Page 11 of Emma on Fire

“Morning, meathead.” Emma does her best to offer him a real smile. She actually likes Elliott, even if he’s never read a book he wasn’t forced to. He has big blue eyes and Cupid curls; he looks like a grown-up baby doll. She surreptitiously checks for a pull string in his back, and wonders if “Morning, gorgeous” is one of his preloaded statements.

“Directions are in the packet at your stations,” Ms. Geller says. “I know that I don’t need to tell you this, but open flames are dangerous, so please be careful with your precious limbs.”

“Ha ha, don’t get any crazy fire ideas, Emma,” Spencer Jenkins calls from the neighboring table.

Emma rolls her eyes at him. Spencer thinks he’s funny because no one has ever told him he isn’t. Probably no one has told him no in his whole life either. For his sixteenth birthday he got a custom Rivian with $100,000 in the glove compartment. Ava sniffed and called him nouveau riche, but Spencer just grinned and said, “Thericheis all that matters, baby.” And maybe that was what it took to convince her, because two weeks later, they were stuck together like lampreys outside the student union.

Emma can’t stand either of them anymore. But is it really their fault? Or is it because now she envies them? Not because they’re rich—Emma comes from money too—but because nothing bad has ever happened to them.

She watches as Ava blows Spencer a kiss. Probably it’s a little bit of both.

“Dude,” Elliott says. “Earth to Planet Emma.”

Emma jumps. “Sorry,” she says. She opens the lab packet and turns to the right page. She’s so tired that the words blur and seem to dance. “‘Before you begin,’” she manages to read, “‘ensure that you are wearing appropriate safety gear, including safety goggles.’”

Elliott hands her a pair, and she slips them on. He’s wearing a lab coat now, too, so suddenly he looks like a grown-up baby doll who dressed as a mad scientist for Halloween.

“‘Dip the Nichrome loop into the beaker containing hydrochloric acid to moisten the loop,’” Emma goes on.“‘Then dip the loop into the beaker holding the strontium nitrate. Ignite the Bunsen burner.’”

Elliott dips the wire into the right beakers and hands it to Emma while he lights the burner. It makes a low hissing sound; the flame burns steady and pale blue.

When Emma holds the treated wire loop in the Bunsen’s flame, it turns a brilliant red.

“Dude,” Elliott says, becausedudeis his favorite word. “Totally satanic.”

“Don’t write that in the notebook,” Emma says. “Just put ‘red.’” She cleans the loop, dips it into the next beaker, and offers it to Elliott. “Your turn.”

The barium chloride burns apple green at the end of the loop. Emma writes this down.

“I should also not need to remind you to make your observationslegible,”Ms. Geller calls. “Maria, Spencer, James—I’m looking at you three in particular.”

Emma’s eyes wander off the lab paper, the flickering light of the flame drawing her in. How hot is it? A couple thousand degrees?

Elliott says, “Okay, what does it say we’re supposed to do next?”

Emma doesn’t answer. Why does it matter what compound they test? It’s a stupid experiment. They could simply write down a series of colors and pass this lab.

Or they could google all the answers in two seconds.

Which Cormac is probably doing with the phone he’s not supposed to have in class. He, like Emma, knows this is sixth-grade science. But—as Ava pointed out with a sniff when she googled Ms. Geller—their new teacher came to them from a public school. Ava practically sneered the words, shocked that somehow she’d be receiving instruction from someone who had been moving among the general public only months earlier.

“Ugh,” Elliott says, “where are the directions—hang on—”

Emma hears him, sort of. But her attention is focused on the steady gas flame. And on her arm moving toward it.

How can she explain what she does next?

Call it an experiment.

Or maybe a test.

She holds her arm three inches above the Bunsen burner’s flame. It doesn’t hurt right away. At first she feels nothing but warmth. But then the pain comes, and it does so in a white-hot rush, and suddenly it’s so bad that her brain starts to short-circuit.

One second.A knife made of fire pushes into her skin.

Two seconds.The blade is twisting inside her arm, cutting muscles as it spins. She isn’t Emma Blake anymore. She’s nothing but pain.

Three seconds.Shredding tendons. Splintering bone. The sun burning inside her skin.

---