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basement, the more complex my experiments became.
    One day, I ordered a bunch of organic molecules including nitrogen off the internet so I could produce a catalyst for breaking down organic chemicals. It was the first time I started doping titanium dioxide with nitrogen groups. I just wanted to see what would happen. What I didn’t realize at the time was that some of the chemicals I was buying were also used to make extremely dangerous explosives.The FBI somehow had access to my purchase history and sent a curt letter to my house letting me know that I was being watched. My mom and dad were not amused. Not even a little. I couldn’t help but notice that from that point forward they began to stay farther and farther away from the basement.
    Sometimes the experiments I intended to create at the beginning turned into ones I didn’t expect. One night I was up late mixing nanoparticles in a breakfast bowl in my kitchen. When I got tired, I went to bed, leaving the bowl out on the counter. The next morning, I woke up and saw my twelve-year-old cousin Allen in the kitchen.
    â€œHey, I forgot you were coming,” I said.
    He looked up and waved, too busy to give a proper greeting, since he was plowing spoonfuls of cereal into his mouth. I noticed something familiar about his bowl. My morning brain slowly made the connection.
    My experiment!
    I looked around the counter for my nanoparticles. They were gone. I looked back at my cousin. He had poured his milk and cereal into my experiment bowl and was slurping up the nanoparticles, which look like white powdery sugar.
    â€œDude, stop eating that!” I yelled.
    He looked up, nanoparticle-infused milk dripping from his mouth.
    â€œYou’re eating my science experiment!”
    He spit out the cereal and ran to the bathroom.
    Since that day, I joke around, telling him that he’s my walking science experiment and I’m closely monitoring him, chronicling the results each time he visits.
    With one week left of vacation before seventh grade, I got terrible news. My two best friends, Jake and Sam, were both moving out of state. It was a rough blow, but I tried to stay positive. After all, making new friends at math camp hadn’t been too hard. Plus, I was coming off a first-place victory in my first science fair. That should earn me some new friends, I thought.
    However, another, even more disruptive change was going on inside me. When seventh grade started, a lot of the guys at school couldn’t help but notice how much the girls had matured over the summer. No matter how hard I had tried to ignore my feelings, it was becoming even more obvious that I wasn’t into girls.
    One day I found myself daydreaming about a male classmate. He’s cute , I thought to myself. Sometimes I laughed a little too long at a boy’s joke, or spaced out in class, thinking about boys. As seventh grade went on, these feelings and thoughts of attraction were becoming more and more difficult to block out. They were happening all the time.
    What is going on with me?
    Despite the obvious signs, I wasn’t really sure, or ready to confront, what it all meant. I didn’t know how people would react, butI had a sinking feeling it wouldn’t be good. I took my feelings and I locked them deep in a vault, and I did my very best to forget about them entirely.
    I stayed focused on science. That was something that made complete sense to me. What I love most about science is how it allows me to peek into a different world, taking me to a deeper place, behind the seemingly random colors and shapes all around us, to a reality of rules and principles, a destination where the more I learn and the more layers I pull back, the closer I can come to unlocking the secret behind every problem or mystery in the universe. In science, contradictions don’t exist. Every action has a cause and every problem has an answer, if only I can inspire myself enough to find it. I felt like