The Science of Breakable Things

by Tae Keller

  She inhaled deep and walked over to my bed, hopping onto it as she spoke. “My mom was with me this morning, but she had to work this afternoon.” She didn’t mention her dad.

  Once, we had been friends who told each other everything—even when everything was nothing at all. But things have changed. I’m not sure which one of us closed up first.

  Twig was uncomfortable—feet tapping against the side of my bed, fingers drumming along my comforter, her whole body full to the brim with nervous energy.

  I’d messed up our pattern. I was supposed to say something totally unrelated after that, so the question of her dad wouldn’t hang there unspoken, heavy in the air between us. Instead, I sat down next to her on the bed and asked, “Did you talk to your dad today?”

  Twig shook her head and bit her lip, and we were quiet for a long time. “He texted to say he’d call later tonight.”

  “Well, I’m sure he will,” I lied. I don’t know much about Twig’s dad, but I know she’s often disappointed.

  Twig shrugged. Twig’s shrugs mean something matters, but she’s pretending it doesn’t.

  She changed the subject. “Anyway, I came to drop off your Christmas present. I thought your dad hated me, but when I called to see if I could come over, he sounded like he might cry from happiness.” She looked at me, waiting for an explanation, and when I didn’t respond, she sighed and pulled a small box out of her pocket. “Open it now.”

  I took the box. It was badly wrapped in newspaper—which meant Twig had done it herself, instead of letting Hélène wrap it in her mom’s shimmery foil paper. I knew what it would be—she got the same thing every year—and sure enough, I pulled out a tiny glass figurine. Whenever Twig and her mom went to France, Twig brought back these little figurines. She was obsessed with them for some reason, even though anything so fragile seemed anti-Twig.

  This year, she’d given me a tiny green frog.

  “In remembrance of Renaldo,” she explained.

  I smiled, and my chest still hurt, but I felt a little lighter.

  “Thanks,” I said, setting the frog on my desk and grabbing my present for her. It was an old board game I’d found at a thrift store—of course.

  I expected her to open it right away, because normally Twig ripped her presents apart—but she set it aside and turned toward me completely, so she was sitting cross-legged on my bed.

  “Natalie. I just—I wanted to say…” She took a deep breath. “I know something’s going on, and I don’t know if it’s something I did or if you’re sick of me or if you don’t want to play board games all the time. We don’t have to play board games at all if you don’t want to anymore. I mean, I can play them by myself or maybe with Hélène, but—”

  “Twig,” I said, trying to interrupt her, but she was unstoppable when she got going.

  “But if I did something to make you mad, I’m really, really sorry. I know I was annoying you at Dari’s house, but S’meggs survived, right? So maybe it’s okay? I just, I know something’s going on, and people don’t think I can tell, but I can tell, and I just…” She stared at me with big eyes, and her mouth opened and closed, searching for more words to fill the silence.

  “Twig,” I repeated. “It’s not you.”

  I wasn’t sure how she could be so right and so wrong at the same time—because of course I wasn’t getting sick of her. She was my best friend. I’d just assumed she was Twig, oblivious to the rest of the world.

  “My mom didn’t come out of her room today,” I said, blurting out the truth before I could talk myself out of it.

  Twig’s eyebrows scrunched up, and her eyes filled with sympathy, and she said, “Oh.”

  “It’s Christmas, and she didn’t come out,” I said again, not sure if I was repeating it for her or for myself.

  “Natalie,” Twig breathed, and I realized then how unfair I’d been. Because the thing was, Twig got what I was trying to say.

  And I knew if I kept looking at Twig’s face I would cry, so I lay on my bed and rested my head in her lap. She didn’t say anything, but she started playing spider-crawling-up-your-back on me, scratching and pounding against my spine, and when she got to cracking an invisible egg on my head, we both kind of laughed and then got serious again.

  “And I broke all the eggs in our house,” I said.

  “Hmm,” Twig murmured. “We could have used those eggs.”

  I surprised myself with a laugh, and when Twig didn’t say anything else, I took her silence as an invitation to continue. I forced myself to speak before the words got all gunked up in my throat.

  “My mom’s depressed,” I explained to Twig. The word depressed felt funny coming out of my mouth. I’d never said it before, and saying it made the whole problem sound too simple.

  I felt Twig stiffen for a few moments, trying to figure out what to say, and I worried I’d said too much truth—that I’d scared her away. But then she softened and said, “That’s why you’ve been sad.”

  I hadn’t realized until then just how sad I was, and hearing her say it cracked something open inside me and I started to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure why I was apologizing. Twig didn’t respond, just kept cracking invisible eggs over my head and running streams of fingertip yolk through my hair.

  I felt weird about Twig comforting me, because she’s Twig, so I sat up and pushed her over so she flopped back on the bed. “Hey!” she protested, but she didn’t get up. I curled up next to her so we were both lying down, and that felt better. We felt like Natalie and Twig again.

  “I thought if we won,” I said, “I would use the prize money to fly my mom to New Mexico. If we could get there, and she could see these flowers…” I didn’t finish, partly because I thought I might cry again, and partly because I felt too embarrassed to finish.

  “What flowers?” Twig asked.

  So I told her about the Cobalt Blue Orchid, about the science and its magic. I told her about Mikayla’s mom and the lab and how Mom and I grew an orchid all our own, but Mom let it die. I told her the secret hope of my heart—my dream of taking Mom to the miracle flowers and saving her.

  “We’ll do it,” Twig said, and then announced, louder: “We are going to win this thing.”

  The sigh that came out of me was so loud and long that it didn’t sound like me at all.

  Twig sat up on the bed, filled with new energy and purpose. “Don’t you Natalie-sigh at me. We’re winning that contest. We’re winning the contest and you’re going to New Mexico, and you’re gonna get yourself one of those blue flowers—no, you’re gonna get twenty blue flowers. You could fill your greenhouse with them.”

  “Twig.” I sat up really carefully. Approaching Twig when she got stuck on an idea was like approaching a wild bear. You have to move slowly and speak in a soft, soothing voice.* “Calm down. We might win, but we might not.” This was something Dad talked about: Managing Your Expectations. “And even if we did, my mom probably wouldn’t want to go. She doesn’t seem to want to do anything right now.”

  I wish I hadn’t said that. Saying it felt like a betrayal somehow, like saying it made it true.

  “Of course she will.” Twig was shifting her weight, left and right, fidgeting with the excitement of a plan. “Once she sees that you did this whole competition just for her, of course she will. Sometimes you need to make one big move to win the game. Sometimes you need to show people how much you love them and then they’ll love you back. We can win this, Natalie!”

  Twig was getting really excited now. “And, and—even if she doesn’t want to go, we can still go. We can fly all the way to New Mexico and get that orchard!”

  “Orchid,” I corrected.

  “Orchid!”

  “Twig,” I said slowly, a warning in my voice. “Obviously we can’t do that.”

 
“You’re right. We can’t.” Twig winked.

  “Twig, no.”

  “I know.” Twig winked again.

  I laughed. “Twig, I’m serious!” But I didn’t sound very serious at all, not with all the laughing and such.

  “Operation Egg is actually a secret mission!” Twig shouted, jumping off the bed. With her bugging eyes and messy hair, she was wild in her excitement. “Operation Egg is secretly Operation Orchard!”

  “No, Twig!” I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt, like when you don’t eat a certain food for so long that when you eat it again your stomach starts cramping. That’s what laughing had become for me.

  “You look so funny when you’re laughing like that,” Twig said, and then she was laughing, too. “You look like a little snail.” She curled up on her side to imitate me, looking nothing at all like a snail.

  Twig reached her pinkie out. “I promise you we’re gonna win.”

  I hooked my pinkie with hers and said okay because this moment was too good, and I didn’t want to ruin it by being all weird and refusing to pinkie-promise her.

  But then I went ahead and did something even weirder because this thought popped into my head and I couldn’t get rid of it. “Twig,” I said, “I think Dari has a crush on you.”

  Twig got all pink, and she rolled onto her stomach and buried her face into a pillow. “You think he does?” she asked, her voice muffled.

  I had never seen Twig like this, but it felt good to talk about something fun. “It’s pretty obvious,” I said.

  She peeked her head up from the pillow to look at me. “I got him a Christmas present, too, but I don’t know if I should give it to him.”

  I tried not to look surprised, because I hadn’t even considered getting Dari a present.

  “It’s a flamingo,” Twig added.

  And I guess I’d forgotten to turn my filter back on after all that honesty, because without really thinking, I said, “Because he has skinny legs?”

  For a second, Twig stared at me in openmouthed horror, and then she rolled over onto her back and started belly-laughing.

  And I started laughing again, too, because laughs like that are contagious.

  Eventually, Twig had to leave, because her dad actually called, and she went home to talk to him properly. The way she looked at her phone, it was like she got the best Christmas present, and I knew she wanted to get home as fast as she could.

  I handed her my present and she hugged me hard. “Remember our pinkie promise,” she said into my ear.

  When she left, Dad came into my room, all hesitant and hopeful, and I ran over and hugged him. “Thank you, Dad,” I said into his chest.

  We hugged for a while and he squeezed me so hard I could barely breathe. I didn’t mind. I held on tight.

  * At least, that’s how I think you’d approach a wild bear, but I’ve never been camping or anything. Twig and I joined Girl Scouts once for a month in fifth grade, but that didn’t last very long. I got bored and Twig kept failing to earn her badges.

  I woke up early on New Year’s Eve—not Christmas-early, but still.

  Dad was standing over the stove, scrambling a pan of eggs. Next to him, he had an open carton of eggs, all new and freshly bought. Intact. Uncracked.

  “Happy New Year’s Eve,” he said.

  I sat at our table, and he slid the eggs onto two plates, placing them in front of us and sitting beside me.

  “Are these eggs some kind of message?” I asked. It was the first time he’d made eggs since Christmas. “Is this a Therapist Trick?” Like, Look, Natalie! Look what good can come from cracked eggs!

  But Dad said, “It’s just breakfast,” and I decided to believe that. I took a bite of my Just Breakfast and pretended eggs were just eggs.

  “I noticed the Christmas flower you got for your mother is still sitting in the greenhouse.” Dad was talking in his fake-happy voice. “You should give it to her today—as a New Year’s present!”

  Suddenly I felt sick, and the eggs turned funny in my stomach. Dad must have noticed, because he started to get that concerned look in his eyes.

  “Maybe later,” I said, and when he opened his mouth to say something else, I interrupted fast, with the first thing that came into my head. “I want to make Grandma’s dduk this year.”

  And that stopped him right in his tracks. He set his fork down and cleared his throat, but he didn’t respond right away.

  The thing was, every year, Mom made Grandma’s dduk. It was our tradition to eat the chewy treat on New Year’s—good luck and long life and stuff—but Dad had never made it.

  About five years ago, Mom discovered the Japanese tradition of making mochi on New Year’s. She’d skipped over to Dad, pointing to a page in the Foreign Foods! cookbook she was reading. “We’ve been missing out on all this luck!” she’d said. “Everybody loves good luck. We should make this with your mom!”

  “My mother is Korean.” Dad laughed, amused by Mom’s enthusiasm. “Wrong kind of Asian.” Dad was eager to play his role. He was the steady one. The one who talked Mom down from her chaos.

  But when Mom called Grandma and suggested it, Grandma was all on board. “Good luck is good luck,” she said. “But we make Korean mochi. Dduk.”

  Grandma sent Mom a recipe, and Mom Americanized and adapted it, but she called Grandma every year as she made it, chatting about ingredients and measurements and life.

  If our family ever needed luck, it was now. S’meggs needed all the help it could get in the egg drop competition. I needed all the help I could get.

  And if Mom didn’t seem interested in making any luck this year, then I would.

  Dad pushed his plate of eggs away and forced a smile. “I guess I could ask Grandma for the recipe. You really want to make it?”

  If I said yes, Dad would agree, but I could tell he was uncomfortable. I told him yes anyway, I really wanted to make it, so we drove all the way to the Asian supermarket to get adzuki beans and sesame oil. Almost before we even started, mochiko flour got everywhere, dusting the kitchen. Dad got this idea to FaceTime Grandma, and she was all, “HOW CAN I MAKE THE CAMERA SEE ME?” because, you know, grandparents and technology.

  I let them fiddle with their phones as I stirred the dduk mixture, allowing my muscles to whip the flour and sugar water into a sweet, chewy mass of luck. And when Grandma finally got her phone working, Dad aimed the camera at me so that she could watch.

  “Are you counting?” she asked, her voice scratchy with static. “You need to stir one hundred times. One hundred is best.”

  So I stirred one hundred times, even after Dad offered to take over, even after my arms burned with all that luck.

  “Ipuda, my beautiful girl,” my grandmother said, and that was when I remembered the promise I’d made to myself at Dari’s house.

  “Grandma,” I said, stepping away from the mixing bowl and massaging the ache out of my arm. Dad was holding the phone, so talking to her was almost like talking to him at the same time, but not quite. “Have you heard of the flower Korean Fire?”

  She didn’t answer for a few seconds, and I thought maybe she didn’t hear me, but it was just the phone lag. “Flower? Fire in Korea?”

  “No, it’s the name of a flower,” I said. I glanced up at Dad, whose face was etched with discomfort, but I decided to ask anyway, because this was part of me, too. And I wanted to be the whole me. “It blooms in the snow,” I told her. “Even when nothing else can grow.”

  Grandma nodded. “That is Korean people. We keep going even in the worst time, like when I take your dad to America and we grow, just the two of us. Always growing.”

  For a moment, I felt like a scientist, gathering little bits of research about myself and trying to analyze it. I looked at my pixely cell phone grandma and said, “Thanks, Halmoni.”

 
Then I glanced over at Dad, afraid to see weirdness on his face—but when we locked eyes, he didn’t look uncomfortable. Instead, he looked confused, as if he were hearing the word halmoni for the first time.

  Parents are strange.

  I said goodbye to my grandmother and went back to the dduk. Dad and I made little dduk balls together. By the time we were done, we had a whole tray of lumpy, squishy, fingerprinty treats, which weren’t nearly as good as Mom’s, but were still lucky.

  We ended up with more of the chewy exterior than the adzuki bean filling, so I took the extra dduk and made it long and stringy. I pressed it against Dad’s upper lip, giving him a ridiculous bumpy pink mustache. I laughed, and Dad looked at me half amused and half worried, like, Is there something wrong with my daughter?

  The best part was, Mom came downstairs in the middle of all this, and she smiled at Dad’s dduk mustache, which made Dad smile for real, which made the dduk fall off his face.

  “You guys made good luck,” Mom said, coming over to us. She leaned against the kitchen counter and crossed her arms over her chest.

  “It was Natalie’s idea,” Dad said, all happy and proud, even though I hadn’t done anything at all except suggest doing the same thing we do every year.

  “They aren’t very good, though,” I said. I felt a little self-conscious about them, like maybe she would be disappointed in Dad and me if the dduk didn’t turn out right.

  Mom lifted a piece off the tray and took a bite.

  I pressed my fingernails into my palms. Nervous, waiting, worried it wouldn’t taste good—that it wouldn’t be so lucky after all.

  But she smiled that faraway smile and said, “Very impressive.”

  I tried to picture Mom’s old smile, the huge can’t help it smile, where her top lip curled up a little to show her gums—and I couldn’t quite see it anymore.

  But at least Mom was smiling some kind of smile, which was good enough. More than good enough, maybe. The smart part of my brain told me not to push my dduk luck, but I couldn’t help myself, so I launched into the whole story about the baking, from the dough rolling to the FaceTiming. Mom listened and laughed in all the right places (even if it was faraway listening, far-off laughter), and the three of us ate all the dduk that day, because we needed all the luck we could get.