by Ben Mezrich
The dome was an accident of architecture; Charlie’s father had told him that the original plans for the second floor of Nagassack Middle School had actually called for a cantilevered, environmentally friendly sunroof that would help heat the building during the cold winter months. But somewhere between blueprints and buttresses, the Nagassack Building Committee decided alumni funds would be better spent on a four-hundred seat theater, which, it turned out, was just as swelteringly hot in winter and summer, because of its unfortunate location right above the main boilers that fed superheated steam through the school’s vascular system. In any case, the sunroof was out, the dome went up, and Nagassack was the only middle school that Charlie knew of that taught science in the round.
The table setup was perfect for a thirty-student class, which was the norm. The far half of the room was reserved for special projects, and for the preserved samples that lined the metal shelves above the microscopes: fish, bugs, frogs, snakes, mostly sealed in plastic containers with cork tops, some stuck right to display boards with brightly tipped pins. Next to the shelves, tucked into the farthest curve of the circular room, was Mabel the skeleton. Mrs. Hennigan, who taught science from fifth to seventh grades, never tired of telling her classes that Mabel was the most expensive specimen in the entire school. At Halloween, she got a jack-o-lantern sidekick, placed right beneath her dangling, bone-white toes. Around Christmas, Mabel was dressed up with a red Santa hat and a cotton-ball beard.
The room itself smelled of hamster wood shavings, though there hadn’t been a live hamster in the room for as long as Charlie could remember. A lot of kids attributed the smell to Mrs. Hennigan herself; a heavyset woman with curly white hair and poorly applied blue eyeliner, she had a penchant for sacklike outfits that seemed to be made of burlap. Everything she wore was beige, down to her hospital-style tights and outdated platform shoes. Her hand always shook when she wrote on the chalkboard at the front of the room, which made her mostly illegible handwriting even more impossible to decipher, and the glare from the fluorescent panels in the dome only amplified the effect.
As usual, Mrs. Hennigan was at that chalkboard, scratching away with a piece of chalk as small as a pencil eraser, while Charlie watched Greta devour her lunch. Every now and then, Hennigan’s nails hit the blackboard as she wrote, sending an awful screech reverberating through the wood-shaving-scented air. Most of the kids groaned at the sound, but Charlie remained focused on the turtle.
He’d often found solace watching Greta; seeing her roam around her tank in the slow-motion manner of her species helped him think, and at the moment, he certainly had a lot to think about. A casual observer might wonder how a turtle could aid a twelve-year-old’s meditation, but for Charlie, it made perfect sense. One of his most significant childhood memories revolved around a turtle just like Greta.
It had happened just a few days past his eighth birthday. He and Jeremy had been outside playing and had discovered a little creek that ran parallel to Jeremy’s backyard. They’d never seen the creek before, because it was past the invisible line that Jeremy’s parents had drawn beyond which they hadn’t been allowed to play, but that morning they’d decided to push those boundaries and explore. They followed the creek through the dense underbrush, finally coming to a little clearing where the water swelled to what almost could be described as a pond. And in the middle of the pond, they spotted a turtle sitting on a rather large log. Before either of them could even react, they heard laughter from the other side of the pond, followed by a rain of rocks, all aimed at the hapless reptile. A bunch of older kids, maybe age fifteen or sixteen, were hurling stones at the poor creature. Most were poorly aimed, but a few were finding their target, and Charlie could see the red splotches where the rocks were cutting through the turtle’s shell, finding the soft meat beneath. Slowly, painfully slowly, the thing was trying to get off the log and into the safety of the pond, but with every second, the rain of stones became heavier, the moment more dire.
Charlie and Jeremy had watched in silence, unable to do anything. Charlie had never felt so helpless. Eventually, he’d just turned and made his way back along the creek to Jeremy’s yard. He liked to imagine that the turtle had made it off the log, injured but alive, and disappeared beneath the surface. But he knew, realistically, that the turtle had probably never gotten off that log.
Greta, safe in her terrarium, made Charlie feel secure in a world that seemed every day less in his control. After a day like this, even a moment with Greta seemed unlikely to put it all in perspective.
“Okay, Charlie, I’m ready for another try.”
Charlie turned away from the terrarium to see Jeremy grinning at him from behind their shared lab table, most of his face obscured by a pair of oversize safety goggles. He was wearing rubber gloves and had in his right hand, held delicately between two eel-like fingers, a shiny red marble.
“You don’t need the goggles, Jeremy. Or the gloves.”
Charlie tried to keep his voice soft, although there was little danger of Mrs. Hennigan turning around any time soon. Once she started scrawling against the blackboard, she was in for the duration.
“Safety first,” Jeremy responded. “Wouldn’t want a marble popping up and taking out my eye.”
“It’s a bowl and a ball. Nobody’s going to lose any eyes.”
Charlie crossed over to where Jeremy was standing and glanced down at their shared science project. Really, on the surface that’s all it was, a bowl and a ball. The marble was from Charlie’s collection, one he’d been adding to since early childhood—he’d always been fascinated by the mathematically perfect little spheres, and the many ways you could use them to turn boring textbook physics and math concepts into fun, illustrative paradigms. Toss one in the air, hello gravity. Roll one down a ramp, potential energy meets friction. Smash two together, kinetic energy and the second law of thermodynamics. Roll one down a bowl, and you got all three paradigms for the price of one.
The bowl was pretty good for the job, ceramic and smooth, although Charlie could have done without the brightly colored petunias that covered most of its inner and outer surface. Charlie had borrowed the bowl from his kitchen cabinet at home; once upon a time, it had been the family salad bowl, in use at least twice a week for many years.
Though it still carried the vague, pungently vinegar smell of salad dressing, the smooth inner surface of the petunia bowl was exactly what Charlie had needed for his and Jeremy’s shared science project. He watched as Jeremy dramatically placed the marble at the top edge of the bowl, right beneath a little black line Charlie had etched to mark the theoretical entrance point. Jeremy gave the marble a little push with his finger, and the marble rolled around the lip of the bowl, then began its descent, rolling in tighter and tighter circles as it traveled down, inch by inch, toward the bottom.
“Houston, we have entry into the upper atmosphere,” Jeremy exclaimed. “T-minus twenty seconds until impact!”
Charlie glanced at the digital timer attached to the top of the bowl a few inches from where Jeremy had started the marble. The device was his own construction; it was actually just a Casio watch with a simple timer application. Charlie had removed the watch’s strap and had superglued the remaining square section of the device to the ceramic bowl. Jeremy had engaged the timer with his left hand just at the exact moment he’d pushed the marble off on its spiraling descent. He had presumably also made a mental note of the time on the watch as the marble passed the entry point, completing its first revolution around the interior lip of the bowl. He’d make another mental note again as the ball finished its second roll around the bowl, and the rest, as Charlie liked to say, was math, math, and more math.
The real science behind the marble’s descent to the center of the bowl was actually so sophisticated that Charlie wouldn’t have been able to explain it without the help of a textbook, and maybe his parents. You had gravity pulling the marble down toward the bottom of the bowl, the horizontal velocity of Jeremy’s initial pus
h fighting that downward motion, the curve of the bowl adding another horizontal element, the friction from the bowl’s surface slowing the descent, the revolutions of the marble itself causing more chaos along the way—but none of this really mattered in the scope of Charlie and Jeremy’s project. Their project was actually quite simple, a ball and a bowl, even if it was an illustration of something incredibly complex.
“And there it goes,” Jeremy continued, squinting down into the salad bowl as the marble spun down to the bottom, then finally rolled to a stop. “Splashdown!”
Charlie grinned at Jeremy’s dramatics. When they finally presented their project, they would certainly use terms like that—splashdown, impact, upper atmosphere—because it was a lot more fun than just talking about a marble rolling around a bowl. Pretending that the marble was a satellite breaking orbit and plummeting to the earth made the project interesting and, really, was where the idea had come from in the first place.
It was actually the continuation of an experiment that Charlie had been working on over the summer, the results of which he’d submitted to a statewide science competition a few weeks before school began. Charlie had only won second prize with his research; first prize had gone to a kid who’d built a functioning volcano using modeling clay, baking soda, and food dye, as clichéd a project as you could find, but admittedly pretty compelling to watch. Still, even second place had inspired Charlie to continue working on the project, so when Mrs. Hennigan suggested that her sixth graders pair up and do an independent project to show to the rest of the students at the end of the semester, it had seemed natural for Charlie and Jeremy to delve into the ball and bowl.
“Splashdown is a good guess,” Charlie commented, “because in real life, there’d be an eighty-five percent chance it would land in water.”
It was Charlie’s dad who had first told him the story of Skylab, a space station/satellite that back in the late seventies had become a front page headline when it had broken orbit and crash-landed off the coast of Australia. As it fell, predicting where the satellite/station was going to impact the earth had become a nationwide sensation, and a couple of magazines had even offered prizes to anyone who got their hands on a piece of the wreckage. Charlie had immediately seized on the story as an inspiration for his science project.
It was that event that Charlie was trying to illustrate with his ball and his bowl. Jeremy was along for the ride; he was a good partner because though he wasn’t quite as skilled at math as Charlie, he was sharp enough to quickly follow along.
“In real life,” Jeremy responded, “this marble would be the size of a speck of dust and this bowl should be as big as the entire room. And in real life, Finn Carter wouldn’t have kidnapped you from the lunchroom and dragged you off to god knows where and then sworn you to secrecy.”
Charlie rolled his eyes as he opened a notepad on the desk next to the bowl and held up a pen.
“He didn’t kidnap me, he just wanted to talk in private. Give me the first and second time marks.”
“It’s 4.3 and 3.2. Yeah, right, he wanted your advice on swimming the backstroke. Oh, I forgot, he doesn’t swim anymore, right? Maybe he’s some sort of superhero now, protecting kids from bullies and making the world a better place for geeks like us.”
Charlie understood Jeremy’s frustration. He’d been peppering Charlie with questions for the past twenty minutes about where he’d gone during lunch and what Finn had wanted. Charlie had never kept anything secret from Jeremy before; they had shared everything with each other pretty much since they could both talk. But Charlie had essentially made a promise in front of Finn and the others, and beyond that, well, he had to admit, he was a little scared of Miranda. Not just because she was basically an adult and had invited him into a secret world, but because he was pretty sure he knew why she had invited him, specifically, and it wasn’t just that he was really good at math and was under the age of fourteen.
“Jeremy,” he said, as he continued scribbling on the notepad, pretending to ponder the two numbers Jeremy had given him while he was actually thinking about something else, entirely, “you know anything about the fall school trip? Incredo Land?”
Jeremy raised the thick safety goggles and ran a hand through his mop of red hair.
“I know I won’t be going. And neither will you. My parents can’t afford to send me to Incredo Land, and your parents are way too cheap to send you.”
“They aren’t cheap—”
“Okay, practical. That’s the word I’m looking for. Your parents are so practical, they’d never send you to Incredo Land. They didn’t buy you a bike until you were ten, and even then it was so used the tires were practically elliptical.”
Charlie wanted to argue, but Jeremy was essentially correct. His parents didn’t like to spend money unless they had to, which meant things like trips to Incredo Land were pretty unlikely.
“Can you imagine it, though?” Jeremy mused, his eyes glazing a bit. “Flying in an airplane. Staying in a hotel room with no parents around? Ordering room service and swimming in some giant, rodent-shaped swimming pool? All those rides? The Space Drop, and that one that goes underwater on Jupiter’s moon, and Saturn’s Rings—and all the freaking candy you can eat?”
Jeremy’s excitement at the idea was infectious. Charlie couldn’t manage the pure ecstasy he was seeing in Jeremy’s eyes, but he didn’t deny that the thought of a week in Incredo Land sent sparks up his spine. It was true, the school trip would be sans parents, though there would be teacher-proctors, of course, three at a minimum. But the rest of Jeremy’s musings probably weren’t that far off. Charlie had flown in planes before with his parents, strapped in between them in a middle seat with an iPad on his lap. This would be different, this would be flying like an adult. And the hotel, the pool, the rides, well, all that would be pretty incredible.
Still, he did his best to temper his thoughts. Incredo Land was a dream that he wasn’t supposed to be able to have again, at least not yet. His parents had talked about going there again when he was older, and only during the summer, when it would be cheaper, and way, way hotter. Nobody wanted to go to Florida in the middle of the summer, when it was practical.
He pretended to concentrate on the notepad in front of him. And part of his brain really was playing with the two numbers Jeremy had given him, the two timer marks that told him how long it had taken the marble to go around the inside of the bowl on its first and second revolutions. Those two numbers were the key to their project and were also the key to the paper that Charlie had submitted to the state science fair earlier that summer. Because those two numbers were all you really needed to tell you when a ball would get to the center of a bowl, or where a satellite would hit the earth. Everything else, you already knew.
Those two numbers, when plugged into an equation that took into account the circumference of the bowl, or the earth, and the height at which the ball, or satellite, made its entry, gave you the rate of descent, and the change in its deceleration on the way down. Once you knew how fast the ball was going around and around, and how that velocity changed as it got closer to the bottom, you could figure out where it was going to end up. The equation was complicated, but the procedure of the experiment was not. All Jeremy had done was drop the marble and hit the button on the timer twice.
With the notepad and enough time, Charlie could figure out the rest. On his dad’s iPhone—which is what Charlie had used for the paper he’d submitted to the state science fair—Charlie could do the calculation almost instantaneously. His dad had helped him write an app for just that purpose. If he’d had his dad’s iPhone with him in the science lab, he could have plugged the numbers in as the marble rolled down the bowl and had a pretty accurate idea of when it would stop before it actually did.
And if the bowl had been a spinning wheel cut into five triangular sections, and instead of a marble the satellite was represented by a little arrow clicking along the outside of the wheel—
Jeremy interrupte
d Charlie’s thoughts, leaning close over the salad bowl.
“So Finn’s interest in you has something to do with the school trip? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
Charlie didn’t immediately respond. Jeremy reached into the salad bowl and grabbed the marble, then tossed it into the air. Charlie managed to catch it before it hit the table, then glanced toward Mrs. Hennigan, who was thankfully still screeching and scribbling her way across the blackboard. Jeremy laughed, poking Charlie with a gloved finger.
“I doubt he’s interested in you because you know how to calculate how long it takes a marble to roll down a bowl.”
Charlie laughed, but inside, he was suddenly sure.
Jeremy couldn’t have been more wrong.
8
MARION TUTTLE WAS HAVING a moment. Hunched over the piece of notebook paper, halfway out of his plastic institutional-style chair, his rounded, spotted cheeks puffed out around his pursed lips, beads of sweat rising in the creases of his doughy forehead and jowls. The Bic pen gripped in his right hand was moving so fast it was a purple blur, the point riding back and forth across the paper in strokes that would make an Olympic swimmer blush. He had been going at it for minutes, but still nobody spoke, nobody said a word, all caught in the awe of the moment, the miracle, the art.
And then, finally, Marion stopped. Pen poised in the air a few inches above the page, breathing hard, the sweat now running freely down the sides of his face. Then he grinned, settled back in his chair, and crossed his stubby arms against his potato-shaped chest. Their corner of the school library had gone dead silent, save for the creak of the heating pipes that crisscrossed the low ceiling and the occasional scrape of a plastic chair leg against the hardwood floor.
