Smiles to Go
Authors: Jerry Spinelli
Smiles to Go
To my schoolmates
Norristown High School
Class of ’59
W
hen I was five or six a high-school kid lived next door. His name was Jim. He was a science nut. He won the county science fair two years in a row and went on to MIT. I think he works for NASA now.
Jim was always tinkering in his basement. I was welcome, encouraged even, to join him whenever I liked. I would sit on a high stool for hours and just watch him. I think he enjoyed having a dedicated audience of one.
Jim built his own shortwave radio that we both listened to. He practically swooned when he heard scratchy voices from the South Pacific, but I was too young to be amazed. He always had a jawbreaker in his mouth, and
when he wasn’t clacking it against his teeth he kept up a constant mutter about everything he did, as if he were a play-by-play announcer describing a game. “And now Jim is soldering the wire to the whatsits….”
More than anything I looked forward to Jim saying, “Whoa!” That’s what he said when something surprised or astounded him. It didn’t happen often, maybe only one or two “Whoas!” a week on average. When I heard one I would jump down from my stool and nose right in and say, “What, Jim?” And he would explain it to me, and though I couldn’t really understand, still I would feel something, a cool fizzing behind my ears, because I was feeding off his astonishment.
Then one day I had the real thing, an amazement of my own. That day was a little strange to begin with, because when I came down to the basement, Jim wasn’t tinkering—he was reading. Watching a person read isn’t the most fascinating thing in the world, even if he has a jawbreaker clacking around in his mouth, and after a minute of that I was ready to leave when Jim barked out a “Whoa!” I
jumped down and said my usual, “What, Jim?” but he only warded me off with his hand and kept on reading. Every minute or so another “Whoa!” came out, each one louder than the last. Then came three in a row: “Whoa! Whoa! WWWHOA!”
“Jim!
What
!” I screeched and snatched the book away.
He looked at me as if he didn’t know me. Young as I was, I understood that he was still back in the book, immersed in his amazement.
Finally he said it, one word: “Protons.” I had heard people say “amen” in that tone of voice.
“What are protons?” I said.
He took the book from my hands. His eyes returned to the present. He began talking, explaining. He talked about atoms first, the tiny building blocks of everything, smaller than molecules, smaller than specks. “So small,” he said, “millions can fit in a flea’s eye.” That got my attention.
One of the most amazing things about atoms, he said, is that, tiny as they are, they are mostly empty space. That made no sense
to me. Empty space was nothing. How could a “something” be nothing? He knocked on his stool seat. “Empty space.” I knocked the stool seat. Empty space? Then why did it stop my hand?
He said atoms are kind of like miniature solar systems. Instead of planets circling the sun, electrons circle a nugget of protons. Then he zeroed in on protons. Atoms may be mostly space, he said, but a proton is nothing but a proton. Small as an atom is, a proton is millions of times smaller. “You could squint till your eyeballs pop out and you’ll never see one,” he said, daring me to try.
“And you know what the coolest thing about protons is?” he said.
“What?” I said.
He clacked his jawbreaker for a while, building the suspense. “You can’t do anything to them,” he said. “You can’t break them. You can’t burn them. You can’t blow them up. Atoms you can smash, but you can’t smash a proton.”
“Not even with a
steamroller
?” I said.
“Not even with a thousand steamrollers.”
And then he hammered home his point. He took out the jawbreaker and put it on the floor. He took a hammer and smashed it to smithereens. He didn’t stop there. He kept smashing until there was nothing but white powder. When he stopped, he grinned at me. “Go ahead, stomp on it.” I brought the heel of my shoe down on the tiny pile of powder. “Oh, come on, don’t be such a wuss,” he said. “Stomp good.” I did. I jumped up and down until there was nothing on the floor but a pale mist of dust. He got down on his hands and knees and blew it away.
I cheered. “We did it!”
He stood. “What did we do?” he said.
“We smashed the jawbreaker. We made it disappear.”
“We sure did,” he said. “But what about the protons that made up the jawbreaker? Where are they?”
I looked around. “Gone?”
He shook his head with a sly smile. “Nope,” he said. “The jawbreaker is gone, but not its protons. They’re still”—he waved his hand about the basement—“here. They’ll always be
here. They’re unsmashable. Once a proton, always a proton. Protons are forever.”
The next words just popped from my mouth, no real thought behind them: “Jawbreakers are lucky.”
He poked me. “Hey, so are you. You’re made of protons, too.”
I stared at him. “I
am
?”
“Sure,” he said. “Zillions of them. The protons in you are the same as the protons in that jawbreaker. And in that stool. And in a banana. And a sock monkey. And a glass of water. And a star. Everything”—he threw out his arms—“everything is made of protons!”
I was getting woozy with information overload. Me and sock monkeys made of the same stuff? It was too much to digest. So I retreated to the one conclusion I had managed to extract from all this. “So…Jim…like, I’m unsmashable?”
He mussed my hair. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess you could sort of put it that way.” He laughed and waved the hammer in my face. “But don’t go trying this on your toe.”
PD1
R
iley picked his nose.
10:15.
Strawberries.
The proton is dead.
These things will go together forever.
My dad remembers exactly what he was doing the moment he heard that Elvis died. For my mother, it was Princess Di. It will be that way with me and the proton.
I was at the kitchen counter this morning cutting strawberries in half, dropping the pieces into my bowl of bite-size Mini-Wheats. My little sister, Tabby, came into the kitchen saying, “Riley picked his nose…Riley picked his nose….” She’s learning to read, and whenever she sees a few words that strike her fancy she keeps repeating them with a snooty I-can-read smirk.
So Tabby said, “Riley picked his nose,” and the knife sliced open the smell of strawberries and the phone on the wall rang. Tabby got to it first. She always does. “Barney’s Saloon.” That’s how she answers the phone
these days. She listened for a moment and said into the mouthpiece: “Phooey!” This is what she says whenever a caller asks for anyone but her. She jabbed the phone in my face. “For
yyew
.”
It was Mi-Su’s voice. Excited. “Ninety-eight point five FM! Quick!”
Click.
I ran for the radio, snapped it on…FM…98.5. Saturday morning news-of-the-week roundup. Man’s voice:
“…years of waiting. Finally it happened. The telltale flash that signaled the death of the proton, the moment when it ceased to be. Scientists around the world are speculating on the significance…”
I couldn’t believe it. A proton was dead! Caught in the act of dying. One moment it was there, then it wasn’t.
I looked at the clock. 10:15. Saturday. September 26. And, for me, the start of a new calendar: PD1 (The Day I Heard of the Proton’s Death).
Tabby was standing on a chair at the counter. She was slicing a sweet potato.
“Don’t,” I told her. She stuck out her tongue at me.
The phone rang. This time I got it.
“Hear it?” Mi-Su.
“Yeah.”
“So what do you think?” Her voice was bouncy.
Tabby was dropping two slices of sweet potato into the toaster. “Don’t!” I said.
“Don’t what?” said Mi-Su.
“I’m talking to Tabby. I can’t believe it.”
“Why not?”
“All those years, nothing happened. Now…”
“Proton de-
cay-ay
.” She sang it.
“Why are you so happy?”
“I’m excited, that’s all. It’s news. A discovery. Nothing will ever be the same.”
“That’s good?” I said.
“Who knows? It just is. Proton decay. It’s a fact of life.”
The toaster popped. Tabby pulled out the two slices of sweet potato toast and laid them in a cereal bowl. She climbed up onto the counter, both feet, stood there daring me to do
something about it. She got the peanut butter, scooped out a glob with her finger and spread it over the slices. She got the brown sugar. She grabbed a chunk, crumbled it over the peanut butter. She stood on the edge of the counter. She gave me her snooty smirk, spoke.
“Riley—”
“Don’t,” I said.
“Picked—”
“Don’t.”
“His—”
“I’m telling you!”
“Nose!”
She jumped from the counter to the floor. Dishes rattled. She grabbed her potato toast and raced upstairs to her Saturday morning cartoons.
“Will? You there?”
“Yeah.”
“What was that noise?”
“My sister. Jumping down from the kitchen counter.”
“She’s too much.”
“She just did nineteen things she’s not supposed to do.”
“To bug you, that’s why.”
“That’s what my mother says.”
“You’re lucky. I wish I had a little sister.”
“Take this one.”
She laughed. “We playing tonight?”
“I guess.”
“My house, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So you bring.”
We play Monopoly on Saturday nights. One person hosts the game, the other brings the pizza. Three mediums. BT comes, but he doesn’t buy, he just plays. He’s always broke.
“The usual?” I said.
“
Extra
pepperoni,” she said. “And don’t let your stinky pizza get anywhere
near
me. Last time, some of your anchovy fumes crawled over my cheese. I could taste them.”
“
I
can taste the fumes from your pepperoni breath. Excuse me—
extra
pepperoni breath.”
She always gets extra pepperoni. I always get anchovies and extra sauce. We always fight about it.
“You’re a sicko,” she said. “Why can’t you just get pepperoni or extra cheese like the rest
of the world? Nobody gets extra
sauce
.”
“I do.”
“Because you’re not normal. Bye.”
“Wait!”
“What?”
“I just heard the tail end of it on the radio,” I said. “Where did it happen?”
“Yellowknife. They charge me for your extras, you know.”
“Sue me. Bye.”
“Bye.”
As soon as I hung up, the phone rang again.
She was giggling. “Sue me. That’s my name backwards. Bye.”
Click.
I went back to my strawberries. When I had them all in halves, I started cutting them into quarters. I looked at my reflection in the toaster. I looked pinched. Loopy.
A fact of life.
I poured Mini-Wheats into the bowl. Added the strawberries. Got a spoon. Sat at the table. Poured milk. Not too much. I don’t like soggy cereal….
The clock said 10:28.
Thirteen minutes and counting.
Nothing will ever be the same.
I stared into the strawberries. Except for the cartoon noise upstairs, the house was silent. Dad was golfing. Mom was at the Arts Center, taking watercolor lessons.
Now pounding from upstairs. Tabby was hammering something. She has her own plastic tools, but she uses most of them to eat with. For serious vandalism she prefers my father’s real tools, which she’s been forbidden to touch since she nailed his slipper to the floor. She steals them when it’s just the two of us in the house. She knows she can hammer away and I won’t stop her as long as she’s not in my room.
My spoon broke through strawberries, sank into cereal.
The proton was dead.
Riley picked his nose.
Colossal tanks holding thousands of gallons of water sit at the bottom of salt mines and coal mines around the world. Japan. South Africa. Europe. Canada. Supersensitive
instruments monitor the water. Trillions of molecules of water—every one watched 24/7/365. For years. Decades.
The instruments have been waiting for a flash. The tiniest, most invisible of all flashes. A flash that would mean that a proton—one of the gazillion protons making up the trillions of water molecules—had suddenly winked out of existence. The flash would prove proton decay really happens. The flash would mean that the matter of the proton—the solid stuff—had turned into the energy of the flash (E=mc2). Totally. Nothing left behind. No ash. No smoke. No smell. Nada. One moment it’s there, the next moment—pffft—gone.
What would it mean? Only this: Nothing lasts. Nothing. Because everything that exists is made of protons.
Decades went by. No flashes. Untold gazillions of protons under watch, and not a single flash. It looked like the universe would last forever.
And then it happened. It happened in the tank two miles below the earth in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, Middle of
Nowhere. It happened in the thirty-third year of watching. Eight days ago, says the Centauri Dreams website. Friday night. At precisely 9:47:55 eastern standard time. They saw it. They recorded it. A flash.
The money was stacked. The cards were stacked. We were both on our second slice. Waiting for BT. Anthony Bontempo.
“Pizza’s getting cold,” I said. “Let’s just start. Teach him a lesson for once.” I rolled the dice.
Mi-Su snatched them up. “No! He’ll be here.”
“He knows we start at seven. Let’s show him we can play without him. Then maybe he’ll learn to be on time.”
She gave me rolling eyes. “Yeah, right. He’s BT, remember?”
She was right. BT will be late for his own funeral.
Commotion upstairs. Mi-Su’s parents squealing: “BT!” The dog squealing. The dog doesn’t squeal like that when I come over.
BT clumped down the stairs. “Gimme four hotels on Park Place!” He rolled his skateboard into the corner. It bumped into mine. BT snatched one of Mi-Su’s slices. Mi-Su screamed, threw a pillow at him.
“Clowns,” I said. “I’m going first.” We sprawled over the floor. I rolled the dice.