Chapter 3

Chapter 3 SCIENCE! HITHOUT IT THERE WOULD BE NO CANDY Several days later, Harper Houston stepped back to admire her team's creation. She smiled. There was just something beautiful about a perfectly constructed volcano. "I hope this works," said Po Chen. He was one of her partners for the science fair. "It will work," Harper promised. "That's the beauty of science. If you follow the instructions, you get the same result every time." She turned to Morgan, the third member of their group. "Right, Morgan?" Morgan didn't say anything.

"Right, Morgan?" she repeated. But Morgan wasn't paying attention to her. He was looking toward the doors of the auditorium. Harper turned to look, too. She saw Morgan's sister, Jodi, with the new girl, Ash. They were arriving with their own project. It was tall and covered with a white sheet, like a Halloween costume of a ghost. "What is that?" Harper asked him. "Did your sister make a volcano, too?" "I don't know," Morgan answered. "They've been working on it in secret for days." "Well, don't let it distract you," Harper said. "This isn't a competition." He raised an eyebrow at her. "They hand out trophies for the best projects. I'm pretty sure that makes it a competition." Harper sighed. She just didn't worry about things like that. She loved learning for the sake of learning—especially science. And she didn't need a trophy to know that her team had done a good job. There were other volcanoes made of paper

mache, clay, and other craft materials in the auditorium. But none of them was quite like theirs. They had constructed it out of one hundred identically sized cubes of modeling clay. It was brown and green and blocky. And it looked like something right out of Minecraft. Harper, Morgan, and Po were very different. But they all liked Minecraft. That had been all the inspiration they needed. Po pulled the finishing touches from his backpack: a bottle of vinegar and a box of baking soda. A small amount of each would make their volcano erupt. That would prove to the teachers that they understood chemical reactions. And a dash of red food coloring would give it some flair! "What do you think their project is?" Morgan asked. Jodi and Ash were setting up their station nearby. Morgan couldn't take his eyes off them. "Focus, Morgan," Harper said in a singsong voice. "Do you have the food coloring?" "Yeah," Morgan grumbled. He began rooting around in his backpack.

Just then, Ash and Jodi pulled their sheet away with a flourish. Their project wasn't a volcano. They had constructed a pi.ata. It looked just like a MINECRAFT CREEPER. with a green body and black eyes. It was as tall as Jodi. Kids oohed and aahed. Harper couldn't blame them. The creeper looked amazing. Morgan went pale. "But…but…," he said. "Minecraft is my thing." Ash saw him looking. She smiled and waved. Morgan didn't wave back.

"You don't own Minecraft," Po reminded him. "But they copied our idea!" Morgan said. "It's probably a coincidence," Harper said. Ms. Minerva and Doc Culpepper looked the pi.ata over. They smiled and nodded and wrote notes on their clipboards. Then Ash directed the teachers and students to step back to a safe distance. Ash put on a pair of safety goggles. She attached a hose to the back of the pi.ata, and then she joined the other students. At the other end of the hose, Jodi stood beside a canister of gas. It was labeled CO2. Harper recognized that as the chemical formula for carbon dioxide. I wonder what they're up to? she thought, her mind racing with possibilities. At a signal from Ash, Jodi turned a handle on the CO2 tank. The hose went taut as gas moved from the tank to the pi.ata. Harper held her breath, excited to see what would happen next. The creeper exploded! It was just like in Minecraft. Except when this creeper exploded, it

sent candy flying across the floor. "Amazing," Harper said. "They made a pi.ata that breaks itself." All the other children cheered and laughed as they ran forward to grab fistfuls of candy. Doc Culpepper cheered, and Ms. Minerva gave Jodi and Ash a thumbs-up. "That does it," Morgan said. "We need to go