BooksBarbecue
Back The Cloud Chamber
Chapters (35)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Author’s Note
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-One
  27. Twenty-Two
  28. Twenty-Three
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. Twenty-Five
  31. Twenty-Six
  32. Twenty-Seven
  33. Twenty-Eight
  34. Twenty-Nine
  35. Thirty

Nate found his spot—at a table along the back wall, directly underneath the basketball hoop. He set down the cloud chamber first and unwrapped it. Then he hung the poster, with the neat lettering his mother had penciled in for him to marker over: How RADIOACTIVE IONS TRAVEL THROUGH A CLOUD CHAMBER. BY NATHAN CHANCE AND NAOMI TORVALD. Next to the cloud chamber he put down first his cooler, then the bottle of ethyl alcohol, and finally, in the same velvet box it had come in back when Poppa had bought it in 1940, the watch. Nearby he positioned the projector so the light would hit the chamber just right, and he plugged it in using the extension cord he’d brought.

Nate was just dusting off the chamber’s glass sides when a group of girls stopped at the table—Pauline Calhoun, her friend Jennifer, and a girl named Janice, who’d taken piano lessons from his mom when she was preparing for the county’s Junior Miss pageant. She’d quit right after winning second runner-up.

“Great project, Nate,” said Pauline, standing in front of Naomi’s drawings of the alpha ray patterns. “I guess you must feel real bad about what happened to your partner, huh?”

Nate looked up from the table at her hard, pretty face. There was something about her eyes—a sharpness to the way they darted from his project to her friends—that made it uncomfortable to look at her.

“I miss Naomi,” she said. “Don’t you, Jennifer?”

Nate doubted that Pauline had ever spoken one word to his friend besides the mean ones that night at the bowling alley. He remembered them now—“I know you have my charm bracelet. Give it back.” Most of all, he remembered the stunned look on Naomi’s face when she told Pauline, “I never took anything. I don’t steal.”

“She was an interesting person,” Pauline went on. It was odd, Nate thought, how people spoke about certain individuals as if they were dead, as if not being in their particular world anymore meant they didn’t even exist.

“Naomi’s fine,” Nate said. “She and I did this project together. She just couldn’t be here today.”

Pauline and Jennifer exchanged looks.

“Hey, Pauline,” Jennifer said in an oddly flat voice. “Did that bracelet of yours ever turn up?”

“No. But it sure was strange, the way it disappeared like that.” Pauline flicked her hair over her shoulder as the trio started to move on to the next display. “That night at the bowling alley, with nobody there but us and, you know, them.”