Free Adam Selzer by How to Get Suspended, Influence People Page A

no matter what went wrong with the inventing, I was able to keep control of my various functions.
    When I stepped into the garage, Dad was already there, wearing a white lab coat, which was just plain embarrassing to see. I was convinced that no real inventors actually wore those and was equally convinced that there was no point at all in wearing one when there were no other inventors around to impress.
    “Hiya, Leon,” said my dad, grinning so enormously that I thought he would probably be sore in the morning. “All set?”
    “I guess so,” I said, pulling out one of the stools and having a seat. “What would you like me to do?”
    “First, put this on.” He held up a long white lab coat and, to my complete horror, handed it to me. I put it on, thanking heaven that the garage door was closed.
    He handed me a notebook. “Mostly just take notes for me. That’ll be a big help.” I pulled the stool a little closer to the table where Dad had all of his chemicals and junk sitting out. “I’ll call out some numbers and names of chemicals, and you just write down what I tell you.”
    I opened up the notebook, flipped to the first blank page, and got ready.
    “Test number one,” he said. “One milligram of boron.” I wrote that down; then he said a few more chemicals and mentioned mixing them over flame until they reached the boiling point. Then he did just that, putting them all together into a beaker, putting the beaker over a hot plate, and stirring them while they got hotter. He got the weirdest look on his face while he did it, like some sort of mad scientist. I wasn’t sure he was actually much of a scientist, but he was certainly mad.
    When it was boiling, he poured it all into some water (“dilute in one liter of H 2 O,” as I wrote in my notes) and said, “Now we just wait for it cool down.”
    The mixture he had made was an ugly blue thing, like the disinfectant people at hair salons keep combs in.
    “So that’s the stuff?” I asked. “Is it going to catch fire on command?”
    “Well, not on its own. But it’s fairly flammable…. Every match will have a tiny power source in it, and some gizmos that are sensitive to noise. It’s pretty complicated. I’ve got the things rigged up to ignite, just a bit, when they hear the noise, but the trick is to make the chemical coating of the match flammable enough to catch fire without being so flammable that it’s dangerous.”
    This struck me as a little unwise. Wouldn’t the sound of a snap set off every match in the matchbook at once? And what about similar sounds, like drumbeats? A guy at a rock concert could set his jacket on fire in a real hurry. But I didn’t say any of that out loud.
    “How much do you think they’ll cost?” I asked.
    “Well, they’re novelty matches, not normal ones,” he said. “So I think people will be willing to pay extra for them.”
    He hadn’t exactly answered my question; I guessed that the matches would probably cost so much that no one would be able to afford a single book of them, and was sure that anyone dumb enough to go into hock for a novelty product was probably not smart enough to take all the necessary safety precautions. On the plus side, having matches that could be lit accidentally would be a great way for someone—Brian Carlson, for instance—to say that he honestly hadn’t
meant
to burn the school down; the matches had just gone off by themselves.
    Just about then, the door opened, and my mother stepped into the garage. “I want a picture of this,” she said, holding up her camera. “My two inventors, hard at work.”
    I knew better than to complain but briefly wondered if it would be worth it to drink some of the blue flammable junk to see if it killed me, which it surely would have done. I decided against it, and she had us stand there, both of us in lab coats, and she took a picture. I felt like a first-class ding-dong. If the invention turned out to be a success, the picture would probably