Chemistry with Kadena

Detention

"Some molecules have the same formula, but are assembled differently. They are like mirror images," Mrs. Carlyle informed the class. She held up both of her hands, palms facing out. "Take your hands, for instance. The left hand looks just like the right, but the thumbs do not occur on the same corresponding side, but rather the opposite side. They are mirror images. Think of the molecules in this way."

She began writing all the things she had just stated on the white-board so her students could copy the information down in their notes.

"Now, these are called isomers," Mrs. Carlyle continued, emphasizing the new vocabulary word and underlining it on the board. "You could also say that they are chiral, depending on the kind of isomerism they display. And while they have the same formula and are composed of the same elements, they do not function the same in the same way."

Adena sighed out of boredom. It wasn't that she didn't understand chemistry, it was just boring. She'd much rather be outside and enjoying the sun and the shade of the trees rather than learning about molecules and such. But the only thing that made this class bearable was that she had a perfect view of the girl she'd been crushing on since freshman year, a cute, outgoing, spontaneous girl by the name of Kat Edison. Adena glanced over at her and noticed that she looked pretty focused, despite the dry material being preached to them at the moment. Adena tried to use that as motivation to refocus herself on the lecture material.

"Some prime examples would be ibuprofen, which has the formula C13H18O2," Mrs. Carlyle told them, drawing two mirror-image structures on the board and labeling them. "Ibuprofen has an S-isomer and an R-isomer. The S is the one you want to take as a painkiller, whereas the R will do nothing for you in the case of pain relief..."

Adena found herself holding back a yawn and looked back over at Kat Edison, who'd lucked out and gotten a seat by the window. And boy, did she look beautiful in the sunlight. Her skin seemed to glow and Adena could see every detail of her hair as it reflected the sun's rays. She swore it was a scene straight out of a painting.

Kat Edison was stunning...

"Another example is carvone, with the formula C10H14O," Mrs. Carlyle paused again to draw and label the two structures. "The R-isomer smells like spearmint to the human olfactory sensory organs, but the S-isomer smells like caraway seeds. That's pretty strange, once you recall that they have the same elements and same amount of those elements in their structure. Such a slight variance—in this case, arrangement—can result in such a drastic change..."

Mrs. Carlyle droned on and on about all these different examples of isomers and chirality that she could think of off the top of her head. Adena couldn't focus. Not with Kat Edison sitting there and looking like she did.

Kat had the fullest, most beautiful lips Adena had ever seen, and wide-eyed innocence about her. And when she laughed, she had this high-pitched cackle that made Adena melt to her very core. She sighed as she realized her friends were right—she had it, and she had it bad for Kat Edison.

Meanwhile, Kat, master of looking focused when really she was spacing out and doodling random things in her notebook, kept noticing a fellow classmate by the name of Adena el-Amin, looking her way. Adena's intervals of focus on her kept growing longer and longer each time, and this current period of staring still hadn't ended yet. Kat giggled to herself and checked to see if Mrs. Carlyle was looking her way. She wasn't.

So Kat succumbed to her impulsivity and did the first thing that popped into her mind: she posed for Adena.

Now, it wasn't a real pose. It was an exaggerated, corny, hand-on-the-hip, pouty-lip pose. She waited for a reaction.