At the end of sixth grade, as he approached graduation from grade school, Adam decided that he would gift his school a scale model of itself.
Working in his bedroom each afternoon, his homework became interleaved with floorplans of the school on grid paper. It would be a 5 foot long model, like the ones you saw in airports or city halls detailing coming new construction. But better.
He'd use actual tiny bricks for the walls. The windows, no, tiny glass windows would be too fragile. He didn't have any clear plastic on hand. But he did have saran wrap. That would even be scale-appropriate thickness! Perhaps he could use toothpicks for the windowframes to hold the saran wrap.
He knew the rooms by the back of his hand. Most of them anyways. In the morning one day before the tardy bell he made a point to count the rooms along each hall. The basement had a tricky boiler and art room. And the library stuck out one side into the parking lot with an unusual alcove. Did he have to do the parking lot too? No, parking lots are yucky. He'd just do the school.
School ended. He had better start this project. While his sisters played outside in the sprinklers, he holed up in his room and finished his sketches. How long was the school exactly? He couldn't really measure it anymore. He knew the classrooms, at least the ones he'd been in, were so-big, and there were ten, so ten times that. He paced it out, about 30 feet, so about 300 feet long.
Did he really have to do all the desks and chairs in detail? That would be a lot. He could just cut approximates out of two-by-fours. Chairs are a base and a back. If you have a rectangle and you cut a square out of the upper left corner you get the profile of a chair. So he could cut that groove into a long piece of wood, and just saw off pieces, and each piece would form a chair.
Pretty soon it was July. He should really finish building this model before junior high started in the fall.
So, he started. He got the cardboard box the refrigerator had come in, put it on the patio, filled it halfway with dirt, then started considering how he'd lay out the basement. What would he lay it out with? Boards? Cement? Maybe his dad had some cement?
It was going to rain, so he tried dragging the box off the patio, but it wouldn't budge. Dirt was heavy. In fact, trying to drag it ripped the cardboard. Then it started to rain. So he went inside.
Where was he going to get a zillion tiny bricks? How many desks did he need, like a thousand? And truth be told he had no idea what the inside of the teacher's lounge looked like. If he finished the basement and built the first and second floor on top, how could anyone see into the model basement? What was the point of making all the desks and chairs if nobody could see it?
Perhaps he should just do a smaller school model. Five inches instead of five feet. And carved out of wood. He had wood and pocketknives and sandpaper. That avoided all these troubles.
So he went down the basement and started carving. But he couldn't get the angles right. The pocketknife didn't like to do clean corners, there'd be frayed wood sticking out of the seams. And when he tried to wear down the frays with sandpaper, that made the walls curved. He couldn't seem to fix that. And though he knew the model was approximately the shape of the school, with the right wings and that alcove and such, if you looked at it it just looked like a oddly-shaped block of wood.
Maybe if he drew windows on it? He tried drawing windows on it with magic markers. But it looked like a bad toy. He couldn't see the school taking it, even if he gifted it to them for free.
He should write a song about the school instead. What should he write about? He got distracted by an episode of Gilligan's Island.
The next day his father saw the wet cardboard box full of dirt on the patio. "Adam, you can't just leave that there," he said.
"I was making that model of the school I was talking about," said Adam, "but the box wasn't strong enough."
"Well then put all that dirt back in the garden."
Adam grudgingly put the dirt back in the garden. The box was a sopping wet mess. He deposited its limp, dirty pieces in the trash.
Next time, he thought, he'd have to find a stronger box.