The Science of Breakable Things: "Step 7: Results"–"Step 8: Analyze Your Results"

All your hard work has paid off! Now reap your rewardz!

He talked with our parents for a bit, about how he left his pharmaceutical research job to teach.

Charlaine went on to introduce the other five judges, but I was too busy eyeing the competition to pay attention. Most were uninspired inverted egg cartons. Ours was definitely one of the best designs.

They spoke in that fancy Valley Hope way, enunciating their consonants and rounding their vowels, and it was hard to tell whether they were sincere or sarcastic.

“Thank you,” Dari said, polite by reflex. “Clever design yourself.”

To be honest, I’d forgotten about Mom’s cereal idea until that’ moment. Or if I hadn’t forgotten, I’d at least buried it deep with all the things I wouldn’t say, and I stood there for a few minutes, watching Twig ramble on without really hearing her.

With so many contestants, the drops took a while, interspersed only occasionally with the cheers from a surviving team.

Later, the judges would score the surviving eggs based on durability and bounce factor and aerodynamic design.

She spoke in a low voice and said stuff like, “The Blondes are tense with anticipation. Will their Bubble Wrapped egg make it past the Drop of Doom? The crowd holds its breath—hold your breath, guys—and, wait for it, our fearless Charlaine is about to drop the egg and—ohhh, close but no cigar. This is a tough break for our Blondes. Literally.”

I wanted to hug each one of them, but I didn’t want to get sappy, either.

Instead, I felt hopeful, partly because winning seemed so inevitable and I had big plans for that money, but also because if my world could be so happy just because of a silly little contest and the fate of an egg, then I knew Mom’s world could be happy again, too.

We’d been talking about sound waves, and to demonstrate the difference in water, she’d concocted an experiment.

She said a sentence, and the water molecules twisted and morphed the sound, and when we both emerged, I had to guess what she’d said—had to find meaning in that garbled underwater language.

“So creative and inventive. What Charlaine said earlier is true—you three are winners, no matter what. You’ve worked so hard, and you’ve learned so much about the scientific process. I’m proud to be your teacher.”

I knew the sadness would come later, but at that moment, I was upset and a little bit nauseated—anger on an empty stomach.

“Finally! This is my fifth time calling!” Twig’s voice blared into my ear, and I turned the volume down on my phone.

It took me a moment to orient myself, to understand that she was standing in my room, in the middle of the night.

The face is a big plastic Hello Kitty, and her mom calls it “a travesty.”

I reached up and tugged the yellow cord, and the bus hadn’t even stopped before we were running to the front, lurching and swaying with that giant hunk of metal.

I even had my own white coat. I think it was from an old student intern, some short girl from Montana, but it became mine and I loved it.

But late at night, the building loomed, looking not at all the way I remembered it.

I opened the drawer labeled gardening: misc. and rummaged until I found a translucent blue ziplock bag like the one she’d pulled the seed from.

I opened the drawer labeled gardening: misc. and rummaged until I found a translucent blue ziplock bag like the one she’d pulled the seed from.

Mrs. Menzer’s expression softened. “Oh, Natalie, I’m sorry. That flower—it wasn’t magic. It was just an interesting, unexpected anomaly.”

She seemed desperate to make me understand, but I didn’t.

“We weren’t able to isolate those properties or graft them onto other plants...."

“I’m only able to call because my mom is at work and Hélène took pity on me.”

This terrible, incomprehensible thing that had descended upon our lives wasn’t new at all.

Twig, Dari, and I would be giving a joint presentation about the egg drop, and since Twig was in charge of bringing our S’meggs replica, she was getting a ride with her mom that morning.

I biked to school alone and was locking up my bike just as Mikayla got out of her car. I guess that’s what Mom and Dad would call coincidence, but I kind of think it was fate.

Her eyebrows rose and her lips parted, like she was so surprised by what I’d said that she didn’t have time to roll her eyes or sneer.

Dari was still grounded, pretty much indefinitely.

We have to turn in our lab notebooks now, and I considered saying I’d lost mine, because how can I turn this in when I was supposed to observe the world scientifically, objectively, and I so clearly haven’t?

Those flowers didn’t take long to grow. They seemed to sprout overnight, like magic or science or something in between, and they filled nearly every nook and cranny of the greenhouse, bursting with color, growing fierce and bold and brave.

Those flowers didn’t take long to grow. They seemed to sprout overnight, like magic or science or something in between, and they filled nearly every nook and cranny of the greenhouse, bursting with color, growing fierce and bold and brave.