The cliffs, p.11
The Cliffs, page 11
Science Club was famous for bringing back numerous trophies for West Valley, and Science Club students had the reputation of being the school’s highest achievers. On Freshman Orientation Day, when new students were given the opportunity to sign up for clubs, Chris had made a beeline for the Science Club table. It was the only club he signed up for. Why waste your time on anything inferior, Chris thought, when you can be with the best?
Chris was especially looking forward to this weekend, which was the traditional lock-in that Mr. Little held every year for his students. The entire class would spend the night at the school, working on a secret project of Mr. Little’s design. It had the reputation of being a life-changing experience, one that secured your status in Science Club and the school. Chris wanted his status to be the best of the best.
“Chris! Your friends are at the door!” Chris’s mom called from the living room.
Josh and Kyle, Chris thought. He felt vaguely annoyed. He had a lot of preparation to do to ensure he made the right impression on his first day. He was in a serious mood, and Josh and Kyle were never serious about anything. “Be there in a minute!” he yelled back.
He finished loading his backpack with school supplies before he went to the door. At least he could get that done despite the interruption.
Josh and Kyle were waiting in the living room. Josh had let his hair grow out over the summer, and it hung in dark brown waves over his shoulders. Kyle had dyed a purple streak in his hair and was wearing a T-shirt for some band with a skull and crossbones on it. Chris was a little nervous about the fact that Josh and Kyle would also be starting at West Valley High tomorrow. They had been his friends since they were preschoolers, but he hoped they wouldn’t hang all over him during school hours. They were nice guys, but he feared the image they projected wouldn’t go over well with the Science Club kids. He didn’t want his old friends to hold him back from making new, higher-status friends.
“Hey,” Josh said, pulling his hair back behind his ears, a habit he had picked up since letting it grow. “It’s our last night of freedom.”
“Yep,” Kyle said. “Tomorrow they lock us back up and throw away the key until next summer.”
“Actually, I’m kind of excited about going back to school,” Chris said. “I mean, it’s high school, you know?”
“Same thing with a different name,” Josh said, sounding like he was bored already. “We were gonna ride our bikes over to the Dairy Bar, then go down to the lake. You wanna come?”
Of course you are, Chris thought. It was what they always did. But he supposed he might as well come along for old times’ sake. Tomorrow, his life was going to change: It would be full of smart friends, science projects, and academic achievement. The bike rides and ice cream of childhood would just be a memory. “Sure, why not?”
He followed the boys outside and got his bike.
“Race you to the Dairy Bar!” Kyle yelled, like he always did.
They took off. Chris intentionally didn’t pedal as fast as Josh and Kyle. He figured he might as well let them win. There were many achievements in his future, so maybe he should let one of them win the race to have some small sense of accomplishment. Soon he would be leaving them in the dust in other ways.
Josh won. Not that it mattered.
At the Dairy Bar, they each ordered their customary chocolate-vanilla swirl cones and sat down at one of the wooden picnic tables to eat them. Even though the ice cream was good, Chris could still imagine better treats he would have in the future once he had risen to the social status he aspired to. Then he would eat luxurious desserts he had only read about or seen on TV: crêpes suzette, molten chocolate lava cake, crème brûlée.
“I haven’t seen you on the server much lately, Chris,” Kyle said. In middle school they had liked to “meet up” online to play Night Quest, a popular multiplayer game, together.
“Yeah, I guess I’ve just had more important things on my mind lately,” Chris said, licking his cone.
“Why? Is something wrong?” Josh asked. “Nobody in your family is sick or anything, are they?”
“No, nothing like that,” Chris said. “I’ve just been thinking about, you know, the future.”
“The future, like with robot overlords and flying cars?” Josh asked, grinning.
They were so incapable of being serious it was infuriating. “No,” Chris said, “like my future. My goals. What I want out of life.”
“That’s some pretty heavy thinking for summer break,” Kyle said. “At the beginning of the summer, I take my brain out, put it in a jar, put the jar on a shelf, and don’t take it out again until school starts.”
Josh laughed. “So that’s what you’ll be doing when you get home tonight? Putting your brain back in your head?”
“Nah, I’ll probably wait till the morning. No need to start thinking any sooner than I have to.”
Josh and Kyle were both laughing, but Chris couldn’t muster a smile. How did he even end up being friends with these losers? He supposed it was just because Josh lived next door and Kyle lived across the street. They had been flung together because they were the same age and lived in the same place. If Chris had grown up in a nicer neighborhood, he would have ended up with a better class of friends.
After they finished their ice cream, they got back on their bikes to go to the lake.
What they called the lake was really just a large pond. Once they got there, they did the usual. They looked for flat stones to skip across the water. They tried to approach the Canada geese, then laughed when the geese hissed at them. They talked about video games and internet memes and nothing in particular.
Looking out at the “lake” that was really a pond, Chris thought of the word stagnant. That pond was going nowhere. It wasn’t a river or even a little stream that flowed and went somewhere else, became a part of something bigger. Instead it just sat there, growing algae and gross bacteria, going nowhere and becoming nothing.
Unlike the pond, unlike Josh and Kyle, Chris had no intention of stagnating. He was going places.
* * *
Chris woke early on the first day of school. He took a shower, brushed his teeth aggressively, and applied a double coat of deodorant. He ran a little gel through his short, neatly cut sandy-brown hair to make sure it wasn’t going anyplace. He put on the polo shirt and khakis he had set out the night before. He wished again that they were a better brand, but at least they were clean and new.
“Hey, there’s my big freshman!” Mom said when he came into the kitchen. She assaulted him with a hug.
“Mom, stop,” Chris said, squirming away from her and sitting down at the table. He poured himself a bowl of cornflakes and started slicing a banana over them.
Mom sat down across from him, holding a cup of coffee. She had already done her hair and makeup for work. As always, it was a little too much, in Chris’s opinion. Her hair was dyed a shade of red that wasn’t found in nature, and she was wearing a leopard-print top, black leggings, and leopard-print shoes. He wished she would aspire to simple elegance instead of cheap glamour.
“I know you get tired of me talking about how big you’ve gotten,” she said. “But when you’re a parent someday, you’ll understand. You start out with this little, tiny baby with toes the size of corn kernels, and then it seems like no time passes till your baby’s so tall you have to look up at him!”
Chris didn’t comment, just crunched his cornflakes. What was there to say? He had grown. It was what kids did. It wasn’t like it was some great achievement or anything.
“Anyway, I’m proud of you,” his mom said. “Proud of your sister, too. It really seems like she should still be a baby, but you should’ve seen her this morning. She got herself all ready and walked to the bus stop. So independent.” She smiled. There was a little smear of lipstick on her front tooth. “Say, I don’t have to be at work till nine this morning. Do you want me to drive you in for your first day?”
Chris nearly choked on his cornflakes. He didn’t want the Science Club kids at his new school to see his overly made-up mom pull in with her ten-year-old economy car that rattled and wheezed like somebody’s great-grandpa. What kind of impression would that make? “No thanks, Mom. I’ll just take the bus.”
“What did I say? Independent.” His mom reached over and ruffled his hair. Now he would have to comb it again.
* * *
On the school bus, Josh and Kyle were sitting next to each other. When Chris boarded, Josh said, “Hey, Chris! Time to turn ourselves back in to the jailer, huh?”
Chris ignored him. There was an empty seat across the aisle from Josh and Kyle, but he ignored that, too, and found another empty seat farther back on the bus. It was better to be seen alone than to be seen in the wrong company. He looked around the bus, trying to figure out if any of the kids looked like they could be Science Club members.
West Valley High was much bigger and more crowded than Chris’s old middle school. In the hallways, he had to concentrate to keep from running anyone over and not to be run over himself. It was hard to concentrate on navigating the hallway when his brain was consumed by one thought: Third period is Mr. Little’s class. Third period is Mr. Little’s class.
After what felt like an eternity and a half, third period arrived. Chris and his classmates crowded into the room at the end of the hall and beheld the bizarre wonders of Mr. Little’s classroom. Chris took a seat and looked around. The walls were plastered with posters, some outlining the scientific method or showing cell structure, others displaying science-related puns and wordplay. One said, IN SCIENCE, MATTER MATTERS, and another, THINK LIKE A PROTON. STAY POSITIVE. The shelves that lined the room were filled with more scientific curiosities than Chris could take in at once. The one nearest him displayed a variety of glass jars filled with clear fluid and different biological specimens. One jar held some poor creature’s heart; another housed a fetal piglet with two perfectly formed heads. Yet another contained what looked disturbingly like a human brain.
Mr. Little stood before the lab table at the head of the classroom. He wore a white lab coat over a collared shirt and a brightly colored necktie printed with the design of a DNA helix. He was a small, energetic man—the literal incarnation of his last name—and he was smiling like the master of ceremonies in a particularly exciting show. His safety goggles, worn over his regular glasses, made his eyes look huge and insectoid.
“Come on in. Find a seat. Don’t be shy,” he said as students filtered into the classroom. “I promise there will be no major explosions or dismemberments. At least not on the first day.” He flashed a naughty grin.
Chris didn’t know everything he would be learning in the class, but he already knew one thing: he had never met a teacher like Mr. Little.
“All right, let’s go ahead and get started,” Mr. Little said, though the tittering among the students didn’t die down. Chris expected Mr. Little to raise his voice, take out his roll book, and start taking attendance, but instead he poured some kind of clear solution into a glass container he held over a Bunsen burner. Within seconds, a huge fireball appeared, its flames falling just short of licking the ceiling, then disappeared instantaneously.
Everybody in the classroom gasped.
“I thought that would get your attention,” Mr. Little said, grinning. “But I promise, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” He looked around the room. “This is science! And it is not for the faint of heart or the cowardly. It’s not about just reading a textbook and answering questions correctly. It’s about innovative thinking. It’s about getting your hands dirty. It’s about experimenting, with all that the word experiment implies. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we fail, but either way, we learn. In this class, I may ask you to do some stuff that sounds kind of crazy, but I promise that if you bear with me and follow my advice, by the time you’re done with this course, you’ll be thinking, talking, walking, and quacking like a scientist.” He looked around the room. “Now who’s ready to learn some cool stuff?”
Everybody clapped, hooted, or cheered. Chris already felt like he was a member of an exclusive club.
“Now, before we get to the fun stuff, we have to jump through a few bureaucratic hoops,” Mr. Little said, “the first being this lab safety contract, which you and your parents must read and sign, saying that you will not intentionally blow up the school or another classmate.”
“Aw, where’s the fun in that?” a kid in the front row asked, and everybody laughed.
“Oh, it’s always good fun until you have to scrub somebody’s viscera off the walls,” Mr. Little said. “I do hate it when students leave a mess.”
More laughter.
The boy sitting in front of Chris raised his hand and asked, “Are you going to talk about the lock-in?”
“Yes,” Mr. Little said. “There will be a meeting in this room right after school today for everybody who’s interested in coming to the lock-in this weekend. I strongly suggest that you all come both for the sake of your grades”—he mouthed the words extra credit—“and for the sake of science!”
Once class was dismissed, the boy in front of Chris turned around. “I haven’t seen you around before. Are you a freshman?” His brown eyes were intense and intelligent.
“Yes,” Chris said. “How about you?”
“Sophomore,” the boy said. “Sanjeet Patel. Everybody calls me San.”
“Chris Watson.” San radiated not only intelligence but confidence. Chris suddenly, desperately, wanted this kid to like him.
“Are you doing Science Club?” San asked as they gathered their belongings.
“Sure. It’s practically all I’ve thought about since I knew I was coming to West Valley.”
San smiled. “Once you’re in, it’ll still be all you think about. Do you have lunch next period?”
Chris nodded, hoping for a lunch invitation. This conversation seemed to be going well.
“So do I and a lot of Science Club people. Why don’t you sit with us and let everybody get a look at you and see what they think?”
“That would be great. Thanks.” Chris was happy to be included, even if it was seemingly on a trial basis.
In the cafeteria, he sat with San and two other kids—a tall, lanky, red-haired boy who introduced himself as Malcolm, and Brooke, a petite Black girl with springy, dark curls.
“Chris is in Mr. Little’s third-period class with me,” San explained by way of introduction as they settled down to eat their lunches. Chris was the only one of them eating the lunch the cafeteria provided. The others all had packed lunches with fresh fruit and raw vegetables and sandwiches on whole wheat bread. Chris made a mental note to tell his mom that he wanted to start bringing his lunch. He would also have to be specific about what kind of foods to buy and pack. He couldn’t let these kids see him eating peanut butter and jelly on soggy white bread.
“Well, you must be reasonably intelligent, then,” Malcolm said, looking Chris over. “Mr. Little only lets a handful of freshmen into his level-two classes.”
Brooke smiled. “Yeah, the freshmen who don’t make the cut have to take Mrs. Harris’s earth science class.”
“I know, right?” Chris said. Josh and Kyle were in Mrs. Harris’s class.
“Oh, come on, guys. They do lots of really challenging experiments,” Malcolm said, “like mixing vinegar and baking soda to make a volcano.” His voice dripped with sarcasm.
“You’re terrible,” Brooke said, but they all laughed.
“They also collect fall leaves and glue them to construction paper,” Malcolm added. “Though it’s too hard an assignment for most of them.”
Chris laughed some more along with his—he hoped—soon-to-be friends.
San could hardly contain himself. “And their final exam,” he said, laughing so hard he almost couldn’t speak, “is to try to find the school cafeteria.”
“Many fail, of course,” Malcolm said, snickering.
Chris couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed so hard. Of course, he felt a little bad because when he laughed about the stupidity of Mrs. Harris’s students, he was also laughing at Josh and Kyle, who had been his friends since he was old enough to walk and talk.
But he knew if he was going to reach his goals, he couldn’t be sentimental. It was time to move up to a better class of friends.
* * *
As soon as the dismissal bell rang, Chris hurried to Mr. Little’s classroom. He couldn’t wait to hear about the lock-in. Other students must have felt the same way because when he got there, the room was nearly full and abuzz with chatter. He found an empty seat near San.
“I wonder what Mr. Little has cooked up this year,” San said to Chris.
Chris smiled. “I don’t know. I hope it’s cool.”
“Oh, it will be,” San answered, as though Chris’s statement implied some kind of doubt in Mr. Little’s abilities. “Until you’ve experienced it, you can’t possibly understand. It will be life-changing.”
Chris nodded. He guessed he didn’t understand, but he was looking forward to learning. And a life-changing experience was exactly what he needed.
“Hey,” San said, “Malcolm and Brooke and I have a study group that meets at Cool Beans Coffee on Wednesdays after school. You should come.”
“Are you sure? Are Malcolm and Brooke okay with it?” Chris asked. He didn’t want to appear pushy, like he was trying to force his way into their friend group.
“Yeah, they suggested it,” San said. “They like you.”
Chris smiled. He could feel his life changing already.
The room fell silent when Mr. Little entered. He walked down an aisle of the classroom like a celebrity walking the red carpet. When he stopped and stood before them, he said, “Greetings, my sweet little guinea pigs! Are you ready to hear what kind of experience I have planned for this weekend?”
