"I mean, if this is a team effort, what do you bring to the team?", I replied.
Her face kind of scrunched up at this. An original thought would kill this girl, and right now she was experiencing death-like symptoms. "Uhhhh..."
I let her off the hook. "Listen, let me give it some thought. I'll talk to you tomorrow. Alright?"
"Thanks, Carl, you're tremendous!", she said, and then she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek! She was off and down the hallway after that, while I stood there in shock, rubbing my cheek until the class bell rang. I was late to English 9.
I was lost in thought the rest of the day. Developing a project outline for a scientific experiment was a piece of cake. I had spent fifty years working with math and the hard sciences before, even at the construction company. I jotted down notes quickly. No, what had me wondering was Shelley. The way she had looked at me, and that kiss ... well, that kiss really made me wonder! It had been a long time since that had happened to me, and I liked it. Was she trying to buy my support via some form of sexual gratification. A Buckman can't be bought - but we can be rented! I looked forward to negotiations.
By the next morning I had developed two plans of attack, one for me doing the project alone and the other for working as a team. We had a week to develop our planned projects, for review by the science teachers, but I wanted to get my project approved before Randy submitted his plan. I saw Shelley in the hallway before class and asked her to meet with me at lunch. Normally she would never have been seen with a geek like me, but she readily agreed. She must be desperate, I thought.
She was. She admitted she needed a good grade on this project in order to pass Science, and everyone knew I was going to win. She was also a lousy negotiator, revealing the weakness of her position like this. I brought out the two person plan and explained it. "Okay, here's the plan. We're going to smoke a whole lot of cigarettes and collect all the tar, and then measure it."
"We're going to what?! I don't smoke and I don't plan to start!", she protested.
I grinned at her. "Good for you. Neither do I. No, we're going to build a machine and let it do the smoking for us." I pulled a sketch I had worked on out of my binder and laid it down. "See, here's how it works. First we get a vacuum pump, and then we simply make a few filters and attach them to the pump. Finally, at the other end, we make a mouthpiece and stick in a cigarette. We turn on the pump and light the cigarette. The pump draws the air in and the smoke goes into the filter. Afterwards we measure what was in the filter." I traced the parts of the system with my finger, and Shelley followed along.
She slowly nodded, but looked up at me. "We do all that for only one cigarette?"
I shook my head. "No, never work that way. There's not that much tar in a cigarette. We'll have to smoke a lot of cigarettes, a whole lot."
"Like how many? Besides, where do we get the cigarettes? We can't buy them. We're not old enough to buy them."
That was questionable, since I knew several guys who already smoked, however no way was I going to buy them from a vending machine. I had given it some thought though. "I'm not completely sure, but probably several cartons." She looked at me confused. "Do either of your parents smoke?", I asked.
She nodded. "Both of them do."
"Okay. There's twenty cigarettes in a pack, and ten packs in a carton. That makes two hundred cigarettes per carton. Five cartons is a thousand cigarettes."
"That's a lot of cigarettes."
"Yeah, but we need that many. I don't know how much tar is in a cigarette, but it's on the order of milligrams. A milligram is a thousandth of a gram.", I explained.
"So a thousand cigarettes is..." She looked stumped.
"A thousand milligrams is one gram. Now we'll never be able to detect a milligram, but a gram we can measure. If it's more than a milligram per cigarette, it becomes easier." I showed her how the filters would work. "We can take the filters apart after we weigh them and then collect the tar chemically."
"You can do that?", she asked.
"WE can do that.", I replied. Her eyes opened at this. "If we are doing this as a team, it won't just be me. You'll have to help out, too. Otherwise I can do it on my own."
She nodded slowly. "Uh, okay, but what can I do? I'm not all smart like you. I don't even know what grams and stuff are. How am I going to help?" I figured Shelley was planning on smiling and flirting and getting that silly nerd, Carling Parker Buckman, to go along with her, for the sheer enjoyment of her company. Five minutes after the A was handed out, Shelley would be history.
I reached across the table and laid a hand on top of hers. "Don't worry. I've thought of that as well. You're going to be a lot of help." I squeezed her hand and then pulled my arm back. No use frightening the prey away. The hunter had to leave a little more bait out first.
"Oh? How so?", she asked suspiciously.
Time to calm the prey down, show her that the trap wasn't really there, but just part of the landscape. "Well, we need a place to set this up. We're going to need someplace which can be secured, without a lot of people wandering through and messing it up."
"Here, after school?"
"Take too long to smoke all those cigarettes.", I answered.
She shrugged. "Home?"
"There's five other people at home, several of whom would take the thing apart or turn it off or something, and I don't have a basement to lock it in."
"Well, I do. I mean, we have a basement. We could set it up there.", she said.
I nodded. "Any kid brothers who'd wreck it?"
"I'm the baby of the family. The only person other than my parents is the cat, and we can keep her out of trouble."
"See, you're already helping. We set the lab up in your basement. We can smoke cigarettes down there after school. You help with that, and get your parents to buy the cigarettes. I'll do the science. Do you know how to type?"
"Better than you, Carl. I've seen your typing!" She smiled at this. We shared the same typing and home economics classes.
"Then you can type up our final report. It's a natural partnership. Even at the actual fair itself. I'll stand there and look like a nerd, and you can dress up and look pretty. We can't lose!"
"I can do more than just look pretty!"
I laid my hand on hers again, just for a moment, and squeezed it again. "I know that, and this will be your chance to prove it. Besides, you end up better off than I do."
"How so?" She never removed my hand.
I pulled back and smiled. "Because you'll always be pretty, and now you'll show how smart you are. As for me, I'll still be smart, but I'll never be pretty!"
She giggled loudly at this and agreed to my terms. I turned in our project outline that afternoon, beating Randy by three days. The first few weeks would all be research anyway, and I would have to do that on my own. My compliments to Shelley notwithstanding, the brain portion of the project was all mine. She was a gorgeous airhead.
I got home late from school that night, missing the school bus, and had to walk. It was only about a mile and a half or so, and my new and improved shape wasn't even a light workout. I came in the door to find Mom standing there. "Detention? Wait until your father hears about this!" The school must have called her.