The Science of Breakable Things

by Tae Keller

  But instead, I tucked the book under my shirt and left the room. It’s not like I was going to read it. I just wasn’t ready to put it back.

  Mr. Neely showed a movie about fungus today, which meant half the class fell asleep immediately. It didn’t help that rain drummed against the windows, a dreamy kind of lullaby that made it hard to concentrate. And even though I tried to focus on the fungi, my thoughts kept drifting back to the orchid and Mom’s book.

  I was so distracted that I almost didn’t notice when Tom K. dropped a note on my desk. He pointed across the room at Twig when I looked up, and Twig nodded as I unfolded the note.

  What’s wrong?

  I shrugged and crumpled the scrap of paper.

  Twig frowned and sent another note down the line. Tom K. handed it to me, shooting me a look that said he didn’t appreciate being our postman.

  Don’t shrug at me, Natalie. I can tell something’s wrong. You look mopey.

  I shrugged again. Twig sent another note.

  Now you’re just being annoying. Come over after school? I got a new board game. Found it at a thrift store with Hélène. Called “Whose PANTS?” Needs to be played ASAP.

  And that’s how I ended up back at Twig’s house this afternoon, playing Whose PANTS? and having no idea whatsoever about our assignment for class. Between passing notes with Twig and thinking about Mom, I hadn’t exactly paid attention in any of my classes.

  “Were you listening when Mr. Neely explained the assignment?” I asked Twig as she rolled the dice and moved her little bell-bottom game piece across the board. As it turns out, Whose PANTS? is basically a combination of Guess Who? and Chutes and Ladders. You move around the board and ask yes-or-no questions, and the first pair of pants to be reunited with its owner wins.

  “No, I was busy asking you what’s wrong,” Twig said. “Which you never answered, by the way, even though something was obviously wrong. You were frowning all through class, and not even at Mikayla. Does my owner wear glasses?”

  “No,” I answered. “And nothing is wrong. I promise.”

  Twig gave me a look that said she didn’t believe me, but she didn’t push it. Once upon a time, Twig and I told each other everything, because we’re best friends and that’s what best friends do. Once upon a time, I would have answered, Yes, something’s wrong. And I would have told her that Mom stopped getting out of bed, and Dad and I couldn’t make her happy anymore—not even with chicken and pasta—and everything was different now.

  Instead, I asked, “Is my owner human?” Because in case I forgot to mention, some of the pants wearers were vampires or aliens. Also one centaur, although why the centaur needed pants was unclear.

  “No, not human,” Twig replied.

  I had been heading down a path toward the clown (decidedly human), so I rolled the dice and started backtracking.

  Twig appeared in my life at the perfect time, back when Mikayla was getting weird—and our best-friendship was instant. Back then, I would have told Twig everything, and Twig would have said, Tell me more, and we would have talked and talked until my throat was scratched and raw with honesty.

  But then we got older and Twig’s parents got “amicably separated” and we learned which topics to avoid, because sometimes that’s what best friends do, too.

  Twig found her pants owner first, reuniting her bell-bottoms with the astronaut. She did her little celebratory dance, which consisted of lots of jumps and spins, but she seemed less enthusiastic than usual. For a second, I thought she might say something real, but then she saw the look on my face and said, “Let’s play again.”

  Before a scientist can understand what they don’t know, they have to investigate what they do know. That was practically Mom’s favorite rule of science, and whenever she tried to work through a Big Question, she always started by making a list of knowns. So here’s what I know:

  1. Mom and Dad met in college, and Dad fell in love first. I’ve seen their photo albums and it’s stamped like bam! all over his face.

  2. Mom is not beautiful, not in the usual way, but people always fall in love with her. She had this way about her. Something like happiness.

  3. Just a few months ago, over the summer, Mom was Mom. She was happy. She talked about her work at the university lab, the research with the orchids and potential breakthroughs, and she smiled and things were good.

  4. And then the hushed conversations started. Not enough funding, not enough findings. Again and again and again. And one conversation, in particular: She thinks I should take a break. I played all those snippets over again in my head after things got really bad, looking for some kind of explanation. And then it clicked. Mrs. Menzer fired Mom. This was the woman I’d known all my life, who’d worked by Mom’s side and laughed as Mikayla and I presented fake research reports. The woman who’d come to our house for countless dinners, who’d always asked me about my life as if she actually cared. But after ten years of research, she stopped believing in the Cobalt Blue Orchids. And she stopped believing in Mom. I don’t know which betrayal is worse.

  5. Mom couldn’t go to work anymore, and she got sucked into the darkness. Basically, Mrs. Menzer ruined our lives, because it was like she broke Mom. Mom just stopped. And now I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to fix her.

  Mr. Neely has decided to give us a break from cutting open small animals and watching boring videos to return to the scientific process. He reminded us to keep working on our long-term project. He also gave me a “friendly reminder” to find a question to investigate.

  Question: At what temperature does water boil?

  Answer: 212 degrees Fahrenheit, 100 degrees Celsius, according to Google. #Done.

  And because I finished my homework early, I figured I might as well investigate my secret question—the question I couldn’t find the words for.

  I let myself into Dad’s office. He sat with his back to me, hunched over a bunch of files on his desk. His office is bright, with big floor-length windows and lamps—lots of lamps. He’s all about brightness now that Mom has retreated into the dark.

  “Dad?” I walked up behind him, feeling like a shadow.

  He startled a bit and turned around, blinking at me like his eyes were adjusting. “Hello, Natalie, what is it?” he said, all formal and weird, like he always gets when he’s working.

  “I’m doing research for class,” I said.

  He glanced down at my notebook and relaxed because research is where Dad’s most comfortable. He’s safe inside statistics and diagnoses and actionable next steps. I looked down at my notebook, got my pen ready to show him this was strictly business, and continued. “What does it mean if someone only likes to be in the dark?”

  I could tell he saw right through me because he tensed back up again. “Naaaatalie,” he said, drawing my name out, cautious.

  I pressed on, staring back down at my notebook, because I didn’t really want to know the answers, but also, I really did. “Why would somebody stop caring about their family?” I asked.

  “Natalie,” Dad said again. He nudged my notebook away so he could look me right in the eyes. Dad believes in eye contact. “We should talk about your mother. We should talk about how you’re feeling.”

  I told him I didn’t want to talk about my mother, or my feelings. What I wanted was to finish my science assignment. But Dad was looking at me with those Therapist Eyes, saying, “I want you to know: what’s happening with your mother has nothing to do with you.”

  That’s the problem. I don’t seem to affect her at all. And that has everything to do with me. Of course, I couldn’t tell him that, so I said, “Never mind,” and left his office. He was conflicted, I could tell, but he didn’t follow me.

  I didn’t know where to go then. I felt trapped between the dark of Mom’s room and the fake light of Dad’s office, and without thinking, I went to m
y bedroom, grabbed Mom’s book, and walked right outside, into Mom’s greenhouse.

  My earliest memories are of being in that greenhouse with Mom, growing our little plant family, following her rules, watering and fertilizing each seed just right. A few months earlier, the greenhouse had been beautiful, blooming with life and color and real, delicious light.

  It was less beautiful now. In the summer, when Mom stopped working, caring, Dad went into a frenzy over the flowers, brimming with energy I’d never seen in him, watering and weeding and watering some more. Dad spent hours in the greenhouse trying to save the plants my mother no longer loved.

  He loved them too hard, if you know what I mean, if you know plants at all. Some of them survived, but you’re not supposed to water plants too much. They need space. Funny, huh?

  Mom and I used to spend all our time in here, touching and smelling the flowers, talking about life, and soaking up sunlight. But today I stood in the corner for the first time in six weeks, staring at our used-to-be plants—brown and crisp and dead all over.

  In the center of the greenhouse, one tall stem stood alone, brown like all the rest of the plants. The petals had long abandoned it. But it used to be blue—a brilliant, magic kind of blue. A Cobalt Blue Orchid. A plant with a brand-new Latin name.*1 A miracle plant all our own.

  I sat down on the dirt floor, beneath the row of dead plants so I couldn’t see them, and held Mom’s book in my lap. I didn’t mean to read it. I meant to turn around and go back inside, but my hands opened the book almost without meaning to. That excited-nervous feeling came back as I smelled its old-book smell, and I turned to the Cobalt Blue Orchid section and read Mom’s words.

  In San Juan, New Mexico, in 1991, a pipe at a power plant burst. The town was contaminated with toxic amounts of metal and chemicals in the soil, but all the people were safe.

  The flowers were not. All the flowers died—every last one. Toxic amounts of cobalt and aluminum saturated the earth, poisoning the plants. Nothing could grow, and nothing did grow.

  Until two years later, seemingly out of nowhere, an orchid sprouted, a shock of blue in this vast expanse of empty dirt. Not too long after, another emerged. Soon enough, there were bright blue orchids blooming all over the field.

  Imagine it. Imagine driving past this field of dirt every day on your way to work, past all that nothingness, and then one day: flowers. Beautiful blue flowers everywhere.

  First nothing, then everything.

  I read on, past Mom’s chapter on anthocyanin pigments and active ion transport, past her talk of hybrids and fungus and moss. The sun started slipping away, and the light in the greenhouse faded. I kept expecting Dad to come find me, to tell me to come inside for dinner, but he never came. And I kept reading:

  Perhaps you have to be a botanist to understand the significance of these Cobalt Blue Orchids—to know how delicate orchids are. How they die without the perfect amount of sun and just the right amount of water. And you would have to understand the sheer impossibility of a blue orchid in order to understand the miracle of these flowers. How this delicate orchid somehow sprouted when no other plant could. How it sucked those toxic chemicals straight out of the earth and churned them into beauty.

  But I’d like to think that even without knowing the nitty-gritty of how plants work, all you’d have to do is stand in the middle of that shockingly blue field to know that this is science at its most miraculous—its most magical.

  Mom was the one who believed in this flower—in all it could do. She’d told the story a million times. How everyone was shocked and amazed by the color.*2 How all the other botanists studied the blueness, but Mom said, Wait. There’s more. There was a magic in living through that chemical poison, and Mom was the first one to realize it.

  And while Mom and Mrs. Menzer studied the Cobalt Blue Orchid in their lab, Mom and I kept our own orchid in the greenhouse. We nurtured it and cared for it and loved it. We kept it safe.

  And now it’s dead. My mother—the one who once wrote about science and magic and miracles—let it die. I felt that whirring, sparking feeling in my chest again. An idea was starting to click into place.

  Because even though our orchid was dead, there was still that vast, beautiful field of blue all the way in New Mexico, full of miracles and hope. Maybe Mom just needed to be reminded of that.

  Maybe she’d forgotten.

  *1 Family: Orchidaceae, for orchid. Genus: Cattleya, for the botanist William Cattley. Species: fortis, for brave.

  *2 For those of you who haven’t spent your whole life with a botanist mother, orchids don’t grow blue in nature. You can dye them blue, but they don’t grow that way. And then the disaster happened and orchids started growing, sucking up the processed chemicals from moss, and just like that: blue orchid. Ta-da, magic. Science. Miracle.

  Mom and I had a Halloween tradition. Every year, I would dress up as a different plant. I would flip through her botany books to find the perfect one, and we’d go to the craft store together and make an elaborate costume. Last year, I dressed as the Hawaiian hāpu‘u pulu fern, and Mom and I spent hours making huge spiraling fronds that came up off my shoulders. Most people thought I was some kind of alien or insect, but I didn’t even care, and Twig and I walked all through my neighborhood trick-or-treating.

  Add Halloween to the list of things Mom forgot to care about, because this year, she didn’t mention it. So I didn’t, either, and Dad didn’t, and our whole family spent this past week carefully avoiding the subject.

  I came downstairs this morning in regular clothes, my normal jeans and a plain sweater. When Dad looked up at me, sadness flashed across his face—just for a moment, and then it was gone. “No costume this year, Nats?” His voice was all false cheerfulness. “You know, there’s still time to dig that fern costume out of the garage, if you’re up for it.”

  I half shrugged, half shook my head. “I’m too old for costumes now,” I said.

  I told myself this was true. That I wouldn’t have worn a costume anyway. If Twig had been in town, she would have protested and worn the flashiest costume she could find—probably something that lit up or made noise—but she was in Paris with her mom for the week.*

  Thing is: I kind of was too old, for the most part. A handful of kids dressed up today, but most kids just wore normal clothes, or those don’t-actually-count costumes like baseball jerseys.

  “I haven’t dressed up in three years,” I overheard Mikayla tell Janie as I shoved my books into my locker before class. She said it as if this were something to brag about, and I bit the inside of my cheek and tried not to think about what plant Mom and I might have chosen this year.

  Mostly, I spent the day keeping my head down and trying not to think too hard about stuff, which I guess is kind of becoming my pattern. I was doing a pretty good job of avoiding any attention until the end of the day.

  Mr. Neely asked to speak to me after class. Again. Which was pretty embarrassing. And when he finally let us go for the day, I spent as long as possible packing up my books, trying to delay the awkwardness of having to talk to him. Mikayla raised her eyebrows at me as she left, like, Boy, you must be really stupid. I hate that I was once best friends with her.

  After everybody had bolted, I shuffled up to Mr. Neely’s desk. “Hi,” I said, which sounded just as awkward as I’d expected, but I wasn’t sure what else to say.

  We’re studying cell division right now, so for Halloween he dressed up as meiosis. This pretty much meant he was wearing a giant Velcro vest with little chromosomes attached. He’d been rearranging them during class, using the vest to demonstrate all the different phases of cell division. He was also inexplicably wearing ladybug antennae. I don’t even know.

  He pointed to his vest, all excited. “Hey, can you tell me which phase of meiosis this cell is currently in?”

  I stared at his vest. One of
the chromosomes wasn’t sticking to the Velcro very well, so it drooped a little. It had been bothering me the whole time.

  “Um,” I said. “I hypothesize that it’s…micro…phase?” I don’t think he was trying to test me, but it was pretty clear I hadn’t been paying attention.

  Mr. Neely deflated a bit. “Well, good job hashtag-educated-guessing, but it’s actually telophase two. See, the chromosomes have been divided into four separate haploids.”

  “Oh, right.” I nodded as if I understood what he was talking about. “Um, is that why you called me up here?” I asked, even though I knew exactly why he wanted to talk to me.

  “Not quite.” He smiled at me, one of those you’re not in trouble yet but you will be soon smiles that teachers love to give. “Have you thought any more about your scientific question?”

  I’d been thinking a lot about Mom, and I had about a million half questions swirling in my head about her, but that wasn’t what he was looking for. “Uh,” I said.

  He nodded very slowly and examined me. I hate how adults look at me now, ever since the “situation” started.

  “Well, you know I’d love for you to do the egg drop,” he said, “but whatever it is, you need to pick something by Friday. If you’re having any trouble, I suggest starting back at the scientific process. Use your Wonderings journal to plumb the depths of thinking, to observe and question the world.” He winked—actually winked—so I knew Mr. Neely was back to being weird old Mr. Neely and not one of those teachers who examined their students.

  “Okay, will do,” I said, but that sounded kind of rude, so I added, “Thanks for the suggestion.”

  He grinned like I’d just thrown a parade in his honor. “You’re so very welcome, Natalie!”