Status Updates From The Weed That Strings the H...

A Jersey cow looked up from her grazing, and I stood on the pedals and gave her a shaky curtsy in passing.

"You are unreliable, Flavia," he said. "Utterly unreliable."
Of course I was! It was one of the things I loved most about myself. Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable. We're past the age of being poppets.

As I worked, I thought with pleasure of how profoundly the great Alexander Fleming had changed the world when he accidentally sneezed into a petri dish. After the sneeze, Fleming noticed that the bacteria in the dish were shrinking back. It wasn't long before he had isolated a particular protein in his snot that repelled bacteria. He called it lysozyme, and it was this substance for which I was now testing.

"Someone told me about a family that lived in a great rambling old mansion not far from here: an eccentric colonel and a family of girls running wild like a lot of red Indians. You're not one of them, are you?"
She saw instantly by the look on my face that I was.
"Oh, you poor child!" she said. "I'm sorry”
"It's quite all right," I told her. "It's far worse than that actually, but I don't like to talk about it."