"I can't believe it!" the tousle-haired boy said angrily, using a phrase that reminded me of my mother in earlier days. "This is so irritating!"
In his hand my partner held a four-page judging form from the District Science Fair and Festival. Out of a possible eighty-eight points, we had received a miserable fifty-six, a score equal to a letter grade of D.
All things considered, it was not a very good showing.
"They didn't believe us!" he wailed. "They said, listen to this, 'Rather than adhere to the scientific method of inquiry, your experiment seems to ridicule it.' What jerks! This makes me so mad!"
I looked at the score sheet. The only thing the judges really liked was the artistic presentation and workmanship of our exhibit.
I had drawn a picture of Orwell in his distinctive, upright pose, with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eyes. Together, the tousle-haired boy and I had painstakingly colored it in with colored pencils. We had glued on actual Scrabble tiles so it looked like Orwell was standing on them. But we got clobbered on our hypothesis, our procedure, and our conclusion, and were served big fat goose eggs for our missing review of literature and our nonexistent bibliography.
"This is so typical!" my partner ranted on. "You make an authentic scientific breakthrough and nobody believes you! What's the use?"
"Well," I said, staring at the row of zeroes on the last page. "Maybe if we'd read up on it first. 'Il faut étudier pour avoir de bonnes notes.' It is necessary to study in order to have good grades."
"You're defending them?" he snapped.
"No," I said. "Just trying to see it another way."
Of course I was disappointed, but I could understand why people would be skeptical of a versifying, fortunetelling, moonwalking rabbit picking letters from a jar with his brain.
"I think people look for what's familiar," I suggested. "If it's different, they figure something's wrong with it. "
"Maybe you're right," he said. "Maybe we're just ahead of our time."
"The first explorers," I added.
"With only a rabbit to guide us," he said, laughing.