The Science of Breakable Things

by Tae Keller

  “This way,” I whispered to Twig, pointing toward the girls’ bathroom.

  “But—” Twig started, but I’d already slipped out of the line, just before entering the cafegymnasitorium.

  I ran around the corner and pulled her with me so we were hidden from the crowd. I think we managed to get out of line unnoticed.

  “What was that all about?” Twig asked.

  “I just…” I didn’t finish. I couldn’t quite explain the panic I felt without explaining everything.

  Twig didn’t push any further. “Dari’s standing over there,” she whispered, peeking her head around the corner.

  I craned my neck to see, and there he was, standing in the middle of the hallway as the crowd passed him by, looking around and rocking back and forth on his heels. He fiddled with the hem of his T-shirt—which was not red and blue—and he looked so nervous that he might as well have worn a sign that said, I’m about to break the rules!

  “Should I go get him?” Twig asked.

  “Maybe you should wait until the game starts,” I said, but Twig had run off before I’d even finished the sentence.

  She grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him back toward me. A few people gave them strange looks but kept walking into the gym.

  “Do you think anyone saw us?” Twig whispered loudly. Her hair was all staticky from the invisible electric current that seemed to run inside her. “Probably not, right? We were as stealthy as secret agent spies.”

  “Sure, Twig,” I said.

  Dari seemed so nervous and Twig was so confident that I couldn’t help but laugh at how opposite they were.

  Twig grinned back at me.

  Inside the gym, a buzzer sounded, the crowd quieted, and we heard the squeak of sneakers that meant the game had begun.

  “Ready?” I said.

  They nodded, and I led them to the stairwell. We tiptoed up the steps, hearts beating in our ears, and when we got to the second-floor stairwell, we peeked down the hall, searching for teachers or an army of security guards. Of course there weren’t any. This was just a JV volleyball game, after all.

  We reached the third floor, and Dari and I held back as Twig ran ahead to be our lookout. She did somersaults and darted back and forth in zigzags, as if she were dodging laser beams. This all seemed like a game to Twig, a strategic board game come to life, and I was torn between telling her to take this seriously and joining in.

  From across the hall, Twig said, “Do you think anyone knows we’re here?” Her voice echoed.

  Dari held a finger up for silence, trying not to laugh, and I could tell he felt as torn as I did.

  Dari and I walked up to Mr. Neely’s classroom door, and when Dari leaned forward, ready to turn the knob, Twig threw an arm out in front of him.

  “Fingerprints,” she hissed, before grabbing the knob with her own gloved hand.

  The door didn’t budge.

  Twig looked over at me and bit her lip. I nudged her aside, not caring about fingerprints. The knob wouldn’t turn. The door was locked. Which meant everything was officially not going according to plan.

  “I think I can kick the door down,” Twig suggested.

  Dari put a hand on her shoulder. Then he turned red and took his hand off her shoulder. “Um, no. Don’t kick the door.” He shook his head. “I should have known the classrooms would be locked. I didn’t consider it.” Like he was the one who’d planned the whole thing, without any help at all.

  “We’ll have to wait until Monday,” he said, nodding once, as if the decision had been made and there was nothing to do about it.

  The logical, scientific part of my brain agreed with Dari. Of course we could wait until Monday. Of course Mr. Neely would let us test the design from his classroom window after school.

  But, then again, we had the eggs, and we were here, and nothing was going according to plan. And maybe we wouldn’t be allowed to drop the eggs on Monday. Maybe we wouldn’t be able to test the eggs at all.

  And then we wouldn’t win the competition. And—

  Twig took one look at my face and shook her head. “No,” she said. “I have an idea. I think there’s another way.”

  Twig led us down the hallway and walked into the girls’ bathroom. “Come on,” she said, sticking her head back out when we didn’t immediately follow.

  I glanced at Dari.

  “Um,” he said.

  Twig rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. Nobody’s in here.”

  “But—”

  “See, look,” Twig said, and then she turned back to the bathroom and shouted, “Hello? Hello, anybody in here?”

  “Twig,” I hissed. “Quiet.”

  Dari still hesitated, and Twig threw her arms in the air, exasperated. “Don’t be such a worrywart.”

  So we both followed her into the girls’ bathroom, and Dari’s face turned dark red. He kept his eyes glued to the floor.

  “All right,” Twig said, walking to the window by the sinks and tiptoeing to push it open. It was higher up and much smaller than the classroom windows, but we’d still be able to drop our eggs out of it.

  I tiptoed and tried to see outside. “Yeah, this could work.” Relief bloomed inside me.

  “Um, guys,” Dari said. “This is just a bathroom.”

  Twig squinted at him as if something were seriously wrong with him. I mean, really. He’s supposed to be the smart one. “Yeah, Dari,” she said slowly. “It is.”

  “No, but, I mean…” He cleared his throat and looked around, then looked at the ground, and then looked around again like he couldn’t help it. “You guys don’t have couches.”

  I blinked at him. “Does your bathroom have couches?”

  “No, no, the boys’ bathroom doesn’t. It’s just that all the guys say…”

  We stared at him.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “Anyway,” I said after a few seconds of awkward silence. I pulled my backpack off and carefully took out each egg contraption. Thankfully, they were all still intact. “We’ll drop all six of these eggs. It would’ve been better to use Mr. Neely’s windows, obviously, because we could’ve spread the eggs apart, but we’ll just drop them on top of one another. I guess that’ll be fine.”

  Dari cleared his throat, and Twig sighed, partly annoyed and partly amused. “What, Dari?”

  I’d never seen him look so out of his element. He started tugging at the hem of his shirt again as if he were trying to drag himself down through the earth and disappear. It dawned on me then that if anybody caught us right now, he’d be in the most trouble.

  “Dari,” I said, “you can wait down by the crash site if you want.”

  His whole body relaxed. “Really?”

  “Yeah. It makes more sense. You can move the old eggs out of the way and clear the space for the next drop.”

  He considered it, already inching toward the door. “That would be very helpful, actually. But I wouldn’t want to leave you guys.”

  Twig stepped in, pulling a wad of paper towels and a plastic bag from the backpack and handing them to him. “It’s okay, Dari. You can be the cleanup man. Plus, it’s probably the most dangerous job of all—because if anyone catches you, you’ll be standing there with a pile of eggs.”

  I hadn’t considered that, and I worried it might be true, but Dari nodded, took the cleaning supplies, and ran out of the bathroom without another word.

  As we waited for Dari to reach the bottom, Twig and I took each egg out of its protective wrapping and lined all of them up on the windowsill. They sat there in a row, ready to meet their fate.

  To be honest, they looked pretty silly, and I wasn’t quite sure how well they’d survive, but I couldn’t think about that. I pushed all that doubt out of my head, and once Dari was ready for us, I picked up S’meggs, the s’mores-theme
d egg. The chocolate and marshmallows had melted slightly, so they stuck to my hands.

  Twig raised her eyebrows. “The first drop. Should we make a speech?”

  I laughed but avoided the question. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. I didn’t want to think too hard about what all this meant. I just wanted to drop the eggs and see which ones survived and get back to being okay.

  “Be strong, little S’meggs,” Twig said. “And fly safely.”

  I held it out the window. “Ready?”

  Twig grinned. “Ready.”

  Down below, Dari stepped back and flashed a thumbs-up. I dropped S’meggs.

  We couldn’t see whether or not it survived. We just watched Dari sweep it aside to prepare for the next egg. Being up there, with the egg just a speck and the results unknown, was strange. I felt like anything was possible.

  “That was awesome!” Twig said, slapping my back.

  My hands were shaking, so I stuffed them into my pockets and let Twig pick up the next egg, which was covered in cotton balls: Cotton Ball Heaven.

  “Dari’s being weird,” she said, peeking outside as she held the egg out, ready to drop it.

  I leaned next to her and looked down at Dari, who was frantically waving his arms in the air.

  She sighed and shook her head as if this were just some strange Dari quirk. “Ready?” she asked me.

  “Twig, wait.” I looked back down at Dari, who was now running around in a panic. “I think something’s wr—”

  A buzzer sounded downstairs, followed by the sounds of the big front doors opening and the chatter of parents.

  I turned to Twig in horror. “The game! It must have been a blowout. Everyone’s leaving now.”

  “Already?!” Twig stared back at me, frozen with her arm still dangling out the window, fingers clamped around Cotton Ball Heaven.

  “It’s okay,” I said, more to myself than to her. “It’s okay. They’re all going to exit through the front, and nobody has any reason to walk around behind the school. We just need to run down, clean up, and get out of here before anybody sees us.”

  Twig nodded. “Right, okay, let’s go.”

  And then, without any word or warning, she swept her arm along the windowsill and pushed all the eggs out at once.

  I gaped at my reckless, illogical best friend. Twig had done some inexplicable things over the past few years, but this was a whole new level. “Twig…why would you do that?”

  She shook her head, eyes wide. “I had to destroy the evidence!”

  “You didn’t destroy evidence. You just splattered it all over!”

  “I just—I don’t know! I panicked!”

  I didn’t have time to deal with this. I grabbed Twig’s wrist and we ran out of the bathroom.

  “Abort mission! Abort!” Twig yelled wildly as we pounded down the three flights of stairs. I hissed at her to be quiet, and we rushed out the back doors to meet Dari.

  “Oh no,” Twig said when we reached him.

  The Cotton Ball Heaven egg was smattered in his hair and sliding down the side of his face. On his forehead, just below his hairline, a red welt had started to form.

  “All of the eggs broke,” he informed us, holding out the remains. He’d haphazardly swept the remnants of the contraptions into the plastic bag, and yolk dripped from a hole at the bottom.

  Neither Twig nor I knew exactly what to say, so we stood there for a second, looking at the bits of egg and cotton in his hair.

  We needed to flee the scene of the crime, but it felt wrong to start running without acknowledging the obvious. “Are you okay?” I asked. I took the messy plastic bag from his hands.

  Twig started picking eggshell out of his hair. “I hit you in the head. With an egg!”

  At Twig’s touch, the rest of Dari’s face turned as red as the welt, and he cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat again. “Well, the good news is that some of the eggs held up really well. Much better than expected. If you let me make some adjustments, I think I could make a couple of these work. The designs could actually make sense.”

  He braved a glance at Twig, who was still messing with his hair. “No offense.”

  Twig stepped back and shrugged, as if she hadn’t created a totally awkward moment and then been insulted a second later. “Okay, Mission Analyst, we’ll try it your way.”

  Even though the mission had totally and completely failed, their words made me hopeful. I let myself relax, feeling a little better, a little safer—until the back door opened and the girls’ JV volleyball team streamed outside.

  Mikayla and I locked eyes at the exact same time, and I saw her turn to Janie and say something before I quickly looked away.

  “Um, we should probably go,” I said to Twig and Dari, who were now both covered in yolk.

  They looked up to see Mikayla walking over. Twig stuck out her jaw, like she always does when she’s annoyed. Dari got this wide-eyed look of panic, as if Mikayla might tell a teacher what we’d done and get us in trouble.

  There was no way she could know we’d been in the third-floor bathroom. At least, she couldn’t prove that. But still, in that moment, I saw us through her eyes: A failed experiment. A mess. Totally hopeless.

  Mikayla stopped in front of us and crossed her arms over her chest. “What are you doing?”

  She was the tallest girl in our class, and she looked down at us like she was the queen of the world and we were her misbehaving subjects.

  “None of your business,” Twig said.

  As weird as it is that Mikayla and I used to be friends, it’s even weirder that Twig and Mikayla used to be friends. They’re basically polar opposites, like magnets repelling each other.*4

  “We were just doing homework. For school,” I said. It wasn’t a lie, technically, but my heart beat loudly in my ears. I don’t know why Mikayla makes me so nervous, and I hate that she does.

  She looked like she was about to say something—probably something mean—but Janie ran up to Mikayla’s side.

  “What’s going on?” Janie asked, looking confused. I realized that I didn’t really know anything about Janie, except that she was friends with Mikayla. And she played volleyball.

  “Nothing,” Mikayla said, and then, just for good measure, she looked at me and added, “Whatever,” before turning and sashaying away with Janie.

  “What is her problem?” Twig huffed.

  Dari lifted a hand like he was going to comfort her, but ended up stuffing it into his pocket instead. “I’m sorry,” he muttered.

  We were all shaken up from the run-in with Mikayla, but Dari was seriously out of whack if he was apologizing for being hit on the head. “It’s not your fault,” I said, which seemed like an obvious thing to say.

  “Not about the eggs,” he said. “I’m sorry because I should have stayed up there with you guys. I wasted so much time being indecisive and coming down here. I should have been part of the team.”

  I wasn’t really sure why he was making such a big deal out of that, especially since it made sense for him to be down here anyway, but Twig just threw an arm around his shoulder, like a dad on some TV show. “No worries, Dari.”

  Dari looked down to hide his face, but not before I saw his goofy grin. Even covered in egg, he couldn’t help but smile around her.

  Twig, of course, was oblivious. “Next time we break into a girls’ bathroom, you’ll be right by our side,” she said.

  I really hoped she meant this metaphorically, not literally, but with Twig, it was a toss-up.

  Dari laughed in an uncomfortable, strangled kind of way.

  “Thank you, guys,” I blurted. I didn’t even care anymore about Mikayla or the failed mission. I had friends who were willing to get covered in yolk—and keep going anyway. “I just…thanks
for being Team Egg.”

  Dari wiped yolk off his forehead and smiled. “Team Egg,” he said, sticking his hand out, palm down.

  I stared at him, not sure at first what he was doing, but Twig got it. She placed her hand on top of his and looked at me. “Come on, Natalie.”

  So I put my hand on theirs. All our hands were still covered in yolk, and somehow Twig’s hand was also covered in glitter, although I don’t remember including glitter in any of our contraptions.*5

  Dari counted down from three, and all at the same time, we said, “Team Egg!”

  And it was so dorky and kind of embarrassing, and in the back of my mind I hoped Mikayla was already too far away to hear us, but none of that really mattered. Because these were my friends, and this was my team. And in that moment, I knew we had a chance.

  *1 Originally, we planned to ask Mr. Neely if we could use his window after school on Monday, but Twig shook her head and said sagely, “Better to ask forgiveness than permission.” Dari cleared his throat and looked uncomfortable, but we decided to go with the Saturday plan, just in case.

  *2 Cafeteria. Gymnasium. Auditorium. Except, you know, all in one.

  *3 Technically, we’re the Fountain Middle Foxes—but the mascot costume definitely looks like a red panda. Most of us just shrug and let it go, but of course Twig needs to make a point about it.

  *4 See? Proof that I do pay attention in science class.

  *5 Twig’s always doing this—adding “surprise glitter” to projects. She thinks it’s hilarious, but anybody who’s ever been in a second-grade classroom knows glitter is no joke. It’s impossible to wash off.

  Twig, Dari, and I spent the rest of the weekend discussing our egg drop plans—except Wednesday, which is now officially Doris Day, unfortunately.

  Dari started sketching out new diagrams and structures—building off Twig’s wild ideas—and we made a plan to test the top two designs this weekend.