Chapter 3
Greg made his way through the crowded hall toward the chemistry lab and entered the classroom only moments before the second bell. Megan was already waiting for him at their large wooden lab table. He dropped his backpack to the floor and straightened his uniform even as the teacher came in through a side entrance and took his place at the front of the class.
Megan, Greg, and the 10 other students sat attentively while they waited for the demonstration to begin. Unlike some of his teachers, Greg's chemistry teacher was all business as he went through the process of demonstrating the day's experiments, but by the end of class was usually downright jovial.
As the teacher began to describe the experiment based on the previous day's lecture, the students pulled out scientific notebooks and began to take notes while following the process that had been typed and printed onto blue-tinged mimeograph pages. Megan and Greg followed along, setting up the flasks and graduated beakers they would need for the experiment onto the thick, black chemical-resistant surface. When the teacher had finished, he walked up the center aisle between the 3 rows of lab tables, passing out measured amounts of chemicals to each pair of students. As soon as he set the chemicals down on their bench, Greg and Megan began their work. They had developed a routine over the few weeks he had been there, one setting up beakers containing distilled water for dissolving the chemicals while the other went to the wooden glass-paneled cabinets for some of the more inert ingredients and supplies.
Greg thought back to when he was 8 and his dad had gotten orders to a remote Marine Corps Base in Egypt. He couldn't remember when he had ever seen so much sand in one place - and they had spent a few months before the transfer at Marine Corps Base Twentynine Palms acclimating to the desert conditions. All that sand, as far as the eye could see, no matter where you looked, fueled the overactive imagination of an 8 year old boy and he couldn't wait to start searching for a mummy's tomb behind their unit in base housing. He never did find a mummy, but every time he dug something up he would bring it inside and test it with the old chemistry set that had been left to him by his grandfather. It fascinated him, the wooden chest so big and heavy Greg could hardly drag it out from under his bed. Some of the old stoppered tubes were empty, some seemed to be filled with plain water for all the good they did when he tried to use them, and he had a really hard time trying to read the tightly written cursive on the labels of others. But there were enough tubes with chemicals inside that Greg was able to spend hours trying to prove that a mummy had been buried in their backyard of sand.
Megan passed the first of the solutions over to Greg, who wrote the contents down in his notebook before pouring it into the large beaker containing a magnetic mixing bar as she mixed together the second solution. They repeated the process a third time before Greg went to the back cabinets to get a stirring plate they would use to mix their solutions and plugged it into an outlet mounted in the middle of the table riser. After pulling on safety goggles, Megan poured the measured amount of the first solution into the second. Greg placed the beaker onto the stirring plate and turned it on, adjusting the speed until a rather large vortex formed. Megan added the third solution and over the next several minutes they watched their colorless solution change between something clear, something amber, and something that was a deep blue color. They were so fascinated with what was happening that they almost forgot to write lab notes and document what they were seeing. Their fellow classmates were experiencing similar results and soon the lab echoed with the sounds of excited murmuring.
And then it was over. While the students finished noting their observations, the teacher explained in more detail the chemical reactions they'd witnessed. Afterward, when all of the chemicals had been properly disposed of and the equipment cleaned and put away, the teacher spent the last few minutes of the session chatting with the students about their plans for the week ahead.