The Schernoff Discoveries

LAWN BOY,
Gary Paulsen

MUDSHARK,
Gary Paulsen

HOW ANGEL PETERSON GOT HIS NAME,
Gary Paulsen

THE AMAZING LIFE OF BIRDS,
Gary Paulsen

MUDVILLE,
Kurtis Scaletta

BUD, NOT BUDDY,
Christopher Paul Curtis

DONUTHEAD,
Sue Stauffacher

It’s wrong to say that Harold and I were best friends.

We were each other’s
only
friend.

The truth is that we were both geeks, easily the most unpopular boys in the entire demographic area encompassing Washington Junior High School to include (and Harold did all the calculations) the towns of Hillard and Peat, Minnesota, and the surrounding rural area in a twelve-mile radius. (Harold would have liked me to convert all the figures to metric but I choose to leave that to the reader.)

It’s not true that even dogs didn’t like us, though Harold said so many times. I’ve had several dogs that didn’t bite me with any regularity. However, it was possible for us to be completely lonely and totally ignored in a crowd.

I was isolated because of my looks and my family’s social standing, or lack thereof. I was skinny and nerdy-looking until the army started to fill me out. My family was best described as a disaster area. If there was a type of alcoholic beverage my parents didn’t consume I never saw it, and the consequence of this was that I was placed well over to the wrong side of the tracks into the undesirable areas where lived such notables as Dick Chimmer, who, it was said, ate small animals alive and once won a bet that involved a tire pump and dropping his pants … well, never mind.

Harold suffered from being curious, from wanting to know all things, mixed with an apparent desire to look like a thirty-year-old accountant. Though we were fourteen, Harold wore a tight suit coat with a tie and combed his hair straight back with thick wads of hair grease and had enough ballpoints in his shirt pocket to supply an entire classroom and glasses so thick that when he turned to look straight at you it
seemed that his eyes exploded … well, it was not a good look for Harold and it most definitely set him apart.

On no other level were we alike, but the fact that we were outcasts meant that we gravitated toward each other like two marbles rolling toward the center of a bowl—bouncing apart now and again but generally getting closer and closer until we were friends.

I don’t know what Harold derived from the friendship unless it was a sense of the outdoors. I spent a large part of my life outside of things—outside of home, outside of school—and so knew a little of the outdoors. Harold was a neophyte there but he was game and almost always tried to do what I was doing, and I like to think that he learned
something
from it.

What I gained from Harold was help with schoolwork—I broke local records for flunking and might be the only boy who ever flunked shop—and somebody to talk with about Julie Hansen.

Julie Hansen was a few months older and was mature for her age, head of the junior cheer-leader squad, destined to be Miss Peat and so beautiful she made my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth. She was completely, totally ignorant
that we walked the planet. Consequently we loved her, Harold and I, and suffered from continually broken hearts. It helped to talk about it, and if that were all I had taken from Harold, it would have been enough.

But because of our proximity I was made privy to the discoveries of Harold Schernoff.

I was, for instance, present when Harold personally discovered a new use for electricity.

Electricity had of course been around for a long time before Harold discovered it. Franklin did the kite, and Edison the bulb, and countless others added their inventions and improvements to bring it up to its present state as a functioning technology.

But Harold found an even newer use for it one afternoon in Mrs. Johnson’s science class.

Actually, had I been thinking, I could have seen it coming. The day before, we had learned about electrons and how they traveled through wires. On the way home we had stopped outside the school in some bushes as I avoided Dick Chimmer, who had said something about tying me in a square knot.

Harold had said, “They’re alive.”

“Who?” I asked. “Oh, you mean Chimmer. I’m not sure he’s human but I know he’s alive.…”

“No. Electrons. They’re alive. They’re in everything, in all the atoms that make us up, so they must be alive.”

I tried to get a mental picture but nothing came, just a diagram that Mrs. Johnson had put on the board with little spheres orbiting in circles.

“I mean think of it,” he said, pushing his glasses back up his long nose. “If we’re alive, then they’re alive in us, whirling and spinning. We have the power of the atom in us, the power of the electron.”

“Uhhh … all right. So we have electrons in us and they’re alive. So what?”

“Right
inside
us, all that power—if we just had a way to harness it.”

“Harness it?”

“Don’t you see? Mrs. Johnson said atoms and electrons are the power of the sun. If we could tap into it … think of it!”

And I tried, but I was too limited. When Chimmer was gone and we were walking home, I might as well have been alone. He was already working on a way to do it, making calculations and formulas in his head.

It happened the next day in Mrs. Johnson’s class. Harold had acted strange walking to
school, not talking much. Usually he was animated, talking with a lowered voice (you half expected him to start smoking a pipe) and pointing when he wished to illustrate something important. (“It would be physically impossible for Chimmer to break you
exactly
in half with his bare hands—the tensile strength of the center of the human body is far too strong to allow it. Though the attempt would probably be painful.”)

Gym had been the usual disaster. Wankle, the gym teacher-football coach-Nazi beast (as Harold called him), made me try to climb the rope, which I couldn’t. I hung in the middle like a sick bat while Wankle made Harold run laps, which he couldn’t, until his sinuses blew and his nose ran down onto his T-shirt.