She texted back.
Bringing extra copper sulfate for your group. See you at 9. Don’t forget your lab notebooks.
The summer program kept her sane, gave her purpose beyond the endless cycle of standardized tests and budget cuts. These kids reminded her why she’d fallen in love with science in the first place. That perfect blend of wonder and precision, of rules that made sense and mysteries still waiting to be solved.
She glanced at her watch. Nearly ten. Just enough time to run to the lab and prepare for tomorrow’s demonstration. The summer solstice experiment needed to be perfect. Dramatic enough to capture their imagination but scientifically sound enough to teach them something real about catalytic reactions and chemical transformations.
In her room, she swapped t-shirts (navy for black), changed into a pair of matching faded black leggings, and washed her hands. Her heart wouldn’t settle. Beth stared at her reflection, a nice enough face, eyes too bright with disappointment, then grabbed her keys again.
After yet another disastrous date, she needed solace. The comfort of her own lab, where the world kept to rules she understood. As she walked through the moonlit school parking lot, pebbles crunching beneath her favorite high top embroidered sneakers, she nodded at old Mr. Roselli as he replaced a light in the hall. The science wing key fob beeped. The hallway whispered back with the faint echo of adolescents, sneakers squeaking and gossip swirling and, in her domain, at least, order.
She entered her classroom, flicked on the overheads. The air was cool. The counters were scattered with beakers, half-sorted molecular model kits, a slow-release scent of lemon floor polish, ancient duct tape, and the ghost of a hundred science fair volcanoes. Mrs. Kline’s reminder about budget paperwork glared from her whiteboard.
As she pulled on her stained lab coat (pale blue, two buttons missing), set “Midnights” by Taylor Swift to shuffle, and made a cup of tea, Beth watched a crack of lightning fork outside the lab windows. Thunder rumbled over the building, the overhead lights flickering and blinking in time with the storm’s fury.
She muttered the periodic table under her breath as she sorted the chemical jars back into alphabetical order. Cu for copper sulfate, NaHCO3 for baking soda. The world made sense when it obeyed the table.
She surveyed the chaos of her workbench. Pipettes, beakers, a dish of sodium bicarbonate for Monday’s demo, the hydrogen balloon trembling in the draft from the storm through the window she’d cracked.
“Maybe,” she muttered, “things will actually make sense for just one?—”
Her hand jerked as she recalled Trevor/Trent’s smug grin. Chemistry should be fun. Bastard. Beth muttered under her breath, something unkind about TikTok and the slow death of Western Civilization, and unscrewed a vial of sodium bicarb. Rain lashed the windows as another bolt of lightning lit up the room, the lights stuttering again. She poured in the vinegar, carefully at first, then with more enthusiasm. The mixture hissed and frothed, bubbling over like an angry cappuccino.
She set the experiment aside, glancing at her notes for Monday’s demonstration while the thunder shook the walls. On autopilot, she tugged the rubber stopper free. Her hands moved by habit, sure and quick, but the laughter from Tim’s direction rang in her ears, mingling with every discouraging staff meeting, every wary glance from boys in her AP classes, every well-meaning colleague who’d called her “the bookish teacher.”
She should have known better than to multitask while raging.
Next, she reached for what she thought was citric acid. Instead, her fingers closed over a vial of copper sulfate, left over from last week’s lesson on catalysis. The powder trickled into the mix, a swirl of peacock blue against the fizzing foam. The flask vibrated. Distracted, Beth didn’t notice the cracked glass until it nicked her fingertip. A sharp sting followed by a single ruby drop. She watched, oddly detached, as her blood slid down and bloomed atop the swirling mixture, spreading in slow motion through the acidic fizz.
Somewhere, a coil of Bunsen tubing sizzled as liquid trailed toward a burner she hadn’t meant to light.
The smell hit first, electric and sharp, like a thunderstorm on the horizon, curling beneath the familiar tang of vinegar. Then, a waver in the fluorescent lights. A static hum along the metal faucet at her left elbow, cold and unnatural.
Light split the lab. Or maybe her vision did. Beth barely registered the flood of electric blue, bright enough to strip the world to bone and flash. For one split second, she saw, no, notsaw, butfelta castle crouched on a green hill, an unyielding sword unsheathed in an iron fist, and a pair of grey eyes, cold as frost, clear as moonstone, narrowed in suspicion.
“What the hell—” she started.
CRACK. The world turned a brilliant white, deafened by the sound of every neuron firing at once. Gravity leapt up and spun her round, yanking her spine out by the roots. She fell, or flew, tasted iron, felt light sink into her bones. Her sense of self stretched like taffy, first this way, then another. Light funneled around her, the universe caught in a centrifuge. She tumbled end over end, the world cracking apart into scent and fire and rain.
Darkness, light, a wind that carried the scent of a lake, flowers, and something else. The world reassembled itself molecule by humming molecule, like a precipitate forming out of chaos.
When the world knotted itself together again, the fluorescent hum of the lab was gone. Instead, there was sun, hot, insistent, prying into her eyelids. When she finally opened her eyes, she lay face-down in loam, the heat of a real sun nudging her shoulder blades through the t-shirt. The ground wasn’t linoleum but thick, springy moss; her cheek was pressed to rough bark, her hair full of leaves and twigs. She pressed her palms to the earth, sat up, dizzy. The world spun green, gold, green again.
Birdsong, sharp and unfamiliar, pierced the heavy green hush. The air tasted sweet and fresh, filled with pine, wildflowers, mud and water, worlds away from the chemical sterility she’d somehow left behind.
She craned her neck and blinked. A canopy of leaves stretched overhead, dappled gold and emerald. Trees pressedclose on every side, their arches older than logic. Beth’s shoes crunched on pinecones. Her leggings were damp, knees streaked with dirt. She reached into her hair and plucked out a twig, gaping.
“This is a hallucination,” she whispered, voice sandpapery and thin. “Psychotic break due to cumulative microaggressions and fluorescent lighting. Classic case. I just need to…”
She trailed off as she staggered to her feet. A breeze swirled the midges. The sun was … wrong. No haze from the lights of the parking lot, just a relentless gold that painted every leaf in supernatural clarity. No hum of traffic or distant music. No cell phone. She fumbled in the pocket of her lab coat, coming up with a bottle of Aleve, lip balm, and a tiny tin with the leftover antibiotics from when she’d been sick last month that she’d meant to turn in for disposal.
The air was alive with insects, the sunlight poured liquid gold through the canopy, and nothing, absolutely nothing, resembled Ashford Crossing, Pennsylvania.
She inventoried herself, brushing pine needles from her lap. One sneaker was untied, the adorable embroidered STEM symbols bright in the sunlight.
“This is not stress-induced.” Her voice sounded wrong, too loud in the hush as she tied her shoe. “Not unless Dad slipped magic mushrooms into my spaghetti last night.”
Tree trunks pressed close, their bark rough beneath her fingers as she stumbled forward, counting her breaths and the steps between panic and action. “You’re not lost,” she muttered. “You’re just catastrophically misplaced.”
