Do high school chem labs still allow these? Or are they too easy to weaponize? Have we moved on to chemistry via YouTube?

When I was in high school, we got to play with fire a lot. Chemistry was a blast. Our teacher was this vaguely insane guy from the private sector, though I can’t remember what he’d done in that former life. He had longish hair and bushy eyebrows and looked a little like a B-movie zealot. My ret-con memory of him is that he looked a bit like the SouthPark version of Charlie Manson in bifocals. He came in one day and sang chemistry-modified lyrics to O Sole Mio, under the title O Mole Mio. (I only remember the title. I only got a B in the class.)

But the most memorable day was the one he set our chem lab station on fire.

It was a typical class of 20 or so high school brats—some hyper and spazzy boys, some too cool for school gals, and then the rest of us along the bell curve ranging from motivated by grades to motivated by flying under the radar. My BFF Judi and I were lab partners, but there were only so many burners to go around, and that meant our lab teams were bumped up to four.  Rounding out our team was Willie Hooks, the high school quarterback who was a wiry little slowish learner with a quick mouth, and Grace Washington, who had the longest and most beautiful nails I had ever seen in my life up to that point (and maybe even since). She had a job outside school as a cashier and I asked her once how the hell she rang anything up (in the days before scanner beds). She told me she did it all with her nail tips; no fingerprints ever left on anything.

So on this day, we are all in the chem lab sitting on tall stools at those fireproof black resin countertops. The Bunsen burners are all set up and we all have our little collections of glassware. We split up the assigned tasks of the experiment: Judi will collect the chemicals we need, I will measure stuff, Willie will observe outcomes, Grace will take notes.

Except Judi and I are both sitting there waiting to get the go-ahead and looking at each other because we smell gas.

“Is that ours?” I asked her. She sort of squinted her eyes and craned her neck in a “I hope not but probably” way. I decided I wasn’t going to light that damn thing, and everyone else on the team followed suit. Willie went and told Mr. Clarke, who came over, extremely exasperated with us all and muttering about how we were hapless and helpless.

Judi tells this story way better than I do, but suffice to say that we all learned super fast what a gas leak can do. Even though we told him we smelled gas and that we had the burner set to the on position, he didn’t believe us, grabbed the thing and lit it up.

In retrospect, I was most surprised to learn that gas explosions actually do go “foom.” (Not kaboom or crack or blammo. Just like a big exhalation.)

I was less surprised that Willie might have set a personal best sprinting from the scene, and not surprised at all that Grace was hot on his heels squeaking at the top of her lungs.

Mr. Clarke suffered the worst of it, which was only fair. He burned off his eyebrows and the hair on one hand before tossing it into the sink and smothering it. He caught Judi’s notebook along the way and she lost half a page or so of notes before she slammed the book shut and handled that crisis.

I don’t remember what happened after that. I know Mr. Clarke did not apologize for doubting us. My recollection is that he bustled us off to some other station to do the assignment, Willie came back and helped out, and Grace watched from the door. Judi did confirm for me that Grace never sat with us in lab again. I guess she figured we were jinxed at best.