I bundled up my paperwork and went back outside. I rode home through a cold wind and decided that the next time I needed to go over to the college, I would call and make an appointment and get somebody to drive me.
The next day at lunch I told Shelley about meeting Professor Milhaus over at Towson State, and how he had offered to give us some help. She was amazed at what I had achieved. So far she had simply managed to get her father to come and take the vacuum pump home. It was now sitting on the old table in her basement. We decided I would ride the bus home with her and I could see what the lab looked like. As soon as lunch broke, I found the pay phone at the school and called Dad to let him know I was changing my schedule, and that I would call when I needed a lift from Shelley’s; he would let Mom know in turn.
The ride to Shelley’s was interesting. She lived in our development, but on the other side of Charmuth Road, so she was on a different bus. We got a lot of questions when I got on with her, and then sat next to her, and she proudly proclaimed she was my partner in the Science Fair. For some reason this seemed to give her an improvement in status, which I couldn’t fathom. She was already in the ‘popular’ clique; why worry about being smart? I don’t claim to understand women.
I was already the King of the Nerds, and fully graced with all the rights and privileges of said kingdom. It was a rather dubious honor. The rights and privileges seemed few and far between.
Shelley lived about a half block from where we got off the bus, and as we walked to her house she tucked an arm in mine. This was the first physical touch that she had initiated, and I liked it. Maybe the King of the Nerds had some hidden rights. Droit du seigneur seemed a bit of a stretch, but I’d be willing to go along. We walked to her house, bumping hips and laughing. She let us in, telling me that her parents were both at work for another couple of hours. Interesting!
Before anything else could happen, I needed to see the lab area. The basement was well enough lit, if a bit dusty. The table was in the corner, with an old vacuum pump sitting on it. I looked around but couldn’t find an electric outlet, so Shelley looked and found one on the other side of the room. I picked up the pump and moved it off the table, and then we both picked up the table and carried it across the room. Then I grabbed the pump and set it up again. “You got any rags and Windex or something?” I asked. Everything was fairly dusty.
“Upstairs.”
“Can you go up and grab a bunch, please? We need to do some cleaning first.”
She scampered up the stairs and came back down a few minutes later with an armload of old rags and a bottle of Windex. I grinned when I saw her. “Professor Milhaus asked what you were doing, and I said you were Facilities and Logistics. I was right!” This didn’t get the response I expected, since Shelley didn’t know what either facilities or logistics meant. Oh, dear. Well, she was very ornamental.
We cleaned up the table and the vacuum pump, which was old and a little dirty and greasy. We still needed a power cord to connect up the pump, which made an ungodly racket when running, but it looked like it would work. I found a wrench and took off the suction end of the pump and stuck it in my backpack. I would need to go by the hardware store and come up with a filtration cavity. I told Shelley I would get my father to take me to the hardware store on Saturday and try and figure out something we could use, probably from plumbing supplies. With any luck we could have a working model next week.
“Wow! That seems awfully fast! I thought we didn’t have to do this until the spring?” she commented.
I looked around the room. At the other end of the basement was some old furniture. I led her over there and sat down on a ratty old couch. She sat down next to me. I leaned back into the corner and said, “You’d be surprised how quickly the time will go. Listen, you want an A on this, right?”
“I need an A on this,” she replied ruefully.
I didn’t react to that, but I admitted, “And I want to win this, not just get an A, so we have to do more than you’d think. First, we’re probably going to have to suck down about a thousand cigarettes to get a batch of tar to take over to Towson State. I don’t know how long it will take to smoke a cigarette, but even if we do one a minute, that’s three packs an hour. It might take us a couple of weeks to smoke fifty packs.”
Shelley blinked at that. “Wow!”
“It gets worse. That first batch of tar will go to Towson State, but they’ll be using it all. We won’t get anything back, which means we’ll need to make another batch for the demonstration of the project. Maybe even two batches.” Even so, I was privately worried we still wouldn’t win. We could win the Nobel Prize with the science, but Mike Misner could still beat us with even a half-assed project. You just can’t beat an incubator full of baby chicks for cuteness.
Shelley saw my worried look and smiled at me. “Hey, we’re going to win, I just know it! You’re too smart to do anything else!” Then she leaned over and kissed me again, only this time not on my cheek but on my lips. “I’m telling you, we’re going to win!”
I smiled and licked my lips. I hadn’t been kissed by a girl since Marilyn died on my first trip through eternity. I liked it, and the hormones going through me were not all that much under control. “Wow, is that how you plan to keep my morale high?”
She waved her arm at the room. “I’m not just good for facilities and logics, but I can also handle morale.”
I grinned. I could have explained the difference between logics and logistics, but I didn’t think that would be all that productive. On the other hand… “You know, I still think there’s an awful lot of work to do. I’m just feeling really depressed about it.” I moaned theatrically.
Shelley waggled her eyebrows at me. She shifted on the couch and crawled over me, and this time the kiss lasted a good deal longer. Then she sat back down on her heels. “Feeling better?”
“Some, but you know, it kind of comes and goes. I think I need another treatment.” I reached out and tugged her towards me. She crawled back on top of me and I stretched out. We began kissing again, and this time I slipped her a little tongue. Shelley instantly responded, and our tongues began dueling. We necked for another hour or so, until we heard a door open upstairs and the floor creaking. We separated, grinning, and got ourselves back in order.
I stood up and tucked my shirttails back in. “I hate to say it, but I think we’re going to have to work on my mental depression some more.”
Shelley licked her lips lewdly. “I know cures you wouldn’t believe!” She checked her own shirttails, and then grabbed my hand. “Come on, we need to go upstairs. I think my mom is home.” I allowed myself to be dragged upstairs to meet first her mother, and then her father when he came home.
Shelley’s parents were both heavy smokers. Nobody had ever heard of second hand smoke in those days, but you could probably get lung cancer just by walking through the house. Both her parents smoked two packs of Marlboros a day, and the house reeked of tobacco. Shelley didn’t smoke, and when I got done with this project, she’d never want to. Mr. Talbot drove me home, since he hadn’t even taken off his coat. The way he and Mrs. Talbot coughed, I hoped Shelley wouldn’t be an orphan before she graduated.
I suspected my father would end up quitting by the time I got through with this project, also. He smoked two packs a day of L&Ms, and had done so since he was in the Navy. He ended up quitting when I was in high school, and then took up cigars for another ten years, before quitting that, too. The curious thing was that for all that the anti-smoking zealots complain about the dangers, and God knows, it’s a deadly habit, not everybody who smokes gets cancer. Dad lived until he was 75 and never had a problem with his lungs. I smoked 26 years and when I had to quit I had a lung test and found I had the lungs of a teenager. Marilyn was seriously peeved with me about that. She wanted me to have something dreadful, but curable, so she could sit there and tell me, ‘I told you so!’ It might eventually kill 95 % of the people who smoked, but Dad and I were in that other 5 %. Then again, I seemed to have been recycled due to a heart attack, but was that because of smoking or the lamp?