Page 19 of The Naughty Professor
And then Dr.Hargreave’s voice cut through my thoughts like a knife.
“The potential is there,”I remembered.“But so is the danger.Dr.Sterling, it could all go wrong, fatally.”
Fatally.
For one long moment, I saw it.Not formulas on paper, not theoretical pathways.I saw myself on a hospital bed, tubes shoved down my throat, my body a husk because I thought I was smarter than I was.I saw Grandma getting the call.Juniper staring down at me, smug and satisfied, saying she knew this would happen.
My fingers twitched.
What the hell was I doing?
The bottles were silent now, just glass and liquid and powder.But the echo of Hargreaves’s voice still vibrated in my skull.
I stared at the notes I’d scribbled, at the crude sketch of a molecular chain.It could all go horribly wrong.
But then again… hadn’t every breakthrough in chemistry begun with someone ignoring the word danger?
I exhaled shakily, wiped my palms on my lab coat, and reached for the cobalt chloride again.
I uncapped the bottle, its chemical tang sharp enough to sting my nose.Just a dash, I told myself, steadying my hand.I poured it into a beaker already holding a pale suspension of acetylsalicylic acid.
The reaction was instant.
A violent hiss, a pop like a firecracker, and then a flare of light as the solution spat upward.The beaker cracked down the side, a hairline fracture racing across the glass, and smoke curled into my face.
“Shit!”I choked, stumbling back.The acrid fumes clawed at my throat, and I doubled over coughing.My hand shot out blindly until I found the switch for the ventilation hood.The fan roared to life, sucking the smoke away in ragged spirals.
I leaned against the counter, gasping, my heart hammering like it wanted to escape my ribcage.The cracked beaker sat there like an accusation, shards glinting at the edges where a piece had chipped off.
What was I doing?
I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes, trying to steady my breath.The warning voice of Hargreaves still lingered in my skull, oily and insistent: The potential is there.But so is the danger.It could all go wrong.Fatally.
Maybe I should stop.
But then—like film reels clicking past one another—I remembered the freshman who’d fled the lab earlier, terrified of me.I remembered Juniper’s smirk when she called me a villain.I remembered years of students whispering behind my back, administrators glancing past me like I wasn’t worth their time.
And most of all, I remembered the boy on the curb.His paperback torn to confetti, his shoulders shaking, his face blotchy with humiliation.
I was that boy.
I’d been him my whole damn life.
Bullied, always forgotten.The weak one.The invisible one.The one nobody wanted, and nobody loved.
Always unloved.
The words settled in my chest like a brand.And as the fan whirred above me, carrying the smoke away into the ceiling vents, I stared at the array of bottles gleaming under the fluorescent lights.
The formula was dangerous.It could kill me.
But what was worse—dying in the attempt, or living the rest of my life as the forgotten boy on the curb?
ChapterSeven
Thorne
The chalk squeaked as I drew the final line across the board.A crude grid, four little boxes stacked neatly like windows.I capped it with the wordsAttackandRetreat, my handwriting slanting a little more than usual.My students leaned forward in their seats, notebooks half-filled, laptops glowing.This was the moment I lived for—the pause just before their brains clicked into place.
