.”
“But I remember telling everyone before our class lined up for dismissal to put their invitations in their backpacks. Didn’t you hear me tell the class that?”
Just then he does remember, but he doesn’t remember why he didn’t do it. Should he admit that? Better not. “Uh,” he says.
Trouble Next Door Page 3
