Barcelona Weekly

That was the magic word: meniscus . The curved smile of liquid in a graduated cylinder. Elena had seen her mother check the oil in the car using the same principle.

Stung, he shoved the equipment toward her: a pycnometer (a fancy, expensive glass vial), a precision scale, and a vial of lab-grade ethanol. Elena read the instructions once, then twice. Mass of empty pycnometer. Mass of pycnometer plus water. Mass of pycnometer plus alcohol.

Her brother passed her the pepperoni. “Just don’t measure how much pizza I eat.”

She carefully tilted the pycnometer, letting the bubbles escape one by one, then topped it off. She weighed it, did the math on a napkin, and slid it back.

Elena, bored with her summer reading, peered over his elbow. “So? That’s basically the same.”

“And you’re in eleventh, crying over 0.001.”

“I’m going to fail,” he muttered, jabbing a finger at his chemistry data sheet. “My numbers are wrong. The density of alcohol is supposed to be 0.789 g/mL, but I keep getting 0.79.”

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