Brendan Buckley's Sixth-Grade Experiment Read Free

patty.”
    â€œHave you actually tasted a dried cow patty?”
    â€œDon’t need to. Remember, son …” Grandpa Ed’s pointer finger tapped against my temple. “Imagination. It’s more important than knowledge.” He’d first told me that Albert Einstein quote one of the times I’d snuck over to his house, before he and Mom made up.
    Grandpa Ed opened the white paper bag between us and pulled out a gooey donut. “I’ll stick with my
maple
bars, thanks.”
    I dropped the energy bar into the sack and pickedout a donut. What Mom didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. “Speaking of dried cow patties and energy,” I said, biting into the sugary frosting, “I’ve been reading about biofuels and biogas.”
    â€œOh yeah? Why’s that?”
    â€œJust curious. You know, the whole global warming thing.”
    I couldn’t tell from his “Hmmm” whether he would agree with me that it was a real problem, or if he thought it was a whole lot of hoo-ha over nothing, as he would say.
    â€œDid you know that in twenty-four hours a cow burps and farts enough methane to run your house’s furnace for the same amount of time?”
    Grandpa Ed’s eyes got big. “That’s some serious power. I suppose you could call it Holstein heat.”
    I groaned.
    â€œHow ’bout Jersey juice?”
    Another bad one. I shook my head.
    â€œBovine burn?”
    I laughed. “They’re getting worse.” I thought for a moment. “I know! Cow kilowatts!”
    We both laughed at that.
    â€œI have a lot of questions about the subject, of course.”
    â€œOf course.”
    I’d recorded my questions in my science notebook—
Brendan Buckley’s Book of Big Questions About Life, theUniverse and Everything In It
—which I’d started keeping at the beginning of the summer and had tucked into my backpack for this trip.
    â€œQuestions are good. They’re what keep us scientists searching, eh?” Grandpa Ed smiled at me with his blue eyes—sky-blue, like the water in one of those sinkholes.
    I nodded. This summer I’d gained not only a grandpa but also someone in my own family who shared my interest in science. I sat back and licked the frosting from my fingers. This was going to be great.

    Someone had beaten us to the campsite. A green Subaru Forester sat in the parking area. Over by some picnic tables, a man worked at pitching a rounded blue tent.
    Our tires crunched on the gravel. Grandpa Ed pulled up and parked.
    A girl’s head popped up from behind the tent. She looked straight at me and smiled. It was that girl … the one from the rock club meeting I’d attended with Grandpa Ed earlier in the summer.
    What was her name? My mind was blank.
    P.J. clawed at the windows and whined. I grabbed my backpack and headed to the rear of the truck. The pine trees smelled good—much better than they did as pulp. Factories in Tacoma cook trees like these down to mush and pump out a smell like rotten eggs. People like to jokeabout the “aroma of Tacoma.” I took another deep breath of clean, piney air.
    The girl walked toward me. Galloped was more like it. “Hi, Brendan!”
    Uh-oh. She remembered my name. I hoped my deodorant was ready for a challenge, because I could feel the sweat beads forming on my upper lip and under my arms. Dad had given me the deodorant this summer to help with the girls, he said. I hadn’t had a chance to tell him that girls were about as far from my mind as Pluto is from the sun. He’d left too quickly.
    Suddenly, the brown-haired girl was at my side, all excited and bouncy, like Silly Putty.
    â€œOh … uh … hi.” I kept my eyes on P.J. as I lowered the tailgate. He jumped out of the truck and trotted off to sniff the ground around Grandpa Ed, who was talking with the girl’s dad. I remembered seeing him at the