Chapter 10: The Lamp

At eight the next morning, Lena was already in the Kellner lab with my procedure sheet in her hand.

She had circled something in red.

"Page one, step four," she said. "You wrote that the string doesn't stretch."

"It doesn't stretch much."

"Much isn't none."

She dropped the sheet on the bench between us.

"We hang a two-kilogram mass off it for an hour."

"By the end, your pendulum is longer than when it started, and every number after that is wrong."

I looked at the sheet.

She was right, and I could see exactly how she was right.

"Fine," I said. "What would you use?"

"Steel wire. The kind in the drawer under the sink, which nobody ever checks because nobody ever reads past the first line of the manual."

She had already opened the drawer.

I watched her take out a coil of wire and cut it with the flat of a pair of snips.

"Are you always like this?" I asked.

"Like what?"

"Right."

"Only when it matters." She grinned, and the gap in her teeth showed. "The rest of the time I'm just loud."

We worked all morning.

She read the numbers off the scale and I wrote them down.

Every time I rounded a figure, she made me say it out loud.

Every time I said it, I heard how sloppy it sounded.

By lunch I had stopped arguing.

By dinner I was ordering my notes the way she did, in columns, with units.

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