by Tae Keller
Twig glared at her mom and I gave a little wave goodbye. Clarissa glitter-laughed again and floated away.
When we were alone, Twig frowned. “Sorry about her,” she said.
If I were Twig, I wouldn’t apologize for Clarissa, because at least she was walking around and talking and living—but I kept my mouth shut. Twig knew Mom wasn’t working anymore, but that was all she knew. The topic was one of those No-Go Zones.
“So, anyway. Operation Egg,” she said in a Serious Business voice. “What’s the plan?”
I sighed. First Dad, now Twig—everyone expected me to have a plan. I reached into my backpack and pulled out my list. “My dad and I bought this stuff a few days ago.”
“Sweet.” She took the list from me and read it. Her eyes moved over the items, as if this whole egg thing—or Operation Egg—were one of her games. Soon she would be talking strategy and battle moves and breaking out her dice, just for luck. “Play-Doh?”
I shrugged. “I thought it might help.”
She scrunched up her face and then nodded. “Yes, I like it. Basketball?”
“I thought that might help, too?”
Twig laughed, slapping the table so hard the glasses jumped. Nobody could laugh like Twig. “Why on earth would you think that?”
My cheeks got hot, and my eyes burned, even though this was only Twig, even though she hadn’t meant to say anything wrong. “I thought maybe I could put the egg inside it,” I said.
Twig frowned. Her tone softened. “How?”
“Um.”
And then she tilted her head and squinted at me like I was her scientific question and she was trying to investigate the answer. “And your dad just bought all this stuff for you? He didn’t think these items were a little weird?”
“I think he felt bad.”
I could tell Twig was thinking, wondering what I wasn’t saying, but she didn’t ask.
Twig was good like that.
*1 Twig gladly abandoned her original question—something with food coloring and placebo effects. “It was boring,” she said, because Twig doesn’t care for long-term projects. She likes jumping to the next thing.
*2 Don’t ask.
After school, I went into Dad’s office before he got home from his therapy sessions, sank into his big desk chair, and Googled egg drop ideas on his computer. Investigative research, Mr. Neely. I found things I had never thought of before—plastic bags and cotton balls and toothpicks and straws. I made a new list.
And when the office door opened, I knew it was her.
“What’re you doing?” Mom asked.
I spun Dad’s desk chair around to face her. Her eyes were red and blurry around the edges, as if she’d been sleeping for a thousand years. The orange of the setting sun lit her golden curls, unbrushed and unwashed, and her skin was paler than usual, but she looked like Mom. Or she looked like Mom with something missing. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t want to scare her away.
In her book, she’d written: Science is living. Science is asking questions and finding answers and never, ever stopping. I wanted to scream her own words at her, and I wanted to say, Why did you stop? But I didn’t say that, either.
“It’s for school,” I said. I wish I could’ve said more—something about the orchids and the prize money—but I wasn’t sure how. I needed to keep her here.
She walked over and started playing with my hair, so much darker than her own. I felt like I was five again. “ ‘Egg drop designs’?” she read over my shoulder.
“Yeah, it’s kind of silly.”
For some reason, her touch wasn’t comforting. I felt like I didn’t know this person. My stomach twisted and I imagined myself standing up, sending the desk chair crashing into the wall. I imagined shoving this Not-Mom and screaming, Give her back! Give her back to me!
“Use cereal,” she said. “Pack the egg in a plastic bag, surrounded with cereal. That’s what I did when I was your age.”
And then she left the office. I did not stand. I did not send the chair rolling back. I did not shove or scream or speak. My heart cracked at the sound of the door clicking shut, but I did not cry.
Instead, I added to my list: cereal.
We had a half day of school today, the day before Thanksgiving, so Twig and I spent the afternoon comparing notes on Operation Egg. Twig had drawn a whole stack of egg drop designs and had started an Operation Egg binder, which contained all her notes and was covered in beetle stickers.* Twig’s flying to New York to see her dad tomorrow, but she changes the subject anytime I mention it. And anyway, I had my own things I didn’t want to discuss, so we poured ourselves into our science.
“You mentioned a basketball,” she told me as she pushed one of her diagrams across the shag rug on her basement floor, “and I shouldn’t have laughed. I’ve been thinking it could work. We cut a hole here, see? And we fill the rest with water. Then we can duct-tape the top back on. Did you know duct tape is awesome? We can use it for, like, everything.”
I shifted on my purple beanbag. Hélène had the day off, and Clarissa was working double time to finish a new app update before Christmas, so it was just the two of us in this enormous house. Sometimes I had the urge to scream in Twig’s house, just to see if I echoed.
“I guess the basketball could work,” I said, even though I wasn’t too sure. I appreciated her for being nice about the whole basketball idea, but the diagram looked pretty ridiculous, to be honest. I mean, it was an egg floating in a hollowed-out basketball.
“I have this one, too.” Twig handed me a drawing of an egg covered in cotton balls. “First we cover the egg in Play-Doh, and then stick a bunch of cotton balls to the Play-Doh.” When I was younger, Mom and I used to make Easter egg animals. We’d blow the yolks out of the eggs, and paint little faces on them. We made chicks, and bunnies, and lambs. The lambs, we covered in cotton balls.
“This could work,” I told her as I examined her design. I meant it this time.
Twig grinned. She doesn’t usually focus or commit to a project, but when she does, she goes all in. She didn’t seem to mind that I hadn’t brought any diagrams or notes of my own. Twig always provides the momentum behind our operations. She is bold and brave and smart, and she wins almost every board game we ever play. Sometimes I win when it comes down to luck, but I haven’t been very lucky lately.
We went through six eggs before we even started the drop test. They cracked in our hands as we built our contraptions, spilling onto the newspaper we had haphazardly laid out. The Play-Doh didn’t work. We would stick it to the egg, apply too much pressure, and end up covered in yolk. Before long, the scent of raw egg and tangy Play-Doh filled the room.
“This smells so bad,” Twig said, laughing as egg goo dripped from her fingers. She reached over and wiped her hand across my hair.
“Hey!” I pulled away from her, and she lunged forward, coming at me like a zombie with her eggy hands outstretched. “You’re a freak of nature,” I told her, but I was laughing too hard to get away, and then she was lying on top of me, smothering me in giggles and egg guts.
“I don’t think this is gonna work,” she said, sitting back up and wiping her hands across her corduroys.
“We might need to rethink this one,” I agreed.
“Also, we probably should’ve done this outside. I guess we better start cleaning,” Twig said as she surveyed the destroyed shag rug in the basement. At least Clarissa wouldn’t be upset about throwing it out.
She ran upstairs to grab paper towels and Clorox wipes and maybe some Febreze, and I sat with our fallen soldiers. I don’t know why I didn’t tell Twig about Mom’s cereal idea. I think I wanted to keep that to myself for a while.
* Fifty cents at Paper World, according to Twig. So get ’em while the getting’s good. That is, of course, if you’re a weirdo who wants a
jumbo pack of beetle stickers.
Mom was in the kitchen when I went downstairs this morning, sifting flour into a mixing bowl. Her hair was washed, and she was wearing her favorite sundress, the one with blue stars.
“Good morning,” she said, smiling as if this were any other day, as if she did this all the time. Her voice was almost normal, just slightly blurry. I felt like I was listening to a recording of her, with a faint static humming in the background.
I ignored the static. “Happy Thanksgiving!” I chirped, and practically skipped up next to her. If she was pretending to be happy, so would I.
“Here.” She set a bag of apples and a peeler in front of me. “I’m making the pie.”
I was about to ask about Dad’s pie, but I swallowed the question. I didn’t want to spoil the moment. The sight of her and the scent of freshly peeled apples made me want to leap up and wrap her in the biggest hug. But we were pretending this was normal, so I picked up an apple and started peeling.
The house rang with silence, but I didn’t dare suggest music, so I listened to the song my peeler made. Tsk, tsk, tsk.
“Your father is picking Grandma up from the airport,” she said. “She’s looking forward to seeing us.”
With all that’s been happening, I hadn’t even thought about my grandmother. She comes to our house every Thanksgiving, and Mom usually worries about her arrival for days in advance. Ever since her own parents died, these visits from her mother-in-law had taken on extra importance, and she’d putter around the house, cleaning and cooking, biting her nails as she went. This year, though, nothing worried her. Nothing seemed to affect her at all.
We cooked in silence for a while. “How’s school?” Mom asked finally. She wasn’t the type of mother who asked how school was. I normally just told her.
“Fine,” I said. I wasn’t the type of kid who said fine.
“How’s the egg drop?”
Part of me couldn’t believe she remembered. I thought back to our conversation in Dad’s office, and it was almost like I’d been talking to a different person entirely. “It’s going great!” My voice came out too loud.
“Did you try the cereal?”
“Yeah. It was great,” I said, without really knowing why I’d lied.
Mom’s smile didn’t reach her eyes.
RECIPE FOR CRAN-APPLE PIE FILLING
MATERIALS:
• 5 green apples
• 1 cup cranberries
• ¾ cup white sugar
• 2½ tablespoons butter
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon nutmeg
PROCEDURE:
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Peel apples while Mom measures.
3. Do not put on Bon Jovi.
4. Just mix. Mix and pretend everything is as it should be.
Dad arrived with my grandmother, who started shedding layers as soon as she stepped into our overheated house. Off with the coat, the scarf, the leather gloves—all piled into Dad’s arms.
“Oh, my big girl,” she said, her accent thick, her hair dyed blacker than ever. “Look at you growing into a woman.” Out of her knockoff Louis Vuitton purse came gifts from Korea—dried squid and colorful erasers and pajamas with dancing cartoon dogs and cats.
“Thanks, Grandma,” I said, accepting the gifts and acting as if that weren’t the most awkward thing to hear.
“I always tell you, call me Halmoni,”*1 she said as she hugged me, but she didn’t really mean that by now. It was an old habit, our standard greeting.
Never in my whole life have I called her Halmoni. The first time I remember her saying that, Dad laughed this strange off-center laugh and said, “Okay, Grandma.” And that was it. She’d raised him on her own, and he said he’d had enough Korean words and foods and customs while growing up. He didn’t want any more “culture” in his life, and he could go on forever pretending the Korean half of him didn’t exist.
And then my grandmother was talking—about her recent trip to Korea and her archnemesis neighbor and her forty-two-year-old boyfriend who she insists we call Uncle Gene. She splits her time between her family in Korea and Uncle Gene in California, and by the time she makes her way to us for Thanksgiving, she always has a treasure trove of tales. The way she was speaking reminded me of the way Mom used to be, even though they aren’t related—bubbling up with laughter and stories, hands dancing in front of her.
We got to eating quickly—that’s the way of my family—and if my grandmother felt uncomfortable with the white food, she didn’t say anything.
When I was younger, she would come over and cook all of her—and my—Korean favorites, bibimbap, kalbi, mandoo, but Dad would never eat them. He winked at me and said, “I’ve eaten enough of Grandma’s cooking for a lifetime.” I’ve never thought about it before, how weird that was, how much he says without really saying. All I know is I will eat my mom’s cran-apple pie forever.
And by the time that cran-apple pie did come around, Mom was smiling and eating and asking Grandma questions. I could almost forget about the “situation.” I could almost forget about the quiet nights, quiet mornings, quiet, quiet darkness that had settled around our house for the past four months. I could almost forget about Dad bumping around the kitchen, navigating pots and pans he rarely used, and me stumbling through the science homework she’d always helped me with. Seeing her smile—seeing her eat and smile and laugh—I could almost forget all that.
Almost, but not quite.
After dinner, we sat in the living room, with Mom and Grandma and me on the couch. Grandma stroked my hair exactly the way Mom used to. Eventually, she made me change into my new pajamas, with the dancing cats and dogs, and I put them on for her, even though they were too scratchy and too small.
“Ipuda,” Grandma gasped when she saw me.*2
Dad stiffened at the Korean language. He always does that. I don’t know why.
I laid my head on my grandmother’s lap, and I felt like a little kid again, listening to my family talk around me. At one point, Dad started talking about his work, about his research, and I fell asleep to the sound of his voice.
Even as I slipped into sleep, I could feel Mom fading into the background, and Dad kept talking, and all the world was backward—but I couldn’t quite remember how our family used to be.
* * *
—
I woke up in my bed the next morning, disoriented and panicked, as if I’d had a nightmare. When I went downstairs, Dad was in the kitchen, taking plates out of the dishwasher and stacking them in their right cabinets—cleaning up and erasing all the evidence of last night. Grandma was staying at a hotel nearby, and we were all supposed to get brunch later—but Mom wasn’t around. Their bedroom door was shut tight.
“Good morning, Natalie!” Dad said, his voice trying way too hard to be happy. He pointed to the top rack of the dishwasher. “Why don’t you help put the glasses away?”
I walked over to him and started working on the glasses, and we stepped through the kitchen in silence, with nothing but the sound of clinking dishware. I couldn’t wait to see Grandma again, because she would fill us with her noise—and she would bring Mom back again.
“Natalie,” Dad said. His voice was still trying too hard. “Remember how we agreed on your appointment? I spoke with a therapist I think you’ll really like. She’s a friend—”
“Okay,” I cut him off real quick. I picked up two more glasses, but they felt so heavy in my hands all of a sudden, and I set them down on the counter. Too hard. “Where’s Mom?” I asked, because I couldn’t hold my question any longer.
Dad frowned. “She’s just in the bedroom, but—”
I tried to slip past him—I needed to see her, to make sure the happy, smiling Mom from last nigh
t wasn’t just an illusion—but he stopped me.
“Don’t wake her just yet,” he said. There was an edge to his voice that I didn’t want to think about. “She’s sleeping.” The word sleeping was layered with a thousand different meanings, and I was pretty sure I would never understand half of them, but I knew the most important one.
Mom has a note in her book, just a paragraph long, called “A Word on Words.” She talks about all those pretty scientific words, all those Big Terms, and justifies all those footnotes in her book. She says how important it is to understand, to know the meaning of the words, because once you know a word, you can own it—it’s yours, and it’s a part of you.
I used to leaf through her book, reading only the footnotes, trying to memorize all those big definitions, trying to understand her indecipherable language. But some words are too big to be contained. Some words take on new, unexpected definitions that you can’t find in the dictionary.
So when Dad said Mom’s sleeping, the word swallowed me whole and spat me back out. I went up to my room and refused to go out for brunch. I read all the footnotes in Mom’s book until my mind was filled only with plant words and all my worries stopped pounding in my head.
*1 Halmoni, n.: the Korean word for “grandmother.”
*2 Ipuda, adj.: the Korean word for “beautiful.” When I was little, my grandmother said it to me so many times that I thought it was my Korean name. I told people Ipuda was my Korean name, until Dad heard me saying it and told me to stop.
QUESTION: How does temperature affect magnets?
MATERIALS:
• 3 magnets
• 1 hot plate
• 50 washers
