The Soda Test

The lemonade was supposed to be fizzy, and it was not fizzy.

"Yours went flat," Maya said. She held her glass up to the window. Tiny bubbles climbed the side, lazy, like they had given up halfway.

"It is not flat," Soren said. "It is less fizzy than yours. There is a difference."

They had made it the same way. Same machine, same syrup, same two bottles of plain water that they had pumped full of gas until the caps strained. Then they had gotten distracted catching a beetle, and Soren had left his bottle out on the porch in the sun while Maya had stuck hers back in the freezer for ten minutes.

"Mine was cold," Maya said.

"So?"

"So mine kept the bubbles. Yours got warm and let them go." She took a sip and grinned at how it stung. "Warm water can't hold the gas. It pushes it back out."

Soren picked up his warm bottle. He had felt this before and never named it, the way a soda left in a hot car goes quiet and stale while a cold one explodes when you open it. He tipped the bottle. A slow line of bubbles peeled off the glass and rose.

"Watch," he said. He set the warm bottle in the freezer next to a fresh one. Then he wrote down the time on the back of an envelope, and under it, the word warm with a downward arrow.

"You don't have to write down lemonade," Maya said.

"I want to see how fast it changes."

They waited. Maya did not like waiting, so she went and got her dad's tablet, the one with the news app, because there had been something that morning she half remembered. A headline about the ocean. She scrolled until she found it.

"Listen to this," she said. "The ocean has fifty times more carbon dioxide in it than the whole sky."

Soren looked up. "Fifty."

"Fifty times. All the gas in all the air, and the ocean is holding fifty of those." She read on, mouthing the words. "And it takes in about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that people put out. Every year. Cars, factories, all of it. A quarter just goes into the water."

"Where?"

"Into the water. The same way the gas went into our bottles." She tapped the glass on the counter. "The ocean is one giant bottle of soda." He needed it in his hand.

"Maya," he said. "If the ocean is a bottle of soda."

"Yeah."

"And warm water can't hold the gas."

She stopped scrolling.

"And the ocean is getting warmer," he said. "Everyone says it. The ocean is getting warmer every year."

Maya put the tablet face down on the counter. She did that when she did not want to look at words anymore because she was looking at something else.

"Then it can't hold as much," she said slowly. "The warmer it gets, the less it can take."

"And it is taking a quarter of everything right now."

"Right now. While it's cold enough." She picked up his warm bottle and tilted it and watched the bubbles let go and climb. "This is the ocean. This is exactly the ocean."

They looked at the bottle together. The bubbles rose and broke at the top and were gone into the kitchen air, where nobody could put them back.

"Wait," Soren said. "It is worse than that." He grabbed the envelope and the pen. "Think about what makes the ocean warm in the first place."

"The gas in the sky," Maya said. "The carbon dioxide. It traps the heat."

"So the gas warms the water."

"And the warm water lets go of gas."

"Which goes back into the sky."

"Which traps more heat."

"Which warms the water more." Soren's pen stopped on the paper. He had drawn an arrow from sky to ocean and then, without quite deciding to, an arrow from ocean back up to sky, and the two arrows made a circle. He stared at the circle.

Maya leaned over his shoulder. Neither of them said anything for a second.

"It feeds itself," she said.

"It feeds itself." Soren's voice was small. "The thing that is supposed to help us, the ocean soaking up our mess, it works less and less the more we heat it up. And heating it up is what we are doing."

Maya sat down on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet. This was not a sad thing exactly. It was a big thing, and big things made her need to sit.

"Fifty times," she said again. "There is fifty times more of it down there than up here. So even a little change in the water."

"Is a huge change in the air."

They sat with that. Outside, the porch baked in the sun, and somewhere out past the town and the highway and everything, an ocean none of them had ever stood beside was doing the exact same thing as the bottle on the floor between them, only the bottle was warm by ten minutes and the ocean was warm by a hundred years.

Maya reached over and pulled the cold bottle out of the freezer, the new one, the one they had not let warm up. She set it next to the warm one. Side by side.

"Open the cold one," she said.

Soren cracked the cap. It hissed, sharp and alive, fog curling out of the neck, the bubbles inside racing each other to stay.

Then he opened the warm one. It sighed. One slow breath, and almost nothing.

They lined the two bottles up on the floor in the strip of sun coming through the door, the loud one and the quiet one, and watched which bubbles stayed and which ones left.