Parker Bell and the Science of Friendship

by Cynthia Platt

  Cassie jumped up and hugged her. Even Theo smiled a little bit.

  The first event of the Science Triathlon was theirs! It was one small step to becoming a world-famous scientist. And it hadn’t been easy.

  Parker had known that some of the other teams would be just as prepared as hers. The Dempsey Triplets had taken her completely by surprise, though.

  Aidan and Braidan and Jaidan made fart noises all the time. They also planned a lot of pranks that didn’t work.

  Just a couple of weeks ago, Braidan and Jaidan had tried to hold their breath under water by putting their noses into their thermoses. They hadn’t believed Aidan when he told them that even if their noses were under water, they could still breathe through their mouths.

  Now that Parker thought about it, it made sense that Aidan had slayed the Science Bee without any help from his brothers.

  All this time Parker had been worried that Theo was going to be her biggest problem in the Science Triathlon. Now she knew the truth.

  Her team had some fierce scientific competition.

  Chapter 5

  The Friendship Experiment

  While there was no big announcement in science the next day, there were still some surprises.

  To start, Ms. Garcia asked all the Science Triathlon teams to come in from recess a few minutes early for a quick meeting. When Parker came back in, there was a box of drinking straws sitting on her desk. But that wasn’t all. Someone had thought it was a good idea to give the Dempsey Triplets duct tape.

  Parker figured Ms. Garcia must have left it out by accident. No teacher would make the mistake of giving these boys duct tape.

  They were already ripping off strips of the stuff and taping their mouths shut.

  It was going to be a lo-o-o-ong meeting after all.

  It turned out that Ms. Garcia hadn’t left the duct tape out by accident. She’d done it completely on purpose. She even passed out more rolls to the other teams.

  No one else taped their teammates’ mouths shut.

  “The next event in the Science Triathlon is the Egg Drop!” Ms. Garcia said as she pulled tape off Braidan’s mouth. “Each team will get a box of straws and some heavy-duty tape.” Ri-i-i-i-i-i-ip. The tape came off Jaidan, too. “And from just those two things, you’ll have to create a case that will protect your egg when I drop it off the school’s roof.” Ms. Garcia zipped the tape off Aidan’s mouth. All three Dempsey Triplets had red rectangles on the skin around their mouths where the duct tape had been.

  Parker looked away from them when Jaidan crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out at her.

  The Dempsey Triplets never seemed to be interested in school. And yet they somehow had come in second place in the Science Bee.

  From a scientific point of view, Parker wanted to know how that had happened. When had Aidan found enough time to study for the Science Bee with all the goofing off he did? And how had he done so well in the Science Bee while his brothers had sat around and made fart noises?

  Parker focused as Ms. Garcia explained what they had to achieve in the Egg Drop.

  “Whenever there’s a force acting on an object, there’s acceleration,” Ms. Garcia said. “And in this case, the force is gravity pulling your egg down to the ground.”

  That all made sense to Parker. The egg would move faster as it fell.

  “But it’s not the acceleration of gravity that will break your egg,” Ms. Garcia continued. “It’s the negative acceleration when the egg stops very quickly and hits the ground.”

  “SPLAT!” called out Braidan. Jaidan pretended to be an egg exploding. Parker shook her head at them.

  “So what each team needs to do is figure out how to slow down the velocity of your egg as it drops from the roof so that the splat doesn’t happen when the egg lands,” Ms. Garcia said.

  As she explained that they were not allowed to use any other materials for this project, Parker was thinking hard. Even though her team had won the Science Bee, there was still a lot of work to do on the next two Triathlon events. Clearly it wasn’t going to be easy to prove they were the best scientists. The Dempseys were a bigger threat than they had let on. And they weren’t the only other strong team in the competition.

  Walking in the footsteps of Jane and Mae was harder than Parker had thought it would be.

  She and Cassie and Theo had to keep working.

  Thankfully, Parker was very good at making gadgets and gizmos. So the Egg Drop would be easy-peasy. All she had to do was organize her team and get to work in her Mad Science Lab, and she knew they would be able to come up with a fierce Egg Drop contender.

  * * *

  It turned out that organizing her team was going to be harder than Parker had thought.

  Cassie had two soccer games that week because last week’s had been rained out. She also really wanted to go to Mara’s gymnastics competition, which was this week too.

  Trying to plan was getting frustrating.

  “Well, what days are you around to work on the Egg Drop, Theo?” Parker asked, with a little bit of that frustration in her voice.

  Theo shrugged.

  “Not Wednesday, right?” Cassie said. “We have Coders’ Club after school.”

  Parker did not like being reminded that Cassie and Theo were in a club together. Or that Parker didn’t have any club to go to, with her best friend or otherwise.

  Besides, they had bigger problems right now. They couldn’t even find a day to get together after school to prepare for the next event in the Triathlon.

  By the time Parker got home and plunked down at a table in her dad’s bakery, she was tired. She was feeling a little left out. She was exasperated.

  Then she looked up and saw something that made her feel not only exasperated but just plain shocked.

  Theo was standing at the counter talking to her dad!

  Parker watched him. His mouth opened and closed. Words came out. Theo wasn’t turning red or whispering. Something he said even made her dad laugh.

  Which meant that Theo could talk to a cat, her dad, and even a teeny bit to Cassie. For some reason, though, he wouldn’t talk to Parker. Something had to be done about this.

  With five quick steps, Parker was at the counter. She got there just in time to hear Theo talking about the price of eggs.

  Eggs? Why on earth would he be talking to her dad about eggs? Or how much they cost?

  Theo turned around and saw Parker staring at him. His mouth stopped opening and closing. No more words about eggs or anything else came out. Instead, his face turned as red as Parker had ever seen it.

  “Hi,” Parker said, trying to break the ice.

  “Hi,” Theo said back in the quietest possible voice.

  “Theo, are you ready?” a man called from the bakery door.

  Her Triathlon teammate gave a nod but didn’t say anything. He did wave goodbye, though, as they left the bakery.

  She turned to her dad. “I can’t believe you got him to talk,” she said.

  Her dad smiled. “We chat whenever he and his dad come in.”

  “Then why won’t he talk to me?” she asked. Parker was starting to feel more than exasperated. Now her feelings were hurt. Theo might want to be friends with Cassie, but he clearly didn’t want to be friends with Parker.

  Her dad scrunched up his eyebrows as he thought it over. “Maybe he’s just shy,” he said at last. “Maybe he’s like Ultra-Megabot in Morph-Bots. He’s powerful but quiet.”

  Parker stopped to consider that. Ultra-Megabot was the strongest of all the Morph-Bots robots. He could morph into ten different kinds of robot depending on what kind of situations the characters got themselves into. One of the forms he took was the giant robotic eagle that was on Parker’s backpack.

  “But all the other robots know Ultra-Megabot is the best,” Parker said. “And he’s not really that quiet. He gave a huge speech before the Battle of Morph Mountain.”

  “True,” her dad said. “But in the beginning, he didn’t giv
e speeches and no one could see that he’d be able to take on the Terrorbots.”

  “So you’re saying that Theo is going to defeat a swarm of evil robots?”

  Her dad laughed as he handed her one of his famous chocolate chip cookies. “I’m saying you should give him a chance.”

  Parker went back to her table and munched on her cookie. Maybe her dad was right. Maybe Theo was an Ultra-Megabot in hiding. Or Peter Parker before he turned into Spider-Man.

  She had lots of proof that Theo Zachary could actually talk, after all. She’d seen it with her own eyes. She had even heard a little bit of it with her own ears.

  But one question still bothered her: If Theo could talk, why wouldn’t he talk to her?

  An idea started brewing in her brain. She could use a scientific method of inquiry to figure out how to get Theo to talk to her. Since Theo talked only to Cassie, maybe he was trying to steal her BFF! The thought hadn’t occurred to Parker until now, but it made sense. This was getting serious.

  Parker whipped out her notebook and started to write.

  INITIAL QUESTION: Why does Theo Zachary talk to Cassie, Cleopatra, and even Dad, but not me? And why does he especially talk to Cassie?

  BRAINSTORM SOLUTIONS: Cassie is nice to Theo, so he wants to talk to her.

  GATHER DATA: Cassie did not freak out when Theo sat in our seat on the bus. Or every time he keeps sitting in it. She also asked him to be on our Science Triathlon team (without even asking me!). Then they designed a game together.

  USE DATA TO MAKE A PREDICTION: If I try to be super friendly to him, he will like me more and will talk to me. Then Cassie will remain my BFF and Theo can be a secondary kind of friend.

  Parker would have to see how her predictions panned out before she could communicate her results, of course. But she had a bad feeling that by the end of her experiment she’d end up with proof that Theo didn’t want to be her friend no matter how nice she was to him.

  Chapter 6

  Flying the Coop

  Parker Bell sometimes had a hard time believing that she and her mom were related. It wasn’t just that her mom always wore sweatpants. Or that she was more interested in basketball than science. It wasn’t even that she and her mom didn’t look anything alike. It was that her mom didn’t understand that she sometimes got Parker into tricky situations.

  “That sounds great,” her mom said into the phone. “I can drop Parker off tomorrow at two o’clock.”

  “Drop me off where?” Parker whispered, but her mom waved her off.

  “Is there anything she can bring?” Parker’s mom said. After a long pause, Parker saw her mom smile. “Perfect. She’ll see you then.”

  “Who will see me then?” Parker asked. “Where am I supposed to be going in the middle of a perfectly good Saturday afternoon?”

  “To Theo’s house to work on your Egg Drop project,” her mom told her. “Cassie’s going too. Theo’s dad said you didn’t need to bring anything, but I think they’d like some of Dad’s lemon drop cookies, don’t you?”

  Parker dropped down onto a kitchen chair in a huff. “Why did you say yes?” she asked.

  Her mom sat across from her. “Because you need to get ready for the Egg Drop,” she replied. “I thought you’d be happy there’s finally time for you three to work together.”

  “No, I am, but . . .”

  “But what, honey?”

  “I wanted to work here in my Mad Science Lab,” Parker said. “What if there’s no room there to create anything? Or if Theo’s parents try to make the Egg Drop case for us? Some parents are like that, you know.” Parker clunked her forehead down onto the table. “What happens when Cassie has to use the bathroom and Theo just sits there not talking to me?”

  “Is that what you’re worried about?” her mom asked. “Theo not talking to you?”

  Parker took a deep breath and sat up again. She decided to tell her mom about what had been going on. “I don’t think Theo wants to be friends with me,” Parker blurted out. “And I’m not sure I want to be friends with him. I just want to work with Cassie in my lab!”

  Her mom took her hand. “It’s good to have more than one friend,” her mom said. “It’s like the robot thingies. You can never have too many.”

  Parker knew her mom was trying, but calling the Morph-Bots “robot thingies”? Besides, her mom had two sisters, a million friends at the high school where she worked, and Parker’s dad. She didn’t understand what it was like to have just one super-important friend.

  “Why don’t you go to Theo’s and see how it goes?” her mom suggested.

  “Okay,” Parker said. She knew what this meant: she was being forced to start testing her theory about Theo on his own turf. Or, as her PE teacher mom would have put it, Parker had lost the home court advantage. And she didn’t like it one bit.

  * * *

  “It’s not going to be that bad,” Cassie whispered to her in the back of Parker’s mom’s car the next day. “You should see him at Coders’ Club. He’s really smart. You should give him a chance.”

  Parker was ready to give Theo a chance. Even if she didn’t really want to be friends with him, she had to get to the bottom of why he didn’t want to be friends with her. If nothing else, she was doing it for the sake of scientific inquiry. Well, and also to make sure he wasn’t going to steal her BFF.

  Parker had her prediction. Now she had to see if it would yield any results.

  By the time they got to Theo’s house, she was in full-on science mode. She rang the doorbell ready for anything.

  A tall, skinny man with big ears just like Theo’s greeted them with a smile. Theo looked up and whispered something to his dad.

  “You must be Parker and Cassie!” he said. “I’m Theo’s dad, Tim. I’m so glad his new science buddies could come over today.”

  Now Parker was confused. Sure, this man looked like Theo. And Parker had read a lot about how genes work, so she knew that he and Theo had to have some of the same ones. But Theo’s dad talked a lot. He had a good, loud voice, too.

  It was the weirdest thing ever.

  “Come on inside and have a snack before you start working,” Theo’s dad said, taking the bakery box from Parker. “I have a feeling these are going to inspire you guys to eggy greatness!”

  Suddenly, Parker knew what was going on here. Theo and his dad were like her and her mom. They were genetically related, but they weren’t a whole lot alike.

  The discovery that she and Theo might actually have something in common made her feel a little less nervous about being at his house. It also inspired her to eat three cookies, two more than she’d be allowed to have at home. She needed fuel to keep her brain going, after all.

  When they got to Theo’s room, Parker stopped short. Theo might not necessarily be like Ultra-Megabot, but he had posters of him all around his bedroom. One was the same picture of Ultra-Megabot as a giant eagle-bot that Parker had on her backpack.

  It was time to begin her experiment by being extra-super friendly to Theo. “You like Morph-Bots too?” she asked him. She remembered Cassie had told her this, but she hadn’t realized how much he liked them.

  He nodded really fast. “Love them,” he said. He said something! Scientific inquiry rocked!

  Parker looked at Cassie, but Cassie was wearing her very best I told you so look on her face. She was also wearing her very best Terrorbots T-shirt under a purple plaid shirt. Parker never could understand why Cassie liked the bad guys so much, but she did like Cassie’s personal style.

  She also liked Theo’s huge shelf of Morph-Bots action figures. He had tons of Megabots and even a few Terrorbots. They were set up as if they were about to battle it out. The Terrorbots looked like they were going to lose. Badly.

  “Wow, you have so many!” Parker said. “I only have three and they’re all different forms of Ultra-Megabot.”

  “My mom works for Morph-Bots,” Theo said. They were the most words she’d ever heard him say at once, and he’d said the
m to her.

  “Oh. My. Morph-Bots.” Parker couldn’t believe her ears. Her experiment was yielding the best results ever! “Will she come home while we’re here? I have so many questions to ask her!”

  With that, Theo turned red and lost all his words again. Parker wasn’t sure what she had done wrong. Or maybe it was her scientific testing that wasn’t going right? Maybe being friendly wasn’t the key to getting Theo to talk after all? She was kerflummoxed.

  Cassie gasped out loud, and Parker immediately turned to make sure she was okay. Her BFF actually looked thrilled. Something had caught her eye outside.

  “You have chickens!” Cassie exclaimed. “Can we go meet them?”

  “Sure,” Theo said. He didn’t even whisper or mumble.

  “Okay, let’s do it!” Cassie sounded really excited. Theo looked really excited.

  Parker Bell was not excited. She was trying so hard to be extra-super friendly to Theo to prove her prediction about him talking as part of her experiment, but this was going too far.

  “I hate chickens,” she whispered to Cassie as they walked outside.

  “Theo was really good with Cleopatra,” Cassie told her. “Maybe he’s really good with other animals, too. Maybe his chickens are amazing.”

  Theo’s chickens were not amazing. As he led Parker and Cassie into the chicken enclosure and shut the gate behind them, Parker made some scientific observations. The chickens smelled like puke. They made weird noises. And they had those bony, yucky feet that all chickens have.

  Parker still really hated chickens.

  Theo, on the other hand, clearly loved them.

  “Come here, girls,” he called to them. The chickens all came running.

  “Here, you can feed them,” he said to Cassie in a quiet voice. Theo put some chicken feed into Cassie’s hand, and the chickens ate right from her palm.