The extracurricular activities of the middle school students in the “Backpack Club” are anything but ordinary! Fueled by their curiosity, love of science, and an extraordinary backpack, they travel through time searching for answers their science class can’t provide.
Members of the Backpack Club, K.T., Jace, and Summer leap into action when their science teacher issues a challenge for their generation to “make the next big discovery”. This adventure, however, will take them into uncharted territory, the future! And, for one member, the glimpse into the future is even more personal than the functioning cells she observes inside herself and her friends.
Near-peer audio readings are by a high school student, B. Fannin.
The story has been divided into 18 pages. Click on the Tabs below to view the pages.
The Friday afternoon sunlight filtered through the window and onto her desk like a fractured prism. One more class to go, was K.T.’s only thought. Then, she would finally be free from the long school week. Startled from her daydream and back into the present moment, she watched as Ms. McCarthy, everyone’s favorite science teacher, wrote P-A-L-A-D-E across the whiteboard in large block letters, sounding out the strange name as she did. The students squinted at the board as they tried to repeat Ms. McCarthy’s pronunciation of George Emil Palade’s last name, a Romanian scientist from the 1960s. Described as the father of cell biology, he defined many of the cell organelles, or parts of the cell, and their functions using a novel way to isolate cellular components.
“Dr. Palade was fascinated by what he saw with the extreme magnification of an electron microscope.” Ms. McCarthy explained further, “He discovered that mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, that ribosomes make proteins, and how cells communicate with each other,” she said. “In the 1960s, he isolated organelles from the pancreas of a guinea pig using a method called fractionation, which wasn’t that precise. He improved upon this method by using sucrose, or sugar.
“This is a classic example,” she explained, “of how science builds on previous technology using a novel idea or invention. In the case of Palade, his sugar method allowed us to study the cellular world and opened a whole new branch of biology. Everything in your textbook was built on previous knowledge — who knows what we’ll discover tomorrow from what we know today. Maybe, in the future, we could view human cells inside human bodies—in real time—instead of in a petri dish!”
That idea sat in K.T.’s head, percolating with possibilities for a new adventure. She and her friends shared an ordinary-looking backpack that housed a powerful microcomputer with time-traveling capabilities. Each member of the Backpack Club was super interested in science and loved tinkering around with all kinds of fun experiments, following their curiosities wherever it took them.
Ms. McCarthy issued a challenge to the class, unknowingly sparking the inspiration for that adventure with her next statement. “Your generation, you or your friends, could make that next big discovery we seek. Palade did it for his generation in the 1960s. What will you do?
“With all our current technological capabilities, in as short a space as, say, a few decades, maybe 2060 or so, we could go past simply seeing things on a slide,” she added, growing more excited as she spoke. “With noninvasive microscopy, just imagine the possibilities.”
K.T. glanced over at Jace who sat one row over and two seats up. Jace was already looking back and over his shoulder at K.T. They locked eyes, thinking the same thought, we know what we will being doing this weekend. This trip would be different, though. This trip would be forward, into the future, a whole new adventure for the Backpack Club.
Once home, the first order of business for K.T. and Jace was to gather the rest of the Backpack Club. K.T. began the group text, “U IN?” Everyone in the club, Summer, Roman, Travis, and Connie (Roman’s little sister) would understand that question. It announced an adventure. As Jace and K.T. waited for the replies, they brainstormed ideas.
K.T. threw out the first question, “Where should we go, Jace?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Maybe Roman or Travis will have an idea. They chose the last place, ancient Egypt to study the origin of cats—super cool!”
“Yeah, but that was traveling to the past,” K.T. quickly retorted. “Now, we need to go forward. That’s a whole new ballgame.”
The simultaneous dings rang out from both their phones, followed in quick succession by two more dings.
“Are you serious?!”, K.T. exclaimed. “Looks like Roman and Connie are no-shows. They’re visiting their Grandma this weekend.”
“Uh, oh,” Jace frowned at the reply that followed from Travis, “Looks like Travis is grounded this weekend.”
“It might be just us two, amigo. I’m ready if you….” K.T. didn’t get the rest of her sentence out before the last text reply beeped its arrival. It was from Summer, and it simply said, “IN!”
Jace wasted no time digging in the back of his closet to retrieve the worn, army-green canvas backpack that housed the microprocessor. He hoisted it over his shoulder, wordlessly announcing to K.T. that it was time to grab their bikes and head over to Summer’s house.
The short bike ride through their shared neighborhood led them straight to Summer, already waiting in her driveway. She had wheeled herself outside and was facing them, eyes sparkling with anticipation for news of when and where they were heading. Propping their bikes up along the fence, Jace and K.T. followed closely behind Summer as she guided her wheelchair into a tight half circle back into the doorway of her house.
K.T. barely waited until Summer’s den door was shut before the plan tumbled out of her mouth. “Summer, seriously, this is going to the BEST trip yet…We are going into the FUTURE!
Ms. McCarthy told us about this Romanian scientist, what’s-his-name, and how he is the first guy to see ribosomes and stuff. He’s super famous, he…”
Summer interrupted her friend with a correction, “Do you mean Palade?”
Jace, pulling the backpack off his back and setting it onto the couch beside him, quipped casually, “How come no one’s shocked you know about him?”
Both Jace and K.T. were accustomed to Summer beating them to the punch, already aware of what they had only just discovered.
Summer explained, “It’s no big deal. Like you said, he’s pretty famous. I actually follow his Instagram fan page. My uncle is a research scientist at Texas A&M University. Of course, he would know George Palade. The last time my uncle came for a visit, he tried to use Palade as a scrabble word, but my mother called it cheating.” Summer laughed, remembering the light-hearted moment.
K.T.’s eyes grew wide, “That’s it,” she half-yelled.
Jace and Summer looked at her, then at one another, struggling to follow K.T’s train of thought. They then said in unison, “That’s what?”
“Don’t you see?” K.T. replied, “That’s our destination. That’s where we’ll land!” K.T. looked pleased with herself while Jace smiled in sudden agreement.
Summer tried to follow them, still confused, “Ok, what’s happening here? I need some background info please.”
Jace quickly filled her in on Ms. McCarthy’s lesson and the interest around future technologies, moving past invasive procedures, and the possibility of viewing cells while still inside the body.
Jace elaborated, “We weren’t sure where to go until you mentioned your uncle. Then, bingo! Let’s pop into a future laboratory at Texas A&M to take a sneak peek. We won’t touch anything. We’ll just see if Ms. McCarthy is right.”
With the mission destination and purpose decided, they wasted no time. K.T. plopped excitedly next to Jace on the couch, Summer gripped the wheels of her chair and pulled herself in tightly with the duo, each careful that their knees were firmly touching. They took quick looks into each other’s eyes searching for any trace of hesitancy. Seeing only excitement and anticipation mirrored back from his friends, Jace pulled out the microprocessor and typed the year 2060 into the number pad.
Together, Jace, K. T., and Summer stated the acknowledgement that began this and all previous adventures, “Mission accepted…Let’s do this!”
This time, instead of the normal CONTROL/ALT/DELETE/BACKSPACE key combo that typically launched them backward into time, Jace eyed ESCAPE/CAPSLOCK/TAB.
In a steady voice, Jace began the count, “One….” They pulled their knees in tighter. Whatever was touching Jace as he hit the key combo is what would be pulled into the time vortex with him.
“Two.…” They squeezed their eyes tightly closed, anticipating the bright burst of energy and light that was about to accompany the switching of dimensions.
In the same instant that Jace uttered “Three….,” he jammed the key combination down. Instantaneously, they felt a huge tug and a rough yank forward as their atoms left the present to be reassembled in their year of choice, 2060.
Dr. Summer Wong, a research scientist at Texas A&M University, had been sitting at her desk all day. Deeply engaged in her current research, she had spent countless hours in her lab. Dr. Wong had always been interested in biology, but not the conventional method where tissue must be killed, sliced, and stained. She was excited about noninvasive imaging abilities. In college she learned about Lidar radar, a 3D laser imaging technology used to map ancient Mayan cities hidden by jungle canopy for thousands of years, prompting her to ask herself, why can’t we discover a similar way to scan the human body to penetrate skin and cell membrane barriers? Figuring out how to reveal organelles and their functions had inspired her science anatomy research. Her famous discovery of how to track disease-induced damage to cell organelles, noninvasively, had greatly benefited the medical field.
She owned the patent on a technology that aided this anatomy research, a special pair of glasses that revolutionized the study of cell biology. At 52, she was considered young to have made such an impact, but, as a perpetual science nerd, this path was her destiny. Confined to a wheelchair for most of her youth, she wagered that science might one day have an answer to help her. Always certain about a career in science, long stretches in the lab were not as tedious to her as her colleagues, which was why she could often be found there, after hours and on most weekends.
Today, however, she felt restless. A beautiful Friday afternoon and extra-long lab hours this week called for a break. I think I’ve earned a nice walk. Her legs felt worrisomely numb. Sitting so long isn’t good for circulation. A walk will get the blood flowing again. She stood up, stretching both arms above her head, elongating her spine, dissolving the tension between her shoulders, and letting her computer-bleary eyes fall on the news article recently snipped from the local paper, a feature story on her. This time, it didn’t showcase her latest scientific achievement. It was a personal story accompanied with side-by-side photos, one 40 years ago, as a young girl in a wheelchair, the other her present self, wheelchair-free—tired, gleaming, triumphant—holding up a medal after crossing the finish line of her first marathon. That medal became a treasure, sitting in her desk drawer, pulled out in challenging moments to remind her that the technology that helped her say goodbye to her wheelchair originated from the same scientific process that would solve her current research questions.
Dr. Wong felt pride as she glanced from the news article on her bulletin board to her other prized achievement, the most advanced technological creation of her time—her Nexus© glasses. To avoid any liquid catastrophes, she moved those famous glasses safely to the opposite side of her desk, toward the bulletin board and away from that potentially dangerous cup of coffee. I’ll just be gone for a bit, and I’ll want that coffee when I return. She took off her lab coat and hung it up, moving toward the door. After exiting the lab, she turned around and stepped squarely in front of the sensor located just outside, at eye-level. As she thought her password into the eye pad, she heard the immediate click of the sensor as it locked up the lab. Breathing in deeply, she exhaled, moving toward the building exit, ready to get the blood flowing back into her legs. She, for one, would never take the pleasure of a walk on a beautiful day for granted.
“Ouch! Jace, dude, that time warp tug gets me every time. I wish traveling at the speed of light didn’t have such a big yank,” K.T. complained slightly as Jace and Summer ignored her.
Both were intently scanning every square inch of themselves, ensuring that all their atoms had made it to their destination. After taking a brief moment to orient themselves to their new surroundings, Jace placed the backpack on the floor, underneath a white lab coat.
Clearly, they had landed in a future science laboratory. Just to be sure, K.T. ran to a nearby computer monitor. The day, month, and the year—2060—floated, like a hologram, outside the bottom right corner of the monitor.
“Score!” K.T. whispered loudly and ecstatically to Jace and Summer.
Lasers and weird tangles of robotic arms, each on pause from their individual and collective tasks, greeted them from every corner. A Texas A&M logo covered the entire back wall. Streams of computers lined two adjacent walls. The monitors reflected billions upon billions of cells communicating with each other, some dividing and multiplying into two, all gyrating and teeming with movement. The cells appeared to be dividing in full view, but it was not obvious where the cells where coming from or whom the cells belonged to, an apparent mystery. K.T.’s eyes widened with wonder as she tried to comprehend what she was seeing.
Jace, pointing to the other side of the lab, announced, “Hey! These are plants.”
The adventurers focused their attention on the botanical side of the lab where plant material from individual greenhouses were remotely connected to the computer monitor, their cell functions and activity reflected on the screens. Right away, they noticed several similarities and several differences between the plant cells and animal cells. Just as they learned in Ms. McCarthy’s science class, plant cells aren’t circular. They’re square. Like the animal cells, they contain mitochondria, Golgi, ER, ribosomes, nuclei, as well as other organelles unique to plant cells, including chloroplasts, central vacuole, and a rigid cell wall.
“Wow, it’s like a science class on steroids in here!” K.T. exclaimed.
Aware they couldn’t stay long, they moved from the monitors to a shiny robotic arm with ten fingertips, each glowing in a different fluorescent color.
K.T. said what Jace was thinking, “Man, it’s taking everything I have to not touch this stuff! Jace, Summer, don’t you wish we could push all the buttons, flip the switches, and give everything a go?!” K.T. literally shoved her hands deep into her pockets to honor her promise, despite the equipment begging to be touched.
“I hear you K.T.—This stuff looks awesome! If only we could post photos of EVERYTHING! Imagine the likes and shares! Our feed would explode!” Jace looked longingly at the equipment, fighting to honor the mutual promise not to touch.
Jace and K.T. were suddenly aware that Summer wasn’t near them voicing the same itchiness to fiddle with the switches of all the scientific equipment laid out like candy, odd because her love of science was bigger than the both of theirs. Instead, Summer’s wheelchair was parked in front of a bulletin board by a desk in the lab corner, fixated on what appeared to be a news clipping attached to its surface. The intensity of her stare briefly muted K.T. and Jace’s excitement. For Summer, her surroundings had disappeared. She seemed deaf the other’s voices and presence. K.T., worried about her friend, moved to interrupt Summer’s stare, but Jace wordlessly placed his hand on her forearm to stop her. Summer’s intense focus announced that whatever was holding her gaze needed a moment to process.
Suddenly a heavy door opened and slammed shut a short distance just outside the laboratory. K.T. and Jace froze. Muffled words mimicked the rise and pitch of a polite conversation between two people. Uh oh…That’s our cue to skedaddle! K.T. thought.
She assertively voiced this thought out loud, “Guys! We gotta get out of here! Now!”
Jace was already on it, grabbing the backpack, readying the microprocessor. Summer, jostled back to reality from her spot before the bulletin board, gave her chair an abrupt turn toward K.T. and Jace. In her haste, she clipped the corner of the desk hard, spilling the cup of coffee.
Summer instinctively turned back to right the cup, but K.T. yelled, “Summer, there’s no time!”
Reluctant, but understanding the urgency, Summer covered the short space quickly and jammed herself toward K.T. and Jace’s waiting knees. Jace quickly laid his fingers on the key combo, ESCAPE/CAPSLOCK/TAB. This time, though, he added RETURN.
With one lightning fast check that all three sets of knees were firmly locked together, he blurted out a hasty “One.Two.Three!” the last number punctuated by the punch of keys.
That same dreaded yank pulled them backward toward home, barely a moment before Dr. Wong’s eyes looked into the sensor and thought the password that opened her lab door.
“Guys, I feel woozy. I wasn’t ready. I feel like I rode a roller coaster after eating a large order of nachos, two cotton candies, three hot dogs, and a pickle,” K.T. whined.
“Too close for comfort is all I can say to that,” Jace said, noticing the greenish tint of K.T.’s face. He wondered what would actually happen if someone barfed in a different dimension while traveling at the speed of light. Summer, in the oddest of moods, remained silent.
K.T. checked in with her, “Are you okay Summer, you seemed mesmerized by something on that bulletin board. You barely investigated all the crazy-looking lab stuff?”
Summer squirmed a bit, wanting to tell her friends something that she didn’t have the words for. Pondering for a moment, she reached both arms around her body as if giving herself a hug, obviously unsure how to answer K.T.’s question.
Jace offered her an out, “It’s okay Summer, you don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to.”
With those words, Summer looked relieved, but that relief morphed into puzzlement and a jolt of shock as her hands touched something at the back of her chair. Panic crossed her face.
“What’s wrong, Summer?!” K.T. questioned as she moved toward her.
Summer slowly uncrossed her arms, presenting her outstretched hands to Jace and K.T. One upturned hand was empty, but the other held a pair of odd-looking glasses. Sudden understanding unfolded between the three friends—the wheelchair bumping the desk, the spilled coffee.
With dread in her voice, Summer stated while staring at the glasses, “I think I accidentally broke the no-touch rule.”
K.T. and Jace opened their mouths to speak but nothing came out.
K.T. finally managed the obvious statement, “Guys, I think we have a problem.”
Dr. Wong returned to her lab refreshed by her walk. As she looked into the sensor, preparing to think her password, she immediately paused, hearing voices behind the lab door. As quickly as she heard the sounds, they disappeared, a fleeting sensation. As the lock clicked open, she hurried inside, quickly scanning the lab, relieved to find it as empty as she left it. That was odd. I could’ve sworn I heard voices. Unnerved, but satisfied that she was alone, she grabbed her lab coat again, pushing her arms into it as she approached her desk. It’s going to be another long night. Time to get busy. Now, where’s that coffee? Reaching expectantly toward the waiting caffeine, she instead found an overturned cup, its brown liquid a shallow puddle across the wooden surface of the desk. Her gut lurched as she then reflexively grabbed for glasses that weren’t there. What?! Where are they?! I purposely moved them to avoid this! Sudden realization came fast, taking with it her breath. Those voices! They were real!
The ever-present anticipation, the uncertainty of when the past would inevitably collide with the future, had been a constant companion to Dr. Wong. As the initial shock subsided, she felt an odd comfort that this day had finally arrived, comprehending that this moment had created all the moments before it. She relaxed her body into her desk chair, recovering her breath and fully experiencing this realization. The first thing to do was to call her husband. He would bring the backpack needed to retrieve the glasses. She sank further into her chair, tilting her head back, closing her eyes.
To cement her resolution for what came next, she glanced upward at the ceiling and calmly mouthed the words that would begin the process, “Mission accepted…Let’s do this.”
Summer held the glasses up to her face and inspected them carefully. They almost looked and felt normal except for the futuristic effect of the metallic sheen and heavy frame density. Even from across the room, Jace and K.T. could tell they were not average glasses. Summer nervously slipped the frames onto her face, looking through the lens. Glancing around her den and back at her friends, everything looked the same.
“What do you see?” K.T. asked gingerly.
Summer looked up, her wheelchair making K.T.’s chest her line of sight. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” she said, disappointed and moving to take the glasses off.
Suddenly, however, they whipped into focus. K.T.’s skin, and everything touching it, fell away to reveal organs underneath. At first, it looked like K.T. was wearing one of those anatomically correct bodysuits that was last year’s Halloween costume, except this costume was ten times more realistic. Summer observed K.T.’s respiratory system in real time: Her lungs expanding then contracting, two grey balloons on either side of her heart. Summer’s eyes followed the oxygenated blood from K.T.’s lungs, through the chambers of her heart and to every artery in her body. Instinctively, Summer clutched at her own heart, the rapid thumps of each pulse of blood pounding in her chest. She looked down focusing the lens, witnessing her own heart pumping to the rhythmic beat in her ears — LUB DUB, LUB DUB. Startled beyond words, Summer let out a gasp that bordered a shriek.
“What?!” K.T. and Jace exclaimed as they lurched toward her.
Summer ripped off the glasses, holding them out to her friends with shaking hands. “Here!” She said, “You have to see this to believe it.”
Taking turns trying on the glasses, each saw past their integumentary system, into the world previously hidden by their skin. Though obviously still present, somehow the skin appeared totally gone with the glasses on. They poked at it, not seeing it but still feeling its familiar thickness. Jace even poured water on his arm and watched, through the glasses, as it appeared to hover above the muscles. He concluded that though invisible, it was still functioning as the body’s protective layer and largest organ. Inspired, Jace handed the glasses to K.T. and took off, zipping around the den. He dashed around, jumping over couches and ottomans while K.T. got a close look at his circulatory system. Jace’s lungs ballooned and his heart pumped hard to supply oxygenated blood to his legs. She also saw his muscles expand and contract to propel him. The muscles stretched over his moving bones, connected by tendons, and the ligaments connected the bones. It all worked in concert to facilitate Jace’s explosive movements.
Next, it was Summer’s turn, “K.T. think about what you want to see while I watch,” she ordered.
Summer peered into K.T.’s brain. Neurons lit up the frontal lobe as K.T. imagined an idea and then again in the auditory cortex as she voiced her idea.
“I want to see the digestive system in action!” K.T. exclaimed. “Here Jace, eat this apple.”
Summer relinquished the glasses to K.T. to follow the apple as Jace chewed it to bits and swallowed. The pieces moved down Jace’s esophagus through peristalses then churned in his stomach as digestive enzymes chemically broke it down further. In just a few short hours, the glob would move past the mechanical digestive process to be chemically digested into simpler molecules. The apple’s nutrients would then be absorbed into the blood and lymphatic vessels to fuel Jace’s body.
Giddy and babbling amongst themselves about the endless possibilities of fun the glasses brought, K.T. piped up with an idea, “Let’s take this party outside! I want to see some bug guts!”
K.T. dashed out the door with the glasses still on, leading the way to Summer’s backyard garden. Jace headed that way as Summer moved her chair in the same direction. Before each of them could get out the door, they saw K.T. sprint past the large window toward the back corner of the lot to the garden. Jace and Summer listed out loud the garden bugs they expected to see, caterpillars, slugs, and earthworms. They discussed how, unlike humans, insects had an exoskeleton instead of skin. However, insects did have an epidermal layer similar to human skin. Completely lost in conversation about the endless opportunities the garden might offer the glasses, they almost bumped right into the back of K.T. who was standing stock still, glasses still on, mouth agape, in front of a middle-aged woman in a white lab coat. They saw the lady hold out her hand, smiling kindly.
And they heard her say, “K.T. I’ll need those glasses back, please.”
Dr. Wong felt a mixture of exhaustion and relief. The long-forgotten roughness of the time warp tug had left her fifty-year-old body feeling sore. It would definitely take a few days to recover from the trip. She placed the freshly retrieved Nexus© glasses back into their locked cabinet as she relived the moments of the long-awaited visitation.
The children, apologizing profusely and all at once, had explained how it was simply an accident, how they had promised themselves not to touch anything, and how they were just having a little fun before planning to return her glasses. Dr. Wong knew their intentions were pure and that the science they encountered through the glasses would have a life-long effect on them. Touched by their earnestness, she offered to answer a few brief questions about what they had learned so far. They thought they had seen everything the glasses had to offer, but they soon learned that they had missed the best feature of the glasses, the one that aligned Dr. Wong in history with Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek.
Dr. Wong’s recent improvement to her glasses could be likened to Leeuwenhoek’s accomplishment with the standard two-lens microscope of the 1600s. Leeuwenhoek improved it into a one-lens microscope, allowing scientists to see single-celled organisms, or microbes, for the first time. Dr. Wong’s refinement to her own glasses, in effect, did the same thing. It took current technology and added increased magnification and clarity.
With a simple head movement, Dr. Wong showed the children how they could zoom in further on the heart, exposing a new world at the microscopic level. The organs they marveled at earlier now consisted of tiny, circular sacs of fluid called cells. Sprinkled into each cell were a series of structures that Dr. Wong called organelles.
“Your body is a system,” she explained. “Everything works together to move, to eat, to breathe, to think. And it all starts with your cells. As she talked, she zoomed in on one structure that looked like a speck of brown inside the cell.
“This is a mitochondrion, the powerhouse of the cell. It makes energy much like your digestive system,” she said.
She adeptly focused in on another structure. “Here’s a lysosome that removes waste from the cell like your excretory system. These structures are protected by the cell membrane much like your skin protects you.”
As the children continued to watch in awe, she traced the outline of the cell and a series of tracts that were part of the cytoskeleton. She told them that, much like our musculoskeletal system, it provides structure and allows for movement of the cell.
When she finished her mini-lesson, the children exploded with questions. They had somehow recovered from the shock of seeing her—a stranger from the future—in their garden.
K.T. instantly remembered the billions of cells they saw on the computer monitor, and asked quizzically, “Dr. Wong, all those cells we saw in the lab, where did they come from?”
Dr. Wong’s reply was shocking, “That’s an excellent question K.T. Some were plant cells, but the others are actually human cells from patients experiencing disease treatment at an off-site location. With their consent, we track cell function during their treatment sessions.”
“But why?” K.T. questioned further.
“Because they want us to understand their disease, to help them and others like them. You see, life starts with organelles; the organelles supply the energy and information needed for all life processes. Seeing how the treatment affects the organelles allows us to develop more precise and effective treatments.
Jace wanted to know, “How do the organelles know what to do?”
Impressed with the question, Dr. Wong felt compelled to answer. “The nucleus, that’s what defines us as eukaryotic and makes us different from bacteria, or prokaryotic, cells. It holds the instructions for the cell and tells it what to do, where to go, and even when to die.”
Jace exclaimed, “Cells die?! Don’t we need them to live?”
Dr. Wong explained, “Yes, all living things are made up of one or more living cells. Our cells do die, but they also multiply from existing cells.”
Dr. Wong found it difficult to pull herself way. The familiarity of the scene produced emotions she hadn’t felt in decades. She noticed that as bewildered and inspired as the children seemed to be with it all, Summer seemed oddly calm and pensive.
When Dr. Wong finally asked the children to go back inside so she could return to her lab with the glasses, the setting sun was giving way to darkness in the garden. K.T. and Jace obediently turned back toward the house, distracted and satisfied from a successful adventure, unaware that Summer was hanging back.
A slight quiver betrayed her emotions as she delivered one last apology, “Sorry about that coffee, Dr. Wong,” she said, pausing. “I’ll clean it up later.”
With that simple promise, Summer smiled, turned, and wheeled herself back, catching up to her friends.
Dr. Wong, her eyes moist with happiness, whispered to herself, “Yes, Summer. Yes, you certainly will.”
ALL sections
- Main Menu
- Overview
- Essential Knowledge: Cell Theory
- Essential Knowledge: Cell Types
- Essential Knowledge: Cell Structures
- Essential Knowledge: Plant vs. Animal Cells
- Essential Knowledge: Levels of Organization
- Essential Knowledge: Cells vs. Organ System
- Backpack Adventures
- Make a Note of That
- Meet a Scientist
- Practice
- Real Science Review
- Scientist videos
