The Science of Breakable Things

by Tae Keller

  And, you know, I think we got it. Because Mom was there and we were happy. All that luck sat in my stomach, tight and full and good, and with all that goodness inside me, I knew I would win this competition. I could do this, because I had Twig and I had Dari and I had dduk and I had luck.

  I had another appointment with Dr. Doris today, and even though school doesn’t start back up until Monday, this felt like the official end of vacation. No more fun—time for therapy!

  Only, therapy was actually really good today, even if that feels weird to admit.

  I started off by telling Dr. Doris about the whole dduk extravaganza, and I went into detail and really “opened up” and “expressed myself” like Dad told me to. That was easy, I think, because telling the story made me happy. I would have told it again and again if Dr. Doris had let me.

  But Dr. Doris wanted to talk about Christmas, too. At first I hesitated, because I was in happy-fun-family mode, but she kept saying, “It’s okay to talk to me, Natalie. This is a safe zone.”

  Until today, my appointments with Dr. Doris had been filled with Quiet, Natalie. Keep it in, Natalie. I would hold my breath and count the petals on her wilting flowers and I would watch snow fall outside, but I would not speak.

  I would not speak—not about anything real—but the silence pressed around me, and everything that had happened on Christmas pounded in my head, and even though I knew this was a Therapist Trick, I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

  I told Dr. Doris about how Mom didn’t come downstairs, about the eggs and everything. “My present wasn’t very good, so I didn’t give it to her,” I said when I finished.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  I bit my lip, realizing I’d maybe said something wrong. “I shouldn’t have gotten a plant. Mom’s the plant expert,” I explained, “not me.” I don’t know why I said that.

  Dr. Doris waited for me to continue, but I didn’t. “What your mother is going through, Natalie, it isn’t your fault,” she said, and she didn’t sound like a therapist. She sounded like a nice lady who was saying something true.

  “Why can’t everything just be okay again?” The question left my lips without permission. I could’ve spent a long time scientifically investigating that one.

  “You will be okay, Natalie.” She said it in that nice-lady, true way again, and for one horrible second, I wished that she were my mother. And then I felt guilty. Maybe that’s why Mom stopped loving me, stopped trying for me, because I didn’t love her enough. Because I wasn’t enough.

  Before our session was over, Doris asked me to tell my favorite story about Mom, and I realized I couldn’t pick just one—because I have a good mother, and I love her, and I’ve never truly wished for anyone else.

  Eventually, I talked about the day in fourth grade when Mom picked me up from school in the middle of the day. Twig was in Paris that week, and Mikayla had been ditching me during lunch, so I was eating alone. And at the end of the week, after I’d cried and told Mom how alone I felt, Mom called the office and told them we had a family emergency.

  I didn’t realize, at first, what she was doing. During lunch period, I got called to the principal’s office, where I sat for twenty minutes and worried about the unknown emergency.

  By the time Mom got there, I was all freaked out until she ushered me into the car. “We’re going to the arboretum,” she explained.

  I thought she’d lost her mind. “What’s the emergency?” I asked, like maybe she’d forgotten and needed to be reminded that our family was in danger.

  But she laughed and waved her hand. “There is no emergency. I just thought you deserved a day off, and I missed my favorite daughter.” In my memory, she is made of sunlight and fresh air.

  We drove to the arboretum, and she told me about every single plant we saw, and it wasn’t even boring because she had a way of making things fascinating. “This is a willow,” she said, running her hand along a thick, tall tree trunk, “the goddess tree. The bark has been used to heal for many, many years. It’s sometimes called ‘nature’s aspirin.’ ”

  When we passed the herbs, she knelt at the sage, fingering the silvery-green leaves. “The wisest herb,” she said with a wink. “Eating it increases brain function.”

  As we wandered through the leaves and trees and flowers, I picked my favorites*1 and she said “Good choice” for everything I listed. When we reached the end of the path and sat on a giant log in the middle of the woods, she pulled me against her and told me about the Cobalt Blue Orchid.

  She told it to me like a legend or a myth. “This is a flower that achieved the impossible,” she told me. “This flower survived in the face of chemicals and toxins, and it turned all that death into something beautiful. That miracle field, Natalie, that’s the happiest place in the world.”

  And when Mom talked about the orchids, she came alive, more alive than I’d ever seen her before. This was the first time she’d told me about her research, and even though I’d read about it in her book, hearing her talk about it, I truly understood the meaning of those words—the magic of her passion.

  “Imagine what we could do with this orchid,” she said. “We have this flower that can grow in the face of toxic chemicals. If we could find some way to harness that healing ability and apply it to human cells—that would more than be a miracle.”

  As she spoke, the flower became more and more magical, until I didn’t care about lavender or lady ferns. The Cobalt Blue Orchid became my favorite flower in the world. And that day was my favorite day.

  Two weeks later, when Mikayla’s mom gave me my very own seed, Mom and I planted it together, very carefully, in perfect conditions, so it would bloom just for us. So it would soak up all the toxins in our lives and save us.

  When I finished telling the story, Doris smiled and said, “What a beautiful memory,” and I smiled and nodded back as if that’s all it was. I tried not to show how excited the memory had made me, because I didn’t want to raise any Red Flags,*2 but inside I was bubbling with hope.

  I’d been Managing My Expectations. But now I was full of luck and Mom was laughing again and we were almost a Happy Perfect Family.

  I could win this competition. I would win. And finally, after months and months of darkness, Mom and I would have another flower. We would regrow that magic.

  *1 Lavender and lady ferns and sweet violet.

  *2 Red Flags, n.: possibly therapists’ favorite term in the world. They see them everywhere. Trust me, I know.

  MATERIALS:

  • 3 washers

  • 3 strings

  • Scissors

  • Tape

  PROCEDURE:

  1. Cut each string to a different length: short, medium, long.

  2. Tie a washer to one end of string and tape other end to table.

  3. Bring washer up to desk height and drop.

  4. Record number of swings.

  RESULTS:

  • Dari’s string, long: 16 swings

  • Twig’s string, medium: 23 swings

  • Natalie’s string, short:

  Today was the first day back in school after break, and Mr. Neely seemed determined to pump up our energy.*1 If we thought Mr. Neely loved dead frogs and magnets, we experienced a whole new level of Neely love today. We walked into class to see #NewtonInMotion written in giant letters on the whiteboard.*2 A weird YouTube song called “Objects in Motion” blasted on the speaker. Even suck-uppy Mikayla was shocked into silence.

  Across the room, Twig started playing air guitar and rocking out to Mr. Neely’s nerdy music, and Dari joined in and played the air piano, because I guess the piano was the coolest instrument Dari could think of. Everyone stared—especially at Dari, because he was usually so serious in class—and I felt half embarrassed and half proud, because I had the weirdest
friends in the seventh grade.

  Mr. Neely clapped along, beaming at their jam sesh, and when the music ended, he introduced our experiment of the day: washer pendulums.*3 Dari, Twig, and I set up on our table in the back, and Dari started telling us about his trip to India while we worked. Dari, of course, could finish his pendulum while he told his stories, but Twig and I kind of gave up working and listened to him talk about his brothers, who tried to teach him to skateboard.*4

  As Dari spoke, I started thinking about my own family, which meant thinking about Mom. And then I thought about the egg drop in a few days, and how important it was, and I started feeling a little head-spinny.

  “Oh, by the way, guys,” Dari said, looking at me as if he’d read my mind—or maybe he’d just noticed I was distracted. “I was working on S’meggs a little more and I added just a few tweaks. We didn’t test it from the height it’ll actually be dropped from, so I adjusted the angles a bit.”

  “That’s great, Dari,” Twig said, and then cleared her throat and glanced over at me. She’d been mostly normal since our conversation on Christmas, but she always looked a little nervous when the competition came up.

  “Tweaks?” I asked. The spinning feeling got worse.

  “They aren’t a big deal,” Dari reassured me. “You won’t even notice. But they should help the egg survive impact.”

  “We’ll win this thing,” Twig said, a little too intensely. “Dari knows what he’s doing.”

  Dari looked between the two of us, trying to figure out what we weren’t saying, but I was saved by Mr. Neely, clapping his hands and announcing, “Five more minutes, class!”

  Dari jumped a little and looked down at our unfinished pendulums in horror. I don’t think he was used to getting distracted during class. He worked fast to finish all three of the pendulums.

  “Well done, us,” Twig said. She picked up her washer and dropped it, and we all watched it swing back and forth, back and forth, as if we were getting hypnotized. “Twenty-three swings,” Twig announced when the pendulum stopped, and we all paused to record the number. Then came Dari’s turn, with a total of sixteen swings.

  And here, just to prove I learned something today, is the scientific concept of the pendulum: once an object is in motion, it either transfers its energy to another object or keeps moving for all of eternity. Based on the laws of physics, if our pendulum was placed in a vacuum, it would never stop swinging, back and forth, back and forth.

  The problem with Earth is there’s gravity, and atmosphere, and all that other sticky, tricky Earth stuff that slows the pendulum down until it stops. So, basically, nothing works as well in real life as in theory.

  Class ended before we had time to test my pendulum. Dari gasped in horror and said, “I’ll have to run this experiment at home,” while Twig said, “We’ll have to make something up.”

  “Sorry, guys,” I said, even though I wasn’t really sorry. And secretly, as Twig and Dari were cleaning up and getting back to their desks, I started my pendulum, swinging fast on its short string. It looked wild, frenzied, like it wasn’t sure which way to go, forward and back, forward and back, and before it could slow down, I clamped my hand over the washer. I didn’t care if I couldn’t record the swings. I didn’t want to see it stop.

  *1 Pump up our kinetic energy, that is.

  *2 Do you think Isaac Newton would be proud or alarmed that his famous laws have been turned into a hashtag?

  *3 Washers, n.: possibly science teachers’ favorite thing in the world.

  *4 A story about skateboarding sounds cool and everything—until you remember it’s Dari. Because of course he managed to make it nerdy by relating it back to science and talking about momentum and stuff.

  On the morning of the egg drop competition, while Dad prepared for his afternoon work sessions, I stood outside his and Mom’s bedroom.

  I almost went in. But I did not. And Mom did not come out.

  More than ever, I knew how important this competition was, and I knew we had to win. I wanted to go inside, tell her what a big day this was—I wanted to make her understand and make her feel. But I couldn’t get my hand to turn the knob.

  Dad came out of his office and found me standing in front of their bedroom door. “Natalie,” he said, ready to launch into some Therapist Talk.

  But I pointed at the clock and interrupted with, “We’re gonna be late,” and went to wait for him in the car.

  When we finally got going, we swung by to pick up Twig, who burst into the backseat of the car and greeted us: “We are going to kick butt.”

  Dad glanced at her in the rearview mirror, probably deciding whether or not to scold her for language, but then she leaned forward, toward the passenger seat, so her breath tickled my ear.

  “I promise you,” she said in an almost-whisper, “we’re gonna win this. I can feel it.”

  At her words, my stomach twisted in excitement—because as much as I was still trying to Manage My Expectations, I couldn’t help it. We were going to win. I could feel it, too, in the air around us.

  We finally got to the competition, and I don’t know if I was expecting some grand ballroom or whatever, but the egg drop was hosted at an old three-story building. The second and third floors had a collection of random businesses, but the entire bottom floor used to be a library. Now it’s apparently used to host community science events.*1

  Dad parked, and Twig and I looked up at the roof, where S’meggs would be put to the test. “I’m so proud of you two,” Dad said—and I felt almost guilty, for the first time, because Dad had no idea why I was really doing this.

  I tried not to think about that, and the three of us went inside.

  “This place stinks,” Twig said. “It smells like old people and wet carpet, but stronger—like fifty old people and piles of wet carpet.”

  “Ew,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Twig grinned, pleased with her description.

  Dad put a hand on each of our shoulders and said, “It’s not that bad,” but he was frowning as he said it.

  “Okay, Yeong-jin,” Twig said, and Dad’s frown deepened.

  The entire floor was still set up like a library, with rows and rows of shelves, but they were empty, and when we spoke, our words echoed along the concrete floors, vibrating against the ghosts of old books.

  The room was already packed with kids and their parents—and I realized I’d never thought about the other teams. I’d figured once we had a good egg, that’d be it, and the money would be ours. Nervousness bubbled up in my stomach, and I buried my hands in my coat pockets and stuffed that worry back down.

  A lone microphone stand was propped up in a corner of the room, but we weren’t given any instructions and nobody seemed to be in charge. The abandoned library felt too loud and too hot.

  Dari was supposed to be there already, and the minutes kept ticking by, and fluttery panic bloomed in my chest. I shouldn’t have let him keep S’meggs, but he’d wanted to hang on to it, and I hadn’t said no, and now if he didn’t show up, we wouldn’t be able to participate and I couldn’t win the money, and—

  The doors opened and Dari walked in with both of his parents behind him.

  “It smells weird in here,” Dari said when he reached us.

  So of course Twig gave him the same description she’d given me, word for word. They launched into a discussion about why the room smelled like old people and wet carpet when there was, in fact, no carpet in the room, but I cut them off.

  “Did you bring S’meggs?”

  Obviously Dari did, because Dari’s smart, and forgetting the egg at an egg drop contest would be a not-so-smart move, but the question got them back on track. “I made a few more tweaks last night,” Dari said. “I reasoned that tightening the inner angles would allow the egg to handle a bigger impact.”

  I wished Da
ri had stopped making these “tweaks.” But I told myself to breathe. I mean, Twig was right: he was the smartest kid in our class. He probably knew what he was doing.

  Within fifteen minutes, so many people had shown up that the room got hotter and more humid and even smellier. Mr. Neely arrived and waved his arms when he saw us, weaving in and out of the other teams as he made his way over.

  “What an exciting day!” he said to us after he’d shaken hands and introduced himself to Dad and the Kapoors.

  “We’re going to win,” Twig informed him.

  “Of course you are—you’re my scientific explorers!” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.

  “I’m the head sheriff, and Dari is the mission analyst,” Twig continued matter-of-factly, and I wished she would stop. Those titles were just a joke, after all.

  Mr. Neely grinned. “Well, of course. Every team needs a head sheriff and a mission analyst.”

  “Natalie is the team captain,” Twig said.

  Mr. Neely beamed at me, and Dad reached over and squeezed my shoulder, and I just wanted to disappear.

  “I’m glad to see you’re taking charge, Natalie,” Mr. Neely said. And then, to our parents: “These three are my top students.”

  That definitely wasn’t true, but it was nice of him to say.

  He talked with our parents for a bit, about how he left his pharmaceutical research job to teach. When he went to talk to the other science teachers, I watched him interact with them. He was still his awkward self, but he wasn’t ours anymore. It was weird, and all of a sudden I felt angry. Like, he was supposed to be our teacher and that was it, and now he was this person, with friends and a past in pharma-something-whatever.