Flame Test

There were five small dishes on every bench, each with a label in Mr Abernathy’s square hand, and each with a pinch of white powder in it that looked exactly like all the others.

SODIUM CHLORIDE. POTASSIUM CHLORIDE. COPPER CHLORIDE. STRONTIUM CHLORIDE. LITHIUM CHLORIDE.

“Flame tests,” said Mr Abernathy, from the front, in the voice. “You have done them before, in eighth grade, with a teacher who let you. You will now do them properly, with one who doesn’t. Goggles.”

Twenty-six people put on goggles. The laboratory filled with the small rubbery sound of elastic being pulled over hair.

“Each of these salts burns a different colour. You will dip your wire loop in the acid, then in the salt, then hold it in the flame, and you will write down what you see, and not what you expect to see, which is a different thing and the cause of most of the errors in the history of science.” Mr Abernathy held up a wire loop on a glass handle. “You will clean the loop in the acid between each salt. If you do not clean the loop, you will get the colour of the last salt as well as the next one, and you will have learned nothing except that you are untidy. Hartigan.”

“Sir.”

“Your Bunsen.”

Theo looked down at his Bunsen burner, which was standing on the bench with its rubber tube attached to the gas tap and was, as far as anybody could see, doing nothing whatever wrong.

“It’s not lit, sir.”

“It is not lit yet,” said Mr Abernathy. “I am speaking to it in advance.”

---

Theo could not light his Bunsen.

He had never been able to light a Bunsen. In eighth grade he had gone a whole term on Frederick’s flame. He had large hands that were good at everything requiring a hand, his mother said, except anything requiring a small hand, and the sparker that Mr Abernathy issued to every bench was very small, a little metal thing like a pair of tweezers with a flint in it, and when Theo squeezed it it went click and made a spark the size of a pinhead and the spark went nowhere near the gas.

“Turn the gas on first,” said Frederick.

“It’s on.”

“It’s not on. Listen. It’s not hissing.”

Theo turned the tap. The tap was a brass lever that went from across the bench, which was off, to along it, which was on, and Theo, who had large hands, turned it along and then, because it did not seem to have done anything, a bit more, past along, round to the other side, where it was very much on, and the Bunsen began to hiss like a cat that has seen another cat.

“Now,” said Frederick.

Theo squeezed the sparker.

---

He would have been watching. Normally he would have been watching, because he always watched Theo light a Bunsen in the way people watch somebody they love go up a ladder. But he was not.

He was looking at the five dishes.

They all looked the same. White powder, five little heaps. You could not tell from the picture. You had to put them in the flame and find out what they were, and you would get a different colour for each one, because the thing you could see was not the thing that it was, and the thing that it was only showed in the fire.

A PERSON UNDER SIXTEEN CANNOT BE KING.

REIGN.

He had said reign. He was sure now that he had said reign. And reign was a thing, and King was a thing, and he had thought until this morning that they were the same thing, like two dishes of white powder, and he was beginning to think, on the evidence so far (a proclamation, an oath, a seventh-grader, Priya’s face) that if you put them both in the flame they would come out different colours.

In his own right.

The words came up from somewhere, from the newspaper in October, from something he had read at the kitchen table without reading it, and he did not know what they were doing there, and then the Bunsen went whump.

---

It was not a large whump. It was a reasonable whump, the whump of a Bunsen that has had a great deal of gas going through it for some time and has been given a spark at last. A ball of soft blue-yellow flame went up out of the top of it about a foot, rolled over once in the air like a cat, and went out, and the Bunsen settled down to a tall, wavering, extremely enthusiastic flame about the height of a wine bottle, roaring.

Everybody in the room looked.

“Sorry, sir,” said Theo.

“Turn your gas down, Hartigan,” said Mr Abernathy, in the voice.

Theo turned his gas down. He turned it the wrong way first, and the flame went up, and then the right way, and it came down to something like a Bunsen, blue and steady and purring.

“Sorry, sir.”

“Your eyebrows are still where they were,” said Mr Abernathy. “I’ve checked. Carry on.”

At the back of the room, by the periodic table with the two wrong elements, Mr Stroud wrote something down.

He had come in during the whump. Frederick had not seen him come in. He was simply there, in the chair at the back, with the clipboard on his knee and the stopwatch in his palm, and on his face, which was otherwise exactly as it had been on the stairs and in geometry and by the bins, a very faint expression of satisfaction, like a man at a dinner who has been proved right about the fish.

---

They did the flame tests.

Frederick did them without thinking, the way he did everything he was good at. Acid, sodium, flame. Orange, bright, a street-lamp orange that filled the flame and stayed. Acid, potassium, flame. Lilac, pale and faint and gone almost before you saw it, the hardest one, the one you had to look for through a piece of blue glass because the sodium got into everything and drowned it. Acid, copper. Green, a lovely sharp blue-green, the colour of the river on Saint Patrick’s Day. He wrote them down. He wrote down what he saw.

Theo held the blue glass for him and said ooh at every one of them.

“Lithium,” said Theo.

“Clean the loop first.”

“I did clean it.”

“You didn’t. It’s still got copper on it. Look.”

Theo looked at the loop. It had a small green crust on it.

“It’s very hard,” said Theo, “to clean a loop when you’re keeping a score.” He dipped it in the acid. “I’ve had three more versions while we’ve been in here. Marcus’s sister says the King’s been demoted. Lucía’s heard you’re King of Sweden instead. And somebody in eighth grade has heard the old man’s your grandfather.”

“My grandfather’s Swedish.”

“I know. I said. They said that was the cover story.”

---

Mr Stroud came round the room.

He came round it the way he had come round geometry, slowly, up the side, looking at each bench as though it were fruit, and at each bench he stopped, and looked at the flame, and looked at the colour, and at the notes, and clicked the stopwatch, and wrote something.

He came to their bench as Frederick held the loop in the flame with potassium on it.

The lilac came up, pale and faint, a ghost of a colour, the way it always did, and Mr Stroud leaned in to see it.

He leaned in a long way. He was not a tall man and the bench was high and the flame was small, and to see the lilac properly you had to get your eye down level with it, which Mr Stroud did, leaning forward over the bench from the side, with the clipboard held flat against his chest in front of him like a breastplate, as he always held it.

The bottom edge of the clipboard was about two inches above the Bunsen.

“Sir,” said Frederick.

“Lilac,” said Mr Stroud, with satisfaction. “Potassium. Very faint. Very good. In Virginia we were taught to say mauve, but lilac will do.”

“Sir, your clipboard.”

“My clipboard,” said Mr Stroud, “is entirely in order, Hanover, as I hope your notes are,” and at that moment the corner of the top sheet, which had been hanging down over the edge of the clipboard by about an inch, the way the top sheet of anything does when it has been written on a great deal, touched the top of the Bunsen flame, and took.

---

It did not go up. It was a very well-behaved fire. It caught the corner of the sheet and ran along the bottom edge in a neat orange line, quite slowly, curling the paper up behind it, making a small crisp sound like somebody eating toast in the next room.

Mr Stroud looked down at it.

“Ah,” he said.

Nobody else said anything. Twenty-six people, in goggles, turned their heads.

Mr Abernathy came down the room. He did not hurry. Frederick had never seen him hurry in three and a half years and did not see him hurry now; he came down the room at exactly the speed at which he walked to the board, and took the fire blanket out of its red tube on the wall on the way, without looking at it, the way a man takes his coat off a hook, and shook it out as he came, and arrived at their bench, and laid it over the front of Mr Stroud’s clipboard, flat, and held it there with one hand.

“Mr Stroud,” said Mr Abernathy, in the voice in which he took the roll, “your notes are on fire.”

Mr Stroud looked at the fire blanket on his chest.

“So they are,” he said.

Mr Abernathy held the blanket for a count of five. Then he took it away and folded it, once, twice, and looked at the clipboard. The top sheet had a brown scalloped edge along the bottom, like a pie crust, and the bottom inch of it was gone.

“Out,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Thank you,” said Mr Stroud.

“Not at all.”

“In Virginia,” said Mr Stroud, “at the Fairfax Academy, we kept the fire blanket nearer the door.”

“So do we,” said Mr Abernathy, “in most rooms.” He looked at Theo’s Bunsen. “Hartigan, your flame’s too tall again. You’ve been leaning on the tap.”

“Sorry, sir.”

Mr Abernathy went back up the room with the fire blanket under his arm, and put it back in its tube on the way, and took up his place at the front, and said, in the voice, “Lithium next. Clean your loops,” and twenty-six people, in goggles, turned back to their flames.

---

Mr Stroud did not move for a moment.

He stood beside their bench and looked at the clipboard. He turned the scorched sheet up and looked at the back of it, and turned it down, and looked at the burned edge, and Frederick, who was standing right beside him and could not help it, could see that most of the writing on it was still there, the upright strict little hand, all down the page: Stairs. Bucket. History. Board. And further down, Geometry, and cardigans, and Boy in the H’s, inattentive, and the little circled 1, and below that, where the edge was, a line that had been mostly burned away, of which only the first word was left.

Hanover

The rest had gone.

Mr Stroud looked at it for some time. Then he unclipped the sheet, very carefully, by the corner that was not burned, and folded it in half and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket. He took a fresh sheet from the back of the clipboard and clipped it on top, and uncapped his pen.

He looked at Frederick.

“You were staring at it,” said Mr Stroud.

“Sir?”

“The flame. Before it caught. You were staring straight at it and you didn’t move. I’ve been watching you. You held a loop in that flame for forty seconds by my watch with nothing on it.” He held up the stopwatch. “Forty seconds.”

“I was looking for the lilac, sir.”

“There was no lilac. There was nothing on the loop. You’d already done the lilac. I saw you.” Mr Stroud wrote on the fresh sheet. “Chemistry. Mr Abernathy. 10.52. Fire, small, extinguished. Boy in the H’s.”

He paused. He looked at Frederick through his goggles, which he had not taken off, and which magnified his eyes very slightly, and the hand went along the shelf and stopped.

“Inattentive,” he wrote.

And the circle. And in it:

2.

---

Theo held up the blue glass in front of his own face and looked at the room through it, which turned everything a deep sea-colour, and said, very quietly, “That’s two.”

“I know it’s two.”

“Freddie, he set himself on fire and you got marked down.”

“I know, Theo.”

“That’s the best thing that’s ever happened.” Theo put the blue glass down and got the planner out from his back pocket, under the bench, and opened it, and wrote, and Frederick saw:

INSPECTOR HAS NOTICED: 2 INSPECTOR ON FIRE: 1

“Lithium,” said Theo, and dipped the loop.

The lithium burned red. A deep, clear red, crimson nearly, the colour of a pillar box, the colour of the uniform of the Guards on the terrace at Columbia Palace at seven in the morning. It was the best one. It was always the best one. Frederick looked at it and wrote it down and found that he had stopped thinking about the board for a full ten seconds, which was a record for the morning.

---

At the end of the lesson, while everybody was turning off their gas taps and the room smelled of hot wire and the faint pleasant scorch of Mr Stroud’s notes, Devon Price took his telephone out again, under the bench, and looked at it, and made a small sound.

Frederick did not look. He did not need to. He could see it in Devon’s face, which was turned down to the screen and lit from below by it, and which had on it the expression of a boy watching a number go up that he had not meant to make go up and could no longer make stop.

Mr Abernathy came down the room collecting the dishes of salt on a tray.

He came to Devon’s bench and stopped, and looked down at the telephone in Devon’s lap, which Devon had not had time to put away, and which still had the photograph of the board on it, A PERSON UNDER SIXTEEN CANNOT BE KING, and the line under it, and the number, which was now in four figures.

“Price,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Sir. Sorry, sir. Notes.”

Mr Abernathy looked at the screen for a long moment. Then he picked up the five dishes from Devon’s bench and put them on the tray, and moved on to the next bench, which was Frederick’s, and picked up their five dishes, sodium, potassium, copper, strontium, lithium, and put them on the tray beside the others, one at a time, square.

He did not look at Frederick. He said, in exactly the voice in which he had said Hanover at sixteen minutes past eight on the morning of the first of November, and on every morning since, at the same speed, with his eyes on the dishes:

“A person under sixteen, Hanover, can be a great many things at the same time. In my experience it is the main thing about them.”

And then, as he lifted the tray:

“Read your reading.”

And he went on down the room with the dishes.