To put it kindly, our trip from Silver Spring, Maryland, to ten miles outside of Columbia, Missouri, is twenty hours of blue burning hell.
And, as Ruby Jo puts it, “We ain’t done yet, honey.”
We’ve napped. We’ve eaten apples and stale microwaved apple pies from fast-food restaurants. We’ve taken turns watching each other’s bags when one of us goes to the bathroom, which, by the time we reach Columbia, Missouri, has begun to smell like the bottom of the monkey cage at the National Zoo. We’ve traded stories and shoulders to rest on, played that old license plate game, and stared out the window at streetlights, telephone poles, cornfields, nothing. We’ve cried.
In twenty hours, Ruby Jo Pruitt and I have become friends.
“So,” she says while we’re in line at what I hope will be the last burger and fries joint I see for the next decade, “how come you’re here?”
I tell her everything there is to tell. Freddie’s transfer, my intentionally screwed-up teacher test, doing a runner from my home like some desperate refugee. In turn, I get Ruby Jo’s story.
“I flunked,” she says. The “I” comes out like an “Ah.” “Flunked it good and well and honest. They asked some question like could I comment on the effects in the global chemistry community of some sonofabitch old guy who got the Nobel Prize in 1925. I just couldn’t do it. I mean, does that—pardon my French—horseshit really matter?”
“No. It doesn’t. And let me get this,” I say, forking over a ten-dollar bill for eggs and cheese on biscuits. The food smells like old grease and sweat, but at least it’s not a hamburger this time. I order two salads as an afterthought and hand the girl at the cash register another five.
“You know,” Ruby Jo says between bites of her biscuit when we’re back in the bus, “they don’t do biscuits here like they do where I come from.”
“I bet they don’t,” I tell her. I’ve had real southern biscuits, the kind made with lard and Martha White self-rising flour, the kind that tricks your tongue into thinking you’re eating a cloud. What we’re eating could be used as a weapon.
Ruby Jo tells me about her scholarship and her high school sweetheart and how she almost set her chem lab on fire when she made plasma with two halves of a green grape and a microwave. “Fascinating stuff, them plasmas,” she says.
My face must have taken on the shape of a question mark.
“No. Really. All you need is a little grape and one of them cheap microwaves. You got your ions in the grape, right?”
I nod. It’s not my field, but I follow, like any well-trained and overeducated citizen. Also, I know Ruby Jo is doing her best to distract me, to stave off another crying jag.
“Look, any living thing has ions,” she goes on. “So you get yourself a living thing that’s the right size, about a quarter wavelength of the stuff your microwave puts out, like a grape. Then you gotta cut it and make sure it’s still connected.” She breaks a piece of tomato from her fast food salad so only the skin holds it together. “This little section here acts like a sort of antenna, right?”
“Right,” I say.
“Now you got your ions and your electrons and your energy, and everything gets all excited and bursts into flame!” I recoil into my seat when she says this. “Wanna hear about my manganese dioxide and hydrochloric acid experiments?”
To be honest, I’m not sure I do.
Ruby Jo doesn’t wait for an answer before explaining how to make chlorine gas, or how to create explosions with gummy bears, or how she wrote secret messages to her girlfriends with lemon juice. “There was one girl in my school who had real strict parents. I reckon they were half off their rockers. Anyway, when they took her out of the fourth grade to homeschool her, I’d send her blank pieces of paper and she’d read ’em when she did her ironing chores. Then she’d sneak a note back to me the same way.”