Billy Sure, Kid Entrepreneur and the Best Test Read online

  I hit send, take a quick shower to wash the curls and fried pieces out of my hair, and climb into bed. Finally, after a while, my thoughts calm down long enough for me to fall asleep.

  • • •

  I wake up the next morning feeling pretty alert. I must have gotten a good night’s sleep. I don’t recall waking up at all, which means that it’s possible . . .

  I jump from bed and hurry to my desk. Sitting there are fully-rendered blueprints for the Best Test! Yes! When I’m working hard on a project, sometimes I sleep-invent. I sleep-write blueprints for my inventions with my left hand. It’s kind of like a SUPERPOWER, but if you asked me what’s better, sleep-inventing or flying or being invisible, I’m not sure which I’d choose.

  I look over the plans carefully, and they make perfect sense. I can even see what I need to do to make sure that no one else gets an unexpected hair-styling, or worse. After all, the first rule of inventing is BEING SAFE.

  I start to feel excited. This just might work. This is going to be Sure Things, Inc.’s Next Big Thing. This will be the invention that gets us out of financial trouble!

  My morning is off to a good start. I send a quick text to Manny, telling him that the blueprints for the Best Test are ready. Then I check my e-mail and it gets even better. Waiting for me is a reply from my mom. I eagerly open it.

  Hi, honey, I’m so happy to hear from you! I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch, but I’m into a very intense phase of my research.

  I’m sorry to hear about the Cat-Dog Translator. I thought for sure you had a winner with that one. But businesses have their ups and downs, and stuff happens when you least expect it. Hang in there.

  Wow, the Best Test sounds fantastic. And I am so proud of you for stepping up and starting a club at school. You’ll get to help other kids who, like you, love to invent. Well, work calls again, but I am so glad to hear from you. Love you lots!

  Mom

  Somehow, when I get an e-mail from Mom, everything else seems okay. I’m in a really good mood.

  As usual, I speed through my morning, throw on some clothes, scarf down my breakfast, and run out the door so I’m not late for school. And because the first club meeting is today, I swing by the Sure Things, Inc. office to pick up a few things I’ll need. Maybe Manny’s online purchases will be useful after all.

  Classes go pretty smoothly, but I can’t shake this worried feeling about the club. Why does it seem like I’m about to walk into something I have no idea how to handle?

  Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined the sight that greets me when classes end and I arrive at the old science lab where the first meeting of the Fillmore Inventors Club is being held.

  A crowd of twelve kids has gathered outside the room. This looks more like a meeting of the BILLY SURE FAN CLUB than of the Fillmore Middle School Inventors Club.

  Every kid is wearing a Billy Sure T-shirt! But not just any Billy Sure T-shirt. This one has a horrible picture of me taken in the sixth grade.

  It’s the photo Principal Gilamon wanted to use on a poster, hoping to inspire kids just after the All Ball came out. The poster has the words: You’d Better Believe You’re Gonna Achieve! But the photo makes it appear like all I’m going to achieve is looking like the WORLD’S BIGGEST DORK.

  Someone in the crowd spots me.

  “Look! Here he comes!” shouts a boy who is not only wearing the Billy Sure T-shirt, but is also waving a copy of the poster, a copy I apparently autographed for him.

  “We love you, Billy!” screams a girl who jumps up and down and points at me.

  “We want to be great inventors like you, Billy!” calls out a boy holding up what looks like a robot missing its head, with one arm and two legs dangling from its body.

  “Will you sign my T-shirt, Billy?” asks a short girl wearing an extra-large T-shirt that hangs down to her knees. I think her name is Samantha. She grabs the bottom of the shirt and stretches it out, hoping to give me a good spot to sign my name.

  This is nuts! I mean, I know a bunch of fan boys and fan girls who love comic books and movies and cool science-fiction stuff. I’m kinda one of them myself. But Billy Sure fan boys and girls? I have no idea how to deal with this. I hate being in the spotlight. That’s why Manny always handles the press and publicity. I’ll just have to try to change the focus from me to the other students and their inventions.

  “Okay,” I announce. “I want to thank you all for coming. Why don’t we go into the room so the meeting can begin?”

  I open the door, and the crowd of kids scrambles past me. I take a deep breath, then walk through the door to somehow start the first meeting of my brand-new club.

  Billy Sure Fans!

  “OKAY, EVERYONE PLEASE find a seat,” I say from behind the teacher’s desk at the front of the classroom, realizing that I have never actually looked at a school classroom from the teacher’s point of view before.

  What I see is a bunch of kids all jockeying to sit in the front row.

  “I want to be in front!” says the boy with the signed poster.

  “No fair, I was here first and I want to be as close to Billy as possible!” says Samantha.

  “It’s okay,” I say, wondering exactly how teachers maintain control in a room filled with thirty screaming kids, when I can’t seem to get a handle on the twelve in front of me. “Wherever you sit is fine.”

  The group finally settles into seats.

  “I want to welcome you to the first meeting of the Fillmore Middle School Inventors Club.”

  A hand shoots up from the back of the room. I certainly didn’t expect questions after uttering my first sentence.

  “Yes?” I say, pointing to the boy whose hand is raised.

  “I think we should change the name of the club to the BILLY SURE INVENTORS CLUB.”

  A low buzz of chatter spreads through the room.

  “Actually, what we call the club is not the important thing,” I explain.

  “How about Billy Sure’s Young Inventors?” a girl in the front suggests.

  “I think the name is fine just as it is,” I say, wondering how long this will go on. “Let’s start.”

  Another hand shoots up.

  “Yes?” I say.

  “Mr. Sure, can you fix my robot?” asks the kid with the broken toy.

  “Well, first of all, please call me Billy,” I say. “And maybe I can take a look at your robot after the meeting is over.”

  I have to get this meeting started, or we could be here all night!

  I lift several boxes of parts and pieces I brought from my workshop onto the desk. I hope Manny doesn’t mind how much stuff I took—but knowing Manny, he’ll probably just purchase it all again anyway.

  “I’d like each of you to come up, one at a time, in an orderly fashion, and take a couple of items from each box,” I explain.

  I’ve just barely completed that last sentence when everyone leaps from his or her seats at once and crowds around the desk.

  Hands dig into the various boxes. Switches, wires, metal parts, and unidentified plastic objects are all snatched up. Within a minute, the boxes are empty.

  “Okay, now everyone pick a spot at the lab table and bring all the stuff you just picked with you,” I say.

  One by one the kids find a spot around a long slate lab table. It’s got sinks, burners, empty jars, and beakers. The kids pile the pieces they took onto the table.

  “Every time we meet, I’ll ask you to bring your ideas in for inventions that I, and your fellow club members, will help you with,” I explain. “But I thought for this first meeting, I would ask you to help me with an invention I’ve been having some trouble with.”

  Again a low buzz spreads through the room along with big smiles and wide eyes.

  “We get to help you?” asks a girl wearing a baseball cap with the same terrible picture of me on the front. “This is like a dream come true!”

  I bring out several bags of spinach, along with beakers of flavorings, a fe
w formulas I always use for food experiments, and a bunch of paper plates.

  “Okay, club members—”

  A hand shoots up, interrupting me. “Yes?” I asked.

  “Can we call ourselves SURETTES instead of ‘club members’?” asks Samantha.

  “How about Billy Juniors?” suggests a boy.

  “It doesn’t really matter what we call ourselves,” I explain, growing more and more impressed by the patience my teachers have when dealing with students. “What matters is that we all try our best to invent a way to make spinach taste good. I don’t know about you guys, but I really, really, really don’t like spinach and my dad is always making me eat it. I want to invent something that will take away the nasty taste of spinach if I’m forced to eat it. Maybe we could even find a way to make spinach taste like candy!”

  A silence falls over the room that makes me nervous for a second. Then the whole club breaks into applause. I can’t help but smile.

  “What a cool idea!”

  “I hate spinach too! We’re so alike!”

  “This idea is better than the All Ball!”

  People cheer. Then a kid in the back of the class raises his hand.

  “But, Mr. Sure,” he says in a timid voice, “you already invented the Stink Spectacular—the drink that smells terrible but tastes great! Wouldn’t the formula for making spinach taste good be similar?”

  It’s a fair question. The Stink Spectacular is one of Sure Things, Inc.’s best inventions (at least, I think so). When I came up with the idea to make spinach and other gross food taste good, I wondered if I could use the same formula for the Stink Spectacular, too.

  “The blueprints I came up with are only to make liquids taste good,” I say. “It’s the way that the particles are connected. When they’re loose, like in liquids, I can make them taste good, but when they’re closely packed in solids, like in spinach, I’m stumped.”

  There is a murmur around the room.

  “So what if you freeze the Stink Spectacular and make it a solid?” asks the girl with the baseball cap.

  “I really wouldn’t recommend tasting that,” I say.

  The room explodes into chatter. Making spinach taste great—that could be the Next Big Thing!

  “Okay, guys!” I say, raising both hands to get their attention. “This invention doesn’t exist yet, and it’s baffled me for a long time.”

  I walk around the lab table, plopping plates full of spinach in front of each student. “I want you to try out different flavorings and formulas to see if you can make spinach taste good. Now put on your thinking caps—”

  “I’ve got mine on!” squeals the girl with the Billy Sure baseball cap.

  “That’s great,” I say. “Okay, guys . . . ready . . . set . . . let’s invent!”

  The next half hour is filled with the sounds of liquid flavorings splashing and bubbling, edible powders being poured onto plates, and spinach being torn, cut, chopped, and smashed.

  “I think I have something!” calls out one boy.

  I hurry over to his spot and see a glob of spinach soaked with a pink liquid on the plate.

  “I mixed this liquid with that powder, then heated the whole thing and poured it over the spinach,” he explains. “Wanna taste it?”

  I pick up a small piece of the pink, drippy spinach. Before I can bring it all the way to my mouth, it evaporates into thin air.

  “Um . . . back to the drawing board,” I say. “But good try.”

  “Taste mine!” shouts a girl on the other side of the lab table.

  I walk over to her workspace and see steam coming off of a piece of spinach.

  “I soaked the spinach in this stuff, then heated it,” she explained.

  I pick up the spinach and it instantly bursts into flames. I toss it into the nearby sink, where it sizzles and smokes.

  “A little less heat, I think,” I say.

  “What about this?” calls out a boy at the far end of the table. He holds up a piece of spinach. It’s as stiff as a board.

  I take the piece and tap it against the hard granite table. It doesn’t bend or break or shatter. It’s as hard as a rock.

  Briiiiiing!!!

  The bell for the end of club period sounds.

  “Okay, thank you all for coming,” I say. “Good work. We’ll continue with this at our next meeting.”

  As I help clean up, Samantha comes over and hands me a marker. She smiles at me. What can I do? I smile back and sign her T-shirt.

  That night, as I try to get a head start on my homework for the weekend, I start dozing at my desk. My head is just about to land on my keyboard when an e-mail arrives from Manny.

  Missing you, Buddy. How’s the BT coming?

  M

  BT? I wonder. Is that some kind of sandwich or something? It takes me a second to realize that Manny is referring to the Best Test, which, although I sleep-invented the plans, I have yet to build a working prototype for.

  I shoot back a quick e-mail telling Manny that the plans are all set and that I’ll dive into the prototype first thing tomorrow.

  The next afternoon I’m at the office. It feels like I haven’t been here for a week, even though I really only missed one day.

  “Hey, it’s my long lost partner,” Manny says, actually turning away from his desk to look at me. “Sorry I couldn’t be at your club. I had some calls to make. How’d the first meeting go?”

  “You mean the Billy Sure Fan Club?” I reply. “ ’Cause that’s sure what it felt like. They had these T-shirts with that terrible picture from the poster.”

  “The weird sixth grade picture?” Manny asks.

  “Yeah, and one girl asked me to sign hers!” I explain.

  Manny laughs, though I fail to see what’s so funny.

  “Ah, the life of a star,” he quips. Then he turns back to his desk.

  I get to work revising the helmet I put together the other day—the one that curled my hair. Hopefully the blueprints from my sleep-inventing will fix that little issue.

  A couple of hours later I’m done. The base of the helmet is still the spaghetti colander, lightbulbs, and TV antenna, but I’ve also built in a mechanism that should print out what the test subject is best at on a piece of paper.

  It gets late, and I have to be getting home. Philo needs to be fed, and I’ve got to eat. I slip the prototype into my backpack. Manny hardly notices me leave. He waves good-bye to me and immediately types on his computer. He bids on a set of deflated tires. What could that be for?

  At home I pull the prototype from my bag. On the way to my room I pass Emily’s open door. That’s weird. She always keeps her door closed.

  Emily looks up from her computer and glances my way.

  “What is that weird thing?” she asks in her ever-supportive way.

  “It’s the prototype for Sure Things, Inc.’s latest invention,” I say proudly. “The Best Test. It can tell people what it is that they are best at in life.”

  “REALLY?” Emily asks. “Does it work?”

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “I haven’t tested it yet.”

  “Well, why don’t you test it on me?” she says.

  “Really?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Fearing this moment of sibling generosity may pass quickly, I hurry into Emily’s room for the inaugural test of Sure Things, Inc.’s Next Big Thing!

  The Best Test Is the Best

  “THIS ISN’T GOING to fry my brains, is it?” Emily asks as I place the helmet onto her head.

  “How could you tell if it did?” I shoot back.

  “Ha-ha! Very funny, genius,” says Emily. “Are you ready, or do we have to wait for a couple of hamsters to show up to run on a wheel to power this thing?”

  “Let’s find out,” I say. “It’s voice operated. Just say, ‘I’m ready!’ ”

  “I’m ready!” Emily shouts. Immediately a slow hum starts, growing louder and louder. The lights along the helmet start flashing in sequence. Sm
all sparks sizzle at the ends of the antennas.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “Yup.”

  “Feel anything?”

  “My head feels a little warm.”

  “All right, I’m going to turn the power up,” I explain. “That should trigger the result.”

  Twisting a knob on the back of the helmet, the hum gets louder, the lights flash faster, and bigger sparks fly off the antennas. Uh-oh. This thing might be dangerous. I definitely wouldn’t recommend trying it unsupervised. . . .

  Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!!!

  When the bell stops ringing, the printer starts spewing out paper . . . and more paper . . . and more paper, until an entire ream of printer paper has covered the floor of Emily’s room.

  I stare at the paper closest to the helmet. It’s blank. Following the long trail of paper, I step backward around Emily’s room looking for something, anything written there. Still blank.

  Finally, at the very end of the ribbon of paper is a single line of text. I read it aloud: “ ‘Emily Sure is best at pointing out people’s flaws.’ ”

  I drop the paper and start laughing. “Well, I could have told you that without this invention!” I say.

  “Just because I have deep insight into people is no reason to make fun of me,” says Emily, doing her best not to crack up too. She looks around her room and sees the paper covering her floor. “Well, your invention may work as far as telling people what they are best at, but you definitely need to tweak the printout part. We don’t need to use half a forest’s worth of trees for each person.”

  “Excellent point,” I say as I bend down and gather up the blizzard of paper in my arms.

  “Still, it is accurate,” Emily says. “For example, some of your flaws include being a know-it-all, always being messy,”—she gestures at the paper I’m gathering—“and, of course, not appreciating your sister’s brilliance nearly enough.”