Once everyone had a turn with the bismuth, he picked up the forceps with a delighted “Awright!” and had another go at it. As time went on, the pot spat out bigger crystals. Probably because the metal was cooling and solidifying, Yue thought. Watching it harden before her eyes—using a principle even a kid like her could comprehend—made her heart beat faster and faster. Putting the lab coat on was thrilling in its own way, but it was nowhere as cool as this.
When Yue went to dig out crystals for the third time, she felt a strong resistance. It was like she was fishing in the liquid bismuth, which was such an odd feeling that she had to smile as she pulled the crystal cluster out. It came up with a blorp past the surface of the liquid—a maze of bismuth with a metallic sheen. The bright pinks and greens showed more variety of color than any crystal yet.
“That thing’s huge!”
“Look at the size of that monster! You’re killing it, first-year.”
“I sure am!”
She set it down on the plate, where it rolled to a stop. Her crystal was larger than any of the others. Its bright, vivid colors almost moved her to tears of happiness. Until she grabbed them with her forceps, these crystals hadn’t existed anywhere in the universe. It was the only stone like it on Earth, and it only existed thanks to one girl in her first year of junior high.
To Yue, it felt like a miracle.
Pull out crystals until the metal hardened, heat it up again, rinse and repeat. Group Three repeated the process three times in total, until their lab table looked like a display at a bismuth-themed rock show.
Just as the kids began to get rowdy with excitement, Ms. Tanimoto clapped her hands. “Okay, everybody, pause where you’re at. This is the end of today’s experiment. Let’s start cleaning up. I want one person from each group to bring the leftover liquid to my desk. Don’t touch the metal portion of the stoves, because they’re still hot. Just leave them where they are.”
“What do we do with the crystals, Ms. Tanimoto?”
“You can each take home the ones you made. Just watch out—bismuth is a soft metal, so it might break if you bump it into something.”
The class erupted into cheers. Yue herself felt some measure of relief. She wouldn’t have minded her crystals going up on display in the science lab, but taking them home to show her sister was even better.
After Ms. Tanimoto deposited the pots of leftover bismuth and gunked-up forceps into the lab’s storage room, she smiled, pulled off her goggles, and went to the blackboard with a piece of chalk. “Let’s talk bismuth while we wait for the stoves to cool off. Does anyone have any idea why bismuth forms these shapes?”
Hiroto raised his hand. “Maybe God made it that way just ’cause he thought it was cool.”
That got the class going. Akira loudly proclaimed that Hiroto was full of it, making Hiroto scratch his head self-consciously.
Ms. Tanimoto, however, took it seriously. “Hm. That’s certainly possible. If we think about the natural elements as—oh, do you all remember what elements are? As you learned in your first-year science classes, an element is the smallest fundamental unit of matter. We’ve discovered 118 elements, although only 117 have ever existed. That’s a lot of elements. If God made them all, I wouldn’t be surprised if he started adding unusual crystal formations into the mix to have some fun.”
“You mean, God was messing around?”
“No, I think God took his work very seriously. After all, every person is unique in their own way, aren’t they? Apples might not fall far from their trees, but each apple can grow up to be their own unique tree.”
Ms. Tanimoto went on to talk about the crystalline structure of metals and illustrated her point by drawing a jungle gym-looking figure on the board. In her words, every element had a certain shape that its molecules tended to assume when they came together to form bigger structures, i.e., the crystal. Bismuth formed that labyrinthine geometric shape. Alum, the stuff the kids often crystallized in science class, formed regular octahedrons. As for the jungle gym, that was a model that showed how metal molecules “linked hands” or clumped together. Much to Yue’s relief, Ms. Tanimoto added that it was okay if not everything made sense now, as it would be covered in class later.
She continued into a broader discussion of metal: the molecular structures, the properties of gold that made it flatten and stretch under hammering. Not once did she say, “This will be on the test.” Most teachers would have peppered their speech with those magic attention-grabbing phrases—“This will be on the test,” or “You’re going to see this often in life”—but not Ms. Tanimoto. She simply acted like metals were fun and interesting to her. It reminded Yue of the way her older sister talked about the celebrities she followed or the latest social media trends. Strangely, Ms. Tanimoto also made a bizarrely debonair face from time to time before she caught herself and laughed it off with an embarrassed grin.
She paused to say, “Oh goodness, it’s almost time for lunch. We only have this room for the morning, so we need to wrap up and head on out. Please take off the gas canisters and bring them with the stoves to my desk. And that’s it, we’re done! Thank you so much for coming, and take care on the way home.”
“Thanks for everything, Ms. Tanimoto!”
The boys were in no hurry to leave even after putting away the equipment. To Yue, it looked like they wanted to talk to Ms. Tanimoto but didn’t know how to approach her. They asked her questions about science, but Yue could tell that Ms. Tanimoto was their true interest.
Yue watched her classmates from the other side of the room. Ms. Tanimoto sure is popular, she thought.
Just then, Ms. Tanimoto caught her eye and walked over to her with a bright smile. Yue’s stomach dropped.
“Thanks again for coming, Kawahara,” said Ms. Tanimoto. “How was it? Did you have fun today?”
“…Y-yes, I did.”
“Wow, is that your bismuth? You got a big one!”