Adam Selzer Read online

  There must be one of those kids in every advanced studies class, because in seventh grade Mrs. Smollet gave him some information about some camp for kids like him. The top of the flyer said, “Do you always have to know how things work? Do you have a tendency to tinker?” Any teacher who thinks it’s wise to give a kid a flyer that asks him if he has a “tendency to tinker” should be fired in a large public assembly. In any case, Brian passed on the camp.

  By the end of lunch I was on enough of a high to get through the rest of my day without too much trouble. Even though I wasn’t entirely sure what Brian was talking about with all the gears and stuff, just hearing him yammering on made me excited about trying to get the wall of sound working again, and the video was starting to feel like it was back on track. Not to mention that I had an invitation to go over to Anna’s house the next day. With all those things, I had enough going on in my head to sit around pretending to be taking notes while I was actually drawing up plans for the wall of sound or writing down more movie ideas. It was almost enough to make me forget all about the hell that surely awaited me at home that night, cooking and inventing.

  Almost.

  Most of the cookbooks in my parents’ collections aren’t really cookbooks so much as advertisements. Like, Crisco put out whole cookbooks in which every recipe called for an obscene amount of “Crisco® Brand Shortening.” The idea behind it was that if people kept cooking things out of the books, they’d run out of Crisco faster and have to buy more of it. That’s all very well and good, but the problem is, a lot of products can’t really be made into all that much stuff, so the people writing the cookbooks really had to stretch for ideas after the third or fourth recipe. I hope against hope that they didn’t really expect people to eat some of the recipes they came up with; they were just doing their job, coming up with as many ideas as they could. They probably didn’t count on people like my parents.

  I was able to hang out in my room for a couple of hours after school, poking around with the wires on the speakers to see if anything was broken or burned all to hell, and trying to get them back into shape instead of being a tangled mess, which they seemed to have become all by themselves. Then, just as the clock struck six, I was called downstairs.

  My mother was dressed in one of her food disaster costumes, which she only wore on special occasions, when she was really trying to make cooking into a chance to spend quality time with my dad and me. On these occasions, when she cooked one of the horrible meals, she liked to dress up like a housewife from whatever decade the cookbook of the night came from. Tonight she was dressed in a costume from the 1950s, with a long dress and a yellow apron, and she was wearing hideous, pointy red eyeglasses. I was convinced that this did not make the meals any more edible, and further convinced that anyone who was into women’s rights would consider the whole scene a giant step backward. But, as usual, I kept my mouth shut. I was under punishment, after all. And, anyway, it could have been worse. The outfit she wore when she used a cookbook from the seventies could probably cause blindness if one looked directly at it. My dad’s costumes, at least, weren’t so bad. Men’s fashions have remained pretty much stagnant, just a plain shirt and tie, for decades now.

  “What are we making tonight, then?” I asked.

  “Applesauce casserole with green beans,” she said, grinning evilly. “It’ll get you every vitamin you need for sure, because all the fruits and vegetables are mixed together in the same dish!” I silently wondered whether putting the two categories in the same dish would actually cause them to sort of cancel each other out.

  “Here,” she said, handing me an apron of my own. “Put this on.” When I did, I realized that it had the words KISS THE COOK printed on the chest. I hoped she wouldn’t try to follow those directions.

  She handed me a copy of a slim, stapled-together cookbook called Everyday Is Applesauce Day, and I flipped through it for a bit, feeling bad for the poor guys who were told to come up with a whole bunch of things that could be made out of applesauce. There’s really only one thing you can make out of applesauce, and that’s, well, applesauce.

  My first job was to mix up the applesauce with milk, green beans, assorted spices, and a couple of eggs in a large bowl. I started out just stirring it like I would normally stir something, but Mom stopped me.

  “That’s not the right way to do it,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “I’m stirring, aren’t I?” Honestly, there are times when I think they don’t think I can do anything right.

  “Yes,” she said, “but you’re not following the rules. When you cook a food disaster, you have to pretend it’s the nineteen fifties, or whatever decade the cookbook was printed. You can pretend you’re a fifties teen.”

  My mother was not above forcing quality time on me.

  I dropped the spoon into the dish and started to walk off, combing my hair with my fingers.

  “Where are you going?” she called as I walked down the hall toward the front door.

  “Out to Dead Man’s Curve,” I said. “My friends and I are gonna listen to some rock ’n’ roll, do some drag racing, and maybe have a knife fight. We’re rebels.”

  “Nice try, Leon,” she said. “Get back here.” I had expected her to call me on that one, but surely she couldn’t blame me for trying. “Just talk about Eisenhower or something while you stir.”

  I gulped and silently thanked God that none of my friends were present to witness the whole thing, then started to stir and say “That President Eisenhower sure is swell” and things like that. While she got the oven ready and mixed up the pastry top for the casserole, she said things like, “Now, I was talking to Betty next door, and she said that if you mix green beans into things, it’ll give your children more iron. Do you think you’re getting enough iron, dear?”

  “Gee, Mom,” I said, “I sure hope so. I’m gonna need to be strong when the Russians attack us!”

  “Oh, don’t you worry about that, dearest,” she said. “You just worry about what all of those friends of yours have been doing at the drive-in. I don’t want you getting into that kind of trouble! You keep your hands to yourself, mister.”

  I almost stopped stirring as I realized that, in a completely sneaky way, my mother had just given me a sex talk.

  If that’s what the fifties were like, and, in particular, if these recipes were really what the food was like, it’s a wonder anyone survived them at all. The suicide rate was probably through the roof.

  But I managed to steer the conversation far away from sex by talking about hula hoops and integrating schools. By the end of the whole thing, I was actually sort of getting into pretending to be a rebellious fifties teen. This, in particular, made me want to stick my head in the oven.

  Half an hour later, we put the food on the table, and my dad sat down, looked at the cookbook, and said, “Oh, boy! I was waiting for Applesauce Day!”

  “I’m pissed off,” I said. “I can’t believe I had to go to school on Applesauce Day!”

  “Leon, watch your language,” said my mother. So much for playing along. I didn’t think “pissed” was a cuss word to begin with. My mother lived in fear of cuss words; the very mention of the infamous “f-word” would cause her eyes to bug out, unless it was being said by someone with a British accent. For some reason, she found it less offensive coming from the British.

  The food itself could have been a whole lot worse, I suppose. You couldn’t really taste the green beans all that well; it wound up just tasting like a whole plateful of hot, chunky applesauce. This was a relief, but it looked gross and I still had to endure the lame jokes my parents made about it.

  “Boy!” said my father. “Can’t you just taste that iron, Leon?”

  “It does taste kind of like metal,” I said.

  “He stirred the applesauce and green beans all by himself,” said my mother, as though this was the big deal of the year or something. “We’re going to have to start punishing you more often, Leon!” A deca
de of formal education and they were proud that I could stir.

  I positively shoveled the last bit of applesauce into my mouth to make sure I didn’t have to answer right away. By the time I’d swallowed it, I didn’t have to say anything, because my father was making comments about how the colors made it look like some sort of junk you could spread in your garden to make the roses look brighter. That was probably a better use for it than to eat it for dinner. Even if it wasn’t as horrible as most of the food disasters, it wasn’t exactly a satisfying meal. Applesauce is a side dish, not a main course. After I was finished, I was still pretty hungry. Call me a spoiled brat if you must, but being chock-full of iron didn’t really make me any less hungry.

  After dinner I sort of felt like a prisoner who had just eaten his last meal before being executed, with a couple of key differences. Number one, criminals get to request whatever they want for their last meal. I sincerely doubt that any criminal has ever asked for applesauce with green beans in it. Number two, going out to the garage to help Dad find a way to make matches respond to a finger-snapping sound wasn’t exactly the same thing as being executed. This is not to say that it was pleasant, but at least I had a better than average chance of surviving, provided that I kept my wits about me and didn’t blow myself up.

  After I cleared my plate, I tried to buy myself some time by going into the living room and turning on the television, flipping from one prime-time sitcom to another. Sometimes if you look busy, people will give you a few minutes, even if you’re just watching something stupid on TV. Did you ever notice how many sitcom families have pretty much the same living room, only with slightly different decorations? The front door opens right into the living room, and there’s usually a staircase behind the couch. I don’t know anyone who’s right inside their living room when they open the front door; this is just one of many reasons that sitcoms are pretty much pure crap.

  Anyway, this didn’t last very long. After about five minutes, my mother came in and told me it was time to go to the workshop. I walked toward the door to the garage, pretending I was about to face a firing squad. They would ask me for my last request, and I’d say that I wanted a bulletproof vest, and then I’d wink and give the onlookers a sly smile. Well, not really. If I was about to get shot, I’d probably just whimper and crap my pants. But since I knew I wasn’t going to get shot, no matter what went wrong with the inventing, I was able to keep control of my various functions.

  When I stepped into the garage, Dad was already there, wearing a white lab coat, which was just plain embarrassing to see. I was convinced that no real inventors actually wore those and was equally convinced that there was no point at all in wearing one when there were no other inventors around to impress.

  “Hiya, Leon,” said my dad, grinning so enormously that I thought he would probably be sore in the morning. “All set?”

  “I guess so,” I said, pulling out one of the stools and having a seat. “What would you like me to do?”

  “First, put this on.” He held up a long white lab coat and, to my complete horror, handed it to me. I put it on, thanking heaven that the garage door was closed.

  He handed me a notebook. “Mostly just take notes for me. That’ll be a big help.” I pulled the stool a little closer to the table where Dad had all of his chemicals and junk sitting out. “I’ll call out some numbers and names of chemicals, and you just write down what I tell you.”

  I opened up the notebook, flipped to the first blank page, and got ready.

  “Test number one,” he said. “One milligram of boron.” I wrote that down; then he said a few more chemicals and mentioned mixing them over flame until they reached the boiling point. Then he did just that, putting them all together into a beaker, putting the beaker over a hot plate, and stirring them while they got hotter. He got the weirdest look on his face while he did it, like some sort of mad scientist. I wasn’t sure he was actually much of a scientist, but he was certainly mad.

  When it was boiling, he poured it all into some water (“dilute in one liter of H2O,” as I wrote in my notes) and said, “Now we just wait for it cool down.”

  The mixture he had made was an ugly blue thing, like the disinfectant people at hair salons keep combs in.

  “So that’s the stuff?” I asked. “Is it going to catch fire on command?”

  “Well, not on its own. But it’s fairly flammable…. Every match will have a tiny power source in it, and some gizmos that are sensitive to noise. It’s pretty complicated. I’ve got the things rigged up to ignite, just a bit, when they hear the noise, but the trick is to make the chemical coating of the match flammable enough to catch fire without being so flammable that it’s dangerous.”

  This struck me as a little unwise. Wouldn’t the sound of a snap set off every match in the matchbook at once? And what about similar sounds, like drumbeats? A guy at a rock concert could set his jacket on fire in a real hurry. But I didn’t say any of that out loud.

  “How much do you think they’ll cost?” I asked.

  “Well, they’re novelty matches, not normal ones,” he said. “So I think people will be willing to pay extra for them.”

  He hadn’t exactly answered my question; I guessed that the matches would probably cost so much that no one would be able to afford a single book of them, and was sure that anyone dumb enough to go into hock for a novelty product was probably not smart enough to take all the necessary safety precautions. On the plus side, having matches that could be lit accidentally would be a great way for someone—Brian Carlson, for instance—to say that he honestly hadn’t meant to burn the school down; the matches had just gone off by themselves.

  Just about then, the door opened, and my mother stepped into the garage. “I want a picture of this,” she said, holding up her camera. “My two inventors, hard at work.”

  I knew better than to complain but briefly wondered if it would be worth it to drink some of the blue flammable junk to see if it killed me, which it surely would have done. I decided against it, and she had us stand there, both of us in lab coats, and she took a picture. I felt like a first-class ding-dong. If the invention turned out to be a success, the picture would probably be published in Inventor’s Digest or something. Luckily, I didn’t think it would be any more successful than the rest of Dad’s inventions, so I didn’t have much to worry about.

  Finally, the mixture for the test was cooled, and Dad was ready to try it out. By that time, it had cooled into a somewhat more solid mixture, like blue clay. It looked sort of like how I imagined plastic explosives to look, and I guess that’s what it was, in a way.

  “Keep the notebook ready,” he said. “Write down everything that happens in the test. The real key is going to be absolute precision in the amount of mixture used per match.”

  He picked up a plain little stick of wood, on which there was a tiny metal device of some sort, and put it on a digital scale. I wrote down its weight. Then, using some piece of goofy gear that looked about like a turkey baster, he added a drop of the blue stuff to the end, covering the metal device, and then held it for a moment, waiting for it to dry. Once it seemed solid, he put it on the scale again and had me write down the new weight.

  “Now,” he said, “when I subtract the first measurement from the second one, I’ll know exactly how much of the material is on the match.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “Are you going to test it?”

  He smiled, held up the match with one hand, and snapped his fingers with the other one.

  I looked at the match and was not at all surprised when nothing happened.

  Dad, however, frowned, and snapped harder. That time, there was a tiny spark, but nothing caught fire.

  “I guess it’s not so flammable that it’s dangerous,” I said.

  Dad just stared for a second. “Damn,” he said.

  “Time to try a new mixture?”

  Dad just sat there, looking bummed out.

  “Well,” he said, finally, “I know what I’
d do if I were Thomas Edison.”

  “What?”

  “I’d hire somebody to invent it for me and then take all the credit. That’s what he did with the lightbulb, film projectors, and everything else he ever made. I’m just lucky he’s too dead to steal this one from me.”

  Then he had me help him clean the place up.

  As much as I disliked all the invention junk, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the poor guy. I thought about how long it might take him to get the mixture to do what he wanted at this rate, which was a very, very long time. The thought of him spending most of his life in the garage trying to make something that, if it worked, couldn’t possibly be safe enough to sell in stores was just plain sad.

  Tuesday seemed like it would be a good day in school. Not only did I have the advanced studies thing in the morning, but instead of being in class the last forty-five minutes of the day, I had the first weekly gifted-pool meeting, where we’d all meet with Mrs. Smollet in the special classroom that had couches and stuff. Going there didn’t do a whole lot to make you popular among other kids, but all you had to say was that you just went because it got you out of class and nobody really held it against you. Also, most of the kids in school knew that half of the people there were, as I have said, a bunch of troublemakers, and it was rumored that Mrs. Smollet tried to have us all expelled pretty regularly.

  I almost didn’t blame her; we did our best to make life difficult for her, though she didn’t always notice. When she had us do a thing in seventh grade where we were supposed to bring in our favorite poem, we all tried to outdo each other finding the worst poem imaginable, and she didn’t quite catch on. She said that the one James read about how “it takes a heap o’ livin’ to make a house a home” brought tears to her eyes. And not because it sucked. And that was one of our minor stunts; the best reactions usually came when we pretended to be devil worshippers.

  Tuesday was also the day I was going over to Anna’s house, which made it doubly exciting. In the morning I took a shower about twice as long as the ones I normally take, brushed my teeth twice, and used a hair dryer to get my hair to look its best, even though on the best days it tends to look like a disaster by noon. I tried some hair spray and hoped for the best.