Battle Fatigue by Mark Kurlansky Page A

hates Communists. “The damn Communists.”
    â€œHoney.” Mrs. Panicelli reprimands him for his language. Soon he vanishes inside the house.
    I feel safe in the company of the Panicellis and it makes me feel good to have engine grease on my hands. At the end of the afternoon we wash up with this special glop for taking the grease off. But I don’t work at it very hard because, in truth, I like having a little black grease showing. My parents don’t like it, though, and always send me back to the bathroom at dinnertime to wash my hands again.
    I have made a deal with Dickey. In exchange for helping him with his Chrysler, he spends time pitching me balls so that I can practice hitting. I hope the Red Sox are doing the same thing. Even on the coldest days, I swing as long as Dickey is willing to throw pitches. Next spring has to be my best season ever, and with some practice it could be. Thank God for baseball.

Chapter Thirteen
    Explosive Elements
    May 18, 1964
    Dear Diary,
    Once again I want to write down something I really can’t tell anyone because it is so weird . Here it is. I love Mr. Shaker’s chemistry class. There are two things that are wrong about this. One: nobody likes Mr. Shaker, and two: nobody likes chemistry. The chemistry teacher was Mr. Balard, a quiet man. He was so quiet that I could not hear anything he said. He would stand in front of this large chart of the elements and talk very quickly in a soft voice. Then something miraculous happened. Mr. Balard left. He just left and nobody told us why because they thought kids were too stupid to notice that Mrs. Pudheiski, the home economics teacher—who was so beautiful that all the guys kept saying they were going to take her course though none of them ever did—also left. And Mr. Pudheiski, the assistant principal, stayed, seemed sad, and started giving a lot of detentions. Why did they think we couldn’t figure this out?
    But that’s not why I am writing this. Mr. Shaker is filling in as chemistry teacher, and even though he is easier to hear, this is very bad news. Chemistry is bad enough without getting it from Mr. Shaker. I had him for history and I hated it the exact way that I always knew I would hate having him as a teacher. And now here he is in the chemistry lab and he’s even moved in his stupid Yankees banner.
    However, I have started to understand that the chart of elements behind him is actually very interesting. To begin with, many of them are extremely unstable and given to exploding. Sodium, for example, is a soft metal that tends to explode and give off hydrogen gas when mixed with water. It is interesting that so many of these elements are given to violent reactions because the elements are what everything in the world is made up of, and so many are violent. Take hydrogen. It is very dangerous, given to burning and to exploding. But Mr. Shaker says that hydrogen is the most common element, that 90 percent of the atoms in the world are hydrogen. No wonder the world is a dangerous place.
    But these explosive elements can be tamed by mixing them in the right compounds. When hydrogen is mixed with oxygen, you get water, which is very stable and puts out fires. Sodium can be mixed with chlorine, which is poisonous, and it makes salt. So when you look at a chart of the world broken down to its basic elements, the world looks dangerous. But it turns out it is just a matter of how you mix things up. Now I realize, after wondering for a long time, what I will be. I am going to be a chemist.
    Mr. Shaker, in his white laboratory coat, faces the class and demonstrates the explosiveness or stability of compounds. He mixes things in glass test tubes that he holds over the sink. Sometimes they turn bright colors; sometimes they give off smoke in different colors. Often they make a little pop and then the test tube shatters and a colored stain appears on Mr. Shaker’s white coat. He flinches when the test