Though Luke's appreciated his teacher’s confidence in him, the embarrassment of his clothes becoming invisible then vapourising all together in front of all those scientists re-emerged with a vengeance. When Mrs. Cuttingham came back stage she discovered him cowering in a corner with his knees folded up to his chest and his arms wrapped around his legs. She found a towel that she handed to him. She turned away after he reached out for the towel to give him a bit of privacy. It took Luke several moments before he could bring himself to stand up and wrap the towel around himself. Fortunately, whatever the obviously altered chemicals had done to affect his clothes didn’t seem to affect the towel.
The ride home was silent. Mrs. Cuttingham wanted desperately to offer consolation to the poor lad but nothing seemed appropriate. Though quite embarrassed to be seemingly naked—except for the towel—in a car with his teacher, Luke was able to devote some thinking to two other problems the first being what went wrong with his serum. It just didn’t make sense. The second problem, of course, was what would he do when he got home wearing only a towel. Fortunately, his parents and brothers had experienced his setbacks before and would probably take this in stride. Still, how do you explain to your parents you still have your clothes on but it doesn’t look like you do?
Luke sat in the chair in his little lab, just glad to be wearing clothes that could be seen. The altered blue serum no longer turned what he was wearing invisible although he still hadn’t figured out how how his clothes from the symposium had been vaporuised. He stared at his calculations and data. Everything added up. Plus he had tried it and the experiment had succeeded. Finally, he began to test the blue serum, the one that should have turned him invisible, not his clothes. He shuddered briefly when a mental picture of his clothes becoming invisible at the symposium flashed across his mind. Through much trial and error, the brilliant lad did ascertain the new makeup of the altered blue serum and how the unaltered red serum had reacted the way it had. How it happened, however, still eluded him. He would never know about the fly’s role in changing his serum’s composition resulting in his public embarrassment.
Being smart did not preclude Luke from thinking about misusing his new potion. In fact, with additional experimentation he was able to add a new small twist to the blue serum’s outcome. Once he’d convinced himself the serum would do what he wanted it to do, he started to plan.