With the squiggly hairs on top

Eee-gal-IT~arian, she said it in parts connected, long word but I saw the hairs on her chin make the syllable sign posts.  Before I could thoroughly search my entire brain for the difference between smart and stupid, the meaning, she cut me off on the trail with the Latin Where It Came From, this gloriously unknown-to-me word.  AEQUALITAS, she said, the "T" emphasized the way people stuck their tongues out at the Priest during communion.  An ordinary thing might be holy.  Sounds like and was matched up in an English word--EQUALITY.  Sister Rose finished wiping down the beakers and jars we'd used to measure the density of rocks and bolts and feathers and Robby Whitney's action figure.  I had a Hydra square in my magnifying glass and was listening but was also smelling the water in the tank and silently warning the batch of tiny life critters that ONE of THEM would be examined under a microscope before our after school time was UP.

Something about the survival of the fittest and making Sister Rose chuckle with a comparison of Nuns to Priests and weighing duties and Spanish Moss made me sure that the stars had aligned.  My world had changed.  Being allowed to stay after school and DO Science for REAL made me egalitarian.  My mother warned against this "going to my head" but her possible jealousy (who wouldn't be?) didn't matter anymore.  With access to the terrariums and freshwater and saltwater tanks of life, the world of possibility opened up to me.  It didn't matter that, at first, I only was allowed to help clean the classroom.  It didn't matter that all of Science had already been discovered before my time.  It didn't even matter that she couldn't give me extra credit.  I was about to embark on the most serious passage from kid to grownup ever undertaken by a single human being.  This was WAY BETTER than space camp.  In fact, from my point of view, the maze to be navigated three days a week could lead to some kind of direct path to GOD, or at least the Vatican where I would, someday, make them understand that lot's of things that aren't men SURVIVE.

I got permission to take a break from the laborious work of eyeing up just the right Hydra and to look up in the huge dictionary the word Equalitarian.  I couldn't find it right off and wasted approximately three whole minutes getting up the nerve to confess my stupidity, I don't know how to spell it, I just past whispered.

Hydra?  Sister Rose turned in her motorcycle boots in a sharply tight little circle.

Oh no, I KNOW that one, I practiced.  I mean Equalitarian.

It has a "G." 

I tried to work out in my head where that might be but without my pencil and paper I wouldn't be able to do it.  I sprang towards the table where I'd left my necessary tools.

Did you find it?  She asked from her station at the bulletin board.

The black slate table was always cooler than the air.  I grabbed my pencil and paper before it could rub off on me and practically ran back to the dictionary.

You mean instead of a "Q"?  I asked a little louder than just past whispering.  Still our talking seemed very, very loud compared to the volume in a room full of other students.

"EG..." she led and then threw a curveball, something about why we drop the "u" when we translate from the old language.  I paused at "egret" and wondered about Bubuculus.  Before I could ask she redirected my search, "...AL..."

"ITARYEN," I tried to beat her to the finish.

"EGAL," she volleyed.

"FOUND IT!" I shouted.  Carefully copying the spelling from the dictionary and preventing my eyes from racing ahead through the definition.  Good, it's not too long, I thought.  I was practically beside myself with the excitement of getting to pick a Hydra and put it on a slide.  I was going to get to do this before everybody else did it in class.  This was a High Honor something akin to being knighted or getting a Purple Heart.

"What's a doctrine?"  I asked before quickly adding that I sort of knew because I'd heard that word before in Religion.

"Correct," Sister Rose turned towards me and I knew that even though there was nobody else in the room, she was totally in teacher mode.  My mother had cautioned me not to wear her out in these afterschool doings and I suddenly got afraid that maybe I'd asked too hard a question or that maybe explaining something as mysterious as doctrine might, you know, kill her.  That would be very, very serious.  I jolted out of my spot by the dictionary and bolted across the room, maybe if she didn't have to send her words all across the classroom she wouldn't get tired of me.  One of her eyebrows went up and down as she considered this behavior.

"What do you think doctrine is?"  She asked me pointblank.

"I, I...well, I guess, maybe not officially, but really it means..." I'd gone too far away from the dictionary, I started to feel like maybe I might drown because not only had I not memorized "doctrine" in a long time, but now I realized that I hadn't read through the entire definition of egalit-

"What about prayer?"  I asked back.  This caused both of her eyebrows to go up at the same time and a kind of one-sided smile to unbalance her face at the same time.

"That can be a doctrine.  What about the Constitution?"

"Well, I don't know about that, I haven't memorized that yet.  Is it a doctrine?"

"I suppose it might be a doctrine, might just be one of the most well-known doctrines in the world."

"Is it egaliTARian doctrine?"

"I suppose in theory it might just be.  Did you pick a Hydra?"

"The one I picked probably moved by now."  We started towards the tank.  Sister Rose's uniform smelled like my Dad's shirts.  "It's complicated anyway," I let her know.

"How so?"

My mind raced to explain a complicated series of emotions and actions that had transpired in the weeks leading up to this Huge Decision.  There was, in my heart, something like pity that had so far prevented me from snagging just one Hydra and depriving it of its natural habitat long enough to view it under the microscope and, I DON'T WANT TO KILL IT, I revealed.

She put her hands in a clasp and nodded her head one time.  I watched her eyes looking at the tank and she didn't seem to be focusing on any one critter, so I knew she wasn't going to force me to pick a certain one.

"It's a sin and it's mean and it's..."

"Science."  She said.

"But isn't it Science to let them all live?"

"Well, I suppose that might be a kind of Science," she unclasped her hands and started to reach for a tiny pane of glass--the SLIDE.

"I let The One get away," I told.  It suddenly felt dire, this mission to defend Them, all the Hydra not just the fittest or the fastest or the longest or the slowest or the MOST valuable.

"I'll tell you a secret about Hydra," Sister Rose glanced at the ceiling and then moved her chin and her eyes right towards mine.  She was trying to gauge if I was going to feel really stupid when she told me, I knew later in life like in high school.

"What?"  I genuinely whispered.

"If we don't put a cap on the slide and squish the bubble of water in between the cap and the slide..." she was dabbing a little drop of water onto the slide with a water dropper "...then no Hydra will be killed in this experiment."

"REALLY?!"  The weight of the entire world was lifted off my stomach and my brain felt like it swelled big for the free.  "THAT REALLY IS THE BEST NEWS I'VE HEARD ALL DAY SISTER ROSE!"

"Okay, see, that wasn't so hard, to come up with a workable solution so a girl can get to work.  You'll have to work rel-a-tive-ly fast.  You don't want the water bubble to evaporate before you get done drawing the Hydra."

"OKAY.  OKAY.  I can't draw as fast as my mother and it's kind of different but I CAN DO IT Sister Rose!"

"Good.  Now take this water dropper and suction one of those Hydra out of there, squeeze all the water into this beaker and then repeatedly rinse the eyedropper out under the sink faucet and I'll show you how to get this thing mounted."

I didn't have to ask her if she was sure, about the Hydra not dying.  I BELIEVED her 100%.  Plus, as I was making an approach to suck up The One, I accidentally sucked up some blank water a couple times.  This made it all the more real, that I knew ahead of time that the water in the tank and the water we'd put on the slide would make the whole experiment different than a "dry slide."  Just in case though I said an extra prayer for the Hydra that would have to endure this trial.