me he and his parents had to get up at six o’clock in the morning and drive for four hours, and now his older brothers are bringing in his triptych from their truck.
“Can I see yours?” he asks.
I nod and unfold my triptych for him, amazed once again by the orderly perfection of it, so many different colors on the graph. Eileen is holding my box of lima bean plants, and she opens the lid to show him. The boy nods and smiles, tells me good luck.
When we get to the front of the line, I am given a number to put around my neck. I am to set up my triptych on a table with the corresponding number in the gymnasium. I have twenty minutes to set up my experiment and display. The judges will walk around then, and will put a special yellow sticker on those they wish to consider finalists. I glide into the gym, Traci’s shoes on my feet, the new and improved triptych in my arms. I think about God putting on the headphones, tuning in.
But looking around, I start to get worried. The girl on my left has a triptych much larger than even Traci’s, clearly labeled HYPOTHESIS, OBJECTIVE, METHOD, OBSERVATIONS, and CONCLUSION. It appears to be made out of something metal, the edges lined in black. It stands behind her, at least six feet tall. On the ground in front of her is a small, intricate maze, the walls inside made of what looks like wooden rulers, sawed in half. Just off to the side of the maze are three cages, each with a small white rat inside. One cage has a bright lamp shining into it, and the two others have a navy blue cloth over their lids. Large red letters read THE EFFECTS OF LIGHT AND DARK ON PROBLEM SOLVING IN RATS.
My mother’s eyes drift over to the rats. They are nibbling on the metal bars of their cages, looking up at us with pink eyes. “Poor things,” she says.
The boy from Hill City appears, directing his brothers, older and bigger versions of himself, also wearing overalls, as they carry his triptych to the table on my right. The hinges squeak when they unfold it. The boy himself is now holding a large plastic tray of lima bean plants, maybe twelve of them.
I walk up to him slowly.
“You did lima beans too?”
“Yeah,” he says, arranging the plants on the table. “I did it for 4-H, so I already had some done.”
I watch him move his plants from the plastic case to the table. Some of them are even taller, even greener, than my best plant. “You have twelve?”
He looks away. “Twenty-four, actually. I wanted to find the best possible growing environment. You know, how much water in the soil, direct or indirect sunlight. That kind of stuff.”
I look at his chart. EXPOSED TO SUNLIGHT BETWEEN 10 A.M AND 2 P.M.; FERTILIZER WITH NITROGEN; FERTILIZER WITHOUT NITROGEN; FERTILIZER WITH NITROGEN WITH HEAVY WATERING; FERTILIZER WITHOUT NITROGEN WITH LIGHT WATERING.
“Yours is good too,” he says.
I hear a hissing sound from across the room, and then a loud pop. A black boy in a red-and-white striped shirt is dragging a tape measure across the floor to where a small model rocket lies on its side, still smoking. He seems pleased, smiling at the numbers he is reading and then writing down. I glance quickly at the graph on his triptych: ESTIMATED TRAJECTORIES BASED ON TYPE OF FUEL.
“Smile, honey!” Eileen aims a camera at me, her middle finger pressed down over one of her eyes. I hear the click, and I see my mother’s eyes catch mine.
“What’s wrong?” she mouths, and I can’t believe this, that she could be so stupid.
“I want to go home.”
Her eyes move around my face. “What? Why?”
The judges are coming down the aisle now, two men and a woman, all of them holding clipboards, looking at the rockets and the triptychs, writing things down. They stop in front of the girl with the rats, and she pushes a button that releases one of the rats into the maze. The judges lean over the maze to see, and I can hear them saying “Ahhhh!” in a very good way. One of them hands the girl a yellow sticker.
They walk past me, their eyes moving over my lima bean plants. One of the men smiles, but that’s it. No yellow sticker.
I will not get to meet Ronald Reagan. I start to pick