'You’re not in trouble for doing your experiment outside,' Miss Fourier told Kirby. 'You’re in trouble for doing it in the men’s toilets!'

The flame-haired teacher slapped the capacitor and copper wires onto the physics lab bench. Her voice raged scarlet, but her eyes … were they … laughing?

The Education Department's District Director for Schools waddled into the lab behind Miss Fourier - all stooped over, groaning and clutching at his groin as if bits of him were about to fall off. 

'Not a word to anyone,' he wailed, shaking his finger. 'Or I’ll make sure you have to do counselling at this school as well!'

'I’m sorry,' Kirby said, trying not to giggle. 'I didn’t think it would hurt.'

'You hooked electricity up to a urinal!' he raved.

Miss Fourier clapped her fingers over her lips to stop her smile escaping. 'A charged capacitor, actually,' she corrected.

'A charged capacitor then,' Mr Zanos repeated. 'What on Earth were you … ' He stopped mid-scream, realising how loud he was and reached for the switch on an FM radio to cover his racket. But it was hooked up to another experiment, and like a lab rat that had been taught to fear its own food, he baulked and pulled his hand back. 'Is it safe?' he asked. Miss Fourier nodded and he switched it on with a quick flick, touching it only for a second as if it might bite him. It was the news, something about a train crash near Acacia Ridge, and he turned it up a little more to make it harder for anyone else to overhear the rest of their conversation. 'What on Earth were you thinking, girl?'

'That you’d just get a little tingle and pull away,' Kirby said. She screwed the toe of her shoe around on the floor as if she was the sweetest schoolgirl in the world. 'I was just testing my hypothesis that urine might be more conductive than water.'

'And you could measure this how? By the volume of my screaming?'

Kirby shrugged. Every experiment needed a scale for measuring success — just that some methods were less accurate than others.  

'The bladder is a muscle,' Miss Fourier explained, still trying to keep a straight face. 'Muscles operate using electro-stimulii from the brain. You study biology too, Kirby. You must know this. Once the stream of urine completed the circuit, the discharging capacitor provided a flow of electrons back up the flow of urine as constant stimulus for the bladder to keep emptying. The poor man was powerless to pull away until he was completely empty and the circuit was broken again.'

'You electrocuted me!'

'Actually,' Miss Fourier corrected again, 'it was only electric shock. There aren't any scorch marks on your … well, on your … your skin,' she said, scratching her left eyebrow politely. 'Electrocution is when you die.'

'Well it certainly felt like I was dying! You could have exploded my bladder, girl! Not to mention my errr … my … my skin,' he groaned, clutching his groin again at the reminder of electricity surging through his most delicate flesh for 238 seconds. It would be more than an hour before the throbbing agony eased enough for him to walk properly again, and he leaned against Miss Fourier’s shoulder for support at the thought of it.

Miss Fourier clamped her eyes shut, hoping he couldn’t feel the giggle rumbling up in her tummy. 'The capacitor wasn’t large enough or charged enough,' she went on, trying to reassure him, 'to explode your bladder. Although that could have been possible if Kirby had used a… '

'Who cares?' he screamed, turning away. 'Punish her – or I will!'