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Anyway, Kenny totally didn’t seem to appreciate my kind remarks. He went, “Mia! Do you mind? I’m in the acid neutralization phase!”
So then I was like, “Fine, sorry I said anything,” and went back to my stool to write this.
And then a second ago J.P. sat down next to me and was like, “So, am I in the clear now?”
And I was like, “In the clear for what?”
And he was like, “Breaking Lilly’s heart. Now that she’s learned to love again, as Tina would put it.”
So I laughed and said, “J.P., whatever, I never blamed you for what happened between you and Lilly. You can’t help it if you didn’t feel the same way about her that she felt about you.”
Although he could probably have helped by not leading her on for so long. But I didn’t add that part out loud.
“I’m glad you feel that way, Mia,” J.P. said. “Because there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time now, and every time I start to, something seems to happen to interrupt me, so I’m just going to say it now, even though this might not be the ideal mo———————————————————”
Wednesday, September 22, East Seventy-fifth Street AEHS evacuation rendezvous
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
J.P. is in love with me.
And we blew up the school.
Wednesday, September 22, Lenox Hill Hospital emergency room
To tell you the truth, I didn’t know which to write first back then.
I mean, I don’t know which is more upsetting—that it turns out J.P. has fallen in love with me, or that we all nearly died from Kenny’s experiment, in which he was trying to recreate—unbeknownst to the rest of us—a substance formerly used as filler in hand grenades during World War II, with a very high deflagration point, which means, in English, that it’s very unstable and BLOWS UP A LOT.
And we weren’t even supposed to be making it! Mr. Hipskin didn’t realize that’s what we were doing because Kenny told him we were making nitrocellulose, which is flash paper similar to what’s used in film.
Not nitrostarch, which is an EXPLOSIVE!
The emergency room nurse keeps assuring me that Kenny’s eyebrows will grow back someday.
I was much luckier. I’m here in the ER under protest—there’s nothing actually wrong with me. They just sent me here to avoid a lawsuit, I’m sure. I mean, I only had the wind knocked out of me. That’s because just before deflagration occurred, when Kenny yelled, “Everybody get down!” J.P. threw me off my stool and flattened his body over mine, so all the flaming debris landed on him and not me.
Which, I might add, was right after he’d said, “Because there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time now, and every time I start to, something seems to happen to interrupt me, so I’m just going to say it now, even though this might not be the ideal moment. And I know you’re going to freak out now, because that’s what you do. So put down your pen and take a deep breath.”
This is when his blue eyes locked on to my gray ones and he said, super intently and without looking away, “Mia, I’m in love with you. I know up until now we’ve just been friends—good friends—but I want more than that. And I think you do, too.”
It was right then that Kenny yelled to get down. And that J.P. threw himself at me.
Fortunately for J.P., Lars was ON IT with the fire extinguisher—I guess to make up for not being the one to throw himself over me, which is, after all, his job, and not J.P.’s—and put out the flames that erupted on the back of J.P.’s sweater. He didn’t even get burned, because our school uniforms are made of so many unnatural fibers, most of which are flame retardant.
So no flames actually ever touched J.P.’s skin. Just his V-neck.
All of us had to flee a cloud of billowing nitrogen dioxide vapor, though. And not just in our Chem class, either. The whole school.
Good thing it wasn’t freezing outside (some kind of cold front has come down from Canada, making the city unseasonably cool for September), and none of us had our coats, or anything. Not.
One of the nurses just came in and said the whole thing was on New York One—a live shot from a helicopter of everyone standing outside Albert Einstein High shivering, with the fire trucks and ambulances all flashing their lights and everything.
Only three people were actually taken to the hospital, though: J.P., Kenny, and me.
Principal Gupta caught me just before they closed the ambulance doors. She was all, “Mia, I want to give you my sincerest assurances that I intend to get to the bottom of this matter. Mr. Showalter will not go unpunished….”
