The Explosionist

A
S A SMALL CHILD
, Sophie used to tell herself the story of her own life, pictures and captions running inside her head just like a real book. Even at fifteen, she found herself now and again transfixed by the sense of her surroundings flattening out into a picture-book illustration: the fair-haired chemistry teacher, beakers and test tubes in racks along the countertops, rows of pupils at their desks, and near the back Sophie’s own slight figure, a cone of sunlight conveniently picking out her head and shoulders (gray eyes, snub nose, sallow skin, straight black hair bobbed short with a fringe to keep it tidy) so that there was no mistaking the main character.

The warmth of the sun on her face brought Sophie three-dimensional again. She blinked and breathed deeply, the
pungent smell of fresh-cut grass cutting through the fug of waterproofed raincoats and formaldehyde.

“Sophie, don’t you know the answer?” whispered Leah Sinclair, Sophie’s lab partner.

The answer to what?

Sophie stole a quick look at the blackboard, which held the formula C
₃H
₅(ONO
₂)
₃. Beside it stood Mr. Petersen looking even more harried and chalky than usual, so that Sophie had to fight a ridiculous impulse to get up and brush the dust off his tweed jacket. His mixture of handsomeness and haplessness brought out in her a painful tender feeling which she had entirely failed to keep secret from the other girls. Sophie
hated
being teased,
really
hated it, but she still couldn’t help gazing at Mr. Petersen with an expression of sheeplike devotion. It wasn’t surprising the others found it funny.

“Can none of you name this chemical?” said the teacher.

Sophie was about to put up her hand when she heard Leah whisper to the girl on the other side of her. Sophie turned and glared. If Leah had just said something about Sophie being in love with Mr. Petersen, it was grossly unfair; Sophie would never have embarrassed Leah by mentioning the well-known fact of her being in love with the games mistress.

Sophie slouched down in her seat. Through her lashes she could see Mr. Petersen looking surprised, puzzled, even
a little hurt. Something in her usually strained to answer him as quickly, as fully, as
perfectly
as possible, but today she kept her eyes fixed on her hands and fiddled with her mechanical pencil.

Mr. Petersen gave a defeated-sounding sigh and crossed his arms.

“I’ll give you three clues,” he said. “It has a sharp, sweet, aromatic taste.”

The other girls’ faces were so blank, it made Sophie squirm (oh, why couldn’t she just be like everyone else and not know the answers?). It was horrible having everyone think of her as an evil Goody Two-shoes when she really wasn’t like that at all. She bit her lower lip so hard she tasted blood.

“It is sometimes used to treat a heart disease called angina.”

A long pause.

“It freezes at thirteen degrees centigrade.”

This one was such a dud of a clue that Sophie couldn’t stop the answer from bursting out.

“Nitroglycerin,” she said about ten times more loudly than she meant to.

“Nitroglycerin,” Mr. Petersen repeated. He sounded pleased (Sophie absolutely
hated
herself for caring what he thought of her). “The active ingredient in dynamite, one of the most powerful explosives known to man.”

The other girls perked up. Explosives were good fun. Sophie had more complicated feelings about dynamite, which was only to be expected: She had been a very small child when both her parents died in an accident at the Russian dynamite factory her father directed.

“Nitroglycerin’s a powerful blessing to mankind,” Mr. Petersen went on. “Doctors use it to treat heart disease, most often in the form of a patch stuck to the skin, although one patient stuck his butter knife into a toaster and received a modest electric shock that actually caused his patch to explode.”

Sophie saw a few girls cough so that they would have an excuse to hide their smiles behind their hands. Was the mind of the fifteen-year-old girl a closed book to Mr. Petersen?

“Even a tiny trace of nitroglycerin placed upon the tongue will give you a pulsating, violent headache,” the teacher went on, his voice soft, even, and rather sleep-inducing. “A dog given nitroglycerin will foam at the mouth and then vomit; within seven or eight minutes it will pass out and almost cease breathing.”

Sophie could hear Priscilla Banks and Jean Roberts almost choking with laughter behind her. She shrank down lower in her seat.

Mr. Petersen pretended not to notice the laughter, but Sophie thought he looked hurt.

“Roughly seventy-five years ago, in the eighteen-sixties,” he continued, “half a dozen terrible factory explosions led the Federated European States to ban the production of nitroglycerin altogether. Soon afterward, a massive explosion near the Wells Fargo building in San Francisco led to that city’s nitroglycerin being seized and destroyed, and before long to a prohibition on its manufacture in both the Northern Union of States and the Southern Confederacy. We must be grateful to Alfred Nobel (the patron saint, so to speak, of the Hanseatic states) for stabilizing nitroglycerin by mixing it with a porous earth called kieselguhr. In doing so, he invented the explosive that would change the world:
DYNAMITE
.”

He began rooting around in his pockets. “I hadn’t meant to show you this, but look….”

They craned forward to see the thing in the palm of his hand: an orange cardboard cartridge that looked like something from a sweetshop window.

“I have enough dynamite here in my hand,” said Mr. Petersen, “to blow up the entire school.”

The shuffling and whispering stopped. Sophie sucked in her breath.

“Dynamite,” he repeated, enjoying the girls’ rare attentiveness. “The word comes from the Greek for ‘power.’ Dynamite Number One was Nobel’s name for his first nitroglycerin compound, manufactured by Nobel Explosives,
Limited. Engineers use it to mine metals and blast railway tunnels through tons of rock, but dynamite also allows Scotland and the other members of the New Hanseatic League to retain independence. By providing the Federated European States with the best explosives in the world, we secure for ourselves the power of self-determination.”

It was hard not to feel a little sick, looking at the charge of dynamite in his hand.

“Dynamite is quite stable at room temperature,” Mr. Petersen assured them. He tucked the stick back into his pocket. “Today’s experiment, however, will give you some sense of the extraordinary power of explosives, even in minute quantities. We will manufacture nitrogen triiodide, which belongs to the same chemical family as nitroglycerin. Then we will blow it up.”

Sophie sat up straighter as Mr. Petersen wrote the equations on the blackboard. The first equation told how the chemical was formed, the second what happened when it broke down into smaller parts, releasing a massive quantity of energy:

3I
₂+ NH
₃—> NI
₃+ 3HI

2NI
₃—> N
₂+ 3I
₂

“Unlike dynamite, nitrogen triiodide is so sensitive that it will
explode when poked with a stick,” the teacher warned as he handed around the supplies. “Even the touch of a feather will produce an explosion.”

Nan Harris was rolling her eyes. The blood rose hot in Sophie’s cheeks and she put up both hands to cool them, hoping nobody would notice.

“You must wear goggles during the experiment,” Mr. Petersen continued, “as iodine vapor irritates the eyes and the respiratory system.”

“What about my asthma, sir?” asked Josie Humphries.

“Any girl with asthma or other respiratory difficulties is excused from participating,” Mr. Petersen said, frowning. “To make up the missing work, she will hand in an extra set of sums on Monday; the first ten problems, let us say, on page two hundred thirty-five in the textbook.”

Josie subsided, and the girls got down to work. With Leah watching, Sophie ground the iodine in a mortar and put a few grams of the dark brown powder in a saucer, then poured in ammonia water to cover it. After twenty minutes, she poured off most of the ammonia, the residue going onto two pieces of filter paper, which were dried with ether.

She looked around and saw that the others were dawdling, just as they always did in chemistry lab. It was hard to believe they were the same girls who would race about the tennis courts later on. She could never explain to them why she felt
exactly the opposite: chemistry and physics made Sophie lively, while sports practice filled her with lethargy. Fortunately she had an excuse for running slowly: a slight limp that was the only remaining symptom of the broken femur she had sustained long ago in the explosion that killed her parents. Sophie had been thrown clear of the building and found virtually unharmed, except for the injury to her leg and a few cuts and bruises.

When all of the girls were ready, Mr. Petersen distributed the feathers for detonating the explosive. Sophie had imagined herself wielding the cast-off plumage of an ostrich or a peacock whose luxuriant fronds might have decorated a particularly expensive hat. It was a disappointment to be given an ordinary pigeon feather, she thought, dutifully setting up the ring stand with its two filter papers covered with dark powdery nitrogen triiodide.

“Class,” said Mr. Petersen, “is everyone ready?”

The girls at the next station quieted down, and they all took their places, lowering their goggles.

Sophie wanted to be the one to trigger the explosion, but fair-mindedness compelled her to offer the feather to Leah.

“You do it, Sophie,” Leah said, edging away from the counter.

“On your mark,” said Mr. Petersen. “Priscilla, stop chattering and put on those goggles. Ready. Steady. Go!”

The moment Sophie touched the feather to the bottom paper, it exploded, detonating the second sample and releasing a violet puff of iodine gas. All around the classroom the reaction was duplicated in a spectacular demonstration.

They spent ten minutes cleaning up, and then the bell rang. As the other girls collected their books, Sophie jotted down a few more notes. The second bell went, and she hurried to put her things together.

Just before she reached the door, Mr. Petersen spoke behind her.

“Sophie? May I have a word?”

At that exact moment the glass in the classroom windows shattered inward, and a soft, slow thump shook the lab equipment in its mountings. The shock moved through the air like a load of cement.

Seconds later Sophie found herself on the floor, Mr. Petersen crouched over her. The room was strangely quiet, though she could hear the Klaxons outside. She felt something wet on her forehead. She raised her hand to her temple, then looked at her fingers and saw a smear of blood.

Confused and disoriented, she thought for a moment that the dynamite in Mr. Petersen’s pocket must have blown up, though if this had been the case, surely neither of them would have survived the explosion.

The shock wave produced by nitroglycerin—why was she
thinking this?—moved at over seventeen thousand miles per hour.

“Damn, damn, damn,” said Mr. Petersen, so close she could feel the heat of his body against hers. “Oh, damn and blast it, Sophie, are you all right?”

“Quite all right,” said Sophie, struggling to her feet.

Mr. Petersen helped her up. Usually Sophie hated being helped, but now all she could think about was how shaky she felt and also what a waste it was to find herself so close to Mr. Petersen under circumstances not at all conducive to the intimate conversations that leavened her daydreams.

He was pressing a handkerchief into her hand; it was none too clean, but she held it to her head anyway, hoping the blood wouldn’t stain her uniform. Her great-aunt would never allow her a new one so close to the end of term.

Afterward she thought his other hand might have rested on her shoulder for a moment, but she was never sure of it.

“Can you make your own way to the infirmary?” he asked. “I need to see that nothing’s broken here.”

It was an odd thing to say, given the great shards of window glass covering every surface. The floor was littered with the wreckage of test tubes, pipettes, and retorts.

He flushed a little at Sophie’s doubtful look, and for the first time she realized that Mr. Petersen was no less capable of mortification than Sophie herself—a strange and liberating insight.

“Go along, then,” he said, smiling awkwardly. “The headmistress will want everybody in the assembly room, but you must see Matron first.”

As Sophie had her forehead bandaged by Matron, her mind wandered back to the cartridge in Mr. Petersen’s pocket. How had an ordinary science teacher gained possession of a stick of dynamite? It was illegal for private citizens to own high explosives without a permit.

She collected her thoughts just enough to retrieve the stained handkerchief from the laundry bin when Matron wasn’t looking. Mr. Petersen probably wouldn’t think to ask for it, and there was nothing to stop Sophie from keeping it as a token of her hopeless and forbidden love. Was there?

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