The Bunsen Burner Incident

The trade agreement lasted nine days. It collapsed during the first real lab, which involved a Bunsen burner, a strip of magnesium, and a set of safety goggles that Mateo wore pushed up on his forehead like sunglasses despite Devon telling him, twice, in two different tones, that this defeated the entire concept of safety goggles. "They fog up," Mateo said. "They fog up because they're working. That's the goggles doing their job." "That's a weird job. Stopping me from seeing." Mateo lit the burner with the casual competence of someone who had clearly lit many things, which did not reassure Devon at all. "Relax, baby binder. I've done this." "You've done a controlled magnesium burn." "I've done burning things. It's a transferable skill." Here is what Devon had learned in nine days, against his will, while running a foreign policy of minimal contact: Mateo Cruz was not stupid. This was deeply inconvenient. Devon had built his whole attitude on the assumption that a person who slept through first period and owned one capless pen was a person who simply did not have the equipment. But Mateo answered questions, when Hollis cold-called him, with this loose offhand accuracy, like the answers were just lying around in his pockets along with the pen. He just never wrote anything down. He never did the homework. He had, Devon had discovered by accident while reaching for a beaker, a current grade of 31 percent. You did not get a 31 percent by being stupid. You got a 31 percent by not handing things in. Those were different diseases, and Devon, who liked to diagnose things, had not finished diagnosing this one when the magnesium caught. There was, Devon would think about it later, a specific kind of person Mateo became around fire, and it was not the lazy unbothered person from the seating chart. Devon had clocked it twice now. Lighting the burner, Mateo's whole face had gone quick and absorbed, the hood-up slouch falling off him like a coat, and Devon had filed that away in the part of his brain that filed things, the orange part, the part for things he didn't have a category for. It was the same part that had been quietly logging, over nine days, every moment Mateo Cruz turned out to be a more complicated machine than the one Devon had decided he was. It caught beautifully. That was the problem. It burned that hard white that you're not supposed to look at, and Mateo, goggles on his forehead, looked at it, and said "whoa," with real wonder, like a little kid, and then jerked back, and his elbow caught the ring stand, and the ring stand went, and Devon — moving on a reflex he did not know he had, a reflex that had skipped the entire planner, every color of it — got a hand flat against Mateo's chest and shoved him back off the stool a half-second before the burning strip dropped where his arm had been. It was not, Devon understood instantly, a careful thing to have done. You did not solve a falling-magnesium problem by adding a falling-Mateo problem. A systems person would have stepped back, raised the alarm, let the bench take the damage. But Devon had not done the systems thing. Devon had done the other thing, the one with no plan in it, the one his body had apparently been keeping in reserve this whole time without telling him, and he was going to have to think very hard, later, about what it meant that his body had decided Mateo Cruz was worth a reflex. It landed on the bench. It scorched a small black comet onto the laminate. It went out. The whole class was looking. Mr. Hollis was already crossing the room. And Mateo Cruz was on the floor, blinking up at Devon with his stupid lopsided face gone, for once, completely open, and he said, quietly, just for Devon, "Okay. Yeah. The goggles. I'll wear the goggles." "You'll wear the goggles," Devon agreed. His hand was still out, flat, where Mateo's chest had been. He took it back. Detention, Mr. Hollis said, was non-negotiable, for both of them, because Devon had been the lab lead and "lab leads own their bench." It was a deeply unfair ruling. Devon had not pushed a ring stand. He had, in fact, prevented a strip of burning metal from landing on a classmate's forearm, which Devon felt was the sort of thing that ought to come with a small certificate rather than a detention slip. He could feel the argument assembling itself in his head, neat and numbered, the precedents lining up like a row of capped pens. Devon opened his mouth to deploy a system, a precedent, a form. Then he caught Mateo watching him. It was a particular kind of watching. Mateo had gone very still on his stool, goggles finally down where they belonged, and his face had done the thing Devon was learning to recognize — the door, opening exactly one inch, the quick defensive brightness behind it. He was waiting. He was waiting to see if Devon would do the obvious smart thing, the thing the planner would do, which was to separate himself cleanly from the disaster, to explain to Mr. Hollis in numbered points that the fault belonged entirely to the other side of the bench. He was waiting to be thrown under it. And Devon understood, with a small cold drop, that Mateo had clearly been thrown under things before, often enough that he had kept a face ready for it, the way you keep a coat by the door. "Both of us," Devon heard himself say. "Yeah. We own the bench." Mateo didn't say thank you. But on the way out he bumped Devon's shoulder with his, gentle, deliberate, a small dumb transfer agreement of its own, and Devon walked the rest of the way to fourth period feeling like a country whose borders had just gotten a little harder to find on the map.