Wunderkind

1.10-Pliers

MISSION CITY, CALIFORNIA

MARCH 15, 2003

The football field has a massive hole in the fence right next to the bleachers. Angus knows about it because he's heard high schoolers brag about being able to sneak in there on late nights and "get some action" with their girlfriends. Dad won't tell him what that means when he asks. He doesn't know Angus already knows; it's just something you're supposed to ask your parents anyway. He's nine, almost ten, not stupid. Even if Dad thinks so.

And knowing about the hole in the fence works out perfectly for Angus's plan. He needs a big enough space to test his science fair project, because if it's good Mr. Ericson promises he'll work on getting Mac an entry in the California Science and Engineering Fair. Angus has read about it, that's for the best of the best.

If I make it into that, Dad might be really proud of me. He likes when Angus gets As in his classes, and when he does extra credit work and the teachers write nice letters or say good things at parent teacher conferences. Dad doesn't like it when Angus doesn't do so well in his classes, when he gets distracted or doesn't pay attention well enough. He doesn't like hearing about trouble, and he got really mad about the time Angus got the entire school evacuated when he mixed some of the chemicals from the maintenance closet.

I didn't make anything really dangerous. But there was a test in English and Mrs. Raffton always made them hard and I hadn't finished The Giver yet. He'd been working late on Mr. Ericson's class's robotics project, because if they could just get their robot's arms to work properly they might stand a chance of winning the state division competition. He'd much rather spend his time working on physics or engineering or chemistry than English. Math and science make sense. If you do things right, you always get the same results. You can make something good every time.

English isn't like that. Angus can't figure out a formula for what makes a "good" story, a "classic" book. He can memorize the "elements of a story" that are written on a big poster on the wall behind Mike Leland's desk, but they aren't like the periodic table of the elements, where when you combine certain ones you always get the same result. One story that put "foreshadowing" and "irony" together was a good story and got an A. Another one that did the same thing was a C-. It doesn't make sense. He doesn't know why the five paragraph essay is supposed to work, or how to find a "theme". Sometimes the books are interesting, but he doesn't want to read them and then have to write papers about them and try to tear them all apart. Can't stories just be to enjoy? Not dissect like the frogs in biology?

The other kids in class were all just as happy as Angus to not have to take the test. But none of the teachers were happy. They blamed Mr. Hobson, the nice maintenance man, for doing something wrong. And Angus couldn't let them do that. He couldn't let Mr. Hobson, who always talked to him in the hallways, and sang opera songs while he fixed the hall lights, and let Angus help use the electric stud finder, and congratulated him for fixing the drinking fountain with a gum wrapper and some rubber bands, get fired for something Angus did. Mr. Hobson was nice and funny and Angus didn't want them to try and find someone new, because what if the new maintenance man wasn't nice and didn't like when Angus asked him questions about how things worked, and didn't let him come sit in the bus garage when he was running from Donnie Sandoz? Even Donnie is scared of Mr. Hobson. He's not really scary, but he's so big and tall. If he's gone, who's going to help me? So Angus told the truth, for once.

So he got in trouble again. Dad had to come, and they had to talk to the principal, and the whole way home Dad yelled at him for making a problem. Now he's not really talking to Angus again, and Angus spends as much time as he can in Mr. Ericson's lab. Which is when they started talking about the science fair. Mr. Ericson says he's sure Angus can at least place, maybe even win his division. If I did, Dad would be happy. When he said that to Mr. Ericson, though, the man just sat him down in a chair and said, "If you spend your whole life trying to make that man happy, you're going to waste the amazing talent you have. If you do this, do it because it makes you happy. Because you want to do it."