The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider Page A

randomly sneak into classes when I got bored. They never caught me. Besides, I picked survey courses, the ones with like a hundred students. We’re just going to appreciate the lectures, take notes on whatever we can use in debate, and then go on our merry way.”
    Which is basically what happened—in History of the British Empire, at least. We joined a hundred other students in an echoing, tiered lecture hall and sat through a mildly interesting but mostly dull fifty minutes on imperialism, capitalism, and war economy. I dutifully scribbled down some notes, which was more than I could say for the bearded guy two rows down who spent the entire class playing Angry Wings on his phone.
    â€œSo?” Cassidy asked, once the class had let out and she’d dragged me into the line for the nearest coffee cart. “What did you think?”
    â€œInteresting,” I said, because I knew that was what she wanted me to say.
    â€œâ€˜Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.’” Cassidy grinned and poured some sugar into her coffee. “ Hamlet . And speaking of which, time for some seventeenth-century literature.”
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    WHEN WE GOT to the lecture hall, something seemed wrong. It wasn’t until I noticed the textbooks that I realized why.
    â€œI think we’re in the wrong room.” I whispered. “Should we go?”
    And then a professor in a funny, flat-bottomed tie strode to the front of the room and it was too late to do anything but sit there and listen.
    Somehow, we’d wound up in Organic Chemistry. I’d done honors chem as a junior, which had been one of the least pleasant experiences of my high-school career, and I assumed that organic chemistry would be an equally painful continuation of the same.
    The professor, this tiny Eastern European guy with a penchant for stroking his little blond chin beard, rolled up his sleeves. He drew two hydrocarbon chains on the board—that much at least I could recognize. One was shaped like an M, the other like a W.
    â€œWho can tell me the difference?” he asked, surveying the lecture hall.
    No one was brave enough to hazard a guess.
    â€œThere is no difference,” the professor finally said. “The molecules are identical, if you consider them in three-D space.”
    He held up two plastic models and rotated one of them. They were identical.
    â€œNow, if you please,” he continued, drawing two new molecules on the board. “What is the difference here?”
    It was mind-blowing, the way I could suddenly see exactly what he was asking, now that I knew to look past the scribbles on the board and to imagine the molecules as they actually were.
    â€œCome on, doesn’t anyone play Tetris?” the professor asked, earning a few laughs.
    â€œThey’re opposites,” someone called.
    â€œThey’re opposites,” the professor repeated, picking up two new models and rotating them, “in the same sense that your left hand is the opposite of your right hand. They are mirror images of each other, which we shall call enantiomers .”
    He went on, talking about how opposites could actually be the same thing, and how they occurred together in nature, not actually opposites at all, but simply destined to take part in different reactions. It was nothing like the grueling equations we’d been forced to crunch in honors chem, numbers with exponents so high that I sometimes felt bad for my calculator. There wasn’t any math to it at all, just theories and explanations for why reactions proceeded the way they did, and why molecules bonded in three dimensions. I didn’t understand all of it, but the stuff I did get was pretty interesting.
    When the class ended, Cassidy turned toward me, a little furrow between her eyebrows.
    â€œI’m really sorry I mixed up the classrooms,” she said.
    â€œWhat are you talking about? That was awesome.”
    I’d never before