We all look at one another. Nine junior researchers—five of us and four from Irwin’s gonad team—competing for three spots. Now only two. This is how it is in our tiny, thankless world. Always looking over your shoulder, always someone gaining on you. You must rely on your fellow postdocs, but you never trust them. There is no team in I, Maxim always says.
“We’ll just have to see what she has in mind,” I say, poker-faced, bending over my lab bench, busying myself.
The PMDD study was the star shot; we all knew it. But even more than that, we’d all come to the lab because of the celebrated Dr. Severin. We all wanted to work on the research that mattered most to her. I did. I’d wanted it for as long as I’d wanted anything. Maybe since I first heard Dr. Severin speak, the summer before my senior year of high school.
“You shouldn’t worry,” Alex says as we walk to our lockers to retrieve my stash of Mexican candy from the dollar store.
“I’m not,” I say, handing him a Pulparindo. “But you better.”
He laughs, but it’s all bluster. I didn’t go to Caltech on an IBM fellowship like Juwon, and I don’t come from a Big Pharma fortune like Zell. I didn’t, unlike Alex, grow up with a stepdad who worked at NASA and a mother who taught experimental particle physics at MIT. I didn’t grow up feeling smart and special, the world my oyster, born with a silver shucker in my hand. No one works harder than you, that’s the way Zell and Juwon like to put it. Everything I have is because I was the dutiful worker bee or because I have no other things to distract me, like girlfriends or wives, like mewling kids or family dogs or a love of weekend brunches and fantasy football or a single, sad hobby, like solitaire or the Sunday jumble. I have this.
It took me until I was seventeen to imagine my own brain as something with all kinds of hidden channels and crevices and drop chutes leading into glittering chambers of even greater possibility. It took me, in some ways, until Diane Fleming.
And now, at a mere twenty-nine, having bolted through undergrad in three years and propelled myself through grad school at a ceaseless pace, who knows what else might lie in those watery neuro corridors? Who knows but that I might be somebody nobody ever guessed?
Except now there is another woman in the mix, stripping me of any advantage I had. And that woman also happens to be brilliant Diane.
Brilliant and strange and extraordinary, as she is in my dreams still, standing next to me at the long slab table in our high-school chem lab, her pin-neat notebooks and her keen gaze.
In the always-empty ladies’ room, with its ancient globes of soap that leave pink soot on your hands, I hold my phone high to get a signal and try to look her up.
The first listing I see is a bio on the Freudlinger Lab site (…receiving her BS with honors and the distinction-in-major award before pursuing her PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology…); I read just enough to know she finished her degrees even faster than me, one step ahead to the end. I skip her citations, all the publications, invited seminars, poster presentations at the finest universities on the opposite coast.
I’ve never looked her up before. I’ve always been superstitious, just like my lamentable old dad. Don’t count the cars in a funeral procession. Never move a cat. Drop a dishrag and it means someone dirtier than you is coming.
In some animal part of my brain, I guess I thought looking her up might somehow summon her. So I never did. And she came anyway.
Tell a bad dream before breakfast and it comes true.
In the lab that evening, they all drift away, one by one. Juwon to his pure-mathematician wife and split-level; Maxim to Sophie, his long-legged opera-singer girlfriend who proofreads all his articles for him and pours him brandy and kneads his weary neck; Zell to his home computer, his gaming chamber, the dark web, who knows. Even Serge is gone from the vivarium that is nearly his home, off to wherever he lives, with his classical music and his two-year-old Persian and his ten-year-old Russian blue.
“Do you ever call it a night?” Alex asked me once. “How come you’re always the last one?”
The answer is: Jenny Hsai. Jenny was the only other woman in the lab when I joined. Jenny, who had two babies at home, fat-cheeked beauties I spotted once at the lab picnic, their weary house-husband dad wearing them both in a kangaroo carrier slung across his bloated stomach.
The whole afternoon, Jenny never looked at those kids or her husband once. She didn’t want Dr. Severin to catch her in an act of divided attention, she said. (It was unlikely Dr. Severin would have noticed. Sometimes she looks at us as if we were as indistinct as the glum little inbred mice lined up in cages in the vivarium.)
Six months ago, Jenny’s husband revolted and accepted a position in the state capital, and Jenny went with him, taking an industry job. Her last day, her notebooks and Koosh Balls and pipettes and Kimwipes piled high in her dimpled new-mom arms, she had a look of impending and permanent loss on her damp face. Sometimes she e-mails me (Is it still like it was? Is it still that intense? Pharma is not intense). Once she said, Kit, run it as hard as you can while you can.
Kit, I’m so bored here.
Kit, it feels like my heart stopped.
“We’re a nest of vipers,” Alex says when it’s just the two of us left. “We’ve got PhDs in protein chemistry, bacteriology, molecular biology, even psychology. And we’re all used to winning.”
“It’s just nature,” I point out, wiping my lab bench, the sweet smell of the ethanol solvent. “Put animals in a small, closed space, and the one with the sharpest nails, the pointiest teeth wins.”
He grins. “Or maybe it’s just like musical chairs?”
It’s a luxury to view it so lightly. But I nod. It’s best never to let them see your teeth.
“I bet,” he adds, “you have a mean elbow hook.”
I don’t say anything, racking the clean pipettes, but he keeps going.
“You won’t need it, though.”
“So you keep saying,” I say, wetting a Kimwipe, rubbing the bottoms of the beakers and tip boxes. “Is it the elegance of my ovaries that’ll push me over the edge?”
“I don’t doubt their elegance,” he says. “But no. It’s because she took your Bunsen.”
I try to hide my smile. It’s the moment to which I cling. A month ago, Severin came into the lab late after an awards dinner, her color unusually high, her Russian-red lipstick slightly stained with a dark wine, a slight give in her step. She found a handful of us in the lab and we didn’t know why she was there, but in her mouth was an unlit cigarette, hand clasped over a Pall Malls pack like the one forever drooping in my grandma’s shirt pocket.
“None of you smoke,” she said, sounding like Marlene Dietrich in some frond-draped nightclub between the wars. “This is what’s wrong with your whole generation.”
I don’t know what came over me, but I thrust forward my Bunsen burner. Gallant, aggressive.
She paused barely a second before leaning toward it, toward me. Smelling strongly of expensive things, she murmured under her breath, “Clever girl.”
Oh, how many times I’ve replayed it in my head, her smoky tones, the faint growl in her voice. I didn’t mind her calling me a girl. I loved it.
“C’mon. Who’s your competition?” Alex says now. “Zell, who’s more likely to steal ammonia tanks for a rolling meth lab than to get this gig? Or Juwon, who’s probably going to ditch us all for the CDC by spring?”
“How about you?” I say, taking one last swipe at the bench, resin gleaming like black stone.
He laughs. “Maybe if I had your brain, your jumbo hands, and that cute gap between your teeth.”
“The better to pick clean the carcass of competition like you.”
He looks at me, grinning still, and tells me I have the funniest way of flirting. Then adds, quickly, “You were flirting, weren’t you?”
I just smile, zipping my backpack shut.
That night, I sit on my balcony, a mere three feet by six feet but the first I’ve ever had, hanging
out like a stubbed toe over the parking lot. But beyond, if you squint, you can see a streetlight-studded expanse that absorbs me every night. A long snaking strip of Quik Lubes and box stores, rippled by brume and the bus exhaust, that extends all the way into the hot brutalist maze of campus, four miles away, nestled deep in the sinking lemon groves.
I’ve always lived in sprawl, so it feels like home. There’s something crazily beautiful about it, the banks of stacked illuminated signs—Sauna Hut, Sheer Elegance, Waterbeds USA, Chiropractic Here, Benihana, Ideal Uniform—gorse rolling from curbed island to curbed island, across the endless parking lots like suburban tumbleweed. Last week, I watched one roll over a lit cigarette, flaring brightly. If there’d been anything natural in its path, it might have started a fire.
The main thing is this: I can’t see the lab itself from here, not with the smog. Even squinting, I can’t see the building, a sealed box, grim and featureless. Windows like mean slits, vertical fins on either side offering narrow places to smoke, scream. Inside, it’s far cozier, the grunting comfort of work, routine, concentration. But each night, stepping from its great concrete maw at eight, nine, ten o’clock and walking the two miles home, the neon springing from the horizon, I always feel lifted the minute I taste real air. The minute I see the sun-scorched signs, the swaying traffic-lights. The lab is gone.
But not tonight, it seems. Tonight all I can think of is Diane Fleming rolling into town, starting fires.
One beer later, I’m on my hands and knees, digging through my closet to find the old milk crates and sunken file boxes from home.
I don’t have anything of hers. Nothing to document our friendship, if that’s what it was. There are a few senior-year mementos—a tasseled leather bookmark Ms. Castro gave me that sits forever in my copy of The Origin of Species, a beanbag bunny in a State U. sweatshirt, a graduation gift from the Ashleys—but none are from Diane. I didn’t ask her to sign my yearbook, which I find in the very back of a crate, wedged between my childhood teddy bear, flat as a gingerbread man, and my diploma. We were no longer friends by graduation.
The only piece of Diane I have—the one I’ve kept through countless cinder-block dorm rooms, sweaty, crusty-carpeted college co-ops, through university apartments with broke-back sectionals and the smell, always, of industrial glue—is the piece I’ll always have.
By which I mean the neural snag she left in my head, the mad drone of her toneless seventeen-year-old voice that long-ago night, the burned-into-my-brain image of her cross-legged on my twin-bed-in-a-bag comforter, purple paisley, as she told me her secret. And showed me what darkness was, and is, and how it works, and how it never goes away or ends.
Because the bad things you do become part of you, literally. This is no metaphor. They become part of you on a cellular level, in the blood.
That night, lying in bed, waiting for my nightly antihistamines to fan out across my brain, I read. Papers on PMDD. Dry scientific articles about progesterone and GABAA receptors, genetic vulnerabilities.
Indeed, many in the field continue to express concern that raising the profile of PMDD will further stigmatize women as emotionally and physically unstable, providing additional mechanisms by which men can claim women are not equipped for positions of power, sensitive positions, etc.—
Other articles. Case studies from Severin’s past research going back years.
I tell my friends, “I’m not myself right now,” Elizabeth H. stated. “I’ll call you back when I’m Elizabeth again.”
And another:
At age twelve, Nina’s mother, who Nina believes also suffered from undiagnosed PMDD, gave her a rabbit’s-foot key chain. Nina notes that when “the feelings came, I’d stroke it and stroke it, hoping they would go away.”
But all I can think of is Diane. And that old Diane feeling, like walking in deep water, the weight against my legs, the unstoppable drag.
It’s late, very late, when the buzzer in the living room shrieks. I bolt straight up, wait a moment, then rise and creep into the living room, my eyes on the white buzzer box, glowing in the dark, the living room lit by the strip-mall signs outside: MEATS HERE. GUNZ AND GOLD, BOUGHT AND SOLD.
“Hello,” I whisper into the vibrating box. “Who’s there?”
But there is no one there. My fingers to the intercom, I think I can hear something, though. I think I can. Someone pulling hard on the heavy door downstairs. Someone breathing. Or the wind.
“Diane,” I whisper, crazily. “Diane, is that you?”
Later, I wonder if I dreamed it. I wake up and I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, my body upright, my hand on my chest.
All my papers, once stacked neatly on the bedside table, are scattered across the floor, binder clips like little bats, nesting.
THEN
AP Chem brought us together. We went shoulder to shoulder amid all that fire and smoke and mystery.
It was fate, Diane would later say.
Two days before she arrived at Lanister High, Benjy Dunphy, my lab partner, got suspended for throwing a fist-size chunk of potassium into a sink full of water, shattering the sink and setting a girl’s hair on fire. I never liked Benjy, who had a hundred jokes about stopcocks and a hundred ideas of how to use science to rip girls’ dresses off or maybe make their bras fall open.
“Kit,” Ms. Steen said, “meet your new comrade in arms.”
Diane took her place beside me at the lab bench in her Peter Pan collar and smooth headband and an expression I remembered well from camp: focus, intensity, a wriggling vein at the temple. The tidiness of her notebooks, the bright and crisply cornered textbook cover of Chemistry in Action and Reaction!, it all spoke to me of seriousness and purpose.
Up front, Ms. Steen was giving titration instructions.
“I don’t know how I ended up in AP,” I said, trying to find a piece of paper in my notebook, stained with my mom’s coffee from the jolting drive to school. “I should have taken the rocks class. But Ms. Steen made me.” I rolled my eyes. “She believes in me.”
Diane looked at me but said nothing.
Then she pulled two pages from her spiral notebook and handed them to me, their edges neatly shorn. “Use this.”
Side by side, we moved through the titration lab, using the juice from two fat cabbages that Benjy surely would have held in front of his chest like big purple tits and I probably would have laughed.
Hair pulled back into a glossy barrette, Diane began labeling everything meticulously: Dr Pepper, Rockstar Energy Drink, tap water, Febreze, hand sanitizer, milk. I poured the cabbage juice into a watch glass and then into our sample cups and I was careful too.
Leaning in close for each reaction, I called out the colors: “Coke, orange—acid! Febreze, clear—base!” Diane recorded them with her little mechanical pencil.
When it was over, she wrote out the report on the spot in her even, exact handwriting, her pencil swirling and equations appearing.
“You can take that home and do it,” I said. “I mean, we can. It’s homework.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “I’ve done this lab before.”
“At Sacred Heart?”
“No, before that,” she said. Later, she admitted she’d mastered it for her fifth-grade science fair. I wondered how it felt being here with all of us. With me.
When the bell rang, she was still washing a burette with a long brush.
“That’s fine, Diane,” I said. “That’s plenty good enough.”
“I want to do everything right,” she said, shaking the burette dry. “I don’t want to make mistakes.”
By the end of the first week, Ms. Steen took us aside after class to compliment us on our lab reports and our A+ quiz scores.
“You’re going to be good for each other,” she said, smiling. My face went warm. A+.
“Maybe we should study together sometime,” I said to Diane as we walked out.
“Maybe. Sometime,” she said. If your dad dies, I thought, maybe even studying with
a classmate takes you out of mourning or something. But even before, even at cross-country camp, I’d never known anyone so private. It felt like you could hurt her just by looking at her, or you could never hurt her at all.
Later that day, I spotted her leaving the school library, backpack heavy with books. I found myself following her.
You always wonder, when someone is trying so hard, what it’s really about. Whenever my dad started calling more or took me out for a surprise dinner at Benihana or sent me leopard-pom booties for Christmas as if I were twelve (or a stripper), it was always because he’d lost his job because his boss was jealous of him or he’d gotten married again to a woman he’d met at the OTB and, anyway, there would be no monthly support checks forthcoming, and Maybe you could even talk to your mom about floating me a nickel? How ’bout a hundo?
Maybe, for Diane, working really hard was a way of crouching low in her grief, of staying under the radar. Of hiding.
But in other ways she was impossible to miss. In class, her hand was up all the time. It was something to see, the way her mind wrapped around things. The way she’d always ask questions (“I’m just wondering why the chapter doesn’t mention stem-cell research even once?”). Sometimes, she even disagreed with something in the textbook or something Ms. Steen or Ms. Cameron, the English teacher, had said. I’d never see anyone do that before.
I wondered what it was like to care so much about ideas from books and to think about things like why we dream and if female brains are different from male ones. But maybe I cared too, because sometimes I found myself wondering about those things. I just didn’t show it. It was high school; you didn’t show things.
I followed her down the hall, only stopping when she did, drawn by a glossy flyer on the bulletin board by the counseling office.