Tj and the Rockets (4 page)

On Monday morning, Ms. K. had an announcement to make.

“Mr. Wilson has moved the science fair ahead,” she said as she wrote the new date on the board. It was only two weeks away!

“Doesn't matter to me!” called out Gabe from the back of the room. “I can be sick that week just as well as any other!”

“No one is going to be sick,” said Ms. K. “And I'd like you to bring in your collections tomorrow.”

“We don't do collections this year,” said Amanda.

“We already did collections back in grade three,” said Roddy.

“If we start looking at everyone's collections, we won't have time to think about our science projects!” said Mia.

“Exactly,” said Ms. K. “It's something we can do for fun instead of going crazy over this science fair business. Please bring in your collections tomorrow.”

“It's all my fault,” I told Ms. K. after class. “Mr. Wilson asked me about the science fair, so I told him we all had amazing projects and we were practically finished.”

Ms. K. just kept smiling her witchy smile.

“I gathered that when I spoke with him this morning,” she said. “But frankly, TJ, it doesn't matter. What difference does it make if the science fair is a month from now or two weeks from now? No one, except Amanda, has even tried to think up an idea. And no one, including Amanda, really gets down to work until about a week before any project is due.”

It wasn't quite true. Seymour and I had been thinking about the science fair, even if we hadn't told anyone else about
it. Hey—maybe everyone had secret science fair projects and we were all about to amaze ourselves!

Fat chance.

I still thought Ms. K. was crazy not to be working on science fair stuff. Seymour thought so too.

“I've reached stage two,” he announced after school. “Incubation. I'm thinking up lots of ideas and writing them down right away so they don't get lost. That's what this notebook is for. And a book like this is important when you go to register a patent so no one can steal your invention.”

“Seymour, kids don't invent the kind of things that need patents,” I said.

“What about earmuffs?” said Seymour. “Chester Greenwood was only fifteen when he invented them. He had the kind of ears that turned blue when he tried out his new hockey skates on the pond and he hated wool toques. He invented earmuffs. It was the beginning of a whole lifetime of inventing and patents.”

“Fifteen is a teenager not a kid,” I said.

“Close enough,” said Seymour. “And what about the kid who invented the Popsicle? He was eleven years old. I'm eleven years old! Frank Epperson—that was his name. At first he called it the Epsicle.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“I'm sure!” said Seymour. “The trampoline was invented by a guy who used to jump up and down on the bed in the guest room when he was just a kid. The idea of colored car wax to cover scratches was invented by some girl who was twelve years old.”

He rapped on the notebook.

“It's hardcover so it can't be destroyed easily. It has pages that don't pull out. There's no place to add extra pages either. That's important. I'm writing on every line so no one can claim I added something in later, and I'm writing in pen and I'm dating it and you're going to sign it every day.

“Why am I going to sign it?”

“To prove I invented it before anyone else.”

I looked at the first page. So far he had invented his name and address.

“I know, I know,” he said. “I haven't quite got started. That's why I thought I'd walk you home. Your house is a good place for coming up with ideas.”

Well it was a good place for the cats to come up with ideas. They'd come up with a lot of them lately. Mostly they were the kind of ideas that knocked things over or tore things apart. However Alaska also had another trick.

“Is she there?” I called.

I'd sent Seymour half a block ahead. Every time I came home, no matter what time of day it was, I always found Alaska sitting in the window looking out at me. She wasn't there when Dad or Mom came home. She wasn't there when the mailman came by or when Gran dropped over—I'd asked them. But somehow she knew when I was coming. I wanted to see if the way she knew was by spotting me coming down the street.

“She's already here,” called Seymour. “Green-eyed fur face at two o'clock.”

Sure enough, when I got to our gate, there was Alaska looking out. How did she do that?

As usual she watched us come up the walk, but when we reached the bottom step her face vanished from the window. I handed Seymour the front-door key.

“You go first,” I said.

“Is this another cat thing?” he asked.

I nodded.

Seymour opened the door and went inside.

“Hello!” he called. “Alaska! T-Rex!”

Not a cat in sight. Seymour shrugged and bent over to undo his runners.

Tha-da–da-thump—wham!

A gray blur came barreling down the stairs, threw itself against his shoes and hands and took off again.

“Wow! Was that T-Rex or a jet plane?” Seymour said. “When did he start doing that?”

“Sometime last week,” I said. “He seems to be getting better at it. Or worse.”

“That's the fastest thirty-one kilometers an hour I've ever seen,” said Seymour.

Thirty-one kilometers an hour is top speed for a house cat.

Two seconds later, T-Rex was back, mewing and purring and all friendly. He rubbed himself back and forth against Seymour's ankles and wove in and around my legs. He was marking us with his scent glands. Mine. Mine. Mine. If they ever make infrared goggles that pick up cat scent, my legs are going to positively glow in the dark.

“We'd better find Alaska right away,” I said.

Seymour looked puzzled, but he followed me around the house. We found her on a shelf above the desk. She was sitting between a stack of books and a plastic cup full of pens. She was rubbing her furry face against the cup. It was moving closer to the brink and tipping, tipping, going, going…

The pens spilled across the carpet. Alaska peered down at us as we crawled on our hands and knees to pick them up. I think she was laughing, but it's hard to tell with a cat.

I lifted her down before we went into the kitchen. Seymour crumpled a couple of pieces of scrap paper into balls and threw them around the floor to keep the cats busy while I made us a snack. After that I filled their food dishes to keep them out of our faces while we were eating.

Seymour took out his notebook and spread it on the table. He stared at it.

“Are you sure that's what they mean by incubation? Staring at a blank page?”

“I'm not staring,” said Seymour. “I'm thinking.”

“Looks pretty much like staring to me.”

T-Rex seemed to feel the same way. He gobbled the last of his crunchies, jumped onto the table beside Seymour and stared at the book too. He wasn't supposed to be on the table, but Mom wasn't home and I think he looks cute up there. Seymour looked across to see a “cat image” of himself staring at a blank page.

“Maybe you're right,” said Seymour. “I need inspiration. I need to think big like…like… Leonardo da Vinci.”

“I thought he painted the
Mona Lisa
,” I said.

“He did,” said Seymour. “But he was an inventor too. He patented all sorts of inventions, even way back then. He watched birds and came up with plans for flying machines. He watched fish swim and drew plans for submarines. They didn't actually work, but he was on the right track.”

Seymour scratched his head. Now his hair was standing up even more than usual. He actually looked the part of a mad inventor.

“Come to think of it, other inventors have got their ideas from nature too,” said Seymour. “The idea for hot air balloons came from two brothers watching pieces of paper rise on the hot air above their factory. And Velcro—you know that sticky kind of cloth? Velcro was invented by a Swiss engineer who found cockleburs clinging to his jacket.”

Seymour took his snack into the living room. For the next ten minutes, instead of staring at a blank page on our
kitchen table, he stared out the window at our yard. I sat on the living room sofa and read through some of the rocket- building instructions I'd dug out of the bottom of the box. I was about halfway through the pages when I found some interesting information.

The fin is the stabilizing and guiding unit of a model rocket. When a rocket is momentarily deflected by even a small gust of wind, the fins enable it to correct the flight and fly straight again
.

Aha! Illumination, as Seymour would say. The loose fin—that's what had gone wrong with my rocket. I'd thought duct tape would hold it, but I hadn't realized the kind of force that a launch would involve.

Seymour had finished his snack and was headed back into the kitchen.

“Any luck?” I asked him.

“Naw,” said Seymour. “God already invented trees. Did a pretty good job too.”

That's when we heard the noise.
Lap lap lap
.

I followed Seymour into the kitchen. T-Rex had knocked over Seymour's half-full glass of milk. He was busy cleaning up the evidence.

What really made us stop and stare, however, was Alaska. Alaska was sitting by my own glass of milk. She hadn't knocked it over, and she wasn't sticking her head inside either. Instead she was reaching into the glass with her lovely little paddy paw, delicately scooping out milk and daintily licking.

“Hey!” said Seymour. “Alaska just invented the spoon!”

Which was true, cat-style at least.

Chapter 6

It was Tuesday when Dad noticed that one of the expensive Swiss Army knives was missing from the lockup case.

“Not again,” said Mom.

“It was there on Saturday,” I said. “Mr. G. opened the case so Seymour could look at it. Seymour's on an invention kick, and he thought it was pretty neat.”

Dad nodded.

“So it was stolen sometime between Saturday at noon and noon today,” he said. “Maybe Wilf left the case open by mistake.”

Wilf Grogan is Mr. G.'s real name.

“He might have,” I said. “He had to help a couple of other customers while Seymour was looking at it.”

“You've got a good memory, TJ,” said Mom.

“I was trying to watch who was in the store,” I said. “If I ever catch the person who's stealing stuff, they're really going to be sorry.”

“Watch all you like, but don't go chasing after them,” said Dad. “You never know what a person will do, and we don't want anyone getting hurt. Tell me or Mom or Mr. G. if you suspect someone.”

That's what parents always say.

The next morning, Seymour and I took a detour when we got to school. We walked past Mr. Wilson's room. Through the door we could glimpse what looked like an entire ocean of science projects— giant springs, long glass tubing, boards with electric wires, switches and lightbulbs.

Our own room looked pretty much as usual—messy. Witches tend to have all sorts of different things lying around, and since kids had been bringing in their collections, it was worse than usual.

The last person to bring in a collection was Gabe. He'd asked for an extra day to get organized. Since when did Gabe get anything organized except on the playing field?

But when he arrived with his sports cards, everyone was surprised. The cards were all in plastic pages; the pages were tabbed and sorted into binders; the binders looked as if they had never been touched by unwashed hands.

“I buy them with my paper-route money,” he said. “Most of what I earn has to go to hockey and baseball fees, but I save a little out for cards and it kind of adds up.”

“I've never really looked at sports cards before,” said Ms. K. “Look at this. It says that this player's pitch has been clocked at ninety three miles an hour. What do they mean ‘
clocked at'
?”