21 Students Remaining #2
Thinking about it now makes my chest feel tight.
I’d been so in awe of those colorful flames.
Everyone in class was. I remember standing shoulder to shoulder with the other students in the dark, watching the chemicals burn down, then flicker out, all of us shouting at Pete to do it again.
Something hardens in my throat, making it difficult to inhale. Did I take any notes that day?
At the front of the class, Pete continues, “There’s no reason at all that this test shouldn’t be perfectly safe.
Instructions for how you are to proceed will appear on your tablets momentarily.
It is imperative that you follow your instructions exactly.
This is an open-note test, so feel free to refer to whatever notes you took when we first performed the experiment.
And…good luck.” With that, Pete opens his hands like a book and says, voice shaking slightly, “You may begin.”
Without another word, he opens the door to the classroom and leaves. The door falls shut behind him, leaving the chem lab in near perfect silence.
Then: the thwunk of a dead bolt turning in place.
He’s locked us in.
At the table next to me, Sofia Diaz anxiously taps her fingers against her tabletop. I look down at my tablet, where instructions for my test have just appeared, but I can’t concentrate on them. The sound of Sofia tapping makes the muscles in my shoulders pull together.
“Stop,” I tell her, pressing my fingers to my temple. “Please.”
“Sorry,” Sofia mutters. “Nervous habit.”
I go back to the instructions. This has to be a joke.
Step one: Fill beaker with distilled water.
Step two: Light Bunsen burner.
Step three: Prepare metal salt samples.
There are no amounts listed, no safety instructions or warnings. Just fill a beaker, add salt.
“Didn’t Pete say you can set the room on fire if you use the wrong solvent?” Ian asks.
“Yeah,” Seven says. “Remember he told us about that girl in Ohio who got third-degree burns all over her body after messing it up?”
Ian frowns and turns back to his own table. After a moment, he says, “He gave us both ethanol and methanol. Does anyone remember which one is safe?”
We all hunch over our tablets, anxiously searching through our notes.
I go back weeks and weeks until—there, the second day of school.
Below the date, I’d scrawled a few notes on how to make a bottle bomb out of Drano and tinfoil, but nothing about the rainbow flame experiment.
I glance at Seven: They shake their head and flash me their tablet.
There are a few scrawled notes, but nothing about what solvent to use.
There’s a tinkle of glass as students begin to move their beakers. A faucet turns on. Tennis shoes shuffle against the tile floor. Sofia and Lauren must have had something written down, because they’ve both begun to work. The rest of us just stand there, watching.
“Can one of you please tell us if it’s ethanol or methanol?” Ian says. I’ve never heard him sound nervous before, but now he does. It sends a flicker of fear over my skin. If Ian’s nervous, this is really, really bad.
There’s a pause. Sofia and Lauren look at each other. Lauren clears her throat. “It’s a test. I don’t think we’re supposed to talk.”
“If we use the wrong solvent, we can set the whole room on fire,” Seven says.
“That girl in Ohio, the one who got hurt, she wasn’t even performing the experiment,” I point out.
I remember the story well. It was the reason I hadn’t been taking notes, because I listen better when I’m not doing something else at the same time.
“She was only watching the experiment, but the fire still got out of control.” As I talk, it occurs to me that most of the assignments we’ve had so far have some sort of morality component.
Maybe the point of this exercise isn’t to see who can remember every detail of the experiment, but to see whether we share what we know.
“Pete locked us in,” I say, looking over at Ian.
I think of what he said last night. It’s more than just a school.
It is a test. Could this be what they’re testing?
Whether we’ll work with or against one another?
“That means if any of us does something wrong, we’ll all get hurt. We have to work together.”
There’s a long pause.
Then Lauren says, “We’re supposed to add water and two and a half to three grams of salts to each beaker.”
It’s as though she’s pushed a button. Everyone in the classroom gets to work.
Seven places the beakers on the heat-resistant mat spread out before us, carefully measuring the correct amount of salt into the base of each container.
Their hand is usually steady as a surgeon.
I’ve watched them draw a cat-eye sharp enough to cut glass with barely a twitch of their fingers. Today, their fingers shake.
When they’ve finished pouring, they look up and tell the rest of the class, “I made a note that we dampen each salt with half a cc of water.”
I take a dropper, trying to ignore the sweat breaking out on my palms as I lean over each beaker and carefully dampen the salt mounds inside.
Once that’s done, I pause, waiting to see if someone else will speak up. Pouring the salt and adding the water were the easy parts. You can’t make anything explode with salt or water. But now it’s time to add the solvent.
“I didn’t write down whether we were supposed to use methanol or ethanol,” Lauren says in a quiet voice.
“Neither did I,” I admit. I look around the room. “Did anyone?”
Slowly, everyone shakes their head.
I close my eyes, trying to remember absolutely everything Pete said about how this experiment has gone wrong in the past. People don’t measure their solvent carefully enough. They don’t handle it according to the rules. They pour too much, too quickly. But which solvent do they use? I have no idea.
“If no one wrote it down, we’re going to have to guess,” I say.
Ian says, “I remember him saying that the experiment can be done with either, but one of them is safer.”
I nod. “Yeah, I remember that, too. He also said that the most important thing was to measure carefully. So, whichever solvent you choose, just treat it like it’s super flammable, okay?”
Everyone in the room nods. I locate the container of methanol and unscrew the lid. While Seven watches, I carefully pour the solvent into a test tube, holding my breath as I work.
When we have the right amount of solvent, Seven takes the tube from me. Their hand has steadied a bit, I notice, but I don’t think it’s because they’re any less nervous. I think they’re just resolved. Whatever’s going to happen will happen.
“I can do the first one,” they tell me, swallowing hard. “But, uh, you might want to take a step back.”
I nod and shift away from our workstation. A few tables to my left, there’s a whoof sound, and I jump, startled, as a red flame crackles to life. Sofia and Lauren are hidden beneath protective goggles, but the portion of their faces that I can see looks immensely relieved.
I swallow my fear and turn back to Seven. “Okay. Do it.”
They pour the methanol onto our first salt and light it. For a second that lasts an eternity, nothing happens.
Then a small red flame flickers to life. It’s three or four inches tall, entirely contained by the beaker. My shoulders fall away from my ears in instant relief.
I look to my left and see that an equally manageable red flame has sparked to life on Ian’s table. He catches me looking and offers a small smile.
“Next one’s orange,” he says.
For the next hour, we carefully repeat the steps exactly as we did the first time. Measuring the methanol, pouring the methanol.
I can do this, I think. Maybe I can actually do this.
Orange flames leap to life around the room, then yellow, green, blue, indigo. We only have one color left. And then we’re done.
My mouth feels dry. My armpits begin to sweat. Next to me, Seven is barely breathing. We’re so close. A bead of sweat trickles down my temple. Everyone in the lab has gone quiet.
I pour the methanol over the salt, and a breath of relief escapes my lips as it hits. I light the salt, and there’s a faint crackle, a ribbon of smoke…
The violet flame is beautiful, and perfectly contained in the little glass beaker. My relief is instant and all-consuming. We’re done and no one got hurt. I could hug someone.
There’s a sound next to me, a kind of wheezing.
It tugs at something in my brain. I turn and see Lauren lighting her last fire.
She’s using methanol as a solvent, but the bottle’s almost empty.
She’s given up on the test tube, as there’s not enough liquid left to pour.
Instead, she squeezes the nearly empty bottle over the mound of salt. That’s what makes the wheezing sound.
Barely a second has passed since I first registered the wheezing, but I feel another tug on my brain.
Something’s wrong. My eyes move from Lauren’s hands to the mouth of the bottle.
She squeezes again, but all that comes out is air.
The faint scent of alcohol burns the inside of my nose.
An alarm goes off inside my head. Not air.
Vapor.
“Lauren—” I start, but I’m too late. The air catches with a sudden whoof and fire engulfs the room like a blanket.