Free Sammy Keyes and the Killer Cruise by Wendelin Van Draanen Page B

she’d said she was proud of me for trying so hard and “showing such discipline.”
    But since Marissa’s already in bed and there’s no place in the room where I can work without keeping her awake, I go to bed, too. But that stupid word
discipline
won’t leave me alone. Plus, it doesn’t feel like my birthday yet, and the last thing I want to do on my actual birthday is chemistry problems. And if I wait until the day after, I’ll be in real trouble because in the back of my mind I’m remembering Marissa saying that the two days after my birthday are “port days,” when we’re supposed to go on land excursions or something.
    The desk clock says 12:30, but since Marissa’s now
snoring
and I can’t sleep, I get up and get dressed as quietly as I can, grab my backpack and sea-pass card, ease the cabin door open, and sneak out.
    I know exactly where I’m going because we’d checked out the Lido Library on Deck 8 when we’d first explored the ship, and Marissa and I had passed by it a bunch of times as we’d gone up and down the stairs near our room.
    There’s a plaque on the door that says Q UIET Z ONE , and inside there’s dark wood paneling and bookcases and library tables and leather armchairs the color of dried blood. There’s also a long table of back-to-back computers and an alcove with a printer. So it’s the perfect place to do my homework, plus it’s really close to our cabin—basically, just down one flight of stairs—so I don’t have to worry about getting lost.
    There’s only one other person in the room when I get there—a middle-aged woman with curly salt-and-pepper hair, who’s putting together pieces of a big puzzle that’s on one of the tables. She’s only got part of the border done, and it looks like it’s a really hard puzzle—the pieces seem small and are in big, yellowish mounds.
    I smile when she looks over, then settle in at a table on the other side of the room with my work sheet, my notes, my pencils, paper, and calculator, and the infamous periodic table of the elements.
    And then I just sit there, staring at the first problem.
    I don’t hate math. And I don’t hate chemistry. What I hate is when the two get put together,
and
scientific words get thrown around in class before I have a really good understanding of them. It’s like reading something where you keep forgetting what certain words
mean
. Or you mix up their meanings. So you spend your time sort of scrambling to keep up, looking at your definitions, going, Oh,right, then realizing that you’ve missed the next thing that was said and that, once again, you’re lost.
    Mole
and
molar mass
and
mole ratio
are all words like that for me.
    Anything with
mole
in it leaves me in the dark.
    Which, yeah, seems pretty appropriate.
    There’s
atomic weight
, which I get, but also confuse with
molecular weight
. Probably because
molecular weight
has the word
mole
in it.
    Anyway
, Ms. Rothhammer’s work sheet has us doing equations—math—with molecules—chemistry—and the first step is to calculate the molar mass of each compound in the equation.
    See?
    What does that
mean
?
    Anyway, there I am, up to my eyeballs in math and moles, trying to fight my way out of the darkness, when all of a sudden I hear, “You’re doing
homework
?”
    Well, let me tell you: Concentration + Surprise = Heart Attack.
    And the net reaction?
    An explosion.
    I bolt out of my chair, shouting, “Don’t
ever
sneak up on me like that again!”
    “Sorry!” Kip says, stepping back. “I wasn’t sneaking.”
    “Were you spying on me? Were you
following
me?” And it flashes through my mind that maybe he saw me spying on his grandmother in the Forest of Cheesy Smiles.
    “No! I came down to check something on the Internet!”
    “To …” I look around. The Puzzle Lady’s still there,but other than her, it’s just him and me and a bunch of books and computers.
    “Sorry,” he tells me, and he’s backing away like I’ve hit