Free We Are All Made of Molecules by Susin Nielsen Page B

mellow
and
dramatic at the same time?

TODAY WAS WHAT I like to call an Alexander Fleming kind of day.
    Fleming was a scientist, and notoriously messy. One day he went on vacation, leaving some bacterial cultures sitting on his desk. When he came back, he found a weird fungus growing on some of his cultures, and the bacteria weren’t thriving around the fungus. He thought his experiments were ruined—till he figured out he had just made a little discovery called penicillin. What he thought was going to be a very bad day turned out to be one of his best.
    I didn’t make any revolutionary scientific discovery, but my day also went much, much better than originally expected.
    Phys ed wasn’t till last period, so I had a lot of hours toget through first. My stomach was twisted in knots all day. All I could think about were the communal showers, and the possibly sociopathic Jared.
    In English, we got back our essays on
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and I got an A+. I don’t know what mark Ashley got, but her face turned beet red when she saw her grade, and she quickly flipped her paper over, so I’m guessing it wasn’t good.
    Then, when I stopped by my locker at the beginning of lunch, I overheard Violet asking Phoebe if she wanted to go to her house for lunch.
    “I can’t. I have Mathletes.”
    “Mathletes?” I asked. I knew I was butting into their private conversation, but I couldn’t help it. “This school has Mathletes?”
    “Yeah,” Phoebe said, shoving her books into her locker.
    “I love Mathletes! I was team captain at Little Genius Academy!”
    “You should really stop saying your old school’s name out loud,” Violet said. She and Phoebe started walking down the hall. I followed.
    “One of my goals is to join at least one club,” I told Phoebe as I kept pace with her. “Do you think I could come?”
    Phoebe shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess.”
    So I followed her up the stairs to Room 222. I was surprised that only five kids were there, not including Phoebe and me. Their team was a third the size of the one at Little Genius. The teacher who runs the club, Mr. Fernlund, seemed more than happy to let me sit in. “Please,” he said. “We could use another member.”
    It was fantastic, because (1) I didn’t have to eat lunchunder the stairwell, and (2) I love math. We got to work on problems like
There are seven people at a party. Each person shakes hands once with every other person there. How many handshakes occurred?
I live for this stuff. And when Mr. Fernlund saw how good I was, he formally asked me to join the team.
    Near the end of the lunch hour I even told a joke. “What do you get if you divide the circumference of a jack-o’-lantern by its diameter? Pumpkin pi.” And guess what—they all laughed! Then I had science, and because there is now an odd number of kids in the class, thanks to my arrival, the teacher paired me with Phoebe and Violet indefinitely. Violet didn’t look too happy, but Phoebe reminded her that I was excellent at science and therefore my involvement might boost their marks. That seemed to perk Violet up a bit.
    For two whole hours I actually forgot all about phys ed and Jared.
    —
    BUT BEFORE I KNEW it, last period was upon me. My feet felt like blocks of lead as I headed into the change room. I didn’t see Jared, and for a moment I was filled with relief; maybe he was sick, or maybe he’d transferred to another school, or, better still, maybe he was in the hospital in a body cast and wouldn’t get out for months. I changed in a bathroom stall, and nobody tried to stop me.
    But just as I was pulling up my shorts, I heard him. He has a loud, confident voice, and it boomed through the change room. “Hey, Chong, you coming to basketball tryouts after school?”
    “You bet.”
    I waited in the stall for a long time, my feet up on the toilet seat, until I was sure the other guys had gone to the gym. Only then did I unlock the door and head out to join them.
    We