Todd didn’t have a single idea for his Mini-Society project. Not one. He knew Amy was expecting him to make some dazzling, clever, mechanical contraption, but whatever he came up with would also have to be something he could manufacture cheaply, and in bulk, and that would sell. Something like Crayon Critters.
All he had to do was ask Isaiah, and he could be his friend’s partner in Crayon Critters. But that didn’t seem fair. Whenever he’d had a better idea than Isaiah, he had told Isaiah he wanted to work alone. Now that Isaiah finally had a better idea than he did, he wanted to work together? No. Isaiah deserved any success he had with Crayon Critters, and he deserved to get full credit for it, too.
“Make little model rockets,” Amy suggested Wednesday night after dinner. Their mother had made the dinner—spaghetti with meatballs—so it had been good. Todd had offered Wiggy the lone leftover meatball, but for once Wiggy hadn’t seemed hungry. Todd hoped Wiggy wasn’t coming down with something.
“Just how would I do that?” It was a mean question, given that Amy was only trying to help.
“How should I know? You’re the engineer, not me. It
doesn’t have to be a great rocket, just something that goes up in the air and then comes back down again.”
“Everything that goes up in the air comes back down again. It’s called gravity. Sir Isaac Newton discovered it three hundred years ago.”
“Okay, then. That makes it even easier. You design the part that makes it go up in the air, and Sir Isaac Newton can make it come down again.”
Todd didn’t bother commenting on that one. If his dad had been in the room, they would have rolled their eyes at each other. It used to be comforting for Todd and his dad to be the family’s two misunderstood scientists—back when his dad had been a scientist.
“Well, you have to think of something. The first selling session is in less than two weeks.”
“What if I don’t?”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t think of anything.”
“Then you’ll fail!” Amy’s voice quavered.
“What’s so bad about failing?” Todd asked bitterly. “People fail all the time. Just look at Dad.”
This time, Amy didn’t say a word.
Damon had a very Damon-like project. He told Todd and Isaiah all about it during lunch the next day. Damon sat with Todd and Isaiah at lunch sometimes. He tended to rotate, sitting with everybody. Either Damon was the most popular kid in the class, and everybody liked him, or Damon was the least popular kid in the class—except for
Violet—and nobody liked him. Damon evidently saw it the first way.
Todd wouldn’t have asked Damon about his product, but Isaiah did.
“Now, don’t tell anybody else, okay?” Damon said in a low voice. Todd thought that Damon had probably told everybody else in the class, swearing them all to secrecy.
Isaiah nodded agreeably.
“I got a digital camera last Christmas, and I’m taking pictures of Riverside Elementary from all different angles, and scanning them into the computer, and making wall calendars.”
“Wow,” Isaiah said.
“Do you think most kids want to buy wall calendars?” Todd couldn’t resist asking.
“I think most parents want to buy wall calendars. My market surveys say it’s the parent market I need to be targeting.”
Damon had done market surveys?
“Which is good,” Damon went on, “since parents are the ones with the deep pockets.”
Isaiah looked at him blankly.
“With the money.”
This time Isaiah grinned.
“What about you two?” Damon asked.
Isaiah explained about Crayon Critters.
Damon shrugged. “Girls might like them,” he conceded. “You could focus on the cute angle. Girls are suckers for anything cute. What about you, Todd?”
Todd couldn’t tell Damon what he had told Amy, that he was seriously considering not coming up with any product at all. “I’m still working on it.”
Damon gave a low whistle. “You’re cutting it pretty close, if you ask me.”
Todd hadn’t asked him.
“I’d get started soon if I were you. Like, yesterday.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Todd said.
“Do you know how many new businesses in America fail?” Damon asked as he stood up with his tray.
Isaiah shook his head obligingly.
“Ninety percent. Nine out of ten. Catch you later, guys.”
Todd was relieved when Damon strolled away.
Todd was lying on the family room floor doing math homework, when he heard his mother, back from her shift at the Crafts Cottage. She was later than usual, so she must have stopped on the way home to get groceries. Todd hoped so. Groceries were one of life’s good things.
Math homework was another. Todd knew other kids thought it was strange to like having math homework, but he did. He loved questions that had answers, problems that had solutions, twenty of them, all on one page. He loved looking at a neat page of calculations and knowing that he had them all one hundred percent right.
His mother came into the family room and clicked off the TV. Todd looked at Amy, so lost in her book that she didn’t seem to register their mother’s presence in the room.
But their father, dozing on the couch with the remote in his hand, came awake with a guilty startle.
“David. Todd. Amy.” Quiet voices could sound so much more menacing than shouting ones. “I need you to come into the kitchen. Now.”
Amy put her book down then, and the three of them straggled into the kitchen. If they had had tails like Wiggy, the tails would have been tucked between their legs.
“Look at this place,” Todd’s mother said.
It was bad: newspapers in an untidy heap on the table, dirty dishes everywhere, an empty milk carton standing on the counter next to spilled cereal left over from breakfast, and two sacks of groceries his mom had just carried in from the car.
“I want this cleaned up. I want these groceries put away. I want a decent meal with every part of the food pyramid represented on the table in sixty minutes. Call me when it’s ready. I’m going to be upstairs soaking in a hot tub.”
Then she was gone.
Once his first spasm of remorse had passed, Todd actually felt relieved. It was so much better to be doing something rather than nothing, to be solving a problem rather than pretending it didn’t exist. He opened the dishwasher and started loading dirty dishes into it, as Amy and their father took the groceries out of the paper sacks and put them on the pantry shelves and in the fridge.
“How does the food pyramid work?” their father broke the silence to ask.
“You’re supposed to eat a lot of grains and cereals,” Todd
explained. They had studied the food pyramid at school last year. “They’re on the bottom of the pyramid, the wide part. And hardly any fats and sugars. They’re the little point at the top. And eat lots of vegetables and fruits. And some protein, too.”
“I don’t think she really cares if we have the whole pyramid,” Amy said. “Just so it looks sort of balanced. I mean, not just popcorn and apples.”
“Maybe we should look in a cookbook,” their father suggested.
There was a whole bookcase full of cookbooks against one kitchen wall. It was hard to know where to begin. Some of them were as thick as dictionaries; others had obviously unhelpful titles such as Fifty Christmas Cookies from One Basic Dough or Easy Entertaining.
“Here’s one,” Todd said. He pulled out Thirty-Minute Meals.
Their father glanced at the clock on the microwave. “Can you find one that says Fifteen-Minute Meals?”
Todd checked the shelves again. “Nope. The only other one that tells the minutes is the Sixty-Minute Gourmet.”
“Okay, thirty minutes it is.”
“Let’s make something with chicken,” Amy said. “I just put away a lot of chicken.”
“How about curried chicken breasts with rice?” Todd asked. It looked good in the picture. “Do we have any rice?”
“Right here!” their father answered.
“What about fruits and vegetables?” Amy reminded them.
“We’ll have broccoli on the side,” their father said.
“Dairy products?” Todd thought the pyramid had dairy products on it somewhere.
“You kids can drink milk. And look, there’s some cream in the sauce. Do we have any cream?”
Amy checked the fridge. “We have half-and-half. That’s sort of like cream.”
The meal took more than thirty minutes to make. It turned out that the thirty minutes started after you had chosen the recipe, located the ingredients, and done whatever preliminary chopping you had to do, which for curried chicken breasts was a lot. Still, forty-five minutes later, their father sent Amy upstairs to summon their mother for dinner.
When she came into the kitchen, she stared in apparent disbelief. “You even fixed broccoli,” she whispered.
“We cooked it too long,” Todd’s father confessed. “But it still counts as a vegetable.”
When they started eating, Todd noticed that if the broccoli had been cooked too long, the rice hadn’t been cooked long enough: it was hard and grainy. And the chicken breasts were a little tough. He didn’t know if that meant they had been cooked too long, or not long enough.
“This is delicious!” his mother exclaimed after the first bite.
That was definitely an exaggeration.
“Um … how exactly are you defining delicious?” his father asked.
“My definition of delicious is food cooked by someone else.”
At least it was edible, which Todd knew was more than his mother had allowed herself to expect. There weren’t even any leftovers for Wiggy. Overcooked, limp broccoli and undercooked, grainy rice drowned in curry sauce probably wasn’t her favorite dish, anyway. But right then, with his whole family sitting around the table together in the lamp-light, and Wiggy lying on the floor beside him, it tasted pretty good to Todd.
“Todd.” Ms. Ives stopped by his desk on Friday “You didn’t turn in the description of your product. I’m going to have to take off points for every day it’s late. Our first selling session is a week from Monday, you know.”
“I know.”
“Is something wrong?”
Todd shook his head.
“Your parents have told me what a talented young engineer you are! I can’t wait to hear what great idea you’ve come up with!”
Why was it that the more people talked about Todd’s great ideas, the fewer great ideas he actually had? The higher people’s expectations, the harder it was to live up to them.
Ms. Ives beamed encouragingly at him. This must be the moment when he was supposed to reveal his brilliant plan.
When Todd didn’t respond, a hint of worry crept into Ms. Ives’s eyes. “Todd, you do have an idea for your product, don’t you?”
“Well … not exactly.”
“But there are so many wonderful products you could
sell! Hundreds of them! Why don’t you make—” She stopped, apparently remembering that students were required to come up with their own products and not use ideas generated by parents or teachers. “I just know you can come up with something splendid!”
“I’ll try,” Todd said, hoping she’d be satisfied and move on.
“That’s the right attitude!” But the enthusiasm in her voice didn’t match the lingering concern in her face. At least she did leave him alone then and bustle off to check on someone else.
He had said he’d try. But if Damon was right, nine out of ten businesses ended in failure. In Todd’s opinion, that didn’t make a person feel like racing out into the world and trying. It made a person feel like giving up before he even started—especially when his own dad had already given up, when his own dad, his fellow scientist, his fellow engineer, had given up on work completely.