Bringing Down the Mouse by Ben Mezrich

environmentally friendly sunroof that would help heat the building during the cold winter months. But somewhere between blueprints and buttresses, the Nagassack Building Committee decided alumni funds would be better spent on a four-hundred seat theater, which, it turned out, was just as swelteringlyhot in winter and summer, because of its unfortunate location right above the main boilers that fed superheated steam through the school’s vascular system. In any case, the sunroof was out, the dome went up, and Nagassack was the only middle school that Charlie knew of that taught science in the round.
    The table setup was perfect for a thirty-student class, which was the norm. The far half of the room was reserved for special projects, and for the preserved samples that lined the metal shelves above the microscopes: fish, bugs, frogs, snakes, mostly sealed in plastic containers with cork tops, some stuck right to display boards with brightly tipped pins. Next to the shelves, tucked into the farthest curve of the circular room, was Mabel the skeleton. Mrs. Hennigan, who taught science from fifth to seventh grades, never tired of telling her classes that Mabel was the most expensive specimen in the entire school. At Halloween, she got a jack-o-lantern sidekick, placed right beneath her dangling, bone-white toes. Around Christmas, Mabel was dressed up with a red Santa hat and a cotton-ball beard.
    The room itself smelled of hamster wood shavings, though there hadn’t been a live hamster in the room for as long as Charlie could remember. A lot of kids attributed the smell to Mrs. Hennigan herself; a heavysetwoman with curly white hair and poorly applied blue eyeliner, she had a penchant for sacklike outfits that seemed to be made of burlap. Everything she wore was beige, down to her hospital-style tights and outdated platform shoes. Her hand always shook when she wrote on the chalkboard at the front of the room, which made her mostly illegible handwriting even more impossible to decipher, and the glare from the fluorescent panels in the dome only amplified the effect.
    As usual, Mrs. Hennigan was at that chalkboard, scratching away with a piece of chalk as small as a pencil eraser, while Charlie watched Greta devour her lunch. Every now and then, Hennigan’s nails hit the blackboard as she wrote, sending an awful screech reverberating through the wood-shaving-scented air. Most of the kids groaned at the sound, but Charlie remained focused on the turtle.
    He’d often found solace watching Greta; seeing her roam around her tank in the slow-motion manner of her species helped him think, and at the moment, he certainly had a lot to think about. A casual observer might wonder how a turtle could aid a twelve-year-old’s meditation, but for Charlie, it made perfect sense. One of his most significant childhood memories revolved around a turtle just like Greta.
    It had happened just a few days past his eighth birthday. He and Jeremy had been outside playing and had discovered a little creek that ran parallel to Jeremy’s backyard. They’d never seen the creek before, because it was past the invisible line that Jeremy’s parents had drawn beyond which they hadn’t been allowed to play, but that morning they’d decided to push those boundaries and explore. They followed the creek through the dense underbrush, finally coming to a little clearing where the water swelled to what almost could be described as a pond. And in the middle of the pond, they spotted a turtle sitting on a rather large log. Before either of them could even react, they heard laughter from the other side of the pond, followed by a rain of rocks, all aimed at the hapless reptile. A bunch of older kids, maybe age fifteen or sixteen, were hurling stones at the poor creature. Most were poorly aimed, but a few were finding their target, and Charlie could see the red splotches where the rocks were cutting through the turtle’s shell,