"Okay," he said finally. "Let's go see Thorne.
Kelly grinned. "Meet you in front," she said, "in five minutes."
As she went down the stairs from the second floor, the singsong chant began again. "Kelly is a brainer, Kelly is a brainer...."
She held her head high. It was that stupid Allison Stone and her stupid friends. Standing at the bottom of the stairs, taunting her.
"Kelly is a brainer...."
She swept past the girls, ignoring them. Nearby, she saw Miss Enders, the hall mointor, paying no attention as usual. Even though Mr. Canosa, the assistant principal, had recently made a special homeroom announcement about teasing kids.
Behind her, the girls called: "Kelly is a brainer....She's the queen...of the Screen...and it's gonna turn her green......" They collapsed in laughter.
Up ahead, she saw Arby waiting by the door, a bundle of gray cables in his hand. She hurried forward.
When she got to him, he said, "Forget it."
"They're stupid jerkoffs."
"Right."
"I don't care, anyway.
"I know. Just forget it."
Behind them, the girls were giggling. "Kel-ly and Ar-by...going to a party...take a bath, in their math...."
They went outside into the sunlight, the sounds of the girls thankfully drowned in the noise of everyone going home. Yellow school buses were in the parking lot. Kids were streaming down the steps to their parents' cars, which were lined up all around the block. There was a lot of activity.
Arby ducked a Frisbee that whooshed over his head, and glanced toward the street. "There he is again."
"Well, don't look at him," Kelly said.
"I'm not, I'm not."
"Remember what Dr. Levine said." "Jeez, Kel. I remember, okay?"
Across the street was parked the plain gray Taurus sedan that they had seen, off and on, for the past two months. Behind the wheel, pretending to read a newspaper, was that same man with the scraggly growth of beard. This bearded man had been following Dr. Levine ever since he started to teach the class at Woodside. Kelly believed that man was the reason why Dr. Levine asked her and Arby to be his assistants in the first place.
Levine had told them their job would be to help him by carrying equipment, Xeroxing class assignments, collecting homework, and routine things like that. They thought it would be a big honor to work for Dr. Levine -or anyway, interesting to work for an actual professional scientist -so they had agreed to do it.
But it turned out there never was anything to be done for the class; Dr. Levine did all that himself Instead, he sent them on lots of little errands. And he had told them to be careful to avoid this bearded man ill the car. That wasn't hard; the man never paid any attention to them, because they were kids
Chapter 3
Dr. Levine had explained the bearded man was following him because of something to do with his arrest, but Kelly didn't believe that. Her own mother had been arrested twice for drunk driving, and there was never anybody following her. So Kelly didn't know why this man was following Levine, but clearly Levine was doing some secret research and he didn't want anybody to find out about it. She knew one thing - Dr. Levine didn't care much about this class he was reaching. He usually gave the lecture off the top of his head. Other times he would walk in the front door of the school, hand them a taped lecture, and walk out the back. They never knew where he went, on those days.
The errands he sent them on were mysterious, too. Once they went to Stanford and picked up five small squares of plastic from a professor there. The plastic was light, and sort of foamy. Another time they went downtown to an electronics store and picked up a triangular device that the man behind the counter gave them very nervously, as if it might be illegal or something. Another time they picked up a metal tube that looked like it contained cigars. They couldn't help opening it, but they were uneasy to find four sealed plastic ampoules of straw-colored liquid. The ampoules were marked EXTREME DANGER! LETHAL TOXICITY! and had the three-bladed international symbol for biohazard.
But mostly, their assignments were mundane. He often sent them to libraries at Stanford to Xerox papers on all sorts of subjects: Japanese sword-making, X-ray crystallography, Mexican vampire bats, Central American volcanoes, oceanic currents of El Ni?o, the mating behavior of mountain sheep, sea-cucumber toxicity, flying buttresses of Gothic cathedrals...
Dr. Levine never explained why he was interested in these subjects. Often he would send them back day after day, to search for more material. And then, suddenly, he would drop the subject, and never refer to it again. And they would be on to something else.
Of course, they could figure some of it out. A lot of the questions had to do with the vehicles that Dr. Thorne was building for Dr. Levine's expedition. But most of the time, the subjects were completely mysterious.
Occasionally, Kelly wondered what the bearded man would make of all this. She wondered whether he knew something they did not. But actually, the bearded man seemed kind of lazy. He never seemed to figure out that Kelly and Arby were doing errands for Dr. Levine.
Right now, the bearded man glanced over at the entrance to the school, ignoring them. They walked to the end of the street, and sat on the bench to wait for the bus.
Tag
The baby snow leopard spit the bottle out, and rolled over onto its back, paws in the air. It made a soft mewing sound.
"She wants to be petted," Elizabeth Gelman said.
Malcolm reached out his hand, to stroke the belly. The cub spun around, and sunk its tiny teeth into his fingers. Malcolm yelled.
"She does that, sometimes," Gelman said. "Dorje! Bad girl! Is that any way to treat our distinguished visitor?" She reached out, took Malcolm's hand. "It didn't break the skin, but we should clean it anyway." They were in the white research laboratory of the San Francisco Zoo, at three o'clock in the afternoon. Elizabeth Gelman, the youthful head of research, was supposed to report on her findings, but they had to delay for the afternoon feeding in the nursery. Malcolm had watched them feed a baby gorilla, which spit up like a human baby, and a koala, and then the very cute snow-leopard cub.