I just looked at her. "That part I haven't figured out yet. Maybe when your parents get home we can ask them."
"It's funny. For once there's something you don't know!"
"Oh, Shelley, if you only knew! There's lots of things I don't know!", I said with a laugh.
She grinned. "Maybe I can teach you some."
"I'd like that."
"Anyway, let's figure that you figure out how to put a cigarette on that end and we smoke a bunch of cigarettes. How do we get the tar out of the cotton?"
"The way I see it, we open it up, take out the cotton balls, and mix the cotton balls in a solvent. The tar goes out of the cotton into the solvent, and then we boil off the solvent.", I replied.
"We do that down here?", she asked, looked very warily at the idea.
"God no, not unless we want the house to blow up! I think we had better do that over at school in the chem lab." She looked rather relieved at that.
We took a break at that point, and settled back onto the couch, where Shelley tried to teach me a few things. She was an excellent teacher. I got a bit bolder and began moving my hands around her back (she had on a small bra under her very thin sweater) and then around to the sides and her front. She had medium sized breasts. She didn't complain, but simply moaned louder when I began touching her through her sweater. Her face was very flushed when we had to stop because her parents started coming in.
Okay, it wasn't just her. I was breathing pretty hard as well. It had been a long time since I had made out with a teenage girl like that, and Shelley seemed very responsive. We both got off the couch and turned our backs on each other, and tucked in our shirttails and tried to clean up and look innocent. Almost as one we turned around to face each other and gave sheepish grins.
I smiled and said, "You know, I plan to become a mathematician, but chemistry seems pretty enjoyable, too."
Shelley laughed at that. "I'm starting to like it, too." Then she smiled and got a little more serious. She sat down on the arm of the couch and said, "You're not at all what I expected."
"Oh?"
"I figured you to be a super serious nerd and a total loser, and you're not." I raised an eyebrow at this. "Oh, I mean, you're just a genius and all, but you're, like, normal, too." She licked her lips and smiled. "You sure don't kiss like a genius."
I had to laugh at that. "And just how do geniuses kiss?", I asked.
She laughed with me. "I don't know, but not like that!"
"I'll have to give you a list of geniuses and how many kids they've had. They aren't a bunch of monks." I got a little more serious, as well. "Does this mean you won't be embarrassed to be around me in school? I won't be a secret?"
"That's not fair Carl, I haven't been treating you like that.", she answered me.
I rubbed my face. "No, no you haven't. I apologize for that. I get treated so differently at times, it's hard to remember not to be sensitive about things. I'm sorry."
She nodded. "We'll talk about that sometime." She looked at the project. "Let's get some help on this." She walked over to the basement stairs and yelled up the stairwell, "Daddy, can you come down and give us a hand?"
Chapter 9: The Science Fair
Shelley showed her father what we had concocted and asked about something to hold a cigarette in. He scratched his head for a moment, and then pulled a pack of cigarettes, Marlboros, out of his pocket. He lit it up and took a drag on it, and then put the filter end into the end of our filter. "Turn it on.", he ordered.
I reached across the table and flipped the switch on the pump. It started chugging away, and the cigarette was pulled firmly into the small pipe on the end of the adapter we were using as a filter cap. The coal glowed brightly and began to quickly march down the length of the cigarette, to ultimately go out when it hit the filter. I turned off the pump. We all looked at each other, and Mr. Talbot said, "That cockamamie gizmo actually works. Nice going, kids."
I stared at it again. "Yeah, I guess it does." Holy shit, this thing actually worked!
Mr. Talbot lit up another Marlboro and put it in place and I flipped the switch again, and we watched it smoke another cigarette. "Well, now what? What exactly are you planning on doing?" He asked it of his daughter, and lit up another cigarette. This one he started smoking himself.
Shelley stumbled a little explaining it, but I refrained from taking over. This was her moment and I didn't want to ruin it. At the end she turned to me and asked, "Did I say that right?"
I smiled. "Pretty much. By the end of this, we're going to have to pretty it all up, but you got it right. We're going to smoke a bunch of cigarettes through it, collect the tar, and measure it all."
"Going to prove I shouldn't be smoking these things, huh?", he said with a grunt.
"Daddy, it's not like that!"
"Yeah, it is, honey. That's exactly what it is. Don't worry about it. If somebody had done this forty years ago, maybe they wouldn't be killing me now.", he replied.
"Daddy?", she asked, suddenly fearful.
He coughed and smiled. "Not just yet, baby, but one of these days. I've still got a few years left. Just don't you grow up as stupid as your mother and me. You, neither, young man.", he said to me.
"No thanks, sir. My father smokes L&Ms and I have no interest in it either.", I responded.
He just nodded at that. "Just how many cigarettes are we talking about, anyway?"
I looked a little sheepish at that. It was a big number. "Uh, I figure we're going to need about five cartons per batch, and probably two or three batches."
He stared at me and gave a quiet 'oof' sound. "That's a lot of cigarettes. You got any preferences on brands?"
I shrugged. "More a matter of what they aren't. We don't want menthols, because they add a chemical to the tobacco which will just complicate things. And they shouldn't be filter tips, just tobacco."
"Why not?", he asked curiously.
"Well, we just built a filter. We don't want any of the tar stopping at the cigarette, but only in the big filter."
"Makes sense. Camel has a non-filter brand. You could try that, I suppose."
"Uh, would you be able to buy some for us? I mean, we'll pay, but no way is anybody going to sell us five cartons of cigarettes. We're only fourteen!", I said.
He looked at me for a minute, and then lit up another Marlboro. "You already bought all these parts yourself, didn't you?" He waved a finger towards the various filter parts.
I nodded. "Yes, sir."
He nodded in understanding. "Tell you what, I'll take care of the smokes. You and your parents can take care of the rest of the expenses. Agreed?"
"Yes, sir, that would be fine." I stuck out my hand. What that meant was that I would pay my half of the bills. My folks would happily donate their time, but wouldn't cough up one red cent.
We shook hands and went upstairs. He offered to drive me over to my house, and today Shelley decided to come with us. She got into the back seat, so I did too, and she sat close to me. It was a move that caught her father's eye, and while he didn't say anything, he looked at us curiously when I got out. I refrained from kissing her good-bye, the better part of valor being discretion, and all that sort of thing.