Me, Myself and I by Jane Louise Curry

Author:Jane Louise Curry [Curry, Jane Louise]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: KMWillis Books
Published: 2014-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

“As You Will Have Noticed...

AS YOU WILL HAVE NOTICED, I do not seem to have a very efficient self-preservation instinct. To put it another way, however full of brains my head may be, it is not always screwed on right and tight.

Oh, I argued. But I gave in.

We were going to do this, I said, on a Need-to-Know basis. What our “little kid” didn’t know, he couldn’t tell, right? All he needed to know was that we wanted him to climb through a hole in a ceiling and look for something like a black box, O.K.? We were not going to breathe one word more than that, understood? We let him jump to the conclusion that we are his cousins if he wants to; we ask if he wouldn’t like to see the inside of a university lab; we tell him I work in one, but to start off, we don’t even say which one. Right? Right.

The pavilion floor was packed with rows of booths and display tables and two or three hundred people. The Bay Area Science Fair crowd was thinner than the hordes I vaguely remembered from the Great Day— maybe because it was getting close to lunchtime, maybe because I was two feet taller this time around, and didn’t feel so towered-over.

Jacko led the way through the maze of displays of experiments and working models that crowded the pavilion floor. Not that I didn’t remember where my project display had been—right on the free-throw line at the far end. How could I forget? On that spot, at eight years old, at my first science fair, I won a one-thousand-dollar college scholarship and got my picture not only in the local paper but the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. But this time around all I felt was dread. The thought of meeting one more me made my stomach feel like it had shrunk to the size of a Ping-Pong ball. A lead Ping-Pong ball.

Not Jacko, though. If I was down, he was up. So up he made me even more nervous. Maybe he managed to hold himself to a walk as we threaded our way across to the middle aisle, but it was a walk with a distinctly enthusiastic bounce to it.

What on earth, I wondered, was the kid going to be like? Do you know, I couldn’t remember much about being eight except that I had been nuts about calculus, physics, and “Star Trek” reruns.

Mutt. That’s what everybody called me when I was little. My big brother Phil started it, and it stuck. Mutt. Some joke. It was because there’s this breed of dog called Jack Russell, in case you don’t know. I mean, how undignified can you get?

I looked around for Professor Poplov and after a bit spotted him talking to a little red-haired kid at a display over on the far side of the floor. Woody I didn’t see anywhere. I didn’t know him back then—back now—but I remembered him saying he’d been to this science fair.

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