Buttermilk Spice

"You're really something else, Dominic," he remembered Mr. Schniebel telling him before class. "Rest assured you'll be getting plenty of extra credit for this."

God knows he needed it. Dominic had A's and B's in all of his other subjects, but biology class just didn't click with him. Ecology, cell structures, Punnett squares, none of it made a bit of sense. It didn't matter. If he really wanted to stay in the National Honor Society, he would have to find a way to earn a passing grade.

"Hey Dominic," his lab partner whispered, "did you see what Christina is wearing today? If you get a chance to walk past her, you can look down her shirt and totally see her bra."

"Oh," Dominic replied distractedly, "that's cool."

"Okay class," announced Mr. Schniebel, "please remove your slides from their storage trays and place them under the microscopes."

It was the first week of the human development chapter, and today was a very special lab class about it. In fact Dominic had to get a permission slip from his dad just to attend: he and his sophomore classmates were going to look at sperm.

"Adjust the microscopes to the middle setting," the teacher continued. "When you're ready, go ahead and have a look."

After carefully clipping the slide under the microscope lens, Dominic peered through the eyepiece. It was the weirdest stuff he had ever seen in his life: bulbous heads, squiggly little tails, most of them motionless but a few still twitching, afloat in a puddle of yellowish ooze. Up close they looked like bugs trapped in a big, messy spider web. Beside him, Dominic had his textbook opened to pictures of fetuses in different stages of gestation. He pondered how the slimy tadpoles under the microscope could ever grow into those mutant creatures on the page, how those mutant creatures could somehow become real people.

"As you can probably guess," Mr. Schniebel, "the white spots with tails are the spermatozoa. The stringy, pulpy matrix they are suspended in contains the nutrients the sperm need for the journey through the female reproductive tract. That matrix comprises secretions from the male prostate and Cowper's glands."

Meanwhile, students all around the classroom were gasping in astonishment. Some thought the lab was awesome; others had to pull away to keep from gagging. "Mr. Schniebel?" a little Asian girl asked. "Why is it so gooey?"

"Good question Suzie." the teacher replied. "The adhesive properties of semen allow for more efficient movement of the sperm."

"Why does it smell like bleach?" another kid asked, holding the slide up to his nose.

"Who knows, Adam. It's just the way it smells."

Everyone continued to marvel at the strange and wondrous features of the semen under their microscopes. But Dominic just couldn't get excited about it. He was still thinking about his extra credit project. Did he really do a good enough job on it? How much would it change his grade? It didn't help that Mr. Schniebel had been staring at him throughout the morning. As Dominic struggled to keep his eyes averted, the teacher stood up and approached him.

"Everything okay, Dominic?" the teacher asked.

"What? Oh, yeah, fine, Mr. Schniebel," Dominic said anxiously. "I'm just fine."

"Just making sure," Mr. Schniebel said, flashing a mischievous smirk. "You're a really good kid, you know that?"

"Thanks, Mr. Schniebel."

Watching the teacher walk away to supervise other students, Dominic breathed a sigh of relief. He simply didn't feel comfortable around Mr. Schniebel, not today anyway. He decided to take the slide out from the microscope stage and examine the cloudy splotch in the center with his naked eye.

"Damn," Dominic uttered silently to himself. "I can't believe I just had to eat a load of this stuff."

He could still taste a thin film of it in the back of his throat; the remembrance of it made him queasy. Glancing up at Mr. Schniebel across the room, Dominic began to shiver with remorse. Did the National Honor Society have to matter that much to him? In that moment, Mr. Schniebel looked back, a dark twinkle in his eyes, assuring Dominic of his promise with a simple wink.