Trial by Fire

“Do you have a fever?” he asked.

“I always have a fever,” Lily replied grumpily, which they both knew was true.

Lily’s body ran hot—about 102 degrees on a normal day. On a bad day, her fever could shoot up as high as 111 degrees. The doctors had no idea how she’d survived some of her worst attacks, but then again, they had no idea about a lot of things where Lily was concerned.

“I’m serious,” replied Tristan, pointing accusingly at the spot of blood on her jeans where she’d impaled herself with the Epipen. “Do you need me to take you home? Or the hospital?”

“I’m fine,” she replied emphatically. “Really. I feel great.” She paused and smiled ruefully. “Well, apart from the whole wet-boobs-in-class thing.”

Lily gave him a saucy look and nudged his arm, brushing the whole thing off. After everything that people had said about her and her family, a wet T-shirt was the least of Lily’s problems. Tristan’s big blue eyes sparkled and his light-brown hair fell across his forehead as he ducked his head with quiet laughter. He had a million little gestures like this that left her star struck. He was almost too pretty to look at sometimes, and Lily couldn’t believe how lucky she was that he was finally hers.

“Pay attention to Mr. Carn,” she chastised, like Tristan had been the one to disrupt class. He nudged her back and they focused on the lecture.

“If any symbol fits the universe better than this one”—Mr. Carnello spun to his projector and drew the sideways figure eight that represented infinity.—“it would be this one.” He drew an equal sign. “Newton proved that if you hit a ball with a known amount of force, that force doesn’t disappear. It’s turned into kinetic energy, and the ball flies a distance that you can measure with accuracy. Why? Because energy in”—he tapped one side of the equal sign—“is equal to the energy out.” He finished by tapping the other side of the equal sign. “So. Energy changes. Matter can even change into energy—we’ll get to Einstein’s E equals mc squared later—but you can’t make something out of nothing. This is the first law of thermodynamics. Now! Thermo, which is Greek for ‘heat,’ and dynamics, from the Greek dynamikos, which means ‘power.’ Heat and power are two halves of the same whole.”

Mr. Carnello began to scribble furiously as he mumbled to himself. Lily and Tristan looked at each other and grinned. They both loved science. In fact, Tristan had scored higher on his Biology Achievement Test than anyone else in the state that year, and he was seriously thinking about enrolling as a premed student in one of the Ivy League schools that he would apply to this winter. It was only early November, and senior’s still had another month or two to pick colleges, declare their majors, and basically figure out the rest of their lives before they all turned eighteen. Lily was sure Tristan had already decided to be a doctor someday. After spending so much time visiting her at Mass General when she was having one of her more severe attacks, he certainly knew his way around a hospital.