Meanwhile his dad, Chuck Haggerty, the struggling musician, bought a house and half a music store. Running the store and teaching guitar and playing local gigs with his band, Whiplash, keeps him so busy he doesn’t have much to say about Spencer’s educational opportunities—except for the occasional, “Where we gonna get the money for that?” But in spite of his (sometimes) sarcastic comments, he agrees that Spencer is unusually bright and should be encouraged. “As long as we’re not too pushy. Let him enjoy being a kid.”
Spencer enjoys being a kid, but he mostly enjoys being a genius. Except lately, not so much.
“What are you doing for the science fair?” Igor asks him as they gather at the gazebo on the first day after winter break.
Igor is not what you’d call the academic type; normally he’d be asking everybody what they got for Christmas (Spencer got a NASA-rated telescope and an Ultra-Tetris game pack). So it’s funny, and a little disturbing, that the first thing out of Igor’s mouth this morning would be the very thing Spencer is starting to worry about. “Why?”
“’Cause I’m going to have the coolest project this year! I got the idea right after Christmas. I gotta scoop out the competition.” Igor is talking so fast his words pile up on the cold air in little puffs of steam.
“You mean ‘scope out.’ What’s your project?”
“It’s a secret. And I’m gonna do it all by myself with no help. So what’s yours?”
Igor’s as eager as a squirmy little puppy, so Spencer decides to tell him. Not that it’s a big secret: “Mouse maze.”
“Awesome! You mean, with real mice?”
“Duh. What’s the alternative—windup mice?”
“What are they supposed to do?”
“Run around in the maze—what else?” These questions are beginning to irritate him.
“Cool! I asked you first because you’re sure to have the best project. But it won’t beat mine.”
The bus arrives, a blob of yellow on the gray landscape, rolling to a stop in a cloud of exhaust. The Thompsons’ SUV pulls up at the same moment and ejects Bender from the backseat, but just as Mrs. Thompson steps on the accelerator, the STOP sign swings out from the side of the bus. She’s so frustrated she almost lays on her horn but taps it instead, making a peevish little toot. Bender moseys over to the bus, taking his time to join the end of the line.
Spencer observes the drama while waiting to board.
“They’re splitting up,” says Shelly to Miranda, directly behind him.
“What? Who?”
“Bender’s folks. Didn’t you notice the for sale sign in their yard? His dad moved out when they got back from Colorado.”
“How do you know?”
“Mrs. Thompson asked my mom to review her sales contracts, like Mr. Thompson used to do. It’ll be a little extra money since Mom quit her job. But not enough.” As he steps up into the bus, Spencer glances back to see Shelly make a face and nibble a fingernail.
Igor grabs a seat in front of Kaitlynn and immediately turns around to “scoop out” her science project. Jay boards last after dashing across the common. “Slept late,” he explains, settling in next to Spencer. “Winter break ought to last a month, like they do in college.”
The STOP sign snaps, and immediately Mrs. Thompson dodges around the bus, gunning the motor. “Did you hear about Bender?” Spencer asks Jay.
“Hear what?”
“His mom and dad are splitting up.”
“Oh. Too bad. That must be why he’s been such a jerk lately.”
“What do you mean, lately?”
“Yeah.” Jay yawns again. “Good point. Hey, me and Poppy made our play-offs chart last night. You want to hear my picks?”
“Sure,” Spencer says, knowing he doesn’t have much choice. Every January, Jay and his grandfather draw up their projected Super Bowl play-off teams, with winners and point spreads. That means football talk for a whole month, or actually from mid-December to mid-February. Spencer puts up with it. Jay is in the middle of a long-winded comparison between the Patriots and the Giants when Bender yells from the back of the bus.
“HEY!” Heads turn to the back where he sits straight as a pencil. “We didn’t stop!”
It’s true—instead of slowing and turning on Farm Road 152, the bus barreled right by.
“What’s going on?” Bender demands.
“It’s not on the route anymore,” Mrs. B calls back.
“How come?”
“Is that any of your business?” The driver is keeping her eyes forward.
Bender slumps back in his seat, arms crossed and brow furrowed, as though thinking through one of his math problems. Meanwhile, a scuffling in the seat in front of Spencer earns a roar from Mrs. B.
“Sit DOWN, Igor!”
“Dang,” Igor mutters, shrinking back to his place in front of Kaitlynn. “Jay!” he hisses across the aisle. “Catch you later!”
“What’s he all excited about?” Jay asks Spencer.
“Science fair.”
“Dude.” Jay’s jaw creaks with another yawn. “Science fair’s not for weeks. Who’s thinking about it now?”
• • •
Spencer, that’s who. Science fair is a very big deal around his house, since he’s supposed to win the Nobel Prize someday. Ever since third grade, when his mom came down hard on his desire to build a plaster volcano (“No volcanoes. If you can’t do something original, don’t do anything.”), he’d come up with a bigger and better project every year. This year especially, because sixth-graders are eligible to go to the regional science fair in March and state in May. Then on to nationals in June. He’s aiming for state, though nationals would be fine with him too.
His project had sounded promising at first. “I’m going to build a mouse maze,” he told his mom early in October.
“Great. And what will you investigate with the maze?”
He hadn’t thought far beyond the basic idea, mostly because he just wanted to build a maze. Mazes were cool. “Um…test their memory.”
“Sounds good. How?”
He did some online research and discovered several nutritional supplements that were supposed to feed the frontal lobe—the section of the brain mostly responsible for memory. The most extravagant claims were for milk thistle, a substance he’d never heard of. But it was available at the local health food store.
So there was his plan: buy the mice, build the maze, run the trials, and keep careful records to determine if herbal supplements really had any effect on the critters’ memories. He should have started in November, but his mom signed him up for an interactive “Live Cam in Space” project that required a lot of prep, and his Youth Court duties took up way more time than he expected.
In December, his “normal kid” regulator kicked in: with Christmas and winter break, who wanted to worry about the science fair? After a little prodding from his mom, he purchased three pairs of mice in various colors, which he named Lucy and Linus, Albert and Marie, and George and Martha. He kept the sexes apart, or at least tried to, until he discovered George building a nest. So Georgina went into the ladies’ cage and Spencer kept the babies as alternates, even though two of them died tragically young.
The mice are the raw material for his experiment but don’t actually get down to business until the first weekend in January. “It’ll be awesome,” he tells Jay, who’s helping build the maze.
“I guess,” Jay says as he lets Lucy crawl over his hand. He’s supposed to be cutting corrugated cardboard strips. “These things feel creepy with their itty bitty paws.”
“Put it back. They shouldn’t be handled too much—it might interfere with the data.”
“‘Interfere with the data’? That’s so scientific, dude. Hey, what if you breed a superior race of mice that remember where you put your gym shoes? You could teach ’em to com
municate and sell ’em in little cages so they could be carried right along with us and—argh! It pooped on me!”
“They do that a lot. Put it back, okay? No, not in the boys’ cage—the other one!”
“Stupid mice.” Jay returns Lucy to her cage, a converted aquarium with a screen wire top. “For little things, they sure do stink.”
“They eat all the time. So they poop all the time. That’s what my research has uncovered so far.”
“Cool. I didn’t know science could be so…”
“Interesting? Useful?”
“No…poopy.”
Spencer hadn’t realized how science could be so frustrating. Earlier projects from third, fourth, and fifth grade involved bread mold, sunflowers, and earthworms. They had also involved help from his mother, but both agreed he was going to do it on his own this year. That might have been the kind of resolution made to be broken, except that last fall, Chuck Haggerty bought out his partner to become sole owner of the music store, and Maureen Maguire Haggerty is really busy with bookkeeping and taxes. So whenever Spencer starts to ask her a project-related question, she shakes her head. “Uh-uh. It’s strictly hands-off this year, remember? Look it up or ask Mr. Betts.”
Mr. Betts is his science teacher but not much better than his mom when it comes to questions. He seldom gives a straight answer but makes suggestions about how you can find it out on your own, which is really helpful. Not.
So Spencer is on his own, even when Georgina croaks and Martha escapes and Lucy and Albert nibble holes in his cardboard maze because he left them in there too long. Or, worst of all, show no improvement in memory whatsoever, even when he ups the dosage or combines memory-boosting supplements. He keeps careful records on his laptop—except for the three days’ worth that he accidentally deleted and couldn’t get back. And that week he was sick with the flu. But no matter how he views the data, it still says the same thing. Which is nothing.
“Well, then,” his mother says after three weeks. “That’s your result. ‘Commonly marketed herbal supplements promoted as memory enhancers are shown to have no discernible effect on laboratory mice.’” She’s slicing beef for sukiyaki and can’t help looking disappointed because his project isn’t sexy enough to go to state.
“That’s not very interesting,” Spencer mutters.
“Except now you know what doesn’t work—”
“You know what?” his dad chimes in while crossing the kitchen from the garage. “I’ll bet most scientific research is boring as a box of rocks. Ninety percent, at least.”
“Don’t discourage him, Chuck—”
“I’m not. That’s just a fact. I’ll write a song about it; that’ll be interesting.”
What makes it worse is that his peers in the neighborhood—well, some of them…okay, two of them—are really getting into the fair this year. Igor still refuses to say what his project is, only that it’ll be the best ever. Hard to believe, because Igor went the volcano route in fourth grade and nothing before. This year, he’s not only entering, but he continues to be very interested in the competition.
“What are you doing?” he asks everybody on the bus, even the Brothers Calamity (who just laugh at him). When asked, Matthew shrugs, Kaitlynn cheerfully admits to making a volcano, Miranda’s has something to do with plants, and whatever Alice says is soon forgotten. Shelly gasps, “Science project?! My camp application is due in four weeks! I have to finish my demo CD!”
Jay is studying the salt-replacing effects of Gatorade, and Bender is making a shrunken head.
“Wow!” gasps Igor. “A real one?”
Bender snorts. “Why bother if it’s not real? I’ve been reading up on how they do it in South America.”
Igor is so excited he’s halfway over the seat. “So how do they do it in South America?”
“Sit down, Igor!” Mrs. B yells from the front.
“First,” says Bender, “you take off the head of the victim.”
Jay, who is sitting with Spencer across the aisle, joins the conversation. “But don’t you have to ask them if you can borrow it?”
“Whatever. Then you peel the skin from the skull and throw the skull away.”
Spencer is intrigued in spite of himself. “Why don’t you keep it?”
“Okay, you keep it if you want a nice pencil holder for your desk. But for the skin, first you boil it till it shrinks to about half-size, then turn it inside out and scrape all the flesh off and let it dry for at least a day. Then you sew the mouth and eyes closed and stuff it with hot rocks to make it shrink even more. After about three days—”
“Okay, okay,” Igor interrupts. “It’s not for real, right?”
“Of course it’s for real. That’s how they did it—do it.”
“But you’re not going to get a real head and—”
“I think beheading is against the law,” Spencer points out.
“Definitely,” Jay agrees.
“Uh-huh,” Bender says. “Ever hear of medical schools? And morgues?”
Of course, everybody hears about Bender’s project from Igor, and at least it steals interest from Spencer’s pathetic little mouse maze. He wishes he’d never even thought of the idea now—it’s totally lame. Or maybe if he’d started it sooner…but how could he, with track and extra credit reading in social studies and the glee club Christmas show? And by the way, how smart was that, to let the music teacher talk him into glee club as a way of “branching out”? During the second session of Youth Court this month, he got in a shouting match with one of the defendants and had to be suspended (“recused”) from the case by Mr. Pearsall, who later asked him if he was feeling stressed.
He’ll probably get a good grade on the science project, as well as encouraging remarks and reminders—lots of them—that research is one part inspiration and nine parts perspiration. Also that Thomas Edison tried, like, three thousand six hundred seventy-two different filaments before he came up with the one for his incandescent lightbulb. But still, boring as a box of rocks, as his dad says, even though some girls will think the mice are cute.
“There’s always next year!” his mom says brightly.
But actually, science fair is only a symptom of the real problem.
The real problem is Spencer is starting to think he’s not genius material after all. Only smart enough to get into the gifted and talented program where, instead of math drills and spelling tests, you do group projects and enrichment circles (which are really easier but that’s a secret nobody tells).
His doubts began with the physics camp in St. Louis last summer. It was a little over his head, but that was only to be expected since most of the participants were one or two grades above him. One of the speakers was an astronomer from McDonald Observatory who took them to the Science Center Planetarium and talked about supernovas and black holes. To tell the truth, Spencer couldn’t follow a lot of it, but the parts he did understand sounded really cool. The guy kept mentioning this book: A Brief History of Time.
So when Spencer got back from camp, he checked out the book from the library. It’s by this guy Stephen Hawking, a physicist with ALS. That’s a disease that twisted his body so he looks like a pretzel. But ALS didn’t affect his brain.
Chapter One was okay, but Spencer read Chapter Two twice and felt even dumber the second time. Of course, he was only twelve and lacked a few basic concepts (as his mom said) so he returned the book to the library and forgot about it…
Until the morning he passes Matthew on the bus and happens to notice he’s reading a book and immediately recognizes the cover because Stephen Hawking is hard to mistake: A Brief History of Time.
He stops so abruptly Jay runs into him. “Hey!”
Spencer is staring, which he knows is rude but he can’t help it. “Do you get that book?” he blurts out.
Matthew looks up, startled. “Huh?”
> “That book. Do you understand it?”
“Yeah…mostly.”
“Move it, dude,” Jay says behind him. Spencer moves, but it’s like he’s sleepwalking.
Matthew understands! Matthew and Stephen Hawking are homies! Matthew the weird, the silent, is just possibly a genius. Don’t they say Einstein was kind of a weird kid too?
“What’s up with you?” Jay asks. “You mad at somebody?”
“No.” But actually, yes.
It bothers him so much that that afternoon, after the bus has emptied and its passengers are scattering, Spencer catches up to Matthew at the bend of Courtney Circle, where Meadow Lane runs to a cul-de-sac.
“So,” Spencer says, panting, “are you doing a science project on that book or what?”
Matthew glances around like he’s looking for an escape. “Why?”
“I just want to know. Because…because I read it last summer.” Stupid, he thinks. If Matthew asks him anything about it, he’s dead in the water.
“I’m interested,” Matthew says, and after a pause, “Is that okay?”
“Sure it is. I just wondered if you were doing anything with it.”
Matthew’s expression changes from irritated to cornered again. “What if I am?”
“Nothing! I just—” Spencer has to stop. What does he just, after all? “Well, are you?”
“Only if my mother makes me,” says Matthew. “Bye.” He stalks away toward his house on the south side of the cul-de-sac. Spencer lingers a moment, telling himself to chill.
But Rude Shock Number Two awaits him at home: Marie, one of the mice in his control group, has expired. In other words, croaked. She’s lying in a corner of the cage with her tiny claws curled up while Lucy sniffs around interestedly, like she might take a nibble. “I can’t believe this! Do real scientists go through mice this fast?”
Somebody on This Bus Is Going to Be Famous Page 11
