PANDEMONIUM

two

After the lesson was over, Breana was the only person left in the room that still cared that someone had walked all over my back. Her eyes lingered on me and that footprint as Aaron and I walked out of class.

I wouldn't mind telling her what happened to me that morning. She wouldn't have laugh. But talking about how I got stepped on isn't exactly the best conversation starter and I wanted to forget about it anyway.

Plus that Heptir goo was more important. I had to study it. And I knew just the person that could help me do it. There was this girl that I took Chemistry with called Jenny and she had her own electron microscope that she brought into class when we were doing classic experiments. She shared it with her friends a lot and sometimes when the work was over, I saw them using it to look at random tiny objects together and draw what they found.

Our chemistry teacher said there'd be more practical work this week so there was a good chance Jenny had brought it in again. I grabbed the piece of bark that had the goo on it from my locker and searched for her. What we saw in the microscope would determine if the Heptir plant was dangerous or not and there were books in the lab we could check.

I found Jenny outside the building walking to her next class. She had black frizzy hair and her light brown skin glowed a little in the sun. She wore blue leggings with whimsical white bubbles drawn on the bottom. It made her look like a bottle of soap without a label.

"Hey Jenny, can I use your microscope. I have something important to see."

"What is it?"

She told me that she had her microscope in her locker and I explained what I wanted to see.

"You found Heptir flowers!"

"Pretty much. And I need to know if they're dangerous or not. If it turns out that they're harmless I can finally stop worrying about them. Maybe hand them over to the teachers even."

She nodded her head and went to get her microscope. Good thing she didn't mind missing her next class, she carried no books with her so I assumed it must have been a free period, but it was still nice of her.

As we walked over to the Chemistry lab I spotted someone walking a long distance behind me wearing a deep blue hoodie.

I opened up the lab door for Jenny, seeing as she had her microscope to carry, and she walked through and set the thing down on the white work bench. I put the piece of bark next to the microscope as she plugged it in the wall. I opened up a drawer underneath the bench a bit further down that had a large periodic table above it on the wall.

There was a lab-rat in a cage on the other side of the room that was resting. You could see its tail twitch slightly. Maybe it was waking up.

I tossed the spare textbooks aside and tried to find the books on Heptir plants but I couldn't find any. Our teacher had read some chapters from those books to us a few week ago to teach us about the deadly ones, they had to still be there, they were extremely important. I searched some more drawers but only found one random textbook with a few pages ripped out.

"Someone took the books away," I said. "We won't be able to fact check without them."

Jenny wasn't at all concerned like I was. "We'll have to go to Mr. Forle's office and see if he has them,"

"He'll want an explanation for why we want them so badly."

"I'll tell him I wanted to study but I couldn't find the books I needed in the lab."

I nodded. "That works."

So we walked out and made our way to Mr. Forle's office.

"So do you actually think it's going to be dangerous?" Jenny asked.