Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It

by Sundee T. Frazier

The lady wore a long, transparent crystal around her neck. The pointy end attached to the chain had been covered in silver so that it looked like it was wearing a hat. A purple stone had been fixed to the front of the crystal. She reached up and touched the necklace. “Do you like it?”

  I nodded. “Is it quartz?” Mr. Hammond had taught us about quartz. The most common mineral in the Earth’s crust. It came in many colors, but it was all the same thing.

  “You know your stuff,” she said.

  “We learned about rocks in school this year—for science. It was pretty interesting.”

  “Maybe you’d like to come on a rock dig with us sometime. We go out a lot during the summer months.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. Let me introduce you to Ed. He’s our club president.”

  Perfect.

  The woman led me to a table where a man was bent over, straightening his rows of rocks—dozens and dozens of rocks, in every color imaginable. Each specimen rested on a puff of cotton in its own white box. Blue veins crisscrossed the tops of the man’s hands like Dad’s road map; brown spots made them look kind of dirty.

  “Ed, this young man is interested in the rock club.”

  The man looked up. His orangish white hair was slicked back from his pink face. His hooked nose reminded me of a parrot’s beak.

  “What can I do you for?” he asked. The woman saw she had a customer and hurried to her table.

  I turned to the man, not sure what to say.

  “Are you interested in minerals?” he asked.

  “I’m a scientist. I’m interested in just about everything.”

  “A scientist, eh? Important people, those scientists.” He picked up one of his samples and held it out to me. “You might find this one particularly interesting, then.” He set the rectangular crystal in my palm.

  “What is it?”

  “Calcite.”

  “But it’s clear. The calcite I’ve seen was more like the color of your hair.”

  “That right?” He ran his hand through the wave above his forehead. “Well, color may be a mineral’s easiest property to identify, but it can also be the most misleading.” He laid a flyer for the mall exhibit on the table. “Set the calcite on one of those words on the paper.”

  I put it down. When I looked through the rock, the words split. It was like seeing double.

  “Cool. How much is it?”

  “Five bucks. It’s pretty common stuff. But that one’s special because of the double refraction. It’ll be a nice addition to your collection.”

  I picked it up and looked through it at the man. It didn’t make him split exactly, just made him blurry. “I don’t have a collection—yet.”

  “Never too late to start. How old are you—eleven, twelve?”

  I lowered the stone. “Ten, but I’ll be eleven in August.”

  “Tall for your age, aren’t you?”

  “I guess. I take after my dad. Or so people tell me.” I looked down the rows of boxes, taking in all his samples. “You’ve got a lot of rocks.”

  “Minerals,” he said. “Been collecting ’em fifty years.”

  My eyes opened wide.

  “Didn’t start till I was fifteen. So see, if you start now, you’ll have a jump on me.” He turned his back and dug through a box for something.

  “If you start what?” Gladys came up. The massage-machine line must have been too long.

  “Gladys, look!” I held up the calcite. “I’m going to have my own collection!”

  The man turned around with a green paper in his hand. It said PUYALLUP ROCK CLUB across the top. “Come to this if you want to meet some other collectors.” He pointed to the bottom of the paper. “My name and number—”

  Gladys gasped. Her jaw had gone limp and her tongue was hanging out.

  The man looked up. His eyes moved back and forth a couple of times between us.

  Gladys grabbed the flyer. She squawked like a startled hen. “Not interested.” She plucked the rock from my hand and dropped it on the table. The piece of green paper fluttered to the ground.

  She yanked on my arm, but I broke free and stooped to pick up the flyer. The man stood frozen, staring at us like one of the wax dummies I saw in Hollywood when we visited my cousins in Los Angeles.

  Gladys grabbed my arm again and pulled me away. What was she doing?

  “Ow. You’re pinching me. What’s going on?”

  She kept moving forward, herky-jerky. “Your mama’s gonna have a fit.”

  We walked around the fountain. The man was out of sight.

  “Why did you say I wasn’t interested? I am!” I wanted to run back and buy my calcite, but Gladys’s grip was firm.

  We kept walking, as fast as Gladys could walk, which was pretty fast. She huffed and muttered about how she couldn’t believe it and what were the chances and Katherine was going to be beside herself.

  At the next empty bench, Gladys finally stopped and dropped. She held her purse in her lap and pulled me onto the seat beside her. She breathed hard. “Holy Moses.”

  I slumped on the bench and looked back at the exhibit. The fountain sounded like static.

  “Of course you were going to run into him at some point. But why with me? I’ve tried to stay out of it.” She was still talking to herself.

  I stared at her. Who was she talking about? I lifted the flyer and looked for the man’s name. ED DEBOSE, CLUB PRESIDENT.

  DeBose. That was Mom’s name before she got married. That was my dead grandmother’s last name.

  I started putting it together. Could it really be? Why else would Gladys be acting so weird?

  I suddenly felt like I’d swallowed a bunch of rocks.

  That man was my grandpa. The grandpa I’d never met. The grandpa who was “gone.”

  CHAPTER 3

  On Tuesday morning, Dad came into my room early to say goodbye before leaving for work. He said something about my do bok, then ruffled my hair and kissed my head. I went back to sleep. When I woke up again, I had the Jitters.

  The Jitters is what happens before I know something, but after I realize I don’t know it. Gladys says I get ants in my pants. I think of it as an electrical storm going off in my body.

  When I get the Jitters, my stomach feels like it’s full of fizzy root beer, and the top of my head and tips of my fingers go all tingly, and my eyes get all blinky, and if I’m eating something, my mouth starts to chew more quickly.

  I try to control myself like Tae Kwon Do tenet number four says I should, but I can’t help these things. They just happen. And they don’t totally go away until I find some kind of answer to my question.

  My Big Question today: Where had Ed DeBose been all these years? He wasn’t gone at all. He was the president of a local rock club. So why had I never met him?

  My stomach fizzed. A minitornado swirled inside me. I had spoken to my grandpa for the first time yesterday, and he hadn’t even known who I was. Thinking of that stranger at the mall as Grandpa made my brain feel like it was short-circuiting.

  I got out of bed. My do bok was lying on the closet floor, where I had thrown it the night before, after practice. I smoothed the pants against my leg, trying to get out the wrinkles. I hung up the jacket and strung my blue belt around the hanger.

  Practice had gone only okay—it was a little sloppy because I kept thinking about Ed DeBose. I hadn’t said anything to Khalfani because before class and after, Dad was right there, and when we’re inside the dojang, we’re not supposed to talk.

  I pulled on a T-shirt and some shorts and went in search of Mom. She only works part-time, and today was one of her at-home days.

  She sat at her desk scribbling in the checkbook. When she saw me, she held out an arm and squeezed me around the waist. “I was just thinking about when you were in kindergarten and the teacher said you were going to learn how to write checks. Remember?”

  How could I forget? Mom loved bringing up that story—especially when she and Dad had friends over f
or dinner.

  I rubbed my eyes, which were still blinky on account of the Jitters. “I thought it was sort of advanced for our age,” I said, yawning. “But I was ready to try.” Of course, the teacher meant making checkmarks, not filling out actual checks like my parents did. That was a major letdown.

  Mom laughed. “What do you want to do today?”

  “Can I go to Khalfani’s?”

  “Sure, if it’s okay with his mom.”

  “It is. She said so last night.” I sat on the spare bed, staring at the back of Mom’s head. Ed’s hair had obviously been orange like Mom’s before it turned almost all white.

  She made some more scribbles. My brain pulsed. My fingers tingled. I clasped my hands and took a breath. I felt like a beaker about to boil over. “Does Grandpa DeBose know about me?”

  Her pen stopped moving. She sat frozen.

  I was asking about the One Thing I knew I wasn’t supposed to.

  “He knows.” She started writing again.

  “Why don’t you talk to him? What’d he do that’s so bad?”

  She put the pen down and twisted in the chair. “Where’s all this coming from?”

  I’d promised Gladys I wouldn’t tell Mom about the mall, but nothing had been said about asking questions. I shrugged. “Just curious.” Mom liked my curiosity…usually. “Will you at least tell me something about him?”

  Her eyebrows pulled so close together, they almost touched. “You miss Grampa Clem, don’t you?”

  I nodded because it was true, even if it wasn’t why I was asking about Grandpa DeBose. “What kind of job did he have?”

  Her chest was turning pink. The color crept up around her neck. “He was a soil tester, for the State Department.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Test soil. Make sure it’s safe for growing crops. Things like that.”

  “Are they scientists?”

  “I don’t know if they all are. I guess so.” Her whole neck had gone pink. “Does that satisfy your curiosity for now?”

  I blinked a few times. I still hadn’t found out what I really wanted to know. Where was Ed DeBose when he wasn’t at the Super Mall? “Can I see a picture of him?”

  “Bren, you know my photos are a mess. I couldn’t find one if I tried.”

  Mom was always saying she was going to organize her photos, along with categorizing her recipes, clearing closets and planting a vegetable garden out back—one day. But she never got around to it.

  My palms itched. My scalp buzzed. I swallowed. Time to get straight to the point. “Where does he live?”

  The pink moved all the way to her face. She was like a giant thermometer. A Momometer. She turned away. “I don’t know.”

  “Could he still live in the same place where you grew up?”

  “I suppose so.” She gripped her pen again. Not like she was going to write. More like she planned to stab something.

  “That’s close to here, isn’t it? Why can’t we go see him?” I stood next to the desk.

  Her eyes looked serious, but they sort of drooped, too. “He doesn’t want to see us, Bren. He’s made that perfectly clear.”

  My forehead tensed. Us? Why wouldn’t he want to see us? I hadn’t done anything wrong. I almost dropped the bomb that I had seen him, talked to him, even. But a promise was a promise, and I didn’t want to get on Gladys’s bad side.

  I went to my room and opened my Book of Big Questions. My grandpa had been missing for ten years. My mom didn’t want to talk about him. Now suddenly I’d discovered him, and he was a scientist, just like me. Who else was he? Where had he been? And why couldn’t we talk about him?

  I dated my journal and recorded my questions. Now I had to find the answers.

  CHAPTER 4

  I pedaled through our neighborhood, past Olympic View Park, where Khalfani and I go to race, or practice wheelies and do jumps on our bikes. Khal and I met at Tae Kwon Do, two years ago. Now he’s like my brother.

  I laid my bike in the rocks alongside the Joneses’ driveway and rang the doorbell. Khalfani opened the door in less than three seconds. “What took you so long, man? We got stuff to do!”

  “I got something for us to do, too.” I reached for the folded green flyer in my back pocket.

  He stopped me. “Not as good as what I got. Come on.” He dashed upstairs.

  I stood under the chandelier in the tall entryway and pulled off my shoes without untying them. No one wears shoes in this house. The carpet is white—or champagne, as Khalfani’s stepmom calls it.

  “Hi, Brendan,” Mrs. Jones called from the family room.

  “Hi, Brendan!” Dori yelled in her high-pitched voice. “Take off your shoes!” Dori’s only four, but she thinks she rules the place. She once told a policeman who came to investigate a neighborhood breakin that even he had to take off his shoes before he could come in. Being around Khalfani’s little sister makes me think it’s not so bad being an only child.

  “Hi!” I yelled back. I took the stairs two at a time and hurried to Khalfani’s room at the end of the hall.

  “Close the door,” he said. He held some kind of contraption that he had clearly made himself. “Check it out.” He smiled so big, his ears rose up on his perfectly round head. Connected to his skinny neck, Khalfani’s shaved skull looks like a brown lightbulb.

  “What is it?” He’d taken a three-pronged garden tool and duct-taped rubber hosing to the outside prongs. The opposite corners of a handkerchief were tied through holes he’d made in the ends of each hose. It looked kind of like a slingshot.

  “A launcher!” He kneeled and jammed the tool’s handle into a hole in a board lying on his floor. Then he sat behind the board, put one foot on either side to keep the device steady and pulled back on the handkerchief. I kept waiting for the hoses to slip off the prongs, but they held steady. He released. The tubes snapped and the handkerchief went limp.

  “Do you think it’ll work?” I asked.

  “That’s what we’re about to find out. I waited for you, since you like to test things so much.” He grinned. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just follow me.” He put his finger over his puckered lips and tiptoed down the hall like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. I walked behind him, hoping he wasn’t about to get us in trouble, but knowing that he probably was.

  He slipped into Dori’s room and headed for the pile of dolls on her bed. “Grab a few,” he whispered. I had a bad feeling about this.

  With our hands full, we rushed back to his room. He dumped his load near the catapult. “Open the window,” he whispered. He turned to shut the door.

  I set the dolls on the floor, then looked outside. Mr. Jones had set up their pool for the summer. The super-blue water reminded me of Ed DeBose’s round, stunned eyes as Gladys had snatched me away. I needed to tell Khalfani what had happened. Hopefully I wouldn’t get sent home first.

  I pushed up the window, then unlatched the screen and shoved it up, too. I knew what Khalfani planned to do, and when Khalfani planned to do something, it was no use trying to stop him. We would sink or swim together.

  He already had the first doll loaded—a small, rubbery, brown-skinned baby. It was a good thing she didn’t know where she was headed.

  Khal pulled back on the catapult until it was stretched as far as it would go. “In five, four—”

  I joined him. “Three, two, one. Blastoff!”

  He released the launcher. The doll shot straight out the window and disappeared. Khalfani whooped.

  I couldn’t help myself. I smiled and then laughed, even though I knew this was going to mean trouble. Dori would have a fit, and when that happened, Mrs. Jones always went straight to Khalfani.

  We slapped each other high five and ran to the window. The doll lay facedown on the cement patio, at least four feet short of the pool.

  “Ooh, that had to hurt.” Khalfani turned back to the pile of dolls. “Your turn.” He handed me a flop
py, skinny cloth doll with a huge head of curly hair. She wore a bright pink shirt and a short, fluorescent orange skirt. Her feet had been sewn to look like she was wearing purple leopard-skin boots.

  Oh boy. With my luck, this was Dori’s favorite doll.

  I put the doll in the handkerchief and slowly pulled it back. I kept hearing Master Rickman’s words from the night before about tenet number two of Tae Kwon Do: yom chi. “Integrity means knowing the difference between right and wrong and choosing to do what’s right.” Integrity was our dojang’s focus for the month.

  My hands shook. My arms were getting tired from holding the slingshot tight.

  And I really wanted to see if I could make the doll hit the water. I released.

  The doll snapped into the air and hit the glass, right above the opening. I held my breath as she tumbled toward the gaping hole, bounced off the sill and landed on the bedroom floor.

  “You aimed too high. Try again.” Khalfani grabbed the doll and shoved her at me.

  I was having fun, but I didn’t really want to get busted, and I had come here with a mission. Physics and the laws of trajectory had given me an out. “Wait. I need to tell you about something.” I unfolded the green paper and showed it to him.

  “Rock club. That’s cool. But how’s it more important than this?” He pointed to his contraption. “Catapults are all about science, man! You should know that.”

  I jabbed at Ed’s name. “That’s my grandpa.”

  “I thought your grandpa died.”

  “My other grandpa. The white one.”

  “Oh.” He held the doll by her boots and swung her around. “So?”

  “So, I never met him before. Until yesterday. At this rock show in the mall.”

  “How’d you know it was him?” He slumped on his bed and threw the doll on the floor.

  “My grandma Gladys freaked out when she saw me talking to him. And his name. That’s my grandpa’s name.”

  “Why haven’t you ever met him? Does he live around here?”

  I sat at the end of the bed and put the flyer between us. “That’s what I need to find out.” He stared at me. “But I can’t do it at my house. Too risky.”