The Nora Notebooks, Book 2

by Claudia Mills

  And not questions like “What does it feel like to hold a baby?” and “How soon can I come over to your house to hold one?”

  “We could do something with model rockets,” Nora suggested during science time on Wednesday. She didn’t know anything about model rockets, but she’d love an excuse to build one.

  Emma shook her head, busy turning the pages of one of Coach Joe’s science-fair books, which she had insisted on bringing over to their pod.

  “Here’s one,” Emma said. “ ‘Will a cat prefer homemade or store-bought cat food?’ ”

  “Um…I thought we agreed: nothing to do with cats.”

  Emma flipped through a few more pages.

  “Okay, here’s another one. ‘Does adding salt to water make it boil faster?’ ”

  “Too easy. Too boring.”

  “Wait,” Emma said. “This is a good one. ‘What animals are most popular?’ ”

  Really? But it was right there in Coach Joe’s book. You got the answer by doing a survey and asking all of your friends which animal they liked best. And that was supposed to count as a science-fair experiment?

  “That’s not…it’s not scientific enough,” Nora tried to explain.

  She took the book from Emma and started searching through it herself. But even the projects that looked more like what Nora thought of as real science—“How do different materials affect air resistance?” “Which metals have greater thermal conductivity?”—didn’t excite her. She couldn’t bear the idea of doing an experiment that thousands of kids had already done.

  “Nora,” Emma said, “put the book down. I just had a brilliant idea. A truly brilliant, amazing, fantastic, fabuloso idea.”

  Nora closed the book, as Emma plainly wasn’t going to announce her idea until she did. But she knew there was close to a zero percent chance that she would think any science-fair idea of Emma’s was brilliant, amazing, fantastic, and fabuloso.

  “Are you ready? Are you sure you’re ready?”

  “Emma!” Nora could take only so much fanfare.

  “We could…” Emma paused for effect. “We could…test different kinds of curling irons! You know, to see which one gives a better, tighter, longer-lasting curl. Tell me it’s a great idea! Because it is!”

  Nora hardly knew how to begin. Nora’s mother never curled her hair. Sarah never curled her hair. Nora never curled her hair. Hair curling wasn’t something Alpers family women did.

  “This will be awesome!” Emma went on. “I’ve been wanting to try different types of curling irons ever since, like, forever, and my mother won’t buy any new ones for me, because she says the one I have is perfectly good, plus there’s too much stuff all over the bathroom from me and my sister already. But if it’s for school, she’d be fine with it, I know she would.”

  Nora had yet to find her voice.

  “And don’t worry, we’ll make it super-scientific,” Emma reassured Nora. “We’ll take pictures of our curls at the start of the day, and then at every hour during the day, to see how they hold up under all different kinds of conditions.”

  “Our curls?” Nora finally made herself speak.

  Emma’s eyes fell on Nora’s straw-straight hair.

  “You’d look good in curls!” She hesitated. “Or maybe not. Look, we wouldn’t both have to have curls. I’d be the one to try out all the different curling irons, and you’d be the one taking the pictures and making the graphs and things. You could find something to graph, right? You’d like that part, wouldn’t you, Nora? So what do you think?”

  I’m not going to do my science-fair project on the best way to curl your hair!

  But Nora didn’t want Emma to get all huffy again and start making more angry flower doodles on the cover of her science notebook.

  Besides, it wasn’t as if Emma’s idea didn’t have any scientific merit at all. It might be interesting to look at different kinds of curling irons and study how they worked, if different ones operated on different principles. Nora loved taking things apart to figure out exactly how they performed their function. She had become the family expert on fixing the vacuum cleaner when it malfunctioned.

  But curling irons? Curling irons were too un-Nora-ish. And would the judges pick a “Science of Curling Irons” project for the regional science fair?

  Emma read Nora’s answer from her pained silence.

  “Well, what are we going to do?” Emma started coloring in the centers of her doodled flowers with sharp strokes of yellow marker. “We have to come up with something!”

  Nora couldn’t disagree with that.

  And at least Emma’s new idea had come from a real scientific question. At least it had begun the way science was supposed to, with something someone really, truly wanted to find out.

  “Well,” Nora said slowly, “maybe it could work. If we don’t find anything better.”

  Emma beamed. “There couldn’t be anything better, ever, ever, ever, because this idea is the best, best, best!”

  Now Emma sounded a lot like Brody. And Nora was starting to feel a lot like Mason.

  But at least they had come up with an idea, however un-brilliant, un-amazing, un-fantastic, and un-fabuloso it might be.

  Nora went to Mason’s house after school that day with Mason and Brody. She always enjoyed going to Mason’s house to taste his mother’s homemade snacks and play with Mason’s dog and hear all the funny negative things Mason said all the time about everything.

  Now she had a new reason for wanting to go to Mason’s house.

  Mason had no newborn baby niece.

  “Nora!” Mason’s mother greeted her. “Tell us all about Nellie!”

  Why was everyone else in the world so interested in babies?

  “She cries a lot,” Nora said.

  “All babies do,” Mrs. Dixon replied. “I bet she’s darling!”

  If you think it’s darling to be bald.

  Mason put four Fig Newtons on a plate and poured himself a glass of milk while his mother served mini spinach-and-feta-cheese quiches to Nora and Brody. Mason had the world’s shortest list of foods he was willing to eat. Nora took a first cautious bite of the quiche. It was delicious: the crust flaky, the filling warm and savory. Meals at Nora’s house had gotten steadily worse since Nellie’s arrival.

  Mason’s dog, Dog, rubbed himself against Nora’s leg. Dog was actually as much Brody’s dog as Mason’s. He belonged to both boys equally, but he lived at Mason’s house because Brody’s dad was allergic to dogs and cats, to all pets except for Brody’s goldfish, Albert.

  “Did I cry a lot when I was a baby?” Mason asked, as Nora had the other day.

  His mother hesitated before replying. “You weren’t what I’d call an easy baby.”

  “Was I a terrible baby?”

  He sounded almost eager to hear that he was.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that any babies are terrible. I’ve never liked when people talk about good babies—‘Oh, she’s such a good baby, she’s already sleeping through the night’—as if other babies are bad. Babies aren’t good or bad. They’re just babies.”

  Nora was pleased to hear Mason’s mother sounding like a fellow scientist. That was the kind of thing Nora was always having to tell other people. Her classmates would argue about whether dogs were good and cats were bad, or cats were good and dogs were bad, and she had to be the one to say that it didn’t make any sense to say that dogs or cats were good or bad. They were just dogs and cats. Nora smiled at Mrs. Dixon.

  “But if you were to say that a baby was terrible?” Mason prompted her.

  His mother sighed. “Let’s just say that there’s a reason your father and I stopped at one.”

  “My mother told me I was the happiest baby anybody had ever seen,” Brody put in after swallowing his fifth mini quiche. “One time, I was out in the backyard playing in my sandbox, and I was laughing so much the neighbors came over to find out what was so funny.”

  “And?” Mason asked. “What was so funny?�
�

  “Nothing! I was laughing because I was so happy.”

  Nora had felt glad the other day to learn that she had been filled with scientific curiosity from the very start. But hearing about Mason’s baby crankiness and Brody’s baby joyfulness gave her a strange feeling inside. Did you pop out in the world already being the person you were going to be?

  As a scientist, Nora knew about genes: the biological markers that determined whether you had straight dark hair like hers or curly blond hair like Emma’s—well, assuming that Emma’s hair was curly even without her curling iron. Genes determined whether you were a girl or a boy. But did they also decide whether you would be crabby or cheerful, would be talented at science or art, would like learning about fashion or ants?

  “So,” Nora said, to chase the strange feeling away, “what are you guys doing for your science-fair project?”

  “It’s great!” Brody said just as Mason said, “It’s dumb.”

  Nora and Mrs. Dixon grinned at each other.

  “You know how everybody says that if you drop a piece of toast on the floor, it always falls butter-side down?” Brody asked her.

  Nora had never heard anybody say that, but she nodded anyway. She wasn’t sure why anyone would even care which side buttered toast fell on in the first place.

  “People say that,” Mason’s mother explained, “because it seems so often that you have to go get a sponge to wipe the butter off the carpet.”

  “Oh,” Nora said. She still couldn’t believe that enough people dropped buttered slices of toast onto carpets to generate any famous saying about it.

  “Our project”—Brody paused to beat out a drumroll on the kitchen table—“is to find out, once and for all, if that’s true.”

  It wasn’t a great project, in Nora’s opinion, but it wasn’t a dumb project, either. It was always worthwhile to try to find out if things that “everybody” said were true or false.

  “We’re going to butter lots and lots of pieces of toast,” Brody continued, “and drop them lots and lots of times, and count how many times they fall butter-side up and how many times they fall butter-side down.”

  “Where exactly are you planning on doing these experiments?” Mrs. Dixon asked.

  “Not on the carpet,” Brody assured her. “On the floor. If any butter gets on the floor, Dog can lick it up.”

  “Now, boys—” Mrs. Dixon said.

  “Coach Joe said we didn’t have to do the whole project at school,” Brody told her, as if that had been her worry. “We can do some of it at home, so long as we do it without any parental assistance. Though I guess if we do the experiments ourselves, but our parents mop the floor off afterward, that much parental help would be okay.”

  “I’m sure Coach Joe would want you boys to do your own mopping,” Mason’s mother said. “And I’d expect you to do your own mopping. But here and now, I’m decreeing that no buttered toast is going to be dropped onto any floor in anybody’s house. There’s no reason you can’t drop your toast outside.”

  “I bet it doesn’t always fall butter-side down,” Brody predicted.

  “I bet it does,” Mason said.

  “What about you, Nora?” Mrs. Dixon asked. “What’s your project going to be this time? I still remember what a terrific project you had last year on water quality in the creek. I told Mason’s father that it should be published in a scientific journal.”

  The compliment gave Nora a pang. She had tried to publish an article in a scientific journal once, and it had gotten rejected. And no scientific journal was going to want to publish an article about curling irons!

  “I don’t know yet,” Nora said, unable to come out with the truth.

  “I’m sure you’ll come up with something splendid,” Mrs. Dixon told her.

  Nora forced a smile. It was all too likely the curling-iron idea was going to fall butter-side down.

  In the team huddle on Thursday, Coach Joe invited people to share some of their diary entries from the Oregon Trail.

  Brody’s hand was first up, of course.

  Bill Breeden here, with my faithful dog, Pup. I don’t have no family, except for Pup, but Pup is all I need. I have him, and he has me. I hope we’ll always have each other.

  Brody’s voice wobbled. Nora knew he was remembering that Bill Breeden was going to die of a fever in Wyoming. What would happen to Pup then?

  Maybe Amy’s rattlesnake-braving pioneer, Sally Hamilton, could adopt him. Sally probably loved pets as much as Amy did.

  Brody could never stay sad for long, however. His happy smile returned as he kept on reading.

  My faithful horse, Albert, is hitched up to go.

  Brody had named Bill’s horse after his own goldfish, Albert.

  Maybe Amy’s Sally would have to adopt Albert, too.

  Or Nora’s Martha could. Martha definitely loved all kinds of animals. At least, she loved writing journal entries about all kinds of animals. That was all Martha had written about in the three journal entries Nora had completed so far: one on crows, one on wolves, and one on porcupines. She had yet to make a single mention of Tom Talbot or her two older children. The only thing she ever said about her baby was to end some entries, “Baby’s crying! Got to go!”

  Brody kept on reading.

  My wagon is filled with all the stuff I’ll need on the trail. Blankets, dried meat, lots of potatoes, flour for pancakes, and syrup to pour on my pancakes. I will be fine, whatever happens, so long as I have plenty of pancakes.

  Pup, Albert, and I are ready for an adventure. Some folks say there will be hardships on the trail. Pup, Albert, and I don’t mind. All three of us like adventures. We’re happy when we go to new places and meet new people and see new things. And eat new pancakes!

  The head of our wagon train, Jake Smith, says he has a bad feeling about the trip. But he has a bad feeling about a lot of things. Not me. I think it’s going to be great!

  I really do!

  Coach Joe grinned when Brody finished. It was hard not to grin when Brody’s own grin was so infectious.

  “Bill What’s-His-Name isn’t going to think everything’s so great when he croaks in Wyoming,” Dunk said.

  Brody shrugged. “Maybe I won’t die.” He looked over at Coach Joe. “Do I have to die?”

  Nora waited to hear what Coach Joe would say. Did Martha Talbot have to be married to Tom Talbot?

  “I do want each of you to stick true with what’s written on your fate card,” Coach Joe said. “That’s the assignment.”

  “Well, Wyoming is a long ways away,” Brody told Dunk. “I might as well be happy now, right?”

  “That’s the spirit, Brody!” Coach Joe said.

  Two other kids read: Tamara, who was sick with a horrible disease called dysentery, and a boy named Ned, whose pioneer apparently liked writing very short and very boring diary entries.

  “We’ll hear from more of you next time,” Coach Joe told the class. “And we’re going to hear from all of you at the end of next week when we make a class documentary about your experiences on the trail. A documentary is a nonfiction film that documents—reports—information about some important thing that happened, usually showing real people talking about real events. For our class documentary, the real people will be all of you, and the real events will be things that happened to you on the Oregon Trail.”

  “We’re going to be in a movie?” Emma squealed, fluffing her curls as if filming were about to begin any minute. Emma was probably already planning out what she would wear to the Academy Awards.

  “Well, not a Hollywood movie,” Coach Joe said. “More of a video, just for our class. A few of our parent helpers will assist us in filming it. It’ll be pretty cool, I think, to have an instant replay of our time together on the Oregon Trail.”

  “Do we dress up for it?” Emma asked.

  Mason groaned. Mason hated dressing up, even on Halloween.

  “Definitely! Do what you can to find yourself some pioneer duds, but don’t s
tress too much if you can’t come up with anything. Bring in any props you can think of, too. A sack of pancake flour, Brody? Anything to add some authenticity to our film.”

  Emma whispered to Nora, “Bring Nellie!”

  Nora smiled weakly.

  She had yet to ask Sarah about the Saturday Nellie-viewing party, even though Saturday was now two days away. Sarah was so close to tears all the time now, from lack of sleep and problems getting Nellie to nurse, that Nora hadn’t dared to mention it.

  And now she was supposed to ask if Nellie could be a prop for the class Oregon Trail documentary?

  Why was it okay to use Nellie as a prop in a movie but not to do a few little experiments with her for the science fair?

  Nora would never understand other people.

  Especially Emma.

  After school, Nora and Amy rode with Amy’s mother to the Plainfield Animal Shelter. No, Amy wasn’t looking for a new pet to adopt. Instead, now that the YMCA basketball season was over, the girls had signed up to volunteer once a week taking care of the shelter animals, while Amy’s brother, Sheridan, was off at gymnastics.

  In the car, Nora hardly listened as Amy explained the science-fair idea she and Anthony had come up with: testing which colors birds liked best. They were going to put out different colors of birdseed—from the same bag, but dyed in all the hues of the rainbow—and see which one Amy’s two parakeets ate first.

  You have to ask Sarah about the party! Nora kept reciting to herself over and over again. You have to ask Sarah about the party!

  “What about you and Emma?” Amy asked. “You’re so scientific, and, well, Emma’s not, and so I’m wondering what kind of idea you’ll come up with.”

  Nora was going to have to tell Amy their dopey curling-iron idea sometime. It might as well be now.