As Straight As Spaghetti

Scarlett Blake, readily known as a professor around the country, had received a golden prize from States for introducing a unique technology in a digital camera. Well, what could be special about a camera? The picture it captured would embed the sound in the background the instant the camera was clicked.

Yes, just like a photographer would ask people to say cheese before clicking, everybody would do so, and only the picture was taken, the technology the professor introduced would save the sound of cheeky grins, encapsulating it in the photo. Not only those grins but any type of sound produced at the time of click would also be embedded in the taken picture.

With the analytical skills, engineers and technologists were still working on how the technology could be used in built-in cameras of phones. Worth deserving a gold award, right? The girl didn't remember when she last saw the golden souvenir of the achievement. Perhaps, dead and buried under the clothes in the closet or lost somewhere in the pile of her valuable paperwork on the shelf positioned to the left wall of her bedroom. It could go either way.

Where kids would run on the beach on sunny days and build sandcastles, she was either sitting in the living area of her house, playing with wires or in the backyard trying to light up a bulb with the rays of sunlight. Not that she was only exceedingly outstanding with the wires, she turned out to be a shit-hot coder as well.

"What are you messing with this time? Using dark chocolate melting point at the place of helium evaporation point or got papaw to turn the motor on instead of a watermelon?", Dylan, the coolest boy of her class, brain working like a robot, as fast in calculations as the professor, genius coder in the campus, however, taking second place after the girl, entered the laboratory. They had worked on different projects together including making a bio scanner scanning the objects within the range of 10 kilometres.

"Is it my fault that watermelon and papaw look the same or that I saw neighbour's kid putting the chocolate bar under the sun to check it himself that how fast it melts as compared to melting on natural gas before coming to the lab?", once, when the professor was stuck on a formula, kept getting the negative value in the answer, the light blub in her head flickered on, pointing out that she should have switched the gasses she was using in the experimental tubes.

As she hurried to her car in the driveway, she saw the little kid from the next door, squatting to the ground in the backyard, eyeing a dark brown bar intently under the dazzling heat of summer sun. When she approached him, inquiring what had had him sweating in the middle of the day, he told her that their teacher had asked him to search up the melting point of the chocolate that made him had the dental cavity. Saying that the boy smiled in a big grin, showing the professor the holes in his teeth.

Then he further added that he had melted one bar of the chocolate on the stove which had earned a fair scolding from his mom as the pot got burnt, chocolate adhered to the metal surface as he got fascinated by how the bubbles were erupting out of the melted mixture. When he was yelled at by his mom, he ran to the backyard with one last piece of the bar in the back of his pants pocket, trying to check how long would it take the same chocolate to melt under the natural heat.

Not taking his mom some type of a typical mother to stop children from learning new things, she was worried for the safety of her son. He could've burnt himself out. When the professor reached the laboratory on the campus and changed the gas in the glass tube before observing the evaporating point of helium, she mistakenly wrote the melting point of the chocolate that had been in her mind throughout the drive to university. This, consequently, resulted in wrong calculations and the breaking of 10 beakers the gas was passing through, creating a foggy atmosphere in the whole lab.

Dylan matched the readings with the ones he had taken and found out the mistake the poor professor was making.

"Watermelon and papaw don't look the same, professor. They just have the same colour", rounding the marble counter in the center of the room, the boy squatted on the chair next to the girl.

"The hell, do I need to write it on my face that you don't have to call me by that name? For Pete's sake I'm four years younger than you", the girl didn't like it when her friends would call her by the title the government had given to her after remarkable inventions and achievements at such young age. 'Young Professor' was what the researchers of the country would address her with. Wherever she would travel within the country, people would start whispering in their ears, probably confirming from each other that it was the young girl who did great inventions. Some would make their way to her, starting with greetings, requesting for a picture together, ending each sentence with 'professor'.

"That's what everyone calls you in the country", possibly, outside the country too she would get to be addressed by the same title if she had travelled to other countries which she wasn't very fond of. Friends, little parties, fun and her inventions, that all was what the girl had dedicated her heart to for years.

"Forbidden for my friends, faggot", she chanted in a playful way with no bad intentions involved at all. It had become their way to address each other with names rather than the actual names. Albeit being gay, the latter never minded the professor calling him the name. The girl was a dearest friend of his.

"I can be as straight as spaghetti only for you, professor", gawking his eyes at the equations jotted down on the paper, he cheerfully remarked.

"Spaghetti also bends in the hot water, dumbass", she huffed in annoyance, head snapping back on the papers sprawled over the table.