Dragonfly Girl

by Marti Leimbach

  It seems wrong to feel so gloomy when all around me is beauty.

  I didn’t go to the awards ceremony last night, but I assume my award was given to Aiden after all, just as Will wanted. At least I had my moment before Will ruined it. Amid the arched mirrors and magnificent chandeliers of the Spegelsalen, I’d felt the approval of people I respected, PhD or not. And while I hate what happened next—the profound humiliation—there had been a parcel of time when everything was perfect.

  I feel someone watching me. When I look up, I see a man standing above me, snow dusting his shoulders. It’s the red-haired man from the ship, the one who told me he knew I was a high school student.

  “We have a mutual acquaintance,” he says now, unwinding a scarf from his neck. He glances around the café before sitting across from me at the table. “Where are your friends?” he says.

  He must mean Helmi and Carlos. I wonder if they will still be my friends now that they’ve found out I lied.

  “I’m not going to be awarded my prize,” I say.

  “No?” he says, as though this is news to him. He leans back in his chair. “Does this mean you will not provide Biba with his money? He won’t like that.”

  Biba. That’s our mutual acquaintance? I think of him in his oil-stained jeans, his sun-bleached leather jacket that gives off the smell of exhaust fumes. He’s nothing like the well-dressed man before me with his delicate features and tidy beard. That they should know each other at all is incredible and frankly scary.

  As though reading my mind, he says, “Biba has a cousin who works as a science scout for us. We are always looking for young people with great talent. He found out about you and brought you to our attention. We don’t mind if you are still in your American high school. We don’t have rules like this silly committee with its small prize.”

  “It’s not a small prize,” I say. “Not to me.”

  “You needn’t concern yourself about the prize. Let them keep it. Come along with me, and the debt will be taken care of.” He makes a gesture as though he’s flicking the debt away.

  “You’d pay the loan?” I say.

  He looks at me disapprovingly. “Do not act so grateful. It’s unbecoming.” Then he adds, “The loan will be repaid once you’ve met with the gentleman I work for. An introduction, nothing more.”

  “But . . . why?” It astonishes me that there are people in this world who can treat thousands of dollars like the price of a cup of coffee.

  “You have unusual abilities. The man I work for creates scientific think tanks with people such as you. We will pay a small finder’s fee to Biba and he will disappear. No more a problem.”

  He gives me a look as though he’s assessing my reaction. Then he says, “The world has changed. People who are good at science have no need to rely on the qualifications they make such a fuss of in your country. All this credentialing!” He nearly spits the word. “PhD this, master’s that. We will educate you. We have a facility for young people like yourself.”

  A facility?

  When I say nothing he looks at me sharply. “I give you a choice. You go home and wait for trouble with Biba. Or you allow me to introduce you to the gentleman I work for. He is in Moscow, a short plane ride away.”

  A plane ride? He terrifies me, but I don’t want to show that.

  “Who is he?” I say finally. “The man you work for?”

  “Someone interested in the sciences.”

  I think, Everyone I’ve met this week is in “the sciences,” as he puts it. But I don’t say anything.

  A waitress approaches. He quizzes her about the menu while I think fast about what to do. If I return home without the prize money, it’s impossible to pay Biba. If I agree to meet this guy’s boss, whoever he is, the debt is paid. It should be easy to decide, but something about the red-haired man tells me that there would be no question about my being required to join their “facility.” They won’t easily let go of a girl they’ve paid thousands for. I feel like a bag of groceries that can be bought and sold, like I could disappear altogether into whatever terrifying world this man comes from. My heart is racing. I feel a bead of sweat running down the inside of my shirt.

  “Would you care for another coffee while you think it over?” the man asks. He’s utterly relaxed while I secretly fall apart. “Though it’s an obvious choice, is it not?”

  I think about what Munn said in his after-dinner talk. He’d said to be cautious about what kind of science we do and who we work for. This man before me, this person who knows Biba, hardly seems like someone I can trust. “Hot chocolate,” I say, the words barely audible.

  “As you wish.” He shrugs. The waitress disappears to the kitchen with our order.

  “The man you will meet is very important. Very wealthy. My advice? No matter how easy he makes the conversation, never forget you are speaking with a man of great power—”

  A man of great power. I wonder how he uses this power.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” I say, trying to sound casual, relaxed. I want him to believe that he’s made a friend of me. “I just have to use the ladies’ room.”

  A flash of annoyance crosses his face as I excuse myself. I don’t want to stay in the coffee house with this man, but I’m not sure how to get away either. I go to the bathroom, shut the door, then open it a crack and watch.

  I can see him there at the table, looking at nothing in particular. I’m hoping for a distraction. I wait, spying through the crack in the door until at last something interests him on his phone. As he begins typing a message I silently count to three. Then, I slip out of the bathroom and move quietly, swiftly, through the door leading to the street.

  Without my pink suitcase with all of Lauren’s precious clothes. Without my coat or hat.

  I keep moving—I don’t even know where—until I see a sign for the Nobel Museum. Inside the museum, I catch my breath and tell myself to calm down. The man with the red hair doesn’t seem to have followed me. I shouldn’t be so scared. He was just recruiting. Plenty of people show up at SFOF to do that. It’s only weird because he knows Biba. Even so, I’m hyperalert, with one eye on the museum’s big glass doors.

  I begin walking through the airy rooms. The museum explains the work of the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institute, and how Nobel laureates are selected. I study the information given about famous scientists and their discoveries, described briefly on placards. I gaze at a model of the molecular structure of DNA, read quotes by Edison and Einstein on the nature of genius, touch a model of the structure of penicillin on a table.

  On the ceiling, photographs of nine hundred laureates slide along a rail. Of these, only a small proportion are women. And very few of those have won in the sciences.

  I know every one of these women by face and name. My favorite is Barbara McClintock, who studied chromosomes. Not only was she one of the few women to receive the prize unshared, but she endured ridicule from the scientific community for over thirty years about the very findings that eventually won her the prize.

  In the museum’s café, the undersides of the chairs are autographed by laureates. I sit on the one signed by Dan Shechtman, the 2011 prizewinner in chemistry. I buy some souvenirs from the gift shop: bookmarks of laureates, gold-foiled chocolate Nobel Medals showing Alfred Nobel in profile, and some chocolate in the shape of dynamite, which is the discovery that made Alfred so rich that he was able to fund the prize in the first place.

  I’m a million miles away when I hear my name being called. I startle, thinking it’s the guy with the red hair again. But when I look up, I see Rik standing above me in an overcoat, snow in his hair. I’m surprised to see him, but also embarrassed. For a moment I’d managed to push away thoughts of SFOF and the prize I didn’t win. But now the shame of last night floods back. I’m aware, too, of my ponytail and jeans, my eyes red with crying and lack of sleep.

  “You missed the announcement at breakfast,” Rik says, dropping into the seat next to me. On its underside are the si
gnatures of Christopher Sims and Thomas Sargent, the 2011 winners in economics. I know because I checked. “They’re deciding what to do with you.”

  “What to do with me?” I say.

  “You know, about the award.”

  He pushes his legs out and sits back in his chair. The snow in his hair melts, making his bangs wet. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” he says. “Why did you walk out last night?”

  I’m so embarrassed I wish I could walk out now, straight from the museum and onto a plane that would take me home. I can barely look at Rik, who seems genuinely puzzled.

  “You were there,” I say, my voice full of emotion. “You saw what happened. Everyone knows that I broke the rules. That I don’t have a PhD.”

  “I saw William Drummond being a bully. I saw people being confused. Did you know there were press there last night?”

  “Not Will’s lovely Elsa,” I say. It sounds like sulking even to me.

  “No, but plenty of others. If you come back to the hotel you’ll see they’ve returned, trying to get the story about the high school kid who somehow beat out postdocs for an SFOF award.”

  “But I didn’t win the award. The rules—”

  “Nonsense the rules!” he says, his eyes wide. “Who told you that?”

  “Will—”

  “Because he wants his brother to win!”

  “Even so.”

  Rik sighs, then shakes his head. Among all the awful things I feel is a sense that I’ve somehow let him down.

  “So, it’s true?” he says, his voice thick with disbelief. “You don’t have a doctorate? I mean—I can’t believe I’m asking this—or any college behind you? Even a few credits?”

  I shake my head.

  He looks at me with a curious expression, as though not sure what to think.

  “Please don’t look at me like that.” I feel small and stupid and impossibly naive. “I’m already embarrassed.”

  He shakes his head slowly back and forth, then says, “What’s it like in high school for someone like you?”

  I see myself suddenly back in the school cafeteria, sitting alone with a pile of books. Walking friendless in the hall. I used to think my aloneness was due to something about my appearance. I have glasses I try not to wear; I slouch so I don’t seem so tall. I say nothing so that I don’t draw attention. I’ve stood in front of the mirror for hours, trying to figure out what is the giveaway. My face, which has nothing striking about it? My hair, which is too curly to brush, too thick to braid? But it’s none of that. I’m alone because of what’s inside me, and I can’t do anything about it.

  “It’s fine,” I hear myself say.

  Rik stares back at me, disbelieving.

  “Okay, it’s a little weird. So what?”

  “Are you eighteen yet?”

  I bite my lip, unable to bring myself to tell him I’m nowhere near it.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” he says. I think I hear disappointment in his voice. It tells me many things: that he’d genuinely been interested in me, but also that he can no longer be so. It’s as though he’s offered me a gift I never even knew I longed for, and then, just as I realized it might be mine, he’s taken it back.

  “How old are you?” I venture.

  “Twenty,” he says.

  “You must have skipped grades,” I say.

  “I went to college when I was sixteen. The question is, why didn’t you? Have you ever had your IQ tested?”

  “They used to give me tests. I never knew what the results were.”

  He looks at me and I know what he is about to say. I’ve heard it many times, and it isn’t helpful. Maybe it isn’t even true. “I’m not that smart,” I say, before he can get the words out. “Loving science makes you seem smart, even when you’re not. There is so much about life that I just can’t figure out.”

  He doesn’t say anything, not to agree nor to disagree. He keeps looking at me; I don’t know why. I feel nervous, like I’m being evaluated. It seems as though I’ve spent my whole life being evaluated. “Anyway, what does it matter? I have to go home now and tell everyone I didn’t get the prize after all. Do you think I’ll have to pay back the hotel and plane fare?”

  He leans forward. “That’s not necessarily how it’s going to pan out, Kira,” he says. “They’re deciding this morning how to handle it.”

  “But Will said the rules—”

  He interrupts me. “Will doesn’t decide. Anyone has a right to lodge a complaint and to argue his case. He’s done that. But you also have an opportunity to state your own case.”

  It sounds good, but all I can think is, What case?

  Rik smiles at me. “You think these rules are like the physical laws that govern the universe? Like Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion?” he says softly. “That’s not the way it works. The meaning behind the rules is what matters. And you satisfy the meaning behind the rules.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He looks at me as though trying to decide something. “Would you come with me somewhere?” he asks.

  “Probably.”

  He laughs.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Most people would have said ‘Where?’”

  “Okay. Where?”

  “I want to show you a place where there are no rules.”

  I shake my head. “Everywhere you go there are rules. Objects in motion stay in motion, laws of thermodynamics, general relativity. Not to mention gravity.”

  He laughs. I like that I can make him laugh, so I cheer up a half notch. But he’s very handsome with his high cheekbones, his golden skin. It distracts me in a way I don’t like. At least not any longer. I try not to remember dancing with him on the ship or our silence together in the chilled water of the stone pool. “Okay, where is this mythical place that has no rules?” I say.

  His answer is surprising. “The Stockholm metro,” he says.

  We leave through the museum’s frosted-glass doors. They are etched with the image of Alfred Nobel, and when they open, his head divides in half. I explain to Rik that I left my coat and suitcase in a coffeehouse, and he looks at me strangely because it’s impossible to forget a coat in such cold weather. But he dutifully accompanies me to the coffeehouse, where, thank God, I discover that the man with the red hair is gone but my suitcase and coat are still by the table. We set off for the metro, Rik trailing the suitcase for me, its pink shell contrasting with his dark coat and shoes. I hold my bag of goodies from the museum’s gift shop in one hand, a map in the other, but Rik knows the way.

  He says, “True or false: Alfred Nobel not only invented dynamite, but at least two other explosives.”

  “That’s true. I bought chocolate in the shape of dynamite,” I say, holding up the bag. “It’s got jalapeño as an ingredient.”

  “Too easy. True or false: Falcons in Australia fly burning twigs to places where they want to start fires in order to flush out their prey.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I say.

  “But true!” says Rik.

  “Birds start fires?”

  He smiles, pleased to have stumped me. “Your turn.”

  “Me? No.”

  “Come on. Take my mind off the freezing cold.”

  He’s trying to cheer me up, and I appreciate it. But I really can’t think of anything. Then I blurt out, “True or false: If p is a prime number, then for any integer a, the number a to the power of p minus a is an integer multiple of p.”

  I clap my hand over my mouth, realizing, of course, that it sounds like showing off.

  Rik stops walking. “That’s not how you play.”

  “I know. It was stupid.”

  “Not stupid, but—” He seems unable to complete his sentence. “Do you talk like that to your friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do they say to you?”

  They just . . . uh . . .” I only really have one friend, Lauren. So I say, “They fix my hair and tell me not to wear s
tripes with plaid.”

  He starts to laugh, so I add quickly, “Just kidding!”

  But I think he knows I wasn’t.

  The snow grows heavier. He thrusts his hands deep into his pockets and we walk into a breeze that pushes against us on the narrow cobbled street. “So was it true or false?” he says.

  “You mean what I said? It’s Fermat’s little theorem.”

  “It stumped me,” he says.

  “Well, I didn’t know that Australian birds could be arsonists. So we’re even.”

  At the metro stop, T-Centralen, we stand beneath a huge arch, like the ceiling of a massive cave. It’s painted with giant blue vines, its base a cool lapis like water against an uneven surface. The only way you’d know it was a metro station is by the trains that run on either side of the tiled platform.

  “How does all this make you feel?” Rik asks, turning to take in the amazing structure.

  “I wonder what they used in order to make the cement look like plaster.”

  “That’s not feeling. That’s thinking. Forget about how the artist made it. Tell me what it is like to stand here.”

  I look again at the blue vines and foliage, the shadowed darker colors, the cratered recesses. “It feels like I’m underwater. Or inside some colorful part of Earth not yet discovered. Calm. And it’s all so, you know, intentional. Someone thought about me standing here.”

  This pleases him. “I couldn’t have said it better,” he says.

  At Kungsträdgården, we gaze up at a ceiling mosaic. “This is a sculpture garden with all the pieces painted onto the ceiling,” I say. “It feels warmer here, as if the colors bring a kind of heat. Do you think the artist knew that?”

  He nods. “Oh yes.”

  “That’s real granite,” I say, pointing at a wall.

  “Yes, and that’s real moss,” Rik says. “There was no intention for it to grow here; it just happened. And they found some fungi in this section that had previously been unknown. And a spider that can’t be found anywhere else in Scandinavia.”