My bruised hip ached for a few days, and then the pain faded away along with the ugly black-and-blue mark that kind of had the shape of the Volvo’s front grille, which would have been amusing if it hadn’t hurt as much as it did. I took kind of a small break from hanging out all day with Dave and Onion after that—probably more out of embarrassment than anything else—and hung out a bit more with Sam, our Geek Supreme.
I’m not sure what was up exactly with the nerds and geeks. What they lacked in social skills they more than made up for in intelligence. You would think that the two would cancel out, but they didn’t. The problem was, their very nerdiness and geekiness made it difficult to relate to them. Sometimes it was like they were speaking in secret code when they tried to explain some new technology or discovery that had them all excited; all you could do was smile and nod.
Another thing about geeks and nerds was that they were deadly serious about the most trivial elements regarding their beloved science fiction movies and TV shows, as if everyone should care deeply, too. I saw them nearly come to blows in the science labs and classrooms about the smallest little details in Star Wars and Star Trek, as if the whole purpose of life is to get those things exactly right or die. Dave joked that when I talk about The Movie, that was my inner nerd or geek trying to break out. That might be, but the full-time nerds and geeks took things to the extreme of the extreme.
As much as I couldn’t relate to them, I could still empathize with their lower social status plight. Maybe that has something to do with the way some people treated Kenny; I don’t know. My own status at The Big Brown Box was pretty much run of the mill—not revered, not ridiculed, just another face in the crowd—so I can’t say that’s the reason. The cruelest thing I saw were the girls who feigned interest in the guy nerds and geeks just to get help with some new tech toy they got for Christmas they just couldn’t figure out. Despite the risk to their carefully cultivated reputations, some girls were actually brazen enough to be seen in public with them, smiling and standing oh so close, sending the boys to new levels of sweaty awkwardness and false hope regarding the opposite sex. Of course, it all came crashing down once the tech lessons were over and the girls knew how to make whatever device they’d gotten do what it was they wanted it to do. And yet the same nerds and geeks guys fell for that heartless trick over and over again, as if for all their intelligence, that was one lesson they just couldn’t learn.
On the other hand, maybe they did know that the attention would be fleeting, but they were willing to play along for as long as it lasted because, well, that was still better than no attention from girls at all.
Either way, watching it happen was both painful and kind of sad.
Sam was still my favorite geek despite the bonfire fiasco at Homecoming. After that scare, I figured he would swear off fireworks altogether, but he actually seemed emboldened by the whole experience, as if he had decided he must be invincible.
“Aren’t you pushing your luck?” I asked him once after he set off a long string of firecrackers right outside the gym doors, using the doors as shields to watch the display. Exploding firecrackers danced all about, with a few finding their way right between Sam’s feet. He laughed his high-pitched staccato laugh.
“No really, Sam. Your luck’s gonna run out someday.”
“Nonsense. You make your own luck, my good man,” he replied, preparing to set off another firecracker pack.
When Sam bought fireworks, that was one thing. It was much more worrisome when he started making his own.
At first I didn’t think much of it. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing, until I realized that his homemade stuff often didn’t work as advertised. And when I say “didn’t work,” I don’t mean they were duds, although he had a few of those. It was the things that blew up in spectacular fashion rather than doing what they were supposed to do that really concerned me.
Once, Sam wanted to hold a fat homemade roman candle in his hand after lighting it. Given his dismal track record, I had my doubts about the wisdom of that.
“You know,” I told him as he lit the long fuse, “maybe you should play it safe and stick it in the ground.”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” Sam said, watching the fuse burn.
“No, really, Sam. Please, do it for me, will you?”
I wasn’t above groveling. Not this time.
“Okay. If you insist.”
“I do. Quick!”
Sam stuck it in the ground just as the burning wick disappeared inside the long tube. We both took a couple of steps back.
It blew up in a loud shower of sparks and flames that sent us staggering backward.
Sam was speechless. I wasn’t.
“Wow. That might have cost you a few fingers,” I said drily.
“Ouch,” was all he could say as we stared at the smoldering bits and pieces scattered in a wide circle.
I tried to talk to Sam about The Movie once—thinking he might be as fascinated by the thought of time travel as I was since science was his thing—but to my dismay, he dismissed The Movie as pure fantasy, unworthy of serious discussion.
“Of course you know time travel is impossible, don’t you?” he said, cutting me off as I speculated as to how the time machine might work. “It goes against causality. You know, the whole ‘if I go back in time and shoot my grandfather I never would have been born so I wouldn’t have been able to go back and shoot him’ type of thing.”
Dave had raised that very conundrum years ago, but somehow I still wanted to believe there was a logical way around it, only I didn’t know what it could be.
I offered a lame counterargument instead. “And yet you talk about interstellar spaceships, which seem just as impossible.”
Sam’s face took on a bright “you’re mistaken” look.
“Oh, but you’re mistaken,” he said brightly. “There’s a warp drive theory that just might be possible, one that doesn’t violate any of the laws of physics. We might be warping our way through space sooner than you think if we can solve the energy requirements. Faster-than-light travel has a much better chance of coming true than time travel.”
He made the last two words sound absolutely absurd.
Disappointed, I didn’t mention The Movie to Sam again. I wondered if I should have befriended a Doctor Who fan instead, someone who wanted time travel to at least be a possibility like I did.
One day, before my chemistry class, Sam met me in the hall with some “great” news. We walked into the lab together.
“I’ve got it.”
“Really? Well, I hope your doctor can help you get rid of it.”
I was proud of that quick response. It was like something Dave would have come up with on the spur of the moment. I guess Dave was a bigger influence on me than I realized.
He frowned. “Very funny, wise guy. I’m talking about the new powder I told you about.”
Sam was always experimenting with new explosive formulas. To his credit, rather than raid the school’s chemistry supplies, he had found some fly-by-night mail order outfits on the internet willing to sell him the chemicals he needed. Why he didn’t get busted by the Feds or Postal Inspectors or someone like that was a mystery to me.
I sat down wearily in my chair at the back of the room. Chemistry wasn’t exactly my favorite subject, and Sam’s quest for the perfect explosive was starting to get old.
I sighed. “Okay, so what’s so special about this new powder?”
Sam was nearly beside himself with joy. He leaned closer to whisper in secret, even though the few other people in the room couldn’t have cared less about his dangerous little hobby.
“It’s one-point-five-micron military-grade dark aluminum powder. That’s really wicked small, man. This will create my most powerful explosive yet.”
He held out a large, dark brown bottle he had been hiding behind his back.
I didn’t especially like the sound of that, or the looks of the bottle with its multiple bright red warning labels. “Military grade? And they sold it to you? Sounds dangerous, dude.”
When I tipped the bottle from one side to the other, the ultra-fine powder inside slide around almost like a liquid. It was actually kind of mesmerizing.
He nodded excitedly. “I know. Isn’t that grand?”
More students drifted into the room, followed by Higgins.
Sam straightened up and grabbed the bottle from me. He didn’t always see eye to eye with Higgins, even though Higgins gave him free reign to do pretty much whatever he wanted ever since Sam volunteered to keep the lab in tip-top shape and did. Somehow, I doubt Higgins had any idea that Sam was making his own ordnance.
Sam hid the bottle behind his back again and waved weakly to Higgins, who barely responded.
“Well, time to mix up my first batch.” He motioned to the small chemistry prep lab next to us, more a supply room than an actual workspace. “Enjoy your boring class.”
“Whatever.”
Cradling the bottle in front of him, Sam crept quietly into the lab and shut the door. Through the thick glass-and-wire window, he held a finger up to his lips.
As if I would even bother to tell someone, and as if they would actually care if I did.
The class began and soon Higgins has us lulled into a trance. A few studious students up front took notes furiously as Higgins droned on in his monotone voice, but most of us slumped in our chairs, reading other things or just plain falling asleep, not even trying to disguise it.
Twenty-two minutes into class, it happened.
There was a muffled boom that shook the walls and rattled the ceiling tiles, a deep, penetrating sound that made everyone jump in their chairs. Even Higgins lurched backward, dropping his chalk. In unison, we all turned to look at the door to the small chemistry lab. Where there was normally white fluorescent light shining through, now there was a dense gray cloud of smoke that roiled behind the window.
The fire alarm went off, the shrill buzz pulsing In unison to the flashing light for the hearing impaired above the lab door.
“Something blew up,” someone cried out, stating the incredibly obvious.
And then out of the dark cloud came a hand that pressed its palm firmly against the glass. The hand didn’t move, as if signaling for help but unable to do anything more.
Sam’s hand.
I leapt from my seat and raced to the door, two classmates right behind me.
“No!” Higgins’s voice roared over the alarm. “Don’t open it! The fumes could be toxic!”
I stood paralyzed, my hand on the doorknob, unable to do anything other than stare. It was a helpless, hollow feeling, one I’ve never felt before and never want to feel again.
“Come on! We have to get out! Now, people!” Higgins’s voice was louder still.
The two classmates behind me slowly turned to leave with the rest of the class. I found myself powerless to respond, my shoulders hunched and my heart thumping in my throat. The whole scene seemed impossible, unbelievable. I stared at Sam’s motionless hand as the fire alarm continued to blare, saw my own hand leave the doorknob and reach out toward his as if with a mind of its own, perhaps to make amends for recoiling from his shaky hands at homecoming. My hand perfectly covered his with only the cool glass between them, as if that were my other hand in there, as if that could have been me in that deadly, smoke-filled room.
And then Sam’s hand withdrew back into the darkness. It didn’t slide down like a drowning sailor as you might expect, it just pulled away and disappeared, and I found myself staring at the impenetrable gray cloud on the other side, the brief connection we had now gone.
I gasped several times in a row—how many, I don’t know—as if I had forgotten how to breathe.
“No, Sam.” I said quietly. “No.”
That was all I could say, the most I could offer.
“Wells!” Higgins yelled. “There’s nothing you can do for him. Let’s go!”
I finally tore my gaze away from the door and turned to follow Higgins, who seemed exasperated by my delay.
He glowered at me as we walked quickly to the nearest exit, the last two people in the building as far as I could see.
“You want to die, too?” he asked.
With those words, I felt my heart jump up to my throat again. The thought of Sam dying or already dead in the lab gave me that queasy, surreal feeling again, as if somehow this was happening to someone else far away, not us here and now.
Most everyone outside milled about with bored expressions, unaware that this wasn’t just another false alarm or someone’s idea of a stupid prank.
As the door clicked shut behind me, the fire alarm suddenly stopped as if it knew everyone was out of The Big Brown Box—or at least, everyone who was still alive. I immediately thought of the scene in The Movie where the Eloi who are lucky enough not to have been harvested by the Morlocks stand expressionless before those solid Morlock doors that had just closed, the wailing siren fading to silence, the Eloi who had marched hypnotically to the cruel death that awaited them already forgotten.
These people outside with me were the lucky ones all right, I thought with a sudden flash of anger, standing there like fatted cattle (as the time traveler calls the Eloi then), unable to comprehend the seriousness of the situation. They had no idea how lucky they were. No idea at all.
I resisted the urge to lash out and berate them like how the time traveler berates the Eloi for their cold indifference to the horrible fate of their own. Then I realized I was afraid to tell them it was Sam who might be dead or dying and hear them laugh about it because, gosh, Sam was just a geek, wasn’t he? Just some marginal nobody who nobody really knew or even cared about.
I felt isolated from the crowd and withdrew to a corner of the yard to sulk.
Onion spotted me and came forward. She stopped a few feet away and then approached warily.
“George? What is it?”
I struggled to put into words what happened and how I felt. “This isn’t a joke, that’s what. It’s Sam.”
“Sam? Sam the lab rat?”
“Don’t call him that! He might be dead.”
Onion’s hands flew to cover her mouth.
“What happened?” she asked again, quieter this time.
“There was an explosion. Sam was trapped in a supply room full of smoke.”
“Poor Sam.”
My anger subsided a bit once I realized that Onion truly sympathized, as I should have expected.
The sound of several fire engines grew louder as they came around to our side of the building. I saw Higgins nearly yank a fireman off of one of the trucks before it even came to a stop, gesturing wildly at the door we came out of as if to make it perfectly clear that time was of the essence.
Then to my relief I saw an ambulance pull right up on to the main sidewalk, as if they already had the urgent message. Students scattered out of the way, and the happy, mindless chatter immediately ceased.
I was glad to see their astonishment and the slow realization on their faces that this wasn’t a prank or a drill.
A murmur went through the crowd as the firefighters raced into the building wearing their breathing gear and carrying coils of hoses.
The paramedics were next, gurney in tow and wearing their own breathing gear. Higgins bounded in right behind them, red-faced and with his tie flapping over his shoulder.
After what seemed like an eternity, the paramedics reappeared just inside the doors with someone strapped to the gurney, an oxygen mask on the person’s mouth and nose.
“Ouch, George. My shoulder.”
I realized I was squeezing Onion’s shoulder much too hard and relaxed my grip. All I could picture was my mom on a gurney, years ago.
“If they hurry, that’s a good sign. But if they move slowly . . .”
She let the rest go unsaid.
The doors burst open and the paramedics flew with the gurney to the ambulance, shouting instructions to one another and into walkie-talkies. One of them held up an IV bag with a tube attached to Sam’s right arm. They loaded the gurney into the ambulance in a matter of seconds, the driver jumped into the driver’s seat, and the ambulance roared backward, lights flashing and siren wailing. It made a sharp U-turn to exit the way it came in, tires squealing in its haste to leave.
I felt myself able to breathe again.
“You okay now?”
“Not really. I’m exhausted.”
Higgins came out, bent over, and put his hands on his knees as if to catch his breath. Then he stood up and looked at me, his face pale and expression oddly blank.
I nodded at him and he nodded in return.
A crowd of other teachers and administrators soon surrounded him and took him to meet with the fire chief, who had exited the school with the other firefighters in no particular hurry at all.
Sam survived, although I never saw him again. I heard he had reduced lung capacity from smoke inhalation, permanent hearing loss, and dozens of scars where shrapnel was removed from his face, chest, and arms, but at least he was alive. He transferred to a private school for the physically disabled, where he continued his science studies—minus the pyrotechnics, safe to say. We stayed in touch by texts for a while, but the texts faded away in time as we ran out of things to say.
As for the chemistry storeroom, it came through in better shape than I thought it would have. All the ceiling tiles had come down, and there was shattered glassware on every shelf, but the only permanent damage was a black, moon-like crater in the middle of the countertop where Sam’s mortar and pestle had blown up, with long burn marks extending like rays in every direction from the center of the explosion. It took months for the school to replace the countertop, but in the meantime it became kind of a geek shrine met with silence for all those who saw it for the first time.
“He’s very lucky to be alive,” Higgins reminded me on more than one occasion. “There was absolutely nothing you could have done to help him, you know,” as if he sensed my pensive mood whenever we talked about it.
That was true enough, but what I won’t forget is how sometimes, things happen in life way beyond your control, and how you react speaks volumes about who you really are.