Kate the Chemist: Dragons vs. Unicorns
HI! MY NAME IS DR. KATE BIBERDORF, but most people call me Kate the Chemist. I perform explosive science experiments on national TV when I’m not in Austin, Texas, teaching chemistry classes. Besides being the best science in the entire world, chemistry is the study of energy and matter, and their interactions with each other. Like how I can use cornstarch to breathe fire or liquid nitrogen to freeze Cheetos! If you read Dragons vs. Unicorns carefully, you will see how Little Kate the Chemist uses chemistry to solve problems in her everyday life.
But remember, none of the experiments in this book should be done without the supervision of a trained professional! If you are looking for some fun, safe, at-home experiments, check out my companion book, Kate the Chemist: The Big Book of Experiments. (I’ve included one experiment from that book in the back of this one—how to make unicorn glue!)
And one more thing: Science is all about making predictions (or forming hypotheses), which you can do right now! Who do you think will win? The dragons or the unicorns? Let’s find out—it’s time for Kate the Chemist’s first adventure.
PHILOMEL BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
First published in the United States of America by Philomel, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by Kate the Chemist, LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Ebook ISBN 9780593116562
Edited by Jill Santopolo.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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To my dragons (Chelsea, Caitlin, Amanda)
and my unicorns (Katie, Becky, Brittany).
This is for you.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Introduction
Copyright
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE: Under Pressure
CHAPTER TWO: Waiting for a Reaction
CHAPTER THREE: It All Heats Up
CHAPTER FOUR: An Educated Guess
CHAPTER FIVE: Like Mud
CHAPTER SIX: Kitchen Chemistry
CHAPTER SEVEN: Leaving It up to Chance
CHAPTER EIGHT: All the World’s a Stage
CHAPTER NINE: Stuck on You
CHAPTER TEN: A Science Spell
CHAPTER ELEVEN: One Step Closer
CHAPTER TWELVE: Accidents Happen
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Always Break a Leg
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Slip Sliding Away
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Something Stinks!
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Orange You Having Fun?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: A Bad Luck Streak
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Perfectly Rotten
CHAPTER NINETEEN: The Stickiest Situation
CHAPTER TWENTY: The Testy Test Subject
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: The Real Deal
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: N-R-G!
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Curtain Call
EXPERIMENT: Unicorn Glue
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
UNDER PRESSURE
Pressure (noun). When molecules work together to apply a force. Like if kindergartners push over an ice-cream truck at recess, or when lava forces its way out of a volcano.
BREATHING FIRE IS EASY.
At least that was what I told myself. I stood in the science lab after school in front of a couple dozen fourth and fifth graders. All waiting on me. No pressure.
“Ready, Kate?” asked Ms. Daly, our after-school chemistry club advisor.
“I was born ready!” I pumped my arm in the air like I was in the huddle before a soccer game.
“Egg-cellent,” said Ms. Daly. It was her typical cornball humor. Mostly because of this stinky experiment we did last April that turned raw eggs into bouncy balls. A bunch rolled all over the place, and one got lost in the radiator.
Only there weren’t rotten bouncy eggs involved in my demo.
Instead:
1 blowtorch (with a steady base so the school wouldn’t catch on fire)
1 big mouth (mine—words pretty much launched out of it and thoughts came later)
2 scoops of cornstarch (nothing to do with Ms. Daly’s cornball humor. It had to do with carbon.)
1 straw (reusable, my BFF Birdie made sure of it)
2 legs (to run with if things got too explosive)
1 bucket (to spit out the cornstarch)
2 best friends (1 to hold the fire extinguisher and 1 to cheer me on)
1 glass of water (to rinse out my mouth after the demo)
1 big bowl of water (safety, duh!)
1 fire blanket (Unlike Supergirl, the girl of steel, I’m fully human.)
Ms. Daly secured the blowtorch onto a nearby desk. With its attachable base, it looked like a missile.
“It’s ready,” she declared. Soon a 2,000-degree flame would spew out of its brass nozzle. Not just anywhere. A foot from my head.
I swallowed hard. Why did I volunteer for this again?
Chairs scraped the floor. Kids leaned forward to see better.
Normally, we got about a dozen for our Friday meetings.
Today, three dozen crammed into the room.
It was the very last meeting before fall break, and everyone had flocked here to see me. I didn’t want to blow it.
Strike that. I NEEDED to blow it—cornstarch, I mean, spitting straight toward the flame to make a gigantic sizzling fireball.
“Is that a real torch?” asked Avery Cooper, a chemistry club regular who played midfield on my soccer team. She pointed so enthusiastically that her short blonde braids bobbed. “It looks like a prop from my dads’ theater.”
“Oh, it’s real all right,” I said.
“I’ll vouch for that,” said Ms. Daly. She should know. She’s a retired air force flight engineer. She knocked on the tank with a wrench from her tool belt. The silver wrench was the same color as her cap of short hair. “It’s loaded with fuel,” she said.
“Awesome,” sniffed a nasally fourth grader in an Avengers T-shirt. He made a kaboom sound that was a little too phlegmy.
“It’s going to be a beautiful swirl of color,” said Birdie Bhatt in a hushed voice. Of course Birdie would say that. She’s my best friend and really amazing at drawing, especially unicorns.
“Take a step back,” instructed Ms. Daly, shooing everyone with her arms. “You should be in the second row. Just in case.”
“In case of what?” snapped Phoenix Altman, who locked eyes with Avery.
“It’s only a precaution,” said Ms. Daly. Just like the fire blanket. And the fire extinguisher that Elijah Williams, my other best friend and also my next-door neighbor, was holding.
For a m
oment, regret zipped inside me like hot gas molecules. Had I really declared in a not-so-quiet voice during recess that I could breathe fire?
Yup. Speak-and-then-think Kate Crawford at your service!
If I had known what was going to happen afterward, would I have breathed fire?
That’s complicated.
Because it wasn’t just the fire breathing demo.
It was all the stuff days later. Because of the demo. Because of me.
But I didn’t know any of that then. I just knew I had to breathe fire like Dr. Caroline, on YouTube. It’s not only because she blows things up and makes the best and weirdest messes. Or because of her hot-pink lab coat and cool shoes. It’s because by listening to her, I realized that chemistry is way more than a bunch of facts in a book. Chemistry is what you eat, it’s how you sleep, it’s why shampoo stings your eyes in the shower. You can taste science, you can smell it. And you can watch it explode. And that was the reason I had to breathe fire.
It was also why weird things started happening to me. You might call them messages. Or formulas that didn’t make sense.
And when something doesn’t make sense, I, Kate Crawford, get very, very curious and just have to figure it out.
CHAPTER TWO
WAITING FOR A REACTION
Chemical Reaction (noun). A process where one thing changes into a completely different thing, irreversibly. Like how we convert chocolate and flour into a cake, but we can’t turn a cake into chocolate and flour!
ELIJAH LIFTED THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER over his short afro, grunting as if it were heavy, which it wasn’t. He could be such a drama king. “I’m on it,” he said. “Just call me the Firefighter.”
Birdie whipped out her phone. Well, not her phone. Her older sister Meela’s. Birdie had dropped hers in the pond by my house. Mostly because she had been a little shocked when I told her I was going to breathe fire after school today.
I wasn’t sure why she was surprised. It’s not like I hadn’t been planning this demo since last spring. Ms. Daly said that if I wrote an essay on combustion (the science word for fire) and showed her I was ready, I could breathe fire when I got to fifth grade. So I had written about my need to understand fire, starting with why toasted marshmallows taste better (the heat from the fire breaks a whole bunch of bonds within the molecules creating yummy marshmallow goo).
Ms. Daly loved it. And now, guess what? It was October 2, and I had been a fifth grader for thirty days. And don’t say not that anyone was counting. Because I was. I love math.
Ms. Daly handed me a pale blue fire-resistant lab coat. “More safety precautions,” she said firmly.
My hair was already pulled back into a ponytail. And the bowl of water sat on a nearby counter. I rolled up the sleeves of the lab coat. Even though I was tall for ten, the long coat brushed the tips of my cowboy boots. The coat would help keep me safe because it was made from a fabric that was not supposed to melt and would protect me from heat. It was okay that it smelled bad and made me look like I was wearing ugly pajamas that my grandma Dort wouldn’t wear, even if you paid her.
I crossed my fingers and toes that everything would go exactly as I had practiced.
CHAPTER THREE
IT ALL HEATS UP
Exothermic Reaction (noun). It’s as if the molecules are on the monkey bars, and they can’t hang out for a long time, so they drop down to the sand and chill. When they move, heat is released.
I GRABBED THE CUP FILLED with cornstarch and tossed it back into my mouth.
The saliva was sucked from inside my cheeks. Cornstarch absorbs moisture. It’s the first weird part of breathing fire.
I had practiced nine times. With Ms. Daly in the room, of course. Since the first Friday after school started, we had carefully gone over each and every step of the demo. And I had also practiced spitting the cornstarch with a fake blowtorch at home all summer.
Ms. Daly grabbed the propane torch to double-check its position.
Lots of “whoas” and lots of “she’s not serious” flew through the room.
I wanted to yell, “You bet!” But then I would swallow cornstarch, and that wouldn’t be fun.
Because I could choke. Or maybe get sick.
Ms. Daly clicked the torch to ignite the fire. With a loud hiss, the blowtorch blasted a jet of gas right next to my face.
Holy jeans! This was fire.
Okay, now I was shaking in my special birthday cowboy boots. Still, I had dreamed about this moment for so long.
I snatched the reusable teal straw.
This was the hardest part. I had to blow the cornstarch in my mouth through the straw toward the flame. It was like having a mouth full of peas and a pea shooter. It was harder though, because my mouth felt like cotton.
Most fire blowers don’t use straws. But Ms. Daly had decided a foot-long one would keep my head a safe distance from the blowtorch. Out of the corner of my eye, I spied my mom and little brother, Liam, peeking in from the back window. Everyone knew Liam was my brother because we had the exact same hair color. Light brown with bright gold highlights. Only mine was super long, and his was super short. And everyone recognized my mother. Especially since she just happened to be the principal of Rosalind Franklin Elementary. But I knew she didn’t want to distract me.
It made me feel better seeing her. But also a tiny bit more nervous, too.
“Don’t step past this line.” Ms. Daly pointed to the red duct tape on the floor, which she’d put there so I wouldn’t get too close to the flames.
Lunging forward, I stopped in front of the red line. From my gut—with everything I had—I blew out the cornstarch through the straw. Like after the ref blew a whistle at the start of a soccer game, I was in the zone.
A giant fireball whooshed out of the straw. It was a serious blast. Longer and bigger and brighter than in any practice run.
I heard gasps of disbelief and awe.
The red-hot ball of sizzling fuel punched out like a fist.
Oh no! It was going to incinerate Ms. Daly’s cactus on the windowsill.
Kids screamed, “Fire!”
The cactus’s needles started to singe.
“It’s going to explode!” Avery shouted. She raced to the front of the room, grabbed the bowl of water, and tossed it on the burning cactus. Only it missed the cactus and drenched me instead.
Elijah pulled out the pin on the fire extinguisher and pushed down on the trigger. A spray of foam whooshed out of the tank. Sweeping back and forth, he blasted out the flames. Soon white extinguisher goop covered the cactus.
It was saved! Water dripped down my chin, but I didn’t mind.
Everyone clapped wildly, and I high-fived Elijah, who was grinning from ear to ear. “Thank you,” I wanted to say, but yucky cornstarch clogged my mouth.
Immediately, I spat out the cornstarch into the bucket and took a big swig of water. You definitely didn’t want to eat that stuff.
Trust me, it was chalky not tasty.
“Do it again!” kids shouted. They meant breathe fire, not spew cornstarch.
“But don’t burn any plants,” said Avery.
“Good plan,” said Ms. Daly. “But it’s a prickly pear. Hopefully, it will resprout.”
“It looked like fire spit right out of her mouth,” said someone in the very back.
My heart pounded louder than Elijah’s drums in his garage. I did it. Oh yeah! I gave Elijah another high five. I gave Ms. Daly a high five just as Mom and Liam rushed into the science lab.
“I’m so happy the fire is out,” said Mom in her principal voice.
“That was cool,” exclaimed Liam. I bounced up and down like the cement floor was a trampoline. I was so happy, I could spring to the ceiling.
I happily and drippily bounced through some of Ms. Daly’s explanations. Like how cornstarch was the f
uel. And that it worked really well because it had carbon in it. The more carbon, the bigger the fire.
It had definitely been a big wow!
A fourth grader in a basketball shirt raised his hand. “I want to breathe fire.”
And then a fifth grader with a shiny ponytail that spurted out of the top of her head yelled, “Me too!” Her name was Julia Yoon, and she was president of the student council. She liked to be in charge, just like me. “Can we try it now?” she asked. “Please?”
Ms. Daly smiled tightly. “Not right now,” she said. And I could hear Avery whispering, “So unfair.” The basketball shirt kid rolled his eyes.
“Kate worked hard to understand how fire breathing worked,” continued Ms. Daly, “and practiced a lot. With adult supervision. However, I’d love for you all to start thinking about your own science projects. You could enter them in our upcoming science fair.”
Then Ms. Daly went on to explain that what I did was called an exothermic reaction. How things went from high energy to low energy.
I was definitely not feeling low energy. I couldn’t stop grinning.
Oh yeah, chemistry was cool!
CHAPTER FOUR
AN EDUCATED GUESS
Hypothesis (noun). Sometimes people call it an educated guess. That doesn’t mean that a guess is super smart. It just means that you are going to make a prediction based on really checking something out.
“I CAN’T BELIEVE WHAT’S HAPPENING.” My fingers furiously tapped on my iPad. “I just popped ten bubbles. At once. I didn’t know that was a thing.”
“It is a thing,” said Birdie, who stood on her head across from me in our family room. Her long black hair spread like a curtain onto the beige carpet. It had been only a day since the fire breathing demo, and I was itching for a new science adventure. But I hadn’t come up with anything. You really can’t count Bubble Zap, although I had been practicing a lot, since it was Saturday.