Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya

visiting the small library around which the school’s classrooms had been organized. Mrs. Smedstadt, the librarian, introduced them to the large wooden card catalogs near the checkout desk and walked them through the complexities of the Dewey Decimal System. Lily and Meena loved leafing through the soft-edged manila cards of the card catalog. Together they assembled a list of books to gather:
    916 Af The Great Explorers of Africa
    917.704 Sp The Discovery of the Source of the Nile
    910.82 Da Hints to Lady Travellers
    917.76 Mi Baker of the Nile
    916.76 Ha Lovers on the Nile
    962.4 Ba Morning Star: Florence Baker’s diary of the expedition to put down the slave trade on the Nile, 1870-1873
    It was, perhaps, not surprising that Lily and Meena were the only fourth graders to request materials from another library. They had been distressed to find that their topic received scant coverage in their World Books, among the several-page spreads devoted to American presidents, state flowers, and breeds of dog.
    Together Lily and Meena read through their stack of books and filled a neat pile of index cards, color-coded pink for biographical details, blue for historical context, green for information on their subject—Lady Florence Baker herself—white for information on her husband, and yellow for notes on other explorers who had been their contemporaries.
    So, while the other students’ index cards read like this:
    Shrimp are a type of crustacean.
    Shrimp are caught in nets.
    There are many species of shrimp.
    Shrimp eat plants.
    Lily and Meena’s looked like this:
    Born Barbara Maria Szász in 1845 in Transylvania.
    Kidnapped and sold into slavery at the age of four.
    Raised as a harem girl in the home of a local merchant.
    1859: put up for sale at a slave auction at the age of fourteen.
    Two men bid for her. One—a servant of the pasha of Vidin. The other—Samuel Baker.
    The pasha’s servant places the highest bid, but Baker bribes Florence’s attendant to allow him to take her. He and his friend, the Maharaja Duleep Singh (an Indian prince), escape with Florence.
    1861: Samuel and Florence set out to discover the source of the Nile.
    1865: Florence and Samuel Baker are married.
    1866: Samuel knighted by Queen Victoria of England. The Queen refuses to receive Florence because of the scandal of Florence and Samuel traveling together unchaperoned before their marriage.
    1916: Florence Baker dies.
    Certainly Florence’s marriage to Samuel had been an unconventional one, and it had pleased Lily to discover this, feeling a sudden kinship with the couple. Lily loved the task of copying out the relevant passages of text onto her crisp note cards, enclosing them carefully in quotation marks and noting the source at the bottom of each card. At night, at her desk, she ordered and reordered them, imagining the best approach to organizing their report and presentation. Meena argued that the only sensible approach to organization was chronological, but Lily had wondered whether they might not start first with a key event of Florence’s adult life—being snubbed by Queen Victoria, perhaps—and then circle back through the biographical details chronologically, using the opening scene as a kind of bookend, as some of the more sophisticated biographies she had read tended to do. “Lady Florence Baker was born Barbara Maria Szász in 1845 in Transylvania.” Lily shook her head. She couldn’t bear that type of inelegant introduction.
    The assignment had been to produce a three-page report and a five-minute presentation, including one optional visual aid. For their oral presentation, Meena had created a posterboard timeline noting the key events in Florence’s life, illustrated with photocopied pictures of Florence and Samuel and a map she had created, on which she had outlined the “Route of Florence and Samuel Baker’s First Expedition, 1861-1865.”
    Meena and