“He left for work so early, part of me was afraid he was hit by a diesel truck or something. And what’s your name? He doesn’t talk much about the people at the lab. Except the Dragon Lady.”
“Dragon Lady?” I say, jaw tightening. “You mean Dr. Severin.”
She grins. “Sorry. That’s what he calls her. Alex is, you know—he doesn’t stand on ceremony.”
“Well, he’s probably just caught up in something,” I say. “I’d let you in, but I don’t have my card.”
“Oh,” she says, shoulders dropping slightly, her magnificent teeth disappearing. “So why are you here?”
“Just heading to the library,” I say. “You should go home.”
She nods, wilting further. A buttercup. For all her height, those long legs, and those long, bolt-bright locks, that’s what she is.
An impossible mix of feelings floats through me.
“I guess you’re right,” she says, sliding her phone into her pocket at last. “What’s your name again? I’m Eleanor.”
“You know what, Eleanor?” I say, not answering, swinging my backpack over my shoulder. “I bet he’s on his way home now.”
At home, I lie in the bath for an hour, adding hot water every fifteen minutes.
A fiancée. A fiancée.
Ms. Owens, you can see how this looks. That’s what the police would say, wouldn’t they? You have your rendezvous with Shaffer, then—what, you found out he was engaged? Or did you know all along, demand he break it off?
But that’s only if they find out about Alex and me. And no one knows about that. Well, two people. One is dead. The other is Diane.
I turn on my phone for the first time in hours, fingers shaking. But there are still no calls, no panicky voice mails, no lab text alerts.
But there is an e-mail. It’s from Dr. Severin, who has never e-mailed me, ever. It says:
Make sure you’re in by nine tomorrow. We need to get started.
(Yes, that’s a hint.)
Maybe it’s a moment of relief from the shock and tremors of the last two days, maybe it’s the churn and froth of last night’s beer still roiling through me, or maybe it’s the eternal mystery of the neurons firing scattershot in my head, but I can’t help but feel something lift inside of me.
I may be smiling, just for a minute. A long, long amoral minute.
All my life, I’ve only seen as much as a keyhole allows, side glances, small corners of something larger, some massive vision. But Dr. Severin—whose brain is immense and, it seems to me, very beautiful; no, sublime, beyond my reckoning—is able to see things I long to see, overarching networks, grand symphonies of the body, the brain, the genes, and the blood. Reproductive hormones and serotonin, stress hormones and neurotransmitters. The whole rickety biological pathophysiology of our women. The PMDD women, maybe all women. She sees the dangerous relays in the suffering body. She understands the mad pulses of the blood.
But to understand, you need to see so much more. Because everything affects everything else. One small speck in one narrow recess and everything else is dark with its shadow. And working with Dr. Severin, I know I’ll see it all. And I’ll be a part of the grander seeing, the illumination of darkness.
The hand outstretched to all those women in the shadows. Come with me, come, come.
Dr. Severin beckoning me so that we both may beckon them.
And I think of my mom and one of our last conversations, in the dusty hospice room, the skin under her fingernails darkening.
I always knew you could do important things, big things. Anything at all. I always knew.
I just wasn’t sure you did.
Mom, I didn’t know. But now I do. And Mom, I can do this. I can. I can I can I can.
THEN
“This is Monday morning, May the eighth, and you will be taking the AP Chemistry exam. You may now remove the shrink-wrap from your exam packet and take out the section one booklet, but do not open the booklet or the shrink-wrapped section two materials. Put the white seals aside…”
The gym, waxed and silent, high windows streaked with dirt, and it was like we were all afraid to speak, to move, to turn our heads.
The proctor, a man with short furred arms and a thick wristwatch, spoke from a script and examined all our calculators.
Diane’s hair was shining. She didn’t turn around, but I noticed an odd odor from her. Something earthy, even animal.
“Now you may open section one and begin.”
The page was momentarily mysterious and then, in a flash, completely familiar. My pencil felt hot under my fingers and then began moving. And once it started, it never stopped.
There was nothing but a roar, and then a blur.
Everything else—the room, the teacher, the pressure, the way my left sock was sinking into my sneaker, the grunt and sputter from a tree-removal truck idling in the parking lot outside—disappeared.
Because, immediately and then ever after, my mind was doing things. Like up there in my head, I was pushing through overgrowth and far reaches of cheatgrass and hoary knapweed, and those reaches stretched themselves to points and the points became spears, and the spears were in my hands, and nothing could stop me.
Something had happened. Something was firing inside me now, and nothing could stop me.
Ever since Diane had told me, I’d been lost, a lost soul floating, but suddenly I felt myself again. In an instant, I was back and I didn’t need her. I didn’t need her gentle nudges, her shining example, to fire my ambitions. Maybe, I told myself, I never needed her at all.
After I finished the exam, long before anyone else—three hours, which was three minutes, so much blasting through my brain—I walked straight into the girls’ room and banged my fists on the sink so hard I split two nails, tearing one loose, a tender pucker slick with blood.
“Goddamn, goddamn,” I said under my breath, then louder, then louder, the echo making me feel godlike. “I killed it. I killed that motherfucker.” Like my old man used to say whenever he hit his number, waving his five-dollar scratch-off.
Running down the near-empty hallway, running to get outside and kick my legs and run and run and run.
I know things, I know everything. I’m smarter than anyone ever thought I could be. Even with my dad’s swiney genes mingling with my mom’s kindly ones, from that briny stew of cunning and weakness, I have something important inside me.
Something extraordinary.
When Diane called out after me—Kit, wait, Kit—her voice wobbly and plaintive down the long, empty corridor, I didn’t turn my head.
That night, my mom made brownies with Kahlua, and we danced to her dad’s scratchy Waylon Jennings albums.
It was only very late, coming down at last, the propulsive, fist-pumping, masculine thrust of the day collapsing in on itself as I crawled into bed, that bed, the bed of the blood confession, that I started to feel it all come back on me.
Staring at my split-nail finger, the flesh laid bare like a little baby’s tender skin, the spot where the cord stump finally fell free, I thought, I am not afraid of this, or her.
And: I never needed her anyway.
Then my mom in the doorway today, holding a check in her hand, waving it.
“Will wonders never cease,” she said. “Your dad sent you twenty-five bucks for high-school graduation.”
“Cash it fast,” I said, sitting up. “Cash it today.”
The next few weeks, the lurch and panic of final exams, graduation, the acceptance from State. Yes, State would allow me into its ranks, but without funding, it was just a piece of fancy bond paper, a taunt. I still hadn’t heard the official decision from the Severin scholarship people, but it seemed impossible. It was Diane’s to lose.
“Don’t worry about that,” my mom kept saying. “City Tech is so happy to have you. You can live here as long as you want. Maybe I could get you a job at the clinic. No more smelling like chicken fat.”
Thinking then of all the things my mother sometim
es smelled like, wet dog or hot cat or far worse, those smells she scrubbed so hard to remove they made her hands look like raw hamburger.
“You don’t know until you know,” Ms. Castro kept saying every time I passed the guidance-counseling office, eyes on the Severin scholarship flyer.
But I did know.
Because there was Diane lurking under the dark scrim, Diane’s voice in my ear, a worm wriggling. I’m taking your scholarship, and leaving you with this.
Because whenever I paused a moment, whenever I let my imagination overtake me, Diane’s confession would reappear, sitting on my chest like a succubus.
In the morning, running, I’d sometimes imagine her chasing me through a thick forest, all the trees with big fat veins blackened from soot, from untold things. Behind me, I could always hear Diane.
The miles-long strides of those colt legs of hers, the slow breathing whirling through my ears. There was no way she would not catch up.
We were matched runners, and she had a will as iron-soldered as her heart.
Her blood ran cold and merciless.
The girl who could do anything.
Who had a rage in her like a bomb in her chest.
Those breaths on my neck now, I readied myself for anything, her arm, a scythe, her perfect doll teeth.
Small but sharp, they’d never stop tearing.
NOW
At five a.m. Monday, my phone clatters like wind-up teeth.
“Have you heard anything?”
“No.”
I can almost hear Diane’s mouth pressed against her phone. It feels like there’s some tunnel made of breath and skin connecting us. An artery blown to life more than a decade ago.
I nearly tell her about going to the lab, opening the bin, about the girl, the fiancée, but I stop myself. Why, an animal part of my brain asks, should I tell her how foolish I am twice over. Alex has a fiancée. How foolish and fooled.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” I say. Which could mean anything but in this case means only talking on the phone.
“Kit,” she says finally, “it’ll be fine today. Just remember what matters.”
What matters, I think.
After I hang up, an ancient phrase from the back of my thoughts floats forward:
You don’t have a self until you have a secret.
It’s hard to wait, but I need to be sure I’m not first. That I’m not the one to find him.
I sit on the edge of my sofa and drink coffee after coffee, running new water through the old grounds.
It’s just after eight thirty when I make my way across the parking lot.
The chug-chug of the soda trucks, the diesel pickups lined up behind the Flying J.
There’s a funny feeling in my chest, an odd exhilaration, like the time I finally sat down for my AP Chem exam or when I spent the hour before my oral exams eating a maple glazed at the Donut Hut instead of reviewing my notes. The sense that the dread is about to come to an end and no matter what happens, at least the dread will be past.
My access card in hand once more, I push through the building’s heavy front doors at eight fifty. Past the security guard with the intricate braid snaking down her back. Past random gray-hoodied students, past the biohazard bins, into the elevator and up to the fifth floor.
When the doors open, I expect to see something. An agitation, a knot of hysterical researchers, a pair of departmental secretaries with grim faces, phones out.
But I don’t see anything, and for a second, I’m worried no one’s arrived yet.
My eyes land on G-21 in spite of myself. I expect to see biohazard tape across it, or police tape. The bloody chamber. But there’s nothing.
“Caught!” The voice like a drill in my ear. It’s Zell in his Motörhead T-shirt, headphones round his neck, a curl of toothpaste on his lip.
“Look at you,” he says. “Slinking in after eight like you’re one of us and not Kit Owens, Super Lab Rat.”
“I haven’t been feeling well.”
That’s when I see Maxim walking toward the lab rooms, coffee and notebooks balanced expertly. He nods at me as he approaches G-21, and I think, Please not yet, please not now, I’m not ready.
“I get it, Owens,” Zell is saying as if we are having a conversation. “Why come in early like the good little girl when what’s done is done? Severin must’ve known who she was going to pick on Friday. Making us dangle over the weekend is classic Severin, though. Shiny-shiny, shiny boots of leather.”
I watch over Zell’s shoulder as Maxim steps into G-21, shuts the door behind him.
Here we go, here we go, ready or not—
Time snaps and unsnaps.
My hand reaches for the wall, knees buckling. I feel my head crack against the baseboard like a busted marble.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t faint. I just…”
The bank of fluorescent lights, acid yellow, flyspecked, shudders into focus.
“Faint is a pretty ladylike term for what you just did,” says Zell, extending both hands down to me. “You been sniffing toluene again?”
“I haven’t eaten,” I say, sliding back up the wall on my own. “I…”
My eyes are on the door to G-21 when something flickers in the periphery: the golden bowl of Diane’s head as she walks toward us.
“Here,” Zell says, hoisting a grease-thick bag of cinnamon-roll holes in front of my face. “Gobble a few of these and get it together.”
My eyes shuttle back and forth between Diane approaching and G-21. I’m waiting, and hasn’t it been far too long? Shouldn’t Maxim have seen—
The door to G-21 shushes open.
My heart folds in on itself as Maxim emerges, head down, looking at his phone.
The door closes, and Diane reappears behind it, her hand dropping from her chest where, momentarily, it must have lain. Her face goes ashen. She pauses a moment, her lab coat around her like moth wings.
“You’re gonna eat tile again, aren’t you?” Zell says, shaking his soggy sack of holes at me again. “You girls and your diets.”
“Get that out of my face,” I say, smacking the bag.
“Conference room, folks,” Maxim says, approaching us. “Dr. Severin is in the building.”
But Zell’s gaze has drifted to Diane. She sees him looking and begins walking toward us again, her gait funny now, stilted.
“I gave Alex five-to-one odds that it’s her and him on the team,” Zell says to me under his breath. “Guys like that never stop winning.”
“Where is Alex anyway?” Maxim says, a tsk-tsk lip twitch. “He’d be late to his own funeral.”
“Is it time?” Diane asks, reaching us at last.
I look at her and then at the door to G-21. Maxim was just in there. He was there. The expression on her face like a child’s fright, eyes big and mouth small.
“D-day,” says Zell, nodding toward the conference room.
“At last,” Diane says, smiling strangely, too widely, showing all of us all her teeth. “Let’s get it over with.”
The ceiling fan skitters dust, pencil shavings, potato-chip crumbs into the air.
Juwon, who’s already staked out the good chair, the one with padded arms that Dr. Irwin donated when he got his Eames, is typing away on his laptop, trying to look busy, unconcerned.
Zell has pushed his headphones back up over his ears, a buzz-saw fuzz escaping into the soundless room.
Maxim is tap-tapping his pen. I can almost hear his anxious thoughts: I’m the one who’s put the most time in with Dr. Severin. All these years, sixty hours a week or more, thousands upon thousands of hours recording cell activity, running gels, tracking supplies, managing the grad students, all for a sad little stipend. Five years ago, I was her darling, her anointed, but then, one after another, came newer, shinier—
“I can’t believe Shaffer is gonna miss this,” Zell says loudly, over his music. “Maybe Severin’ll change her mind if he can’t bother to show up.”
Maxim
looks at him, clenches his jaw.
Juwon just keeps typing as if we’re not there. I wonder if he’s typing the same sentence over and over again. The look on his face is like the time someone spilled Mountain Dew all over his cell cultures.
“Why would she pick Alex?” Maxim says. “He’s a lightweight.”
Zell shrugs, drumming the table with meaty pink fingers. “I heard he has an in.”
“Who told you that?” Juwon says abruptly.
“Serge.”
My hands knotted, I look over at Diane.
“Well, you know Serge,” Maxim says.
“True.”
Diane’s eyes lift toward mine.
“I’ll never catch up with all your lab intrigues,” Diane says, so smoothly it makes me think of Dr. Severin. Of how Diane aspires to be like Dr. Severin. The nice shoes, the chic haircut. Except Diane will never, ever be like Dr. Severin. Dr. Severin is cool and Diane is one of those people who appear so cool, icy, but touch the surface once, you’ll realize they’re aflame.
“Serge is a strong believer in the rules,” Maxim explains to Diane.
“He favors compliant souls,” Juwon adds.
Diane nods and looks away, her shoulders hunching in a way I haven’t seen since high school. Diane, I think. No, Diane.
Everyone is quiet. There’s the distant sound of heels on sealed concrete.
I tuck my feet under the chair’s bottom spindle to keep from shaking. There’s no chance Maxim could have been in G-21 and not seen everything.
So I must have lost my mind. But Diane lost hers first.
The door claps open, and with it comes a cloud of that perfume she sometimes wears—figs and soft leather.
Unwinding a long, slender scarf with a pair of red lips painted on either end, Severin walks to the table as we all watch, turning our heads one by one.