The boys hunkered in groups of three or four at the green desks around some pieces of equipment. They looked like portable cassette stoves to Yue, the kind with gas canisters that could be used at home. She had one just like it at her house. Her family would put a pot of a little something on it to cook at a low boil, and similarly, a small, empty pot sat on each of these burners.
Ms. Tanimoto stood in front of her desk. She was dressed in a white lab coat and a pair of transparent goggles, just like all the boys. Right as Yue was about to lose her nerve and back away, Ms. Tanimoto looked directly at her and smiled. Her black hair, tied up in a bun near the base of her neck, bobbed with the movement.
“I’m so glad you could make it, Kawahara!” Ms. Tanimoto said. She opened the door with another smile and invited Yue in.
The goggle-wearing group stared holes into Yue. She flinched for the briefest of moments, but once she realized she knew every boy behind his goggles, her fear vanished altogether. They may have been dressed weird, but they were still just her classmates.
Ms. Tanimoto wasted no time in introducing Yue. “I know we have many new club members today, but I’d also like to introduce one more new face. This is Kawahara from the first-year class. Kawahara, take a coat and a pair of goggles and join Group Three.”
“Okay.”
Yue donned both—this was her first time wearing a white coat over her clothes for anything besides lunch duty, and she was surprised at how exciting she found it—and hurried to join the students at the third table on the right. The other members of group three welcomed her with a wave. Only after she sat down with them did she realize she had missed her chance to ask what exactly they were doing today.
Yue turned her head to look at the neat chalk letters on the blackboard. “Bismuth?” she read.
“It’s a type of metal,” the boy sitting next to her explained. She hadn’t met him before. He was a bit on the tall side, with large, round eyes. Probably an upperclassman. “Ms. Tanimoto said you can melt solid bismuth in a pot and let it harden again to make crystals. The crystals make wicked cool shapes.”
“Neat.”
Ms. Tanimoto announced that it was time to begin and moved from table to table plopping small cubical objects into the pots. They looked like the magnets Yue used in class, and it reminded her of melting chocolate cubes to make treats for Valentine’s Day. The only difference was that they were heating metallic chips, not bits of chocolate.
Ms. Tanimoto then turned on the burners and told the designated group leaders, “Go for it, and good luck!” There was a click, the smell of gas, and the thrum-thrum of the large ventilator fans whirring to life.
“Careful of the fire,” she warned the class. “We’ll be working with flames at 270 degrees.”
“Whoa, 270 degrees? How hot is that?” a boy at the next table called out.
The boy who had explained the experiment to Yue rounded on him and yelled back, “Duh, 270 degrees! How stupid are you?”
“No, Matsuda is asking a good question. We fry tempura at around 170 degrees, so you can think of it as even hotter than that. Watch out, everyone.”
“Ms. Tanimoto, that means nothin’ to me. I’m one of those guys who doesn’t know his way around a kitchen.”
“Get with the times, dude,” Yue’s groupmate jeered.
“Aw, shut it, Akira. My big bro cooks all the time. I figure it’ll rub off on me eventually; the apple can’t fall that far from the tree.”
“Apple or no apple, you still have a brain, don’t you? You can imagine how hot tempura oil is. Friggin’ Hiroto… Right, Sensei?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Ms. Tanimoto. “I never cooked tempura when I was your age, either.”
“Come on, Sensei! Back me up here!”
The boys’ open laughter took Yue by surprise. Boys her age were a largely unknown species that tended to lurk in the back of the class, acting surly and sneaking in manga to read, but these boys were as chatty as any of the girls. They weren’t sullen and scowling at all.
Ms. Tanimoto cleared her throat to quiet the rowdy classroom. “You do need to watch out, though. It will hurt very badly if you get burned. Plus, you’ll make me sad.”
The students responded with a unanimous “Yes, ma’am,” as if they’d gone back to being elementary schoolers for a moment. Ms. Tanimoto, Yue thought, could work magic.
The magician lifted her index finger to add one final thing. “Remind me, kids. What’s the Okayama Higashi Public Junior High School science club motto?”
“Science is fun, and safety comes first!” This time, Yue and about a dozen other kids answered as one. Ms. Tanimoto nodded with a bright smile.
The chips in the pot softened by degrees as the fire sputtered away. It really was like chocolate, Yue thought. Metallic chocolate. She couldn’t tear her fascination away from the array of colors that oozed out of the bismuth.
Someone tapped her on the elbow as she stared through her goggles into the pot. “Hm?” she said.
“What grade are you? And what’s your name again? I’m Hiroto Matsuda. A second-year.”
It was the loud boy from earlier, the one her groupmate had spoken to. Yue answered shyly, “I’m, uh, Yue Kawahara. First-year.”
“Dang, a first-year! Well, thanks for coming. Lucky you showed up on an experiment day.”
“…What kinds of things do you guys do here in the science club?”
“All sorts of stuff. Ever since Ms. Tanimoto came to our school, we started doing a buncha new things. The club’s way more fun now. We go to the beach to collect rocks, break stones with hammers, check out geological strata in cliff faces. All sorts of stuff.”
“And this,” Yue’s helpful groupmate added, pointing to the pot.