Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It

It was the first Sunday of summer break, and I was in a hurry to finish my dusting chores fast so I could call Khalfani to ride bikes. I wasn't even thinking too hard about anything, like Dad says I do sometimes. Well, okay, maybe I was thinking a little bit hard. About Grampa Clem and how I'm going to miss fishing with him this summer. Which made me think about the funeral and how the man in the black robe had said, "From dust we come and to dust we shall return." And then I started looking more closely at the gray particles I was picking up with my dust rag, and I thought, What is this stuff anyway? And where does it come from? And how come it keeps coming back no matter how many times I wipe it away? That's when the science part of me took over. I stopped thinking about Khalfani and riding my bike, and even Grampa Clem. And I definitely wasn't thinking about finishing any chore. I went straight to my computer and got on the Internet, where I typed in the search question "What is dust?" Sixty-seven million, nine hundred thousand results came up. I had no idea there would be so much out there about dust, but that's the thing about asking questions: They often lead to surprises, and they always lead to more questions. I climbed our table to get a sample from the candelabra-thingy (it was the dustiest place I could think of in our house, since I never dust it), and went to my room. I set the microscope slide on my desk and pulled out the spiral notebook I keep between my bed and the wall. Across the yellow cover, I had written in big black letters, confidential. Dad taught me how to spell it. He's a police detective, so he knows all about confidential things. confidential says that what's inside is important. Plus, you never know when you might discover something that really is top-secret. I sat at my desk and flipped open the cover. The question notebook was my fifth-grade teacher's idea, but the name for the notebook was mine: Brendan Buckley's Book of Big Questions About Life, the Universe and Everything in It. "Scientists," Mr. Hammond had said at the beginning of the school year, "ask questions." That's when I knew: I am a scientist. Because as far as I'm concerned, no question is unimportant, and nothing in the universe is too small to ask about. I ran my hand across my book's title. Summer vacation had finally arrived. That meant seventy-nine days to find answers to the questions I'd already recorded. Seventy-nine days of scientific experimentation. And seventy-nine days to mess around with Khalfani, swim in his pool and get to the next level in Tae Kwon Do. Khal and I are only five ranks away from our black belts. The thing I wouldn't be doing was fishing every Monday with Grampa Clem. When Grampa Clem died in April, it was sort of like having my leg taken away. You always expect it to be there, but then to one day wake up and find it gone? Suddenly everything's different and there's nothing you can do about it. Now Gladys is my only grandparent, because my other grandma died right after I was born and I've never met my other grandpa. Mom doesn't talk to him. Or about him, either, which makes me wonder what happened. But I guess I can't miss someone I've never even known. The one time I asked where he was, she bit on her lip, and her forehead bunched up like when she cut her thumb and had to get stitches. She just said, "Gone," and that we'd talk about it when I was older. So that's the One Thing I know not to ask questions about. I turned to the front section of my notebook, which I'd titled TheFrazier, Sundee Tucker is the author of 'Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780385734394 and ISBN 0385734395.