Page 103 of The Price of Scandal

“A pleasure,” I said, shaking Esther’s proffered hand.

“I don’t suppose there’s time for me to take a peek at the data?” Emily asked her.

“Nope,” Esther said cheerfully. “It’ll keep.” She turned her attention to me. “Let’s get you suited up before these girls eat you alive.”

* * *

“And what’sthe most important rule at AHA?” Emily asked from the front of the learning lab. She was wearing a white lab coat and safety glasses. Her hair was pulled back in a short tail. Once again, I found the look to be discomfortingly alluring.

“Follow all safety protocols,” a new generation of budding scientists chorused back at her.

“Good,” she said. “Because we’re going to make fire.”

The girls oohed.

I wondered what kind of liability insurance Emily had and if the policy had a rider concerning twelve-year-olds and pyrotechnics.

I watched from a safe distance as Emily explained step-by-step what she was doing as she poured a small amount of ethanol from a beaker into an empty water cooler jug. She swirled the liquid around and around, coating the inside of the jug.

“Who knows what combustion is?” she asked.

About half the hands in the room shot into the air.

Emily beamed at her attentive students. “Combustion is an ignition. A rapid chemical combination that produces heat and light. Once it starts, you can’t stop it until it flames out.”

Her gaze flitted to me and then away again, and I wondered if she thought that what we had was as simple as a chemical reaction.

The energy in the room was reaching a fevered pitch.

Emily, a showman, held the bottle upside down. The girls gasped with enthusiasm when not a drop of liquid appeared.

“I’ve just created ethanol vapor. Turned a liquid into a gas. Now, I’m going to light it.”

We all watched raptly as she lit a long, thin taper with a lighter. “Arm’s length,” she said.

“Arm’s length,” we repeated.

With another grin, she held the taper to the mouth of the bottle, and everyone in the room except for Emily jumped when chemical flames in blues and oranges shot out and up. It burned fast and bright for a second or two and then vanished.

There was controlled pandemonium in the room. It was a much classier version of the fart lighting experiment my brother and I had performed once or twice in our backyard, and I saw from some of the faces of the parents in the room—mostly fathers—that they were reliving their own gaseous youths.

“But wait,” Emily said, holding up a hand. “The bottle isn’t empty anymore.”

As she held it upside down, the class watched in rapt fascination as a clear liquid dribbled into the beaker.

“We’ve made water from fire,” she announced.

I could hear every girl in the room decide to become a scientist.

“Now it’s your turn,” she said, gesturing at the lab tables. “Set up your slow-motion cameras first so you can capture the reactions. Esther, Lala, and I will assist you one table at a time starting from the back.”

Emily claimed her first table and struck up a conversation with her new, young lab partners. Esther and Lala, a six-foot-tall version of Salma Hayek with a PhD in chemistry, did the same.

I loved it. I itched to document the lab, the experiment, the girls. Emily.

She was resplendent. There was nothing not to be loved.

This was the Emily Stanton that the world needed to see. And she was stubbornly refusing to be revealed.