Read Online The View From Who I Was by Heather Sappenfield - Free Book Online Page A

her now with such clarity.
    â€œYes, I’m playing soccer,” Ash said real loud, her glance a knife. We’d played soccer together since kindergarten, moving up through Club to high school, where we’d been a starter, left fullback, and Ash had warmed the bench.
    Corpse entered the hall to AP Bio, our favorite class. But Ash was our lab partner, and as we approached the room, I dreaded how uncomfortable that was going to be. How Ash even got into the class was a mystery; she wasn’t the greatest student. The bell rang as Corpse limped through the door.
    Mr. Bonstuber stood at the lectern. He nodded to her and returned to scanning some papers, but everyone else watched Corpse limp to her seat, watched surprise register as she found Clark Millhouse on the stool next to hers. Corpse set her books on the cool black tabletop and slid onto her metal stool.
    â€œHey,” Clark said.
    â€œHey,” Corpse said.
    Ash whisked in, giggling, but everyone watched Corpse as Ash rushed to her seat at the back with her new partner.
    Clark glanced at Corpse’s hand. Mr. Bonstuber started explaining Mendelian genetics in his German accent as he drew a diagram on the whiteboard. Corpse pulled out Biology: Life’s Course and a blank sheet of paper, tuned out her screaming digits, and scrawled notes with her left hand.
    Clark grimaced at her scribble. He leaned close and whispered, “You can borrow mine.”
    â€œThanks,” Corpse said.
    Mr. Bonstuber might have been the one who switched our partner. Ash was a Cstudent, while Clark was all A’s. I wouldn’t have put it past Mr. Bonstuber to notice Ash gossiping about us or saying something cruel, and moving her for that reason too. He was that way.
    He wore a wrinkled dress shirt, slacks, and some sort of science tie every day, even though most of the faculty was in jeans. Corpse studied the way his shirt, though he was slim, puffed out the back like a water balloon. I noticed a thin gold wedding band on his left hand, couldn’t believe I’d missed it before. What would his wife be like? Were they happy together? I had an image of him cradling a faceless woman in a sheer nightgown. Corpse shook her head to banish the thought. We owed Mr. Bonstuber a lot.
    Last fall, before class had even started, he’d assigned the textbook’s first chapter. About water. Maybe we were bored after a summer of brain atrophy, I’m not sure, but water’s properties fascinated us. Its role in all life. When school started, Mr. Bonstuber showed us this YouTube video of a property called “coalescence cascade.”
    In the video, a drop of water was deposited gently onto the surface of a pool. The drop dipped below the surface, making a ring, and shot back out as two drops. One drop disappeared below the surface. But the smaller, second drop bounced twice and dipped below the surface. We couldn’t see it divide this time, but again two smaller drops popped out, one disappearing below, the other bouncing twice and disappearing, shooting out even smaller.
    It did this four times, until the tiniest drop disappeared and did not shoot back out, and the pool’s surface was eerily still. Mr. Bonstuber explained that as the drop impacted the pool at low speed, a layer of air was trapped beneath it, preventing it from immediately coalescing into the pool. That air layer drained away, and surface tension pulled some of the drop’s mass into the pool, but a smaller drop was spit back out. It bounced off the surface of the pool again, and the process was repeated until the viscous properties of the pool became too strong for the drop to withstand coalescing completely.
    Later, in a lab on surface tension, we deposited water on a quarter with an eyedropper till there was a towering bulge. We couldn’t pull ourself away from the microscope, from how that bulge trembled, and to the beat of Ash popping her gum, we kept seeing that