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THE VOLCANO
a Brent story by Tanner

On the first day of the science fair unit, Mr. Dix stood at the front of the room and wrote two words on the board in huge capital letters.

NO VOLCANOES.

Then he underlined it. Twice. Then he turned around and looked at the whole class over the top of his glasses, the way he does when someone has put a pencil in the gas jet.

"Every year," Mr. Dix said, "I get eleven volcanoes. Eleven. Baking soda, vinegar, red food coloring, a little mountain made out of newspaper. They all do the same thing. They all prove the same thing, which is that baking soda and vinegar make bubbles, which we have known since approximately the invention of baking soda. This year, I want science. I want a question you don't already know the answer to."

Brent raised his hand.

"What if it's a volcano," he said, "but it's a scientific volcano?"

The whole class laughed. Mr. Dix didn't. He looked at Brent for a long moment. Then he said, "Convince me. One page. Friday."

So Brent and his partner, Justin, went to Brent's house after school and sat at the kitchen table and tried to figure out how to make a volcano scientific. Justin wanted to do a project on whether hamsters prefer classical music or rap, but Justin's hamster had died over the summer, so that was out.

"What's a variable?" Justin said.

"It's the thing you change," said Brent. "Like, you change one thing and see what happens."

"So what if we change everything?"

"That's not how it works."

"Why not?"

Brent didn't actually know why not, so he looked it up in the science book, and by the end of the night they had a project. It was called The Effect of Different Variables on the Height and Duration of a Baking Soda Eruption. They would test three things: how much baking soda, how warm the vinegar was, and whether you added dish soap. Each one by itself. Three trials each. Measure the height of the foam with a ruler taped to the side, and time how long it lasted with Justin's digital watch.

Mr. Dix read the page on Friday. He read it twice. Then he wrote APPROVED on the top in red pen, and under that: Prove me wrong.

They built the volcano in Brent's garage over two weekends. The inside was an empty two-liter pop bottle. The outside was chicken wire and newspaper strips dipped in flour paste, which is the messiest substance known to science. When it dried, they painted it brown and gray with some green at the bottom for trees, and Justin painted a little village at the bottom with tiny houses, because he said a volcano needs something to threaten.

Then they did the experiments. They did them in the driveway, because Brent's mom had seen the flour paste and said there would be no more science in her garage. They did every trial three times. They wrote everything down. It took forever. They used four gallons of vinegar and so much baking soda that the lady at the grocery store asked if they were baking for an army.

And they found out something. Warm vinegar worked better than cold. More baking soda worked better, but only up to a point, and then it didn't matter. But the dish soap was the big one. With a squirt of dish soap, the foam didn't just bubble up. It stood up. It came out thick, like shaving cream, and it kept coming. Their best trial went eleven and a half inches above the top of the bottle and lasted forty-one seconds.

They made a graph. It was a good graph. Justin colored it in.

The science fair was in the gym on a Thursday night. Everybody's parents came. There were three judges walking around with clipboards: a lady from the water company, a man who taught chemistry at the high school, and Mr. Dix.

Brent and Justin's table was between Nina's project and a kid who was growing bean plants in the dark. Nina's project was called Which Paper Towel Is the Most Absorbent? She had five brands of paper towels lined up in a row, all hanging from a little wooden frame she built with her dad, with their bottom edges dipped in a pan of water, and she was measuring how far up the water climbed. It was neat and quiet and organized. Her poster was laminated.

Brent's poster was not laminated. There was a little bit of flour paste on it.

When the judges got to their table, Brent did the whole presentation. He talked about the variables. He showed the graph. The chemistry teacher nodded. The lady from the water company wrote something down. Mr. Dix stood there with his arms folded, waiting.

"Would you like to see it?" Brent said.

"I believe," said Mr. Dix, "that is the whole point."

Now, here is where Brent made his mistake. Their best trial had been warm vinegar, a lot of baking soda, and dish soap. That was the result. That was the science. But it was the science fair, and the judges were right there, and the whole gym was watching, and Brent thought: what if it went even higher?

So he used ALL of them. The extra warm vinegar from the thermos. A double scoop of baking soda. And instead of a squirt of dish soap, he squeezed the bottle until it made a noise like a whoopee cushion, which made the bean-plant kid laugh so hard he knocked over a plant.

Then Justin poured.

For about one second, nothing happened.

Then the volcano made a sound like a dog clearing its throat, and the foam came out. It came out red. It came out FAST. It went up, way past eleven and a half inches, and then it fell over the sides and kept coming, and coming, a thick red wave of it rolling down the slopes of the volcano and over Justin's little village, which Justin watched go with his hand on his heart, like a mayor.

It covered the table. It ran off the edge of the table. And then it found Nina's table.

The red foam flowed under the little wooden frame and right into the pan of water that Nina's paper towels were standing in. Everybody froze. The whole gym was looking. Nina stared at it.

And then, slowly, in front of everybody, the paper towels started to drink. The red climbed up them like a thermometer, one brand faster than the others, then the next, then the next, until there were five red stripes at five different heights, in exactly the order Nina had predicted on her poster.

There was a long silence.

"Well," said the man from the high school. "That's conclusive."

Nina won first place. She said it would have happened anyway, but she let Brent and Justin hold the ribbon for a minute. Brent and Justin got a yellow ribbon that said HONORABLE MENTION, and under that, in Mr. Dix's red pen, it said Most Memorable Results.

Brent's mom made him clean up the whole gym floor with a mop and a bucket while the janitor watched. It took forty minutes. Brent figured that was a variable too.

On Monday, Mr. Dix stood at the front of the room and erased NO VOLCANOES from the board. Then he wrote something else.

CHANGE ONE THING AT A TIME.

He underlined it twice and looked right at Brent.

Brent thought that was fair.