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“With just a little bit of this,” Calvin said slowly, gently tapping the small metal spoon with a finger, orange powder falling into the beaker underneath. “The mixture becomes this.” The opaque green liquid, a small flame underneath it, turned an opaque yellow.
Several of the students ooh’d and ahh’d, doing a lot to Calvin’s ego. No matter how many times he does this experiment, he never gets tired of the reaction. It’s why he got into chemistry in the first place, after all. The way things affected each other—sometimes subtly, sometimes with a flash and a bang—was endlessly fascinating to him.
He glanced at the clock and turned off the fire. “Alright, go and put your goggles and lab coats away. You can leave your lab observations on my desk on your way out.”
The sounds of metal stools scraping against linoleum was something he feared he’d never get used to. The sounds of backpacks being unzipped and zipped, papers being tapped against desks and shuffled around, pencils scratching at it—those were all school sounds that he could get behind, though.
He leaned back against the sink counter behind him, and called out above the din of the class, “Don’t forget, tomorrow is when exam review starts. Your midterms are next Friday. That gives you a little over a week to prepare.”
A collective grumble came from the teenagers, with a few students actually acknowledging what he said with words.
“Oh!” He said, remembering something. He straightened up and the small group of students clustered near the door stopped walking. “Do any of you see Miss Derkins after this class?”
Several teens rose their hands. “One of you tell her that Doctor Cal said she was wrong, and that it went off without a hitch.”
The ones who rose their hands shared a confused glance with each other before shrugging. One girl who went by Heresy—something Calvin was one hundred percent in support of—looked back at him. “Sure, Doc, I’ll tell her.”
“Thanks, Heresy,” he said, leaning back against the counter again.
Once the kids had cleared out of the room, he smirked. “Well, that worked out great.”
“Do you know what that was about?” Heresy asked Connor as they walked with Elsie and Meagan down the hall to the stairs.
Connor shrugged, his windbreaker making a small swooshing noise as it rubbed against itself. “Who cares, honestly?”
“I think it’s a coded message,” Elsie said, her green eyes wide with excitement.
“It’s literally possible to send someone a message using your watch,” Connor pointed out. “Why would he need us to deliver a message to Miss Derkins?”
“I bet that he’s flirting with her,” Elsie insisted, refusing to accept Connor’s logic.
“I don’t think he is,” Meagan frowned, tugging absently on the strap of her messenger bag.
Heresy and Elsie rolled their eyes at the same time. “That’s because you have the unfortunate taste of being into older blond men.” Heresy snarked over her shoulder as the quartet started to ascend the stairs. “We don’t have that problem.” Heresy motioned to herself, Elsie, and Connor.
Heresy was the third daughter of a Filipino immigrant family. Her hair was curly and had a tendency to do its own thing, much to her annoyance. And if she stayed out in the sun too long for lunch or while waiting for her Ate Marietes to pick her up, she would get one to three shades darker. (Much to her Nay’s annoyance.)
Elsie was Irish-Mexican, with green eyes and paler skin, but dark and thick hair that had a tendency to frizz when it was humid out. She looked white at first glance, but something in the curve of her eyes and the shape of her nose gave away that she was mixed. She spoke Spanish so rapidly sometimes, especially when she got excited, that Meagan and Connor—who’d both been taking Spanish as a second language for as long as they’d been in the United States’ education system—would start to just stare at her, trying to pick out at least one word.
Meagan was a white girl with a few freckles scattered across her face, brown hair that turned blonde in the summer, and hazel eyes. She had the unfortunate talent of getting sunburned first before she could get a tan. But, she ran track and field in the spring, and played soccer in the autumn, so she was out in the sun a lot. Her grandparents on her Mom’s side live somewhere in England or Wales, and her Dad’s parents are out in Nebraska.
Connor was some kind of East Asian and white, a result of a one-night stand his Ma had in college. She doesn’t remember the name of the guy she slept with, and as a result, Connor doesn’t really have any leads on his heritage on his biological father’s side. His step-father was Afro-Latino, with family in New Mexico. His Ma’s family was from the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan. Both his Ma and his Pops support him in his endeavors to explore East Asian culture, and along with Spanish, he is learning Mandarin and Japanese.
Meagan playfully whined at Heresy while they made their way to the middle of the hallway where Miss Derkins’ classroom was. “I would try to say sorry, but that would be a lie,” Heresy gave Meagan a sickly sweet smile as the four of them sat down at their table.
“When are you gonna tell her?” Connor asked before Meagan and Heresy could really get into an argument.
“She’s not even here yet,” Elsie looked around the room just to make sure. “Chill out.”
Connor stared at her with such a look of offense that Heresy had to cover her mouth with both hands to keep from laughing out loud. “You are telling me to chill out?” His voice was half an octave higher than it usually was.
“Alright, alright, I’m here,” Miss Derkins said as she walked into the room. She headed for her desk, her medium brown hair in a braided bun today. “You can all relax now.”
Elsie kicked Heresy’s ankle under the table as a cue. “Shit,” Heresy hissed at her friend, dark eyes narrowing at her. One hand rubbing at her ankle, the other came up and rested in the air.
“Yes, Miss dela Cruz?” Miss Derkins called on her.
Heresy straightened up, pushing her hair out of her face. “Doctor Cal wanted to let you know that you were wrong, and it went off without a hitch.”
“Doctor Cal said that, eh?” Miss Derkins crossed her arms, glaring out her door as if the blond chemistry teacher was standing in the hall.
“I told you it was a coded message,” Elsie said quietly to the other three after Miss Derkins had started class. She carefully regarded the canvas in front of her, tentatively sketching out what she was going to be working on for the next week and a half.
“Or,” Connor said, looking over from his sketchbook to Elsie, where he had written the paints and their amounts that he wanted to use for his painting. “They just have some rivalry thing going on. I think I heard Mrs. Jankowski say once that the Doc and Miss Derkins have known each other since they were little kids. That’s a long time to build up a rivalry.”
“And a long time to develop inside jokes,” Meagan said, not looking away from the paint she was mixing together carefully.
Heresy, double-checking her plan in her sketchbook, looked up with a mischievous smile. “And, one could say, a long time to create a secret code.”
“Thank you!” Elsie exclaimed, gesturing at Heresy. She almost knocked over her cup of water, earning her name being called out in warning by the three of them and Miss Derkins.
“So,” Susie said, leaning against the side of Calvin’s desk. “I heard that you sent one of our students to give me a message?”
“What they do after they step out of my room is not my business,” Calvin said, leaning back in his chair and twirling a red pen between his fingers.
“You do know you can just send me a text between periods,” she said, trying to keep the amusement out of her voice.
“I could also tell you in the car ride back home, during dinner, and before we fall asleep.” Calvin rebutted. “But where’s the fun in that?”
“Your students were hypothesizing during my class.”
“Oh, so when they do something super creative and pretty with watercolors, they’re your students. But the second they inconvenience you, they’re my students?” Calvin rolled his eyes dramatically, tossing his pen onto his desk.
“That’s been our arrangement since we started teaching,” Susie smirked.
Calvin’s gaze flickered down to her lips for a brief moment, before he met her eyes again. He stood up and grabbed the jacket off the back of his chair. “Come on,” he said, haphazardly putting the day’s lab reports in his backpack. “I have some things to discuss with you at home.”