by Bella Raven
“12.0107,” Ethan says.
“And what are the three states of matter?”
“Actually, there are four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.”
Mr. Fischer looks completely perturbed. I think he was certain he was going to get to handout that detention.
“Talk in my class again, Mr. Storm…”
Ethan nods.
“As Mr. Storm correctly pointed out, matter can transform, shifting properties,” Mr. Fischer says. He looks extremely pained to admit Ethan’s correct knowledge. “At room temperature lead is a solid. If we apply sufficient heat, it will melt and become liquid. If we could subtract three protons from its atomic structure, it would become gold.”
Mr. Fischer drones on for the next twenty minutes about protons, neutrons, and electrons. Then he introduces us to the Bunsen burner, and how to operate it. Giving a room of high school students access to a burner, capable of producing a flame that reaches upwards of 1500°, seems a little insane to me. But then again, high school seems pretty ridiculous to begin with.
Surely this is going to end badly at some point in the semester. Mr. Fischer tells us how there is always some kid every year who lets too much gas build up before igniting the burner. This results in a small explosion that typically singes off the student’s eyebrows and bangs. Therefore, it is essential to learn to use the striker properly to spark the flame.
Mr. Fischer goes on to admonish us of the dangers. If he sees a student letting the gas build up, without striking the burner in a reasonable amount of time, he’s just going to sit back and let the explosion happen. By his reasoning, once a student singes off their eyebrows, they will never let it happen again. “Some people just have to learn the hard way,” says Mr. Fischer.
I don’t know why, but this makes me like Mr. Fischer just a little bit, despite my dread of all things math and science related. The thing I don’t like is that I’m going to have to interact with Ethan as my lab partner. This whole tilt my head to the side, hide my face with my hair routine is not going to work for much longer.
Mr. Fischer says that this is going to be a hands-on class. Full of activities and experiments designed to illustrate the principles that we will be studying throughout the semester. Today we are going to witness a state change of matter. Today’s lab will be addressing both physical and chemical change, distinguishing the difference between the two.
We are instructed to gather up supplies for the experiments from the cabinets in the back of the room. Beakers, graduated cylinders, test tubes, tongs, and an evaporating dish. The first experiment is to form a precipitate by combining two solutions. When I return to the table with the equipment, I find Mr. Fischer has set two containers on each table—NaCl (sodium chloride,) and AgNO3 (silver nitrate).
Ethan’s body grows rigid, every muscle is flexed. He seems thoroughly freaked out. It becomes clear that he’s not going to participate in the lab, and that’s fine by me. I follow the instructions, filling a test tube halfway with water. I mix in the sodium chloride until it dissolves completely. Then I take the pipette from the bottle of liquid silver nitrate, hovering the dropper above the mouth of the test tube. Ethan leans back, keeping his distance. Sweat beads on his forehead.
I squeeze the dropper unleashing the silver nitrate into the test tube. It instantly solidifies when it hits the saline solution—forming a precipitate of silver chloride.
I hold the test tube out to Ethan. “Want to see?”
He recoils.
I shrug and set the test tube in a bracket. But as I reach to replace the pipette into the bottle of silver nitrate, my hand knocks the brown bottle over, spilling the fluid across the desk. It splashes Ethan’s hand.
He winces with pain, jerking his hand back, doubling over. He clenches his teeth—his face red, the veins in his forehead popping out. I hear his skin sizzle, and light wisps of smoke rise from his left hand as he clutches it with his other.
“ Oh, my God, I’m so sorry.”
His eyes burn into me before he dashes out of the room.
“Mr. Storm, is there a problem?” Mr. Fischer asks, calling after Ethan. But he’s long gone.
I feel like such an idiot, and I whither down in my chair.
“Ms. James, perhaps you can explain Ethan’s dramatic exit?” asks Mr. Fischer.
“I’m a klutz and spilled the silver nitrate all over my lab partner.”
“Interesting. Can anyone tell me what type of chemical reaction will occur when silver nitrate interacts with human skin?”
No one answers. The entire class is staring at me.
“Does silver nitrate burn?” I ask.
“No. The silver nitrate mixes with organic compounds within the skin and reduces to silver. Brief exposure doesn’t provide any cause for alarm. But his skin will likely be stained black at the point of contact for the next few months.”
CHAPTER 7
AFTER SCHOOL, I march through the parking lot, past the Volvos, Beetles, and the occasional BMW, to the lovely rust bucket. I can’t put this day behind me fast enough.
On the way, I catch sight of Ethan and Olivia arguing with a kind of reserved fury. Both of their eyes dart to mine almost instantly, as if sensing my presence. Olivia glares at me, sending shivers down my spine, turning my stomach in knots. I can feel acid tickle the back of my throat, rising up my esophagus with a sour taste. Part of me wants to apologize to Ethan for my clumsy mistake in chemistry. The other part of me wants to run. As fast as I can. A blood pumping, temple pounding, chest heaving, turn your legs to jello, run. If you run hard enough, fast enough, long enough… can you run away from yourself?
I think better of approaching the feral duo and finish my dash to old rusty. The engine clatters to a start, and I leave the parking lot behind me in a blur.
At the elementary, Noah sits curbside, leaping to his feet when he hears the rumble of the rust bucket’s exhaust. He is the only student left on school grounds, as the elementary is dismissed for the day at 2:45pm. Unfortunately, I get out of class at 3:15pm. If I’m more than thirty minutes late, the school can fine the parent or guardian for missing the pickup window. Thankfully, the elementary is only five minutes away from the high school, and today, no one seems to be a stickler for time. Still, I hate the thought of Noah having to sit alone for thirty five minutes.
Noah hops in the car, and I ask about his day—he just shrugs. If I can get this kid to say more than two words by the end of the year, I will consider it a miracle. We spend the rest of the drive in silence, and my mind drifts back to the events of the day. I’m absolutely certain the silver nitrate burned Ethan’s hand, like acid.
As I creak the rust bucket up to Jake’s mobile home I realize that my math book is still in my locker. I’ve got to get back to campus before they lock the doors. My math class is before lunch, so I won’t have any time to dash off my homework before class if I don’t do it tonight. I let Noah out, and spin back around, heading to town.
Rain begins to sprinkle on the windshield as I hit the highway. I twist on the wipers, and worn blades smear a slimy mix of dirt, pollen, and drizzle across the glass, obscuring visibility. The road and oncoming cars are blurry shapes. I figure things will clear up as it begins to rain harder, diluting the sludge the wipers have whipped up.
By the time I hit the ravine, I can see through the windshield a little better, but these blades have got to get changed out. One leaf is stuck between the blade and the glass, and the incessant scraping is driving me crazy. I thought, surely, it would have fallen off by now, but no. Scrape, scrape, scrape—back and forth, and back and forth. I’m seriously contemplating pulling over just so I can get out and remove it.
I round the corner, peering through the murky window, and that’s when I see it. My first thought is that I should have pulled over at the last turn. Everything unfolds with a distorted sense of time. My brain becomes hyper aware, processing information at light speed. But the situation unfolds in super slow mo
tion. Everything becomes more intense—colors are brighter, sounds are more crisp and defined. My senses come alive, and the entire universe comes into focus. Ahead, a logging truck is toppling over as it takes the corner too fast. It's too top heavy. Pine logs, three feet in diameter, spill out onto the highway, wheeling their way across to the drop off. Some hit the guardrail and ricochet back, while others bounce over.
My foot stomps the breaks as I veer the rust bucket. I try to find a gap in the rolling stream of logs—but there is no gap to be found. The right front tire hits first, spinning the car until the back right tire slams into another log. The impact launches the car into the air, tumbling side over side. Metal crunches as the roof collapses farther and farther with each flip. The windshield webs with cracks, spewing shattered bits of glass about the interior. My body smashes back and forth against the seatbelt, crushing my ribs with each rotation. It’s like a merry-go-round from hell, turning and tumbling and flipping.
Another impact reverberates with a metallic ping. I can tell the car has pierced the guardrail as I suddenly feel weightless. It’s like when they take astronauts up in a hollowed out 747 and descend sharply to give the feel of zero G.
But the feeling doesn’t last long. The car crashes down against the side of the ravine, slamming into a tree.
The crumpled car dangles above the ravine, wedged between the tree and the cliffside. I hang upside-down by my seatbelt, and my head fills with pressure as blood rushes into my skull—my temples pounding. The mangled metal creaks and groans with each gust of wind. Through the shattered windshield I can see the bottom of the ravine hundreds of feet below. I’m afraid to move. It feels like even the slightest shift of weight could send the teetering clump of rusty metal plummeting down.
I unbuckle my seatbelt, dropping to the roof—the car shifts, inching closer to oblivion. I realize something even more disturbing—my left leg is pinned between the dash and the seat. Even if I could get the crinkled passenger door open, I can’t get myself out of the car.
My heart is racing, and I start to sweat. I can move my leg, I just can’t get my foot out. Nothing really hurts right now, and that scares me a little bit. Has my body released so much adrenaline that I just don’t feel the pain yet? Panic and I don’t get along. My body shakes and my extremities tingle. The car slips a few inches, drawing ever closer to that inevitable instant when I will feel weightless once again.
I don’t really like the feeling. It reminds me of those rides at amusement parks. The ones where they strap you into a seat and drop you vertically, plummeting as fast as gravity can pull you. It always felt like your heart was sucked up into your throat as you screamed forty stories to the ground below. I imagine that’s what it would feel like to jump off a building, or a cliff—except the landing wouldn’t be quite as gentle.
My mind races through all the possible scenarios that could happen upon impact with the bottom of the ravine. What will be the thing that kills me? Will my chest get crushed against the dash? Maybe a trauma to the head? What if I survive and lay mangled in the wreckage for days until I die of dehydration? My head starts to spin as I work myself into a frenzy obsessing about my impending demise. The rust bucket groans and squeals. I’m convinced it’s going to slide away, plummeting below any second. Suddenly, the passenger door rips open, completely torn from it’s hinges. Ethan appears, jutting his head inside the car. “Are you okay?” he asks.
“My leg,” I say.
I stare at him in shock. Did he just tear the door from it’s hinges like it was paper?
Ethan leans into the car and I watch in disbelief as he pries the dash away, releasing my leg. His eyes burn with that same fire I saw in him back in the forest, when he was hovering over the bodies. He extends his hand to me and the instant I clasp it he pulls me from the wreckage. I watch the rust bucket tumble end over end crashing into a heap of metal at the bottom as Ethan whisks me up to the shoulder of the road. I feel like I’ve been airlifted away. The whole thing is surreal.
Ethan sets me gently on the ground, brushing the hair from my face with his soft hands. I gaze into his eyes and he smiles as he cradles my face with his hand. Gone are the days where you can just bat your eyelashes at a guy. Now it seems you practically have to kill yourself just to get a smile. It’s a smile I’ll accept, none the less. But it just doesn’t seem possible. How did he get to me so fast? How did he have the strength to pry open the door and the dash? How did he scale the side of the cliff with me in his arms so effortlessly?
Adrenaline?
It has got to be adrenaline. I’ve always heard stories of people exhibiting super human strength during a crisis. The body’s fear response kicks in. The adrenal glands pump cortisol and adrenaline into the blood stream, spiking blood pressure. Surging the heart rate. Allowing people to tap into these reserves of strength. They say we normally only access 65% of our muscles’ capacity. But in times of extreme stress we can reach near 100% of our maximum because of this chemical rush. We’ve all heard those stories of the father who was able to lift a car to free his son trapped underneath. There has to be a logical explanation.
The sound of a siren echoes off the mountainside, drawing near. I peel my eyes away from Ethan’s perfect face to see the driver of the logging truck climbing out of the toppled cab. He’s a portly guy wearing a red flannel shirt and orange baseball cap. He waddles to us through the maze of spilled logs. “Oh dear God, is she okay?”
CHAPTER 8
SOMETHING IS SERIOUSLY wrong. After waiting in the ER for over an hour, the chemical rush of the moment long since past, pain decides it’s time for a visit. My chest and hips are a horrific rainbow of colors. Red and raw from abrasions and deep bruising of purple and blue, ringed by a sickly yellowish green. But that’s not the worst of it. My leg throbs with that kind of deep pain you feel in your gut, and I know it’s broken. I’m just waiting for the doc to come back with the results of the X-ray to tell me how bad. And what type of fashionable leg accessory I’ll be wearing while it heals. At least it’s not a compound fracture—the kind where the bone breaks and punctures the skin—those are grizzly. I shiver just thinking about it.
All things considered, I can’t complain. This whole thing could have gone so many ways of wrong that my mind just spins at the possibilities. What if Noah had been with me? The thought is mortifying. I’ll take a broken leg and some bruises any day. But I feel so stupid for getting myself in this position. If I’d have paid more attention and not forgotten my math book, this would have never happened. I should have cleaned the windshield better. I shouldn’t really have been driving in the first place with those worn out wiper blades. I don’t think I was speeding, but maybe I should have been driving slower? My brain swirls to the point of nausea as I second guess myself to no end.
My stomach sinks even farther. I’ve destroyed uncle Jake’s only method of transportation. As unsightly as it was, it got the job done. I wonder if he’s going to be pissed? I would be. I mean, here’s a guy who has two kids dropped in his lap that he’s got to take care of, and I don’t know how he really feels about that. I don’t know if he likes us, or hates us? Is he resentful that he’s stuck with his brother’s kids after they had a falling out? Does he feel duty bound and is just doing this out of some strange sense of obligation?
Another half hour passes. The doctor bounds in telling me the CT scan is ok, and he doesn’t see any major issues other than my fractured fibula. I’ll be wearing a boot for at least the next six weeks.
“Your boyfriend can come and wait in the room with you, if you’d like?” the doctor says.
“Boyfriend?” I ask.
“He’s out in the waiting room.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Oh, well, he rode in the ambulance with you. I assumed…”
“He did?”
“It’s ok,” the doctor chuckles. “You were quite dazed when they brought you in here. You were probably in a little shock. Do you want me to send hi
m back? He’s been asking to see you?”
But before I can object, the doc darts out of the room and Ethan appears within moments, poking his head through the doorway.
“So, they tell me you’re going to live,” he says, with a sparkling smile.
“Well, I won’t be dancing anytime soon.”
“As long as they don’t let you drive.”
“Hey!” I object. “My driving is just fine.”
“Okay. If you say so,” he says.
There is an awkward silence and we just stare at each other for a moment. Then I realize that I look like a train wreck. I’m sitting here in this pale green hospital gown, the kind that you can never really fasten in the back. My hair is frazzled, my mascara is probably running. Suddenly, I feel my face flush with embarrassment, and I become self conscious.
“How did you…?” I ask.
“I saw the truck topple. Then I saw you do your little acrobatic trick. It was just lucky I came along when I did,” Ethan says.
“You ripped the door off it’s hinges.”
“Sorry. I’d offer to fix it, but—”
“I don’t care about the door. How?”
“Well, they just don’t make cars like they used too,” Ethan says.
I huff. “I suppose that’s how you were able to pry apart the dash?”
“No offense, but that car was kind of crappy. It was falling apart.”
Ugh. I’m so frustrated. He’s dodging. I know he knows what I’m getting at. “Let me see your hand.”
Ethan’s eyes squint at me. I see him contemplating this in his mind before he finally extends his arm.
“No. The other hand,” I say.
He raises an eyebrow and shows me his hand that I spilled the silver nitrate on. My mouth drops when I see it. It’s perfectly smooth. No discoloration like Mr. Fischer said there would be. No burn or scar, despite the fact that I heard his skin fry when the silver nitrate made contact. I stare in disbelief, taking his hand in mine, examining it. My stomach flutters ever so slightly when I touch his immaculate skin—his warm, strong grip. My hand fits in his arched palm naturally, as if it belongs there. It's comforting.