EngiNerds Read online

  For Danni

  Preface

  BEFORE WE GET STARTED, I just want to make one thing clear about the guys I hang out with.

  I did not, do not, and will not ever endorse our “name” or “motto.”

  EngiNerds.

  That’s what we (excluding me) call ourselves.

  And our motto?

  “Because it’s the nerds who are the engine of the world.”

  Now, if you’ll excuse me—I have to go wash my mouth out. You see, I puke a little every time I have to recite that thing.

  Anyway, there are a dozen or so of us, all kids who prefer to spend our lunch hours discussing science and technology rather than, say, talking about the guest list for what’s-her-face’s birthday party or who was spotted holding so-and-so’s hand in the hallway. We usually meet in one of the science teachers’ empty classrooms. If for some reason none of them are available, we’ll hang out in the hallway or gather in the gym. Basically, we do everything we can to avoid the cafeteria and the kids who eat their lunches there. And believe me—most of the EngiNerds have very good reasons for doing so. At one point or another every one of us has been picked on or pushed around or, worst of all, forced to help some kid complete a homework assignment or prepare for a test.

  So we isolate ourselves and pick on and push around one another. Not physically, of course. All our picking on and pushing around is of the intellectual variety. I mean, you can’t get a group of self-described nerds in the same room and not expect them to partake in a little friendly competition.

  Or a lot of friendly competition.

  And actually, now that I think about it, maybe it’s not always exactly “friendly.”

  Which brings me to the guys.

  I guess I could go through and list each of the EngiNerds’ names, give their particular skills and interests, and then share one or two of their greatest hits—like the time Alan rigged up his parents’ vacuum cleaner so it hovered a whole inch and a half above the ground, or the time Edsley gathered up two thousand straws and launched a spitball over a building.

  I could do that. But honestly, that stuff deserves a book of its own. So instead I’ll stick with the guys in this first part of our story, the four of us you need to know about in order to understand how we unleashed a horde of hungry—

  Whoops.

  I’m getting ahead of myself.

  This is only the preface.

  Let me try that again:

  The four of us you need to know are me, Dan, Jerry Lin, and John Henry Knox.

  Dan and I are best friends. Have been since the second grade, when the two of us teamed up during recess one day to make a fort out of some twigs and rocks and a few old T-shirts that had been sitting in the lost and found since we’d been in kindergarten. He’s brilliant, Dan is, if a little serious. And unless he’s in one of his gloomy or annoying moods, there’s no one I’d rather have around.

  I can’t say the same for John Henry Knox. Well, I can admit he’s also pretty smart. Okay: really smart. But he wastes all his brains (not to mention tons of his parents’ money) studying clouds and measuring rainfall and developing elaborate theories about how the world as we know it will be swept away by some “catastrophic weather event” any day now. It doesn’t help that he’s super arrogant about it all too.

  And Jerry—well, let’s just say that if Jerry wasn’t around to lighten things up a little (and supply us all with chocolate milk), I probably would’ve been driven nuts by John Henry Knox long ago.

  Like how he—

  But wait.

  I’m getting ahead of myself again.

  Maybe we should just get started.

  You’ll meet the guys soon enough, and then you can decide for yourself what to think about them.

  1.

  THERE’S A BOX ON MY front porch.

  It’s big.

  Brown.

  Smooshed in at the corners and bruised along the sides.

  It’s for me.

  How do I know?

  Somebody wrote KENNEDY in thick black marker on the box’s top.

  Normally, I’d assume a random box on my front porch was from my grandpa. But this isn’t my grandpa’s handwriting. His is neat and clean, and this person’s? It’s a mess.

  The only thing I can think is that maybe my grandpa disguised his handwriting. Maybe the surprise of what’s inside is so good that he didn’t want me to know it was from him at first.

  I start to wonder what the old guy might be up to—but then I remember that there’s a big box on my porch with my name scrawled on top of it.

  In other words: I’m too flipping excited to stand here and think about anything else. I want to open it up. I want to open it up NOW.

  So I lug the box inside.

  2.

  WELL, I TRY TO LUG the box inside.

  But the thing is heavy.

  I’m talking crammed-full-of-lead-pipes heavy. Heavy like the box has been packed up with the pieces of a taken apart truck.

  I try and try to pick it up. I try until my back starts screaming and my forehead fills with sweat.

  Then I run around to the backyard and find a few sturdy sticks. I bring them back to the porch and wedge the tips of each of them under one side of the box. Because if I can use the sticks as a lever to get one end of the box just a little bit up into the air, then I can—

  CRUNCH!

  POP!

  SNAP!

  Before I can lift the box even half an inch, every one of the “sturdy” sticks breaks on me.

  I pull my leg back and nearly give the box a kick.

  Luckily, I stop my foot just before it connects with the cardboard. Because kicking a superheavy, possibly lead-pipe-filled box wouldn’t do much. Much besides break all my toes, I mean.

  So I go inside—boxless—and call up Dan.

  3.

  “DAN.”

  “Ken.”

  “Come over.”

  “No.”

  “Please?”

  “Still no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  “Because . . .”

  “Because I’m busy.”

  “With what?”

  Dan hesitates half a second. Then he says:

  “Stuff.”

  I sigh.

  “You’re watching that stupid show, aren’t you?”

  “What stupid show?” says Dan.

  “Ladybug whatever. The one with all the insects. The League of Ladybugs.”

  “So what if I am? I’m not—but so what if I was?”

  “Dan,” I say, “it’s a show for kids. For little kids.”

  “Not true, Ken. That would be a false statement. False and probably founded on prejudicial assumptions.”

  I sigh again.

  “Stop sighing,” Dan says.

  “Stop being ridiculous,” I tell him.

  “I’m not being ridiculous. I’m just stating the facts.” He clears his throat. “First of all, the show is most definitely not stupid. It’s educational. And entertaining. And if you ever gave it a chance, you’d see that each episode is carefully designed to appeal to both kids and adults, boys and girls and men and women too.”

  “Okay, okay,” I say. “All right. Just put the thing on pause and come over.”

  “No.”

  “Dan—listen. There’s a box on my porch. A mysterious box with my name scrawled across the top, and it’s way too heavy for me to lift.”

  Dan’s silent. Meaning, I know, that I’ve gotten him at least a little bit interested.

  Eventually he says:

  “What’s in it?”

  I can’t keep from smiling. But I try to hide the happiness from my voice.

  “I don’t know, Dan. That’s the t
hing. That’s why I’m calling you. I wanna get the box inside before I unpack it. But it’s too heavy for me to lift on my own.”

  More silence.

  Then:

  “What do you think it’s got in it?”

  “Well, I guess it could be anything.”

  “Even like . . . like a rocket?”

  I highly doubt there’s a rocket in the box. I’d bet all the money I’ve got stashed in the booby-trapped shoebox in my closet that the thing’s not packed up with a rocket.

  But Dan doesn’t need to know this.

  I don’t need to shatter the guy’s dreams.

  So I say:

  “Yeah. I guess, theoretically, it could be a rocket in there.”

  I can practically hear the gears of Dan’s brain churning on the other end of the line.

  “Can I leave in fifteen minutes?”

  I check my watch.

  It’s 3:18.

  And I just so happen to know that the stupid little kids’ show that Dan’s obsessed with runs from three o’clock to three thirty.

  So I tell him fine—but not before sighing one last time.

  4.

  IT TAKES DAN HALF AN hour to get to my house.

  During that time I have a snack—popcorn dipped in heated-up peanut butter, in case you’re curious. I also manage to scoot, shift, and shove the box all the way across my porch, right up to the front door.

  That’s around when Dan arrives.

  “How are the ladybugs?” I say as he’s walking up.

  “Shut it.”

  I hold out my hand and Dan grabs it. Giving it a tug, he pulls me up off the box—I’d been sitting on it for the past couple minutes, trying to ignore the fact that it was there at all.

  “So,” he says, “how do we do this?”

  I open the front door. Peer inside. Make sure my dog, Kitty, is nowhere in sight.

  You see, Kitty’s kind of an idiot.

  I love him.

  I really, really do.

  But let’s just say that I’ve encountered rocks with bigger brains than the pooch’s.

  Anyway, I don’t see Kitty on the coffee table, under the couch, or slouched up against the radiator, and those are all his favorite living room nap spots. Meaning he’s probably upstairs on my bed, or else in the kitchen licking the linoleum floor—that’s the guy’s main hobby.

  Turning back to Dan, I say, “Coast is clear.”

  “I’ll get this side,” he says, and crouches down to get a grip on the box.

  I do the same on the opposite side.

  “One . . . ,” I say.

  “Two . . . ,” he says.

  Then we both say:

  “THREE!”

  5.

  THERE’S A LOT OF GRUNTING and a little whining—all on Dan’s part, I should say—but we finally get the box into the living room.

  “Get the door, will you?” I say, and then head to the kitchen to grab us a couple glasses of water.

  When I get back to the living room, Dan’s just staring at the box. He’s not saying anything, but I know exactly what’s going on in his head. His brain might as well be hooked up to a loudspeaker.

  Rocket. Rocket. Rocket. Rocket.

  I hand him a glass of water, guzzle the other, and fish my house keys out of my pocket.

  “You ready?”

  “Ready,” Dan says.

  I run the jagged side of a key across the layer of tape that’s keeping the top of the box closed. Then I pull back the flaps.

  And it looks like I was right about that whole lead pipe thing.

  Or almost right.

  Because inside the box—there’s metal. And countless pieces of the stuff too.

  There are long, flat rectangles.

  Small squares.

  Trapezoids.

  Round things.

  Round things with holes in their centers.

  Round things with long, straight rods sticking through the holes in their centers.

  Round things with long, bendy rods sticking through—

  Okay, you get the picture.

  These are parts, of course. Individual pieces of a larger—and probably way awesomer—whole.

  And looking at all those pieces—maybe two hundred in all—scattered about the living room carpet, I think, Man oh man oh man oh man.

  I think that this might be Dan’s lucky day.

  I think:

  This might really be a rocket.

  6.

  BUT IT’S NOT A ROCKET.

  This becomes obvious once we find the instruction manual, buried beneath a giant bag of screws and nails and nuts and bolts at the very bottom of the box.

  The manual doesn’t actually say what the thing is. There is, in fact, not a single word printed in the entire 163-page booklet. It’s just diagrams and pictures and numbered instructions.

  And even at the end, on the last page, there’s no drawing or photo of the final product. Not a clue as to what this huge heap of metal is supposed to make.

  Meaning there’s only one thing to do:

  Start building.

  7.

  A FEW MINUTES INTO BUILDING, Dan says:

  “Who do you think it’s from? Grandpa K.?”

  “Of course it’s from Grandpa K.,” I tell him.

  Grandpa K. is my dad’s dad, and just in case you haven’t put it together yet, he’s pretty much the coolest person on earth, and also kind of my personal hero.

  He’s an engineer.

  Or was an engineer.

  Now he lives in this retirement community called Bright Horizons, where he mostly just sits around and moves a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.

  Sometimes, he throws the toothpick away and replaces it with another one. Then he moves that toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.

  I spend every Saturday morning hanging out at my grandpa’s, and it’s usually the highlight of my week. The only time it isn’t the highlight is if Grandpa K. happened to have given me a gift that week. Because my grandpa’s presents are the greatest—period. They’re always the kind that require elaborate assemblies, and in my opinion, that’s the best part.

  Once he gave me eight identical toy train kits—the exact number I needed to wrap the tracks around the entire basement.

  Another time he handed me a huge sack of miscellaneous materials and several pages of handwritten instructions showing me how I could construct a wind tunnel.

  Why, you ask, would I want my own wind tunnel?

  To which I say:

  Why wouldn’t I want my own wind tunnel?

  Anyway, all I’m trying to say is that it really wasn’t so weird for me to come home and find a big box of metal pieces and a booklet of cryptic instructions waiting for me on the front porch.

  Wasn’t so weird, at least, as long as the box and the booklet had actually come from my grandpa.

  The handwriting on the box was wrong, like I said before. Grandpa K.’s is small and neat and precise, because back in the day, before computers, engineers had to have nice, readable handwriting. Which meant my grandpa had written sloppy on purpose.

  And that made sense, I guess.

  It had to.

  Because who else could the box have come from?

  8.

  DAN AND I WORK HARD for close to an hour. By this point we’re both sweating. Our T-shirts are clinging to our skin.

  We take a break. Step back. Have a look.

  Here’s what we’ve so far got:

  A large, three-dimensional trapezoid with a square plate missing from its middle and a long, thin, flexible rod sticking out of one side.

  The pile of remaining pieces on the floor looks just as big as it did when we first started.

  “Man,” says Dan.

  He doesn’t say anything else.

  But he doesn’t need to.

  I hear him loud and clear.

  Man—as in:

  Well, this is quite the undertaking, isn’t it?
/>
  Or as in:

  I didn’t expect it to take this long.

  Or:

  I could probably go for a spoonful of peanut butter right about now.

  And man, do I agree.

  I’m just about to head to the kitchen to get us some food and fresh glasses of water when a breeze blows in and sweeps across my back.

  I shut my eyes.

  I just stand there and enjoy it.

  “This is nice,” says Dan.

  “It sure—”

  My eyes pop open. Because I just realized something.

  “Dan,” I say, “you got the door, right?”

  I could, of course, simply look over and check to see if the door is open or shut.

  But I don’t want to. I’m too afraid of what I might see.

  “The door?”

  “Yes,” I say. “The front door. The one I asked you to shut.”

  “You didn’t ask me to shut any door.”

  “I did, Dan. I most certainly did. I’m a hundred and ten percent positive.”

  “Well, how am I supposed to trust you about that when you don’t even have a grasp of the basics of percentages?”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s impossible,” Dan says, “to have a hundred and ten percent of something, whether it’s positivity or marbles or—”

  I give Dan a shove so he’ll shut up. Then I turn and look at the front door, which is open so wide a hippopotamus would have no problem squeezing through.

  Or, you know, a not-so-intelligent dog.

  9.

  FIRST I SHUT THE DOOR.

  Then I tell Dan not to move a muscle.

  After that I check the downstairs and the upstairs, the basement and the attic and even the towel closet that I already know is way too small for a labradoodle to fit into.

  But I’m desperate.

  Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the facts.

  And the fact is:

  Kitty is missing.

  “Come on,” I say once I get back down to the living room.

  “Come on where?” Dan asks, though he’s already started to follow me.

  “To find the dog,” I tell him.

  “Your dog,” he says.