Free Egg-Drop Blues by Jacqueline Turner Banks Page B

time to spare. Ms. Hennessey and a couple of parents were there with the kids who needed rides. They followed us over in a caravan.
    Almost as soon as the van went through the big green gates, I knew it was going to be a special day.
    "Feel the electricity in the air," Faye said as
her feet touched the ground. She started twirling around like the good witch had just zapped the ruby slippers back on her feet.
    Like I said before, Faye and Angela can be quite dramatic. But I had to agree with her this time. A band from somewhere deep in the campus was playing some marching-type music. Every time the drum beat, I could feel it inside like it was my heart. For some reason, I thought about how athletes must feel during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. There were all kinds of kids there, wearing all kinds of T-shirts. Angela and Faye had had a big argument last week about Angela going to the student council and getting them to buy matching T-shirts for all the Einstein Rally participants from Faber.
    "We're going to look so lame, so babyish," Faye complained.
    I don't know how Angela was able to call this one—sometimes I think the girl is psychic—but nearly everybody had on matching school T-shirts or hats or both. One school even had matching jackets.
    Most of the kids seemed to be carrying something like cars made from shoe boxes or weird-looking stuff like mobiles made out of vegetables or spools of thread; one kid even had some animals shaped out of what looked like dryer lint.
    "Check out all the babes," Jury
thought
he whispered. Like I needed him to tell me. Angela and Faye gave him the "you pig" look, but I know they were checking out the dudes—and there were probably twice as many guys.
    Tommy and Jeff, the boys on the question bowl team, had moved ahead of the Faber group. I guess they were acting as our scouts. If the red-and-white T-shirts Angela picked out weren't so visible, they might have gotten lost in the maze of people. They stopped just before they got to the registration table. We caught up to look at something that was so cool I immediately developed a new appreciation for science.
    There was a square section of lawn about as big as half a football field blocked off by yellow plastic police department crime scene tape. It stretched away from the crowd over grass that had been covered with some kind of white stuff that looked like salt. Inside, where the tape was about waist-high and held up by caution signs all the way around, were ten lawn-mower-powered cars being driven by kids who didn't look much older than us.
    "This is my event next year," Tommy said. I didn't have to ask to know that all the guys agreed with him. The kids in the cars wore helmets and some kind of padded suits, but they
were on the far end of the square moving faster than I would have expected any lawn mower to go. I could have stood there watching that all day, but the adults caught up and Ms. Hennessey told us we better go register before we got too fascinated by anything else.
    It's a good thing Ms. Hennessey told us to move on. When we got to the registration table, we learned that the question bowl was scheduled for 9:45, less than fifteen minutes away. Our event was at 11:15, just ten minutes after the scheduled end of the question bowl event. That seemed like enough time to get from the LS&A (literature, science, and arts) building to the physical education building. The campus is getting smaller as I get older, but it still seems huge to me. I've taken summer recreation classes in the phys. ed. building and Angela's father's office is in the LS&A building, so I know the campus as well as I know my back yard. When Ms. Hennessey asked, "Does anybody know where the LS&A building is?" all five of the posse members pointed at a building up the hill behind her head.
    "Somebody in group A—that's the sixth-graders—has to wear this and somebody in group B has to wear this," Ms. Hennessey announced as she