Dark and Deepest Red(43)

Now Emil moved in a way that made me notice a streak of color, a brushstroke of teal against the brown of his forearm.

“What’s that?” I asked.

He looked down. “Oh,” he said. “Just flame tests. I’m comparing different kinds of cobalt glass to see which is best at filtering out orange light from sodium ions”—his tone shifted mid-sentence without him pausing—“and I’m gonna stop talking because I’m probably boring you to death.”

“No,” I said. “I was just gonna ask, what’s a flame test again?”

He half closed his eyes. “You’re serious? It’s one of the few labs even non–pocket protectors remember.”

I felt my eyes widening.

“Yeah,” he said, stretching out the word. “Graham’s not quiet about calling us that.”

“Sorry,” I said. Graham meant it as a term of endearment. Mostly. But I still couldn’t help apologizing for her.

“Do you want to see it?” he asked.

“Your pocket protector?”

“Sorry,” he said, leading me toward the back door. “Just brought it in for dry cleaning.”

I went out to the old garden shed with him, wondering if he’d been this cute in middle school, last year, last week, and I hadn’t noticed. He had always just been Emil, the boy who used to tell me about geode formation while I snored, pointedly and loudly, pretending to be far more bored than I was.

He had a lab bench now. Garden tools leaned in the corners on either side, like they were standing guard.

“You’ve come a long way from growing crystals in sugar water,” I said.

He laughed. “Thanks.”

He set up a row of glass vials, each holding a labeled powder. Some white, some blue green or dark red. I watched his hands, his brown fingers that always had a few paper cuts from library reference books.

Emil handed me a pair of goggles. “Insert preamble about not trying this at home.”

I put them on. “Got it.”

He put on his own and started the burner. With a few clicks of the striker, the petal of hot blue appeared.

He tapped a wooden stick into one of the vials and held it into the flame. It turned green as light through honey locust leaves.

I looked at him. “How’d you do that?”

“Barium,” he said. “The ions burn different colors.”

The next one turned the flame fall-leaf orange (“calcium,” he said). The one after purpled it to the winter-dusk color that always made me think of December.

Except now, it made me think of the purple tint to the sky around the glimmer.

“Emil,” I said.

“Cesium chloride,” he said.

“No,” I said, the words hot in my throat. “I was just gonna say, if…”

He was looking at me now.

Out by the reservoir, the way I’d grabbed him and kissed him had seemed almost inevitable, like the glimmer had set some charge between us. Static electricity that would stay on our skin unless we touched and sent it into the air. It was logic that had followed from the light in the sky.

But now, with daylight outside and the dark inside the shed, the contrast left me with a kind of delayed embarrassment so intense I was sure he could see it through my skin.

“If what I did the other night,” I said, still stumbling, “if I did something you didn’t want me to…” No matter how many ways I went at it, I could not catch the end of my own sentence.

He looked back at the flame. “I didn’t mind.”

That should have let me breathe out. Instead, his words just fluttered inside me instead of my own.

I didn’t mind, meaning what? I didn’t mind, meaning he wouldn’t mind doing it again? I didn’t mind, meaning he’d already forgotten about it?

He handed me a stick and a vial of turquoise powder. Our fingers brushed in a way that seemed like it could have been on purpose.

“You’ll like this one,” he said.

I dipped the wood into the powder and held it into the flame. It turned to a gradient between green and blue, chlorine-pool green at the tip darkening to iris blue at the base.

My breath caught in my throat.

“Copper sulfate,” he said.

I looked from the teal flame to Emil, his face behind the safety plastic and his glasses. I used to know what Emil looked like without glasses, but not anymore. Now the fact of him, this close, seemed more fever dream than the red shoes themselves.

“Emil?” I asked.

He glanced at me. “Yeah?”

“Why did we stop being friends?”

He held a powder to the flame that burned the color of early lilacs. “Because there’s always a point when girls stop being friends with boys.”

He didn’t sound bitter about it. More resigned.

With another coating of powder, he turned the flame mint green.

After a few more colors, and a long time of both of us being quiet, Emil said, “You know, the first time I ever saw the ocean was with my grandfather.”

I almost asked, What does that have to do with anything? But I kept my tongue still, realizing I wanted to hear him talk, even if I had no idea what he was talking about.

“It was from a bridge, and I saw this buoy in the water,” he said, turning the flame pink. “And this buoy, it stayed in place. I knew it was staying in place because it was a buoy, right? But I didn’t understand, because it looked like it was moving. It was still, but it left a wake behind it, because it was staying still while all the water around it was moving. It was staying in the same place in a current. That’s why it left the wake.”