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Her eyes opened at that. “I never thought about that.”

“I just want what everybody else wants. I’m so normal I’m boring, even to myself.”

Shelley rolled her eyes at that. “You aren’t boring! I mean, what about all the karate and working out and all?”

“Lots of guys work out. What’s the difference between me and the guys who stay after school for sports?”

“But that’s just it; you’re not going out for sports! You do it on your own.”

“Who’d pick me for sports? I’d still be the smallest guy on the team, and besides, I’m not a black belt in karate. That’s just silly.”

She pointed a finger at me. “I know you go up to the Miyagi place. I saw Lance two weeks ago and we were talking.”

“That’s aikido, which is different, and I’m not a black belt.”

“Listen, say what you want, but you’re different, special-like. I’m just glad you let me be your partner and not one of the other girls.”

My eyes widened at that. “What other girls?”

She rolled her eyes again. “Oh my God! Give me a break! There were a bunch of them — and no, I’m not giving you their names! — and I just asked you first. Besides, now that you’ve outgrown the midget stage, you’re kind of cute.”

I just stared for another minute or so. “I think each and every one of you have lost your fucking minds!”

Shelley laughed loudly at that and stood up. She grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. “Come on, we need to work on this project!”

She dragged me down to the basement and it was obvious that somebody had been working. I won’t say it was spotless, but it was a whole lot cleaner. The room had been swept and dusted, and while the couch was still dilapidated, it was clean, and an old Afghan had been draped over it. “Wow, somebody has been working.”

Shelley laughed. “Daddy made me do it. He said it was pretty disgusting when he saw what we had been working in. I got Mom to help.” On the table along with the pump was a shopping bag with a half dozen cartons of Camel nonfilters.

I pulled a carton out of the bag and opened it up, and then pulled out a pack. “Let’s give it a shot. Got any matches?”

She looked startled. “This is it? We’re starting?”

“Sort of. We need to test the machine and see how it works first. I figure we should smoke a couple of packs and time it and see how it goes.”

She nodded and ran upstairs, coming down with a small box of kitchen matches. I turned on the pump and stuck a Camel in the end, and then struck a match. In just a bit over half a minute the Camel was sucked down in its entirety, not even leaving a butt. Shelley stuck in another cigarette and I lit another match. Over the next fifteen minutes we smoked an entire pack of Camels.

I turned off the pump and laid my hand on the filter. It was uncomfortably warm. Well, we were sucking burning material through it. We smoked another pack of cigarettes and the filter was becoming too hot. I shut off the pump. “We need to figure a way to cool this thing down,” I said.

“What’s the problem?”

“The problem is that if we keep sucking hot smoke through the filter, it’s going to get too hot and start baking the tar it’s already trapped. We need to cool it down somehow.” This was a problem. I was trying to envision wrapping some sort of hose around the filter and running cooling water through it, or building a double layered filter. That could get very complicated, very fast!

“You just need the filter cooled? Can we use ice?”

I looked at her curiously. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Shelley scampered back upstairs. I turned on the pump and drew some air through it, hoping to use air cooling to bring the temperature down. That worked, but it would slow things down immensely if we had to spend half our time just sucking in cooling air.

Shelley returned with a tray of ice and a couple of different size Baggies. She also had an old candle. She broke up the ice and put some in a Baggie and sealed it, and then draped it over the filter. She didn’t like how it looked, so she repeated it with the next larger size and added another couple of ice cubes. “Try it now.” I shrugged and opened another pack of cigarettes and then picked up the box of matches. “Here, wait.” She set the candle between us and lit it with a match. “Use that and save on the matches.”

“That’s a good idea,” I commented. I smoked another pack of Camels. Inside the Baggie the ice began melting and the temperature of the steel filter stayed at a decent level.

I shut off the pump. “You know, that actually works.”

“Really?”

“It’s ugly, but it works. Next time, we mix a little water in with the ice, and crush some of the ice cubes first. We start off cool and stay that way.”

“Why?”

I explained heat transfer and surface area and heat capacity, but after a few minutes her eyes were glazing over. “Hey, it doesn’t matter why. This will work. You saved us a lot of grief.”

“Wow! I did?”

“Yep!” I grabbed the filter and twisted it off the pump. “Let’s see what it’s like.”

“I thought we had to smoke all these first,” she said, pointing at the rest of the Camels.

“No, this week we are in test and preparation mode. We need to make sure it all works first.” I twisted the filter apart. The suction end was noticeably brownish-yellow, showing tar accumulating, but there were also a number of bits of unburned paper and tobacco. Over five cartons of cigarettes, that would be a problem. I pointed it to her. “We need something to keep out this junk.”

Shelley picked up some spare screen. “Can we use this?”

I shook my head. “Too coarse. We need something finer.”

She went over to a workbench and pulled out a piece of metal window screening. “How about this?”

“We’ll try it tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Why not now?”

“Because we don’t need to. We’ll have to suck down another pack or two of Camels and we don’t have the time. The schedule allows us plenty of time to get this right.”

“What schedule? You haven’t said anything about a schedule,” she said accusingly.

I thought about it for a moment. “You know, you’re right, I haven’t. Sorry about that. Listen, I will type up a schedule at home tonight and bring it over tomorrow. Anyway, on the schedule, this week I have us doing initial design and testing. Next week we can start for real.”

Shelley nodded with that. Her eyes perked up when I asked what she was doing after school on Thursday. “Why?”

“We need to take the filter over to Towson State to be weighed. My mother will pick me up after class and take me over. Want to go with me?”

“Sure! That would be pretty cool. Why are we weighing the filter, and why over there?”

I explained that we needed to accurately weigh the filter assembly before and then after the experiment, to try and measure how much tar we had collected. The only balances the school had was a bunch of old triple beam balances. We needed something much more accurate. I don’t think it really sank in, but Shelley went along. I figured to weigh the filter now, weigh it again after loading it with the tar, then remove the cotton and collect the tar, and weigh that as well. The science would be impressive. Whether it would beat baby chicks was questionable.

Lab work for the day was ended, and the sounds of the front door opening and a parent arriving indicated there wouldn’t be much in the way of non-lab experimentation going on. Shelley glanced at the stairs with an unhappy look. “I wanted to spend the time down here differently,” she said.