1. A Mole in the Lab

I was beginning to get rather bored of listening to Mr. Atkinson go on and on about chemistry. He was saying something rather uninteresting about how the number of hydrogens on the left side of the board had to equal the number on the right side. 

"You see," he said. "None of us mortals are God. For us, matter can neither be created nor destroyed."

Meanwhile, I was thinking about how nice it would be to have some strawberry ice cream. I like it particularly when the strawberry ice cream has real strawberries in it. But, then again, Cookies and Cream is also quite delicious and hard to pass up.

"There are exceptions, Stefanie," Mr. Atkinson said directly to me.

"What?" 

I was startled that he was now speaking directly to me. He also seemed quite smaller than before. In fact, he was standing on top of his desk, which was not really a desk but a lab table with a sink and a Bunsen Burner on top. He quite delighted in setting the thing afire and burning all manner of things over its intense blue flame.

Come to think of it, he seemed to have taken on the shape of a mole. Not that I had ever seen a mole before. Rather, he looked like what I had imagined a mole to look like, not more than a foot tall.  

"There are some exceptions, Stefanie," he said again. "According to Einstein, you can convert matter to energy according to the equation E = mc². It happens all the time in particle accelerators."

I looked around to see if any of my classmates saw anything particularly bizarre about having a mole for a teacher, but they all seemed rather unconcerned. Mike the jock feverishly wrote down E = mc², and April the cheerleader's lips moved as she spelled out a-c-c-e-l-e-r-a-t-o-r.

"Could we perhaps get a particle accelerator?" Troy the skater asked. "Perhaps we could sell some pies or wash some cars. We could put it around the inside of the track, and the runners could race the particles during practice."

"That is quite a good idea, Troy," Mr. Atkinson said. "But we will also need some rather more interesting atoms than we have in the stock room. That is, unless the principal has been hiding some radioactive isotopes around here without telling me."

I was now barely listening to Mr. Atkinson and wouldn't have undertood him if I were. Rather, I was entranced by how attentive Mike and April were, whose engagement was usually limited to copying Wade's homework. And, seriously, how would Troy know what a clavicle -- or whatever -- was?

Meanwhile, Wade the brain was flicking Cristy-of-exceptional-IQ's ears, while she drew pictures of daisy chains. Mary Jo and Libby too, whose brains were so big they hardly fit in their heads, were distracted by some sort of fly skirting its way around the room.

"There is another storage room, of course," Mr. Atkinson said, jarring my attention once again. He was now standing alarmingly on my own desk, his handlike facial features flapping too close to my personal comfort zone. He had a molish odor of sorts, not unlike the exotic scents of PE.

"There is another storage room that Principal Crum doesn't know about," he repeated in a whisper to me. "It's directly through that molehole next to the door to the stock room." 

I looked over to see that, indeed, there was something like what I imagined a mouse hole to look like, although I had never seen one outside of a cartoon. Funny that I had never noticed it before.

"Wouldn't a mole hole go straight down into the ground," I asked innocently. "I mean, that looks more like a mouse hole."

Mr. Atkinson was undeterred. 

"The other stock room has much more interesting atoms and other things the government will not let us have up here. I'd get them myself, but you see they pay me to teach this class. And I can hardly leave Wade and Cristy alone.

"But how am I supposed to get through such a small hole," I asked. "And, in any case, aren't atoms much smaller than that hole?"

"We could try a Lorentz contraction," Troy the skater suggested.

"Yes, a Lorentz contraction," Mike and April chimed in.

"What's a Lorentz contraction?" I nervously asked. 

"We'd have to get her going quite fast," Mr. Atkinson replied.

"Perhaps we could spin her fast enough in your lab chair to do the trick," Troy continued, pointing to a swivel chair behind Mr. Atkinson's desk, of which he was quite fond.

"What's a Lorentz contraction?" I asked again.

 "Mike is a linebacker," April added. "I know from personal experience that he is quite strong."

"And I am quite good at pool," Wade interjected unexpectantly.

"What's a Lorentz contraction?" I asked a third time.

"It's really quite simple," Troy said, jumping off the front of his desk. He had been sitting on top with his legs draped over the empty chair in front of him. He proceeded to the board where he wrote some sort of equation with an L and a square root in it.

"It's quite obvious," he continued. "As you approach the speed of light, L becomes infinitely small, which means we will have to be careful not to spin you so fast that you completely disappear out of existence."

"What?!" I asked, not having understood a word he said except the part about disappearing out of existence.

"He's saying that the faster we spin you in the chair, the smaller you'll become," April explained excitedly.

This was news to me. I had on many occasions enjoyed a good spin in a swivel chair. Indeed, I took a spin once in Mr. Atkinson's chair when he was out of the room, along with several others in the class. But I had never seen anyone shrink in the process.

"It's settled then," Mr. Atkinson said, hopping in a zigzag fashion from desk to desk back to the front of the room and onto his lab table. Mike and Wade jumped up and grabbed the swivel chair enthusiastically. April joined in as well and waved her hand with a bow in front of the chair, saying, "Have a seat, your Majesty."

With everyone in the class looking at me expectantly, exhuberant smiles on their faces, I hardly wanted to disappoint. After all, I did enjoy a good spin anyway. So I sat down.

Mike and Wade wasted no time. They immediately began to spin me, round and round and round. I enjoyed it for a moment. Then I thought I might get sick. They were spinning me quite fast now, more quickly than I ever could remember going.

But soon it seemed that I was not going very fast at all, but they were. They were moving faster and faster. Also, they were getting larger and larger. And they seemed to move farther and farther away from me.

"Wait!" I suddenly exclaimed. "What atoms am I supposed to get?"