Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj;

Author:Susan Muaddi Darraj;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bookwire GmbH

Dr. Bledsoe is like a caricature of a crazy scientist—his brown hair is never combed, and he’s so skinny because he forgets to eat. I always think about how my mother would love to feed him.

When I stop by to see him after school, he explains that he wants me to help him build a gyroscope. I’m the only one in the whole physics class that he asked. “Is it for a grade?” I ask. I’m taking a full load of honors classes and nervous about taking on something that will hurt my grade. I need to keep my GPA up high for college applications next year.

“No grade, just for fun,” he says. “Are you in?”

“Hell yeah.”

Even when I was a freshman and didn’t qualify yet for Bledsoe’s classes, I would wander in and he would let me hang out in his lab. I’d clean the equipment and wipe the tables after school several days a week, when I wasn’t in Drama Guild, and so I became kind of an assistant lab tech.

“Why acting?” he would ask me sometimes, studying a paper or peering at his computer screen through his tiny, rectangular wireless glasses. They looked funny sometimes, like two blank microscope slides, butterflying his nose.

“I like drama.”

“Are you an actor?”

“Nah. I’m more behind the scenes.” I could never risk acting: What if I forgot a line or made a wrong move? It would be witnessed by hundreds of people. Sometimes, I think that is why I like science. Science doesn’t mind when you make a mistake. Instead, science gets kind of excited.

Before we start planning the gyroscope, Bledsoe shows me a video. “It’s almost like an optical illusion,” he says. I see a disk mounted on a frame, and it starts spinning wildly— but not really, I notice. There is stability provided by the frame, a force that always keeps it upright no matter how out-of-control it looks.

“It looks like it should be falling over, but it’s not,” I say.

“Like it’s defying gravity, right?” He nods excitedly. “The torque applied to the disk causes a precession—so what happens is the axis is caught between gravity and its own angular momentum vector, and it’s forced to find a happy middle ground to remain stable.”

We watch the video quietly, like awed worshippers at an altar.

“I could buy one,” he says thoughtfully. “I have money in the science budget. But . . .”

“Nah,” I reply. “Let’s build it.”

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