by Tae Keller
• 1 beaker of ice water
• Tongs
HYPOTHESIS: Hot magnets work better than cold magnets.
* * *
—
Mondays are always hard, but on the Monday after Thanksgiving weekend you can tell nobody wants to be in school—not the kids, not the teachers, not the janitors or the lunch ladies. There’s a sleepiness in everyone’s eyes, a slowness in their steps, a sadness in their voices.
I was the only one happy to be in school, happy not to be home.
Twig came to science class dragging. “School is the worst torture in the world,” she said, leaning her head against my shoulder as the rest of Fountain Middle’s seventh graders slumped toward their desks.
“Good weekend?” I asked.
“I was with my dad, so yes.”
Twig loves her dad more than she loves her mom—she always says so—but I don’t know why. She only sees her dad a few times a year, and even though Twig’s mom works a lot, she’s always there for Twig, always trying. Sometimes Twig seems backward to me. We’ve been best friends for years now, but I don’t always get her.
“What about you?” she asked.
“My grandmother came over.” My stomach clenched as I thought of Grandma leaving this morning, taking her flurry of noise with her.
“Did she give you weird Japanese presents?”
“Korean, and yes.”
“Any board games?”
“No, sorry.”*1
Twig sighed. “I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything to make this day better.”
Twig was always in a bad mood whenever she left her dad’s house. That, at least, made sense to me. A few months ago, I couldn’t imagine what that felt like, having a parent disappear on you. Now maybe I kind of could.
Mr. Neely clapped his hands to get us settled, and we made our way to our seats. Even he was in a somber mood today. Holidays, apparently, don’t make people happy. They just remind us of what we’re missing every other day of the year.
“Today we are starting our physical science unit, and we will begin with magnets!” Mr. Neely said, trying to be chipper as usual. “At your workstations, you will find six magnets, and you will expose these magnets to different thermal conditions. One magnet will be hot, one cold, and one at room temperature. Please work in groups of two or three.”
I think he said some more stuff after that, going on about magnet facts and educated guesses, but I wasn’t listening anymore. Twig and I were autopiloting over to our table in the back.
“I miss Renaldo,” Twig sighed.
“Renaldo?” I said as we settled onto our lab stools and started rearranging our materials.
“Our frog,” she said, as if that were obvious.
I blinked at her. “You mean the one we dissected.”
Twig held a hand up and looked to the sky. “Rest in peace.”
Mr. Neely was instructing us to note our materials and hypotheses in our lab books, and I was vaguely listening, and vaguely following instructions, when Dari pulled up a stool and sat down at our table. He didn’t even say anything—just sat down.
Here’s a hypothesis: Twig wouldn’t take kindly to a newcomer.
“Um,” I said.
Twig narrowed her eyes at him in a way that was meant to be intimidating, but kind of made her look like a sleepy cat. I realized I’d never told her about Dari’s potato and our weird mini-conversation, although I’d meant to.
“George is sick,” Dari said, referring to his usual lab partner. Dari seemed older than everyone else in our year, not in the way he looked—although he was the tallest boy in our class—but in the way he was. He didn’t seem to care when people looked at him funny, and he didn’t react the way Twig did, by doing something even weirder. He just shrugged and smiled and kept looking you right in the eye. It made me uncomfortable.
Other people started looking at him weird, too, and Mikayla whispered something to Janie. I knew she was probably surprised Twig and I were talking to a boy, and she was probably saying something mean about us, but I almost didn’t blame her.*2 If George was sick, Dari should’ve gone with Tom K. and Nick, because boys went with boys and girls went with girls. That’s pretty much the unspoken rule of middle school.
Dari shrugged and smiled and continued to sit next to us.
When it became obvious that he wasn’t moving, Twig grunted and slid our materials over to him. “Might as well get started.”
So Dari got started. We watched him scribble notes into his lab book and organize the materials, and within five minutes, we had a hot magnet, a cold magnet, and a magnet at room temperature.
“Sorry, I should’ve let you guys help more. I guess I got kind of carried away.” His cheeks got darker, and he seemed genuinely sorry for doing all the work. “George doesn’t really contribute at all, so…”
Twig gaped at the magnets. Her mouth actually fell open. Normally, it takes us the whole class period to do an experiment because we get distracted talking about which superpower we’d rather have*3 and then realize halfway through that we never listened to the directions and did the project entirely wrong.
“Well.” Twig nodded, her face serious. “We would have liked to contribute more, but if you let me do the hot magnet, I won’t tell on you.”
Dari smiled big and stuck out his hand for Twig to shake. Then he stuck his hand out for me, and as we shook on it, I could tell he got us.
Maybe we kind of got him, too.
Twig picked up the tongs and plucked a magnet off the hot plate. It took her a couple tries to get it, but once she did, she yelped in excitement and held the magnet over the washers. We counted how many washers the hot magnet picked up, a grand total of thirteen. Dari did room temperature and got twenty-one. I did cold and got twenty-nine.
Twig jumped up and shouted, “You won, Natalie! You won!”
I smiled at Twig, but I felt a twisting in my stomach—like my hypothesis was wrong and the world didn’t work quite like I thought it did.
Then Dari started explaining why the cold magnet worked best—something about hot magnets having disorderly molecules—and Twig nodded along like she was actually listening. She was being so un-Twig-like, paying attention to our science experiment, so I tuned them out and started doodling snowflakes and flowers in my notebook.
It’s funny how the cold magnets actually worked best. It’s like how perennial plants seem to die in the winter, but really, they’re just waiting till everything is all right again. Maybe it’s not such a surprise that there’s strength in the cold. Maybe sometimes the strongest thing of all is knowing that one day you’ll be all right again, and waiting and waiting until you can come out into the sun.
* * *
—
After school, as Twig and I were biking back to her house, bundled up against the too-cold air, she said, “I think we should adopt him.”
For one strange moment, I thought she was talking again about Renaldo, our cut-open frog, but then she said, “We’d never have to struggle through those assignments, and we’d get A’s just for sitting there.”
All at once, she was the Twig I knew and the Twig I did not know. She was the smart girl who schemed to get out of schoolwork, but also a stranger who suggested hanging out with someone new. She hadn’t done that in all the years I’d known her.*4
I shrugged. “That’d be great, but Dari was only sitting with us because George was out sick.”
Twig frowned and pedaled faster, so we were no longer side by side. “Easy come, easy go!” she shouted into the crackling autumn air.
*1 My grandmother did give me a Korean video game once. It had to do with both aliens and yoga and was surprisingly addictive, but Twig refused to play it. “It sounds awesome,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “But I’m a purist.”
*3 Me: invisibility. Twig: shape-shifting.
*4 One time when I slept over at Twig’s place, her mom commented that Twig should try to branch out and find more friends than just me. This was a little insulting, to be honest, but Twig shut her down real fast. “I don’t need anyone else, thank you very much,” she said. Clarissa never brought it up again—at least not in front of me—and I never asked about it, either.
Is it possible to be mad at someone for being sad?
When I got home tonight, Mom was sitting on the couch, watching some cooking show on TV, and I sat down next to her and started telling her about the whole magnet-Dari weirdness from earlier this week—about how Twig actually suggested hanging out with someone new. About how she said it was just to get A’s, but they got along really well, and she seemed to like being around Dari. I wasn’t sure what to make of this new Twig—I wasn’t even sure why I was so upset—and I needed a mom. I needed someone to help sort all of this out.
Mom smiled and nodded along, but I could tell she wasn’t really listening. I know she was trying, and I know Dad says this blankness isn’t her fault, but none of that mattered to me anymore because I was sitting right in front of her and she wasn’t listening.
“Twig and I were working on the egg drop project,” I said, thinking maybe, when it came to science, she might pay attention. “But the eggs kept breaking. We probably need help.”
Mom stared off into space before turning toward me, as if she were in slow motion. “Sorry, honey. What was that?”
Looking into her eyes was like peering over the edge of a well and not being able to see the bottom. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to jump on the couch and wave my arms in the air and scream.
But I turned away from her bottomless eyes. “Nothing,” I said, before walking out of the living room and into my bedroom.
She didn’t try to stop me.
I shut my door—quietly, because I couldn’t quite bring myself to slam it—and I lay down on my bed. I tried to count to one hundred. Back when I was little and used to throw temper tantrums, Dad would walk me to my room, sit me on my bed, and tell me to count to one hundred. Once I finished, everything would be okay again.
One.
Two.
Three.
The thing is: Mom was laughing on Thanksgiving. She did it for Grandma. That’s trying. But she doesn’t care enough to try for me. In the back of my mind, I thought about my winter sickness, about all those days she spent in bed with me, comforting me, refusing to leave me, but I buried those thoughts and counted.
When I got to fifty-two, I made a resolution: if she doesn’t care about me, I’m not going to care about her. She is not my mom right now. She is an impostor in my mother’s skin.
I hate her.
I hate her.
I hate her.
Twig got in trouble today. This should not be surprising, given the Eyewash Incident and the Stolen Turtle Incident,*1 but it’s still annoying. Twig is a person who doesn’t know when to stop. To her, the word no is a challenge, and I get why she drives teachers nuts. Sometimes I want to shake her and say, TWIG, STOP. But of course that would only make her do whatever she’s doing louder.
Anyway, she snuck into the teachers’ lounge during lunch and drank half a pot of cold coffee, just because she’s not allowed to drink it and she was curious. Basically, she went wild. Like, Twig × 1,000. She wouldn’t stop talking or bouncing around in class. So, of course, she had to have a “talking-to” from our principal—which is probably the hundredth talking-to Twig has had at this school. She told me I didn’t have to wait for her after school, but I said I would anyway. I didn’t feel like going home yet.
Dari was sitting by the lockers again. Of course he was. Since Dari’s last name starts with a K, his locker is in the exact middle of the hallway—halfway between Twig’s and my lockers.
“I thought only losers stayed after school,” he said as I hovered in front of Twig’s locker.
“I don’t think I said losers,” I replied.
He laughed. “So why are you hanging around?”
I walked over to him, because it was kind of awkward having a conversation with fifteen lockers between us. “Twig’s in trouble. Well, not trouble-trouble—her parents donate so much to the school that she never really gets in trouble for stuff.” I think that might have been an overshare.
He smiled but didn’t respond. Dari doesn’t say much—he’s a thinker. And it’s like he needs to have all his words stored up and ready to go before he speaks.
“Advanced algebra again?” I asked, pointing to the book in his lap.
He shook his head and turned his lab notebook for me to see.
“Oh,” I said, moving closer to look at the diagrams he’d been drawing. “That’s for the egg drop contest.” I wasn’t sure why I was surprised. Of course he was entering the contest. Mr. Neely had mentioned something about Dari and all the best, brightest students being involved.
He nodded. “I’m investigating acute angles and their effect on impact. Mr. Neely said I could use it for my scientific process project.”
“Right,” I said, as if he weren’t speaking gibberish to me. “I’m doing it, too.”
His grin widened, and I immediately regretted telling him. He was my competition, which probably made him my sworn enemy or something. I don’t know. I don’t really do competitions. He scooted over on the floor, even though there was plenty of space, so I assumed that was a signal for me to sit. I sat.
“Have you come up with a design yet?” he asked.
“Um.”
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” He was talking quickly and blushing again. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
Mom would’ve shaken her head at that. A scientist never apologizes for asking questions, she’d say. Questions keep us alive.
“No, it’s okay. We’ve come up with designs. They just haven’t exactly worked out.”
He smiled. “If you wanted, we could team up?”
I hesitated, thinking about splitting the money three ways, instead of just two. And then I remembered the magnet project. And also all the eggs Twig and I had broken. “Why? I’m sure you can do it on your own.”
He shrugged, matter-of-fact. “I probably can.”
I was trying to figure out what to say to that when Twig popped out of the stairwell and made her way over, bouncing on her Sharpied-up Converse. The seventh-grade classrooms are on the top floor of the school, and we all hate those stairs, but Twig never seems winded by the three-story climb.*2
She glanced between Dari and me and gave me a weird look. “Hi.”
I stood up quickly, feeling guilty without knowing why. “Twig! How’d it go?”
She rolled her eyes. “Principal Nutter Butter*3 thought it would be a good idea for me to learn respect, maybe see a counselor, the usual.”
See a counselor. I thought about Dad and my stomach clenched. “Twig,” I said, “Dari offered to team up with us on the egg project.”
“Us?” Dari asked, looking between Twig and me. He was grinning like this was the best news ever. The kid was weird.
“Us,” Twig said, gesturing between me and her and making her wannabe-intimidating sleepy-cat face.
“Twig and I are working together,” I explained, even though I think he’d already figured that out.
“Great.” Dari smiled like he meant it.
Twig adjusted the straps of her backpack. “We have to go,” she informed him—and me—and walked off without another word, her footsteps
echoing, pounding down the stairs.
I gave Dari an awkward wave before running after her. “Are you okay?” I asked once we made it to the first floor.
“What is it—am I not smart enough for you? Am I not a good enough partner anymore?” she asked. She walked out of the school and wouldn’t slow down.
“He volunteered himself,” I said. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. And I figured it couldn’t hurt. You’re the one who said we should team up with him more often!”
“Yeah, for class.”
“This is for class. Basically.” I couldn’t make sense of her. One second she wanted to work with Dari, and the next she didn’t.
“Except we’re doing it for fun, too. Together.”
We’d gotten to our bikes by then, and Twig swung her leg over the seat, hovering with her tiptoes touching the ground. I unlocked my bike. “If he helps us, we’ll get A’s on our project. And we’ll probably win the money.”
“Who cares about money?” Twig asked.
Like I said, sometimes Twig and I are from totally different galaxies. “I care. And it’ll still be fun. I promise.”
Twig sighed up a windstorm, keeping her eyes on her bike. “Fine, fine. He can join us. I gotta get home now. My mom is having some supermodel friends over.” She pushed her feet against the pedals and left me behind. I couldn’t tell if she was lying, but either way, I wasn’t invited.
Either way, I’d have to go home eventually.
* * *
—
When I got home, Mom was in her room with the door shut, so I did the same. I went straight past Dad without saying a word and went into my bedroom and locked the door. Mom’s book was still lying on my bed, and I threw it across the room. It hit the wall and landed on the floor facedown, spine bent open, the pages crumpled beneath it. I told myself I didn’t care, that I never wanted to read a word of that book again, but five minutes later I was on the floor smoothing out the pages, reading those paragraphs for the thousandth time, repeating the Latin words like a secret spell.
