The Fourteenth Goldfish

At age 11, Ellie is an avid jigsaw puzzler. She’s working on a 1,000-piece puzzle, a picture of a New York street complete with taxicabs. Ellie’s sitter, Nicole, performs in a high school drama class directed by Ellie’s mother. Nicole says Ellie’s mom is at the police station, where they have Ellie’s grandfather.

They order pizza and try to guess how Ellie’s grandpa got mixed up with the police. Nicole thinks maybe it was a car accident because, she insists, old people are way worse drivers than teens. Or maybe he has Alzheimer’s and wandered off.

Ellie’s granddad is an inventor who went to Harvard and is miffed that his daughter didn’t follow in his footsteps but went into acting. He believes “theater isn’t a real job” (7).

Ellie lives with her mom in a small house near San Francisco. Her bedroom walls are decorated with handprints she and her best friend, Brianna, put there over the years. Brianna is suddenly busy with volleyball practice and tournaments, and they hardly see each other. Ellie also won’t see Nicole anymore: When Ellie’s mom, Lissa, gets home, Nicole informs her that she just got a job at the mall.

As Nicole leaves, they notice a teenage boy standing on the lawn. He’s dressed like an adult in slacks and a jacket. His hair is dark brown but with gray tips. He tells them they must put their trash cans out for the next day’s pickup. Also, they should weed the grass. Impatiently, Lissa tells the boy to hurry up and come inside. He picks up a duffel bag and trudges in.

The boy looks at Ellie and asks if she’s made the honor roll. She asks who he is, but he ignores her. The boy continues his harangue, complaining about Lissa’s weird clothing—she often raids the school’s theatre wardrobe—and declaring that Ellie’s short pajamas make her look “boy-crazy like your mother was” (14-15).

Ellie notices a college ring on the boy’s hand. She recognizes it. She looks at him and says, “Grandpa?”

The boy looks at Ellie like it’s obvious who he is. She asks if this is some sort of magic. He scoffs and tells her it’s science: “I discovered a cure for aging” (17). He’s her grandfather, scientist Melvin Segarsky. Hungry, he wolfs down the leftover pizza and a couple of glasses of milk. He says his vision and hearing are perfect again, and he no longer has arthritis.

Ellie asks why the police detained him. Melvin says they thought he was trespassing at his own lab. Suddenly tired, he asks where he can sleep.

Ellie likes to cook breakfast. It’s orderly, and she can experiment, adding surprising things like S’mores or pineapple and coconut. She calls them “Crazy-Mixed-Up Pancakes” (22). She serves some, filled with bits of peanut butter cup, to her grandpa, who gobbles them down like a teen.

Melvin tells her about his lab work with a species of jellyfish he discovered. Now named for him, “Turritopsis melvinus” can revert its body to its young polyp stage. A chemical from the jellyfish injected into adult mice made them revert to a juvenile state. Ellie notices for the first time that when her grandpa isn’t bickering with her mom, he’s really interesting. Melvin says he injected the formula into himself, and he, too, reverted to adolescence.

The police have placed Melvin in Lissa’s custody. She announces that she can’t have him wandering about if she wants to keep her school job; she cooked up a story about how he’s a distant cousin whom she’s taken in. Melvin must therefore attend school. On top of that, “you’re Ellie’s new babysitter” (29).

When she graduated from elementary school, Lissa’s boyfriend, Ben, warned her that her diploma meant little compared to the one she’d earn in middle school: “They should give you a medal for surviving that” (31).

Now that she’s in middle school, with its assortment of weird new kids, Ellie looks for a safe haven at lunch and finds Brianna sitting with her volleyball team. Brianna has cut her hair really short. Ellie joins her, holds up her corn dog—an old favorite of them both—and they briefly laugh and joke about it. Ellie offers to share, but Brianna begs off because her coach is a stickler for healthy food. Ellie invites her to sleep over on Saturday; Brianna squirms and says, “Tournament.” The team leaves quickly to attend a meeting; Ellie is left alone.

Her grandpa, dressed formally in a jacket and tie, sits down with a food tray. He marvels that a whole meal only costs $3. He practically inhales his corn dog and then asks Ellie if she’ll be eating hers. She’s not hungry and pushes her tray to him.

Ellie and Melvin take the city bus home. Melvin gripes about his science textbook because it doesn’t mention his name. A goth kid named Raj—dressed all in black and sporting several piercings—sits behind them and says that Melvin Sagarsky is a “quack” and that “my teacher says he’s just another in a line of charlatans looking for the fountain of youth” (38).

At home, Lissa announces she’s chosen the lead actors for the next high school play, Our Town. She wants to celebrate by ordering Asian takeout; Melvin wants safe, non-spicy Chinese and wins the argument. He complains that Our Town is “a snooze.” Ellie has seen it and agrees; Lissa argues it’s one of the best plays ever written.

The phone rings; Ellie answers; it’s her dad, who’s on the road playing the part of Javert in Les Misérables. Ellie misses him when he’s out of town; he says he misses her, too. He hears Melvin in the background and guesses that they’re eating Chinese. He says her grandfather never changes. Ellie says, “I don’t know about that” (42).

During lunch at school, Ellie searches for Brianna and sees her at the courtyard's edge, laughing and joking with her teammates. Ellie looks away.

Melvin again sits with his granddaughter. He has a printout of his published scientific papers that he plans to show to Raj. He says, “I’m going to be the next Jonas Salk!” (45). Ellie doesn’t know who Salk is; Melvin explains that Salk created the vaccine for polio, a disease that once paralyzed and killed children. Salk tried out the vaccine on himself. Ellie thinks that’s crazy, but Melvin insists that scientists do what they do because they believe it’s possible to discover things that can change the world. Something clicks into place in Ellie’s mind.

She tells her grandpa that she knows where to find Raj.

After school, Ellie and Melvin locate Raj standing at the curb. Melvin hands him the printout; Raj looks at it and says the articles are 30 years old. A car drives up; the driver is Raj’s older brother. Raj gets in; Melvin says Raj doesn’t know anything because he’s just a kid. Raj replies, “You’re a kid, too” (50).

At home, Melvin is starving, so Ellie makes him a burrito. He makes hot tea, adding sugar precisely. Ellie says she always starts a jigsaw puzzle with a straight piece and wonders how scientists begin their projects. He says they use their eyes. He asks her what she sees in the kitchen’s fruit bowl; she stares at the fruits. He asks if they’re alive or dead. She thinks they’re alive, but he points out that they’re not attached to a root system and start to die the moment they’re harvested.

He slices open an apple and points to the seeds. She guesses they’re dead, but he says they’re “dormant” and, in a way, immortal. He says observation leads to discoveries that can make people rethink their world.

Melvin needs a lab so he can continue his analysis of the T. melvinus jellyfish. They go to the garage, which has an old workbench and a freezer. Melvin says at least it’s better than being in the desert like Oppenheimer. Ellie asks who that is, and Melvin explains that Robert Oppenheimer oversaw the creation of the first atomic bomb, which they tested in the desert.

They move aside years of old props from her mom’s plays, putting them where Lissa parks her car. Melvin commandeers a box of clip lights and aims them at the workbench. Lissa arrives home and says she must park in the garage. Her father argues that she’s “standing in the way of scientific discovery,” but Lissa retorts that she’s “standing in the way of birds pooping on my car” (56). They move everything back.

Ellie must do a report on a famous person. She looks up Salk and Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer looks like a matinee idol. They both were scientists at war—Oppenheimer in World War II, Salk in the war against polio. When his atomic bomb went off, Oppenheimer said, “We knew the world would not be the same” (59). Ellie felt the same way when her grandfather showed up as a teen.

Melvin asks to borrow some acne cream. He says next time, he’ll invent a cure for acne. At dinner—again, Chinese takeout—Ellie observes her mom and grandfather. He keeps trying to get her to apply to grad school in science. She argues a while, then goes silent. Ellie realizes he still treats Lissa like a child.

Melvin wants to borrow Lissa’s car, but she refuses. He doesn’t look anything like the picture on his driver's license. He says he won’t get pulled over; she says he passes on the right; he reminds her that she always borrowed his car and finally wrapped it around a tree.

On the bus to school, Ellie suggests Melvin ask Lissa to drive him to his lab. He says he can’t show his face there lest he is arrested. On the way home, though, he announces that he and Ellie will take their bus all the way to his lab.