Cavendish added to Newton = mass of the earth.
Figure out the distance from the center of the earth to the center of a person: 6.38 x 106 meters. It’s all in the relation of two bodies. Cavendish is awesome.
He got G, the universal gravitational constant, and that’s what I didn’t tell Kyle when he asked about a body falling.
Even in the middle of Einstein’s theory of relativity, there’s G. And all those pansy social scientists say there’s nothing absolute. Here’s one. G is always the same. Always. They also throw around terms like “sphere of influence.” They make it sound like science. Like gravitational field. Tell me about it. Let’s talk Japan during the war. Koreans can tell you lots about spheres of influence.
But G is benign.
Figuring out G gives a person the mass of the world.
The way Cavendish did it was so precise, so patient. He measured the way that metal balls affect each other when suspended from long metal rods, and he helped measure the inverse proportional pull of two objects on each other. Since Newton couldn’t figure out the mass of the earth in his time, Cavendish had to go at it a different way, and turn it on its ear, solve for G. Once he got 6.67 x 10-11Nm2/kg2, he could figure that the mass of the earth was
That’s the mass on Alta’s shoulders.
It’s in the news. Body surfaces a mile and a half downstream from Boathouse Row, identified as female in her twenties, presumed the rowing coach from the prep school who drowned ten weeks ago in a rowing accident on the Schuylkill. The media have a way of putting things. Body. Presumed. Prep school. Not Alta’s friend. Not someone’s daughter. Not Sarah.
My sister’s name, Kim, 
, means gold. My father, the chemist, was also Mr. Historian, proud of the biggest clan in Korea, bragged about our heritage through Kim. But when she died, from an inherited disease, he didn’t want anything in the papers, only the short obit I wrote. I’m no Hemingway, but in the paper, she was our sister and daughter, our gold.
Rower Girl Alta lives in an apartment attached to the girls’ dorm. The day the news breaks, I go to check on her. Not that she knows I exist. Before I go, I fold a rowing shell. Give me a big piece of paper, and I can make anything. Oars are tricky.
The distance between her dorm and my dorm, maybe fifty meters. Down the hall to her apartment, one open door blasts Grateful Dead, and another blasts Earth, Wind & Fire, and another Talking Heads. Pitiful music afflicts both sexes. There’s music coming from Ms. Alta’s place as well. God-awful. Christopher Cross. King of the Sappy.
Knocking pushes the door open, and King Sappy’s song slams me. “Sailing, sailing” are the only words I catch. It must be their song. A song about skin drag, the tension of a body across water. Rowers are predictable.
The living room is girl bodies. Ms. Alta is the queen sitting in an overstuffed armchair, and two Fifth Formers sit on the armrests. Fourth Formers and Third Formers sit cross-legged on the floor, leaning back on knees. Her rowing team is here, the one Second Form girl, Maggie Anderson, and the girls assigned to her dinner table.
And Carla.
The curls fall in Carla’s eyes, and she uses that hand, fingers straight out, wrist flat in line with the elbow, the mannequin move, to sweep the curls out of her face. Her high-tops, untied, are parked in front of her. She’s leaning on her elbows, elbows on her knees, toward Alta. Inverse square formula applies to the attraction two bodies exert.
“Mr. Song,” Alta says. She tries to push off from the chair, but kids are at her feet, kids on her armrest. She’s stuck under the weight of the world.
“Ms. Alta, you’re busy,” I say across the room, over Christopher Sappy on the record player. The girls on the floor and the girls on the armrests look at each other. The rumor mill fires up. Few men go into the girls’ dorms. No boys. No girls in boys’ dorms. Usually.
“No, please, have a seat,” she says, and that’s when Carla turns to me, her shoulders turning with her chin. That’s when Alta stands up. So I hold out the paper shell.
About fourteen inches long, the ends pointy. I made it from brown origami paper with leaf prints in a darker brown. The hull is rounded like a real rowing shell. But the oars look like legs. Another stupid bug. A centipede. That’s the way Carla will see it. How simple. Anyone can make a centipede. Adolescent boy in the middle of Tim-Tim girls, my gift is a stupid piece of paper.
Ms. Rower meets me in the middle. “That’s an eight,” she says. “How did you do that?”
The fourteen-inch paper is small in her hands. Her eyes are level with the shell. The creases and the folds have names.
“Practice,” I say.
“It’s beautiful. It must’ve taken forever.”
“Give me a big piece of paper and twenty minutes, no problem.” This line almost stops my throat. I’ve used it so often. Carla knows. Carla’s looking at me, Ms. Testament to My Indiscretion. She is static electricity.
Alta tips the shell one way to look in, tips it another. Her blue eyes are gray, and the eyelids are puffy. She’s not here, not in this living room packed with Tim-Tim girls. She’s not on this beige carpet, and she’s not six feet tall. She’s on the lake, feeling the drag of the eight on the surface of the water, timing her body to match her friend’s body. Floating in the Schuylkill.
After Kim died, I wasn’t a lot of places. The grocery store. The kitchen. The classroom. Sure, I cooked meals, and I graded lab books, but really, I was sitting on Kim’s bed, reading to her the latest Doonesbury and Bloom County, taking her temperature.
No science can explain grief.
“Won’t you sit?” Ms. Rower-Girl has manners, white girl, old money. Every place to sit is taken by one or two girls. A Little Miss Manners gets up from a chair, and I sit in the mass of bodies. The girls on the armrests where Alta was sitting are still looking at each other, talking without talking.
Rambo, by the brown dresser, gets up to change the record. Bye-bye, King Sappy. Grateful Dead. Carla’s music. She puts on “The Wheel,” and she cranks up the volume. Dorms are dens of hearing loss.
Carla doesn’t sit down. She turns toward Alta and me. We’re on one side of the living room. And she closes her eyes, and her body goes liquid. Like amber, electricity. Things that change substance. The way she moves, her jerky motions smooth out. She follows the form of the music. Her shoulders curl closed and open, and her hips and shoulders and knees turn little circles. The curves of her body catch her loose clothing, suggest the waves that bodies can make when skin drags across skin.
The other girls in the room aren’t looking at each other. Their faces are spotlights. They stare. Conveyers of Negative Ions. I stare.
Carla dances in a room full of girls, and one coach stuffed with grief, and one guy stuffed with guilt. We are caught in her gravitational field. The two adults in the room have the greatest mass, and thus, we are attracted more. My greater emotional mass generating attraction has an inverse effect on my resistance.
Sure, it’s science. Carla exerts her sphere of influence, and we are caught in the sphere. But each of us has a sphere. Therefore, Alta and I exert ours on her, ours on each other. All objects with mass will pull toward each other with gravitational force.
Imagine the pull if a person carries the weight of the earth.
Evenings in study hall, forces acting upon inertia are revealed. Most students believe that inertia is the resistance to change. Wrong. Or it’s doing nothing. Wrong again. It’s the resistance an object has to a change in its state of motion. Inertia is potential, and it relies on tension.
So, if Donny Zurkus, King of the All-Nighter, keeps his head on his open textbook, drools on the page, and keeps sleeping, that’s not inertia. That’s study hall.
So, if all goes well, I can blast through ten lab books in the hour. Since Kyle’s here, who knows. Study hall’s for the kings and queens of wayward acts or mediocre minds. Every time Kyle’s here, he asks me to fold bugs and buildings and gifts. He asks about inertia, skin drag, and vectors. He’s here a lot.
Ever since we folded cranes, he’s folded simpler things and pretended not to be folding. Not usually the Sneaky King. Strolling through the desks, I read late homework for Algebra and Geography, French and Social Science. When Mediocre Minds try to hide their procrastinating habits, they slide homework over the top, bring pencils to their mouths, and say, “Hmmmm.”
“As if,” Carla would say.
On one of my tours of the procrastinators, when I saw an origami box with “You’re the best rower. Donny Zurkus” on Kyle’s desk, he didn’t pull a paper across it. Not subtle. So obvious he goes invisible.
The second one was a bat, the mammalian kind. Kindergarten kids can make bats. Inside the wings, it read, “You’re number one” on one wing, and “in my cave” on the other. And “Donny Zurkus” was down the belly, all caps. Kyle was playing a dangerous game.
The third one was a bluebird. On a scale of one, easy, and ten, tough-to-make, it’s a two. Nice folds, though. No do-overs. Striking blue paper. Inside it said, “Meet me before dinner in the cornfield. Donny.” Since dinner happens before study hall, this note was to be given the following day. The boy was planning. He was so engrossed in his planning, he didn’t see me pass behind him.
Here inertia was motion, the tendency to stay in motion. Kyle was Newton’s First Law by setting something in motion at a certain velocity. Newton was amazing. If there were no drag or other force acting, what Kyle starts would continue forever. Surely Zurkus will stop whatever it is.
In any way I can, I will resist resistance to this object in motion. Kyle will complete what he has set in motion. He will beat Bad-Boy Zurkus on his own. Completion of his plan by his own hand will teach him more than anything I can help him achieve.