The Big Mistake Club, Part 5: When the Project Began to Smell

The Big Mistake Club, Part 5: When the Project Began to Smell

The Story Begins

On the back table in the classroom stood a jar with a label stuck to it: FRUIT – OBSERVATION.

Next to it lay Adam’s notebook, Ela’s pencil, and Samo’s drawing of an apple, meant to show what the fruit had looked like at the start of the experiment. In the jar were pieces of apple, banana, and pear. They no longer looked as fresh as they had on Monday.

“We’re nearly finished,” Adam said cheerfully. “Today we’ll write the final observation, tomorrow we’ll show it, and then our project will be the most interesting one in the class.”

Ela adjusted her round purple glasses. “If it’s the most interesting, that isn’t always good news.”

Samo leaned towards the jar. Carefully, he waved a hand over it, just as he had seen Mrs Benková do when checking a smell from the kitchen. Then he sniffed his hand.

His face twisted strangely.

“Something in here smells like a very tired apple,” he announced.

Adam laughed. “Apples don’t get tired.”

“Then something else is very tired.”

All three children bent over the jar. Ela narrowed her eyes. Adam frowned. Samo took a small step back.

“Right,” Adam said quickly. “We have a problem. But I already have a plan. We’ll just move the air around a little, and the smell will be gone.”

“First, we should find out whether it really comes from the jar,” Ela suggested. “Maybe someone forgot their lunch in a locker.”

“Or maybe lunch forgot someone inside itself,” Samo added seriously.

But Adam was already pulling a small table fan from under the desk. They had used it the week before while making paper pinwheels. He set it beside the jar and stretched the cable to the socket.

“Just a little air,” he promised. “Very gently. Like a butterfly flicking its wing.”

The fan began to whirr.

At first, nothing moved. Then Ela’s paper shifted. Next, Samo’s apple drawing fluttered. And finally, the strange smell from the jar moved around the classroom too.

Suddenly, it could be smelled by the window, near the blackboard, and even beside the flowerpot, which was entirely innocent.

“That butterfly must have a tractor,” Ela said.

Adam immediately turned the fan down. “All right, so it moved the air more than I meant it to. We can fix that.”

“We’ll open the window,” Ela suggested. “We’ll put the jar closer to it and cover it with a clean cloth.”

Samo nodded so eagerly that his curls shook. “Cover it. I understand.”

While Ela opened the window and Adam unplugged the fan, Samo ran to the supply cupboard. A moment later, he returned with a large map of Slovakia, a striped notebook, a plastic plate, and a cardboard crayon box.

“I found covers,” he said heroically.

Ela looked at the pile of things. “That’s a map, a notebook, a plate, and a box.”

“They all cover something,” Samo explained. “A map covers a country. A notebook covers a desk. A plate covers a table when it’s lying on it. A box covers crayons.”

Adam thought for a moment. “That’s actually surprisingly accurate. But we only need a cloth.”

Meanwhile, the fan was still spinning down. It sucked in the corner of the map, scattered a few worksheets, and pulled in the light cloth that Ela had just taken from the cupboard. The cloth caught on the grille. The map stuck to its side. The plastic plate spun across the table like a slow carousel.

“Nobody move!” Adam shouted.

When Things Start to Change

“That’s usually what someone says just before something moves even more,” Ela said.

Samo caught the plate, Adam switched off the fan, and Ela carefully freed the cloth. Soon the table was covered in papers, but at least nothing was whirling through the air anymore.

“Now, lemon,” Adam announced.

Ela looked at him. “Now what?”

From the pocket of his red hoodie, he pulled out a small bottle of lemon scent. “When something smells of lemon, people think everything is clean. That’s a well-known fact.”

“That’s a well-known mistake,” Ela replied.

But Adam had already pressed the sprayer.

Pssst.

A soft cloud of lemon scent drifted into the air. Adam pressed the bottle again. Then once more, because the first two clouds seemed too small to him.

The classroom smelled of lemon.

And at the same time, it still smelled a little like the experiment.

Samo breathed in, thought for a moment, and asked, “If something smells of lemon, is it really clean too?”

“No,” Ela said. “If it were, we could wash socks with lemonade.”

The boy thought about that sincerely. “That probably wouldn’t be practical. They’d be sticky.”

By the open window, cold air, lemon scent, and the unfortunate smell from the jar mixed together. Adam covered his nose with his sleeve.

“Now it smells like a cake that went bad in the gym,” he admitted.

“The problem hasn’t disappeared,” Ela said. “It’s just wearing a lemon hat.”

Just then, Mrs Benková appeared in the doorway. She held a lesson-planning notebook in her hand and wore a calm expression. She stopped, took a breath, and raised one eyebrow.

“I can smell that science is working very hard today,” she said.

All three children froze.

“Sorry,” Adam blurted out. “We wanted to fix it, but the fan blew it everywhere, and then Samo brought the map, which wasn’t wrong, just not the right map, I mean, it was the right map, but not for this, and then there was the lemon…”

“Stop,” Mrs Benková said gently. “Take a breath. If you can.”

Adam fell silent.

The teacher stepped closer to the table. “An experiment about fruit decomposing can have a smell too. That isn’t a disaster. It’s part of the observation.”

“We still spread it around the whole classroom,” Ela admitted.

“That is more a part of your own method,” Mrs Benková said with a smile.

Samo held the plastic plate. “I still have a cover. But maybe not the best one.”

“The right cover is a clean cloth,” Ela reminded him.

The boy set the plate aside and picked up a large plastic bowl. Carefully, he placed it over the jar. But he did not notice the fan cable beneath the bowl. When Adam quickly reached over to lift the bowl, the cable pulled taut.

The table shook dangerously.

“Don’t do it quickly,” Ela said.

Adam stopped with his hand in the air. “I can do things slowly too.”

“Show us.”

Slowly, they moved the fan aside, loosened the cable, and only then lifted the bowl. Nothing fell. It was such a small victory that all three of them smiled at one another for a moment.

Mrs Benková looked at the clock. “In a few minutes, the headmistress will arrive. She wanted to see the projects in progress.”

The smiles disappeared.

“We can hide the jar in the cupboard!” Adam suggested.

“But then the cupboard will smell,” Samo objected.

“We can put it in the hallway!”

“And then the hallway will smell,” Ela said.

“We can say it’s a project about lemons!”

An Important Moment

Ela took a breath. “Adam.”

“What?”

“Let’s try, for once, not to create another problem.”

That stopped him. Then he nodded. “All right. So what do we do?”

The girl pointed at the table. “We’ll put away everything that doesn’t belong here. We’ll air the room. We’ll cover the jar with the cloth. And we’ll tell the truth.”

Samo looked at the jar. “That the fruit changed because the experiment is working?”

“Exactly,” Ela said. “It’s just that our improvements didn’t work.”

Together, they put away the map, the notebook, the plate, and the crayon box. Adam carried the fan back to the shelf. Samo opened the window wide, then checked whether the wind outside was stronger than the fan. Ela laid the clean cloth over the jar so that it could still be seen safely.

Finally, they practised their explanation.

“I’ll say what we observed,” Ela suggested.

“I’ll say that fruit changes over time,” Samo added.

Adam swallowed. “And I’ll say that the fan and the lemon were my idea. I mean, our idea for fixing it. But it wasn’t a good one.”

“It was my idea too, to keep the fan near the table,” Samo said. “So we’ll say it together.”

A moment later, the headmistress appeared in the doorway. The classroom already looked tidy. Yet a faint, mysterious cloud of lemon still lingered in the air.

Adam stiffened like a ruler. Ela gripped her notebook more tightly. Samo smiled at the jar, as if silently wishing it good luck.

Mrs Benková calmly introduced the project. “This is an experiment about what happens to fruit when we leave it in a jar for a longer time. Today, it has also prepared a small aromatic surprise.”

The headmistress smiled. “I can certainly smell that.”

Then Ela began. She clearly described what they had written down each day. Samo explained that the pieces of fruit no longer looked the same as they had at the beginning. Adam took a breath.

“And we got frightened by the smell,” he said. “We tried the fan and lemon scent. But the fan spread the smell, and the lemon didn’t make it disappear.”

“The lemon gave it a hat,” Ela added.

The headmistress laughed, but not unkindly. “That is a very precise scientific observation.”

“Next time, we’ll air the room first,” Samo said.

“And then think,” Adam added.

“That sounds like an excellent plan,” said the headmistress. “I like that you didn’t hide the experiment. And that you cleaned up after yourselves.”

When the visitor had left, all three children breathed out. Outside the window, leaves rustled, and the classroom now smelled mostly of fresh air.

Adam took out the club notebook. On a new page, Ela wrote in large letters: “When something smells bad, air the room first, then explain, and only then spray lemon.”

Samo read the sentence twice. “What if we don’t have lemon?”

Adam closed the notebook. “Then we’re saved.”

This time, all three of them laughed, and even Mrs Benková laughed at her desk.