Chemistry Lessons

by Meredith Goldstein

  The Leschinsky lab was now the Araghi lab, but my mom’s former mentor, Dr. Araghi—​who postponed his retirement to run her lab for at least a few more years after she died—​had honored her decisions when it came to personnel. There were probably about thirty people in the space, and fewer than ten were men. That included Kyle, who didn’t really count; he was only there to do full-time lab tech work while on academic leave.

  I’d never talked to Kyle about his academic circumstances, but Yael explained that he was almost kicked out of school when he began failing classes at the start of his junior year. His adviser convinced administrators to let him do full-time lab tech work while taking a year to regroup. Kyle was already young for his class because he’d skipped a year in middle school, and everybody agreed he could use the extra time.

  Best-case scenario, MIT would let him start again in September. Worst-case scenario—​well, we didn’t talk about it.

  I could tell Kyle liked having me around the lab, because I was another person who was technically a temp and too young to be there.

  Yael, who at twenty-three was trudging along with her PhD, had taken Kyle under her wing probably because she liked being the boss, and because he was the only one in the lab young enough to follow her around. Once I turned them into a trio, she tried to mentor me, too, often barking practical advice in her thick Israeli accent.

  “You should get your physical education requirement out of the way freshman year!” “Enroll in the minimum meal plan!”

  I didn’t mind the directives or her big personality; my friendship with Bryan trained me to listen.

  That said, I had no interest in seeing her or Kyle, for that matter, when I returned to work the Monday after my trip to Cindy and Pam’s. I arrived at the lab early, hoping to beat them in and get out early, but Yael was already there when I arrived.

  You okay? she texted after I sprinted by her lab bench, avoiding eye contact.

  Whit and I broke up, I responded, keeping my back to her. I don’t want to talk about it. I just need to zone out for the day.

  Sure, she wrote back, after a longer pause than usual. Whatever you need.

  Thank goodness—​no follow-up questions or advice. What I needed was to get through five more hours of transcription so I could beat my dad home and get up to the attic. I wanted to be able to go through my mom’s research without him asking any questions.

  I powered through one of Dr. Araghi’s tapes but paid little attention. Usually I stopped to google all the terms I didn’t know—​listening to his dictation was like taking a free master class—​but I couldn’t be bothered. I skipped lunch.

  At four, satisfied with my moderate productivity, I gathered my things in my backpack and shuffled toward the door, but Kyle stood in the way of the exit. He wore his gray hoodie, because it was always twenty degrees colder in the lab than it was outside. His dark hair was spiky from a recent cut, the shorter length making his bushy eyebrows look bigger.

  “Hey,” he said when I stopped short in front of him.

  “Hey,” I said, looking down, waiting for him to get out of my way. “I have to go.”

  “Yael told me what’s up—​you know, about the breakup.”

  Kyle leaned against the door frame, bending a few inches so we were face-to-face. “Look, Maya, it’s going to be okay,” he said, those eyebrows raised with concern. “I know you’re upset. But . . . you know you’re not supposed to wind up with your high school boyfriend.”

  I felt the Hulk-like transformation begin, where I went from normal person to furious and rejected. I wanted to shout, “You don’t know what I’m supposed to do!” Instead, I nodded and barreled past him, my arm smacking his as I made it out into the hallway.

  “Maya,” I heard him call after me, but I kept moving. Our friendship felt too new for conflict.

  I’d had acquaintances in high school, people I knew through Bryan, but Kyle and Yael felt like the first friends I’d made without help. They made me feel like I could survive college on my own, and I wasn’t ready to show them anything but kindness.

  I ran down the steps of Building 68b in seconds, feeling safe when I made it onto the quad. But then I sprang back, crashing into Kyle, who’d grabbed the loop on my backpack.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, struggling to get away like a turtle on its back. “Let me go.”

  “Maya,” he said, out of breath, turning me around and taking my shoulders.

  We locked eyes and he gave me a sad stare, then pulled me close and hugged me. I was stiff, my arms at my sides.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said into my hair, and then I sagged into him, forgiving him before I could think about it. “That was a stupid thing to say. If you want to marry your high school boyfriend, you can. I just . . . I’m sorry. Sometimes I say dumb things.”

  “It’s okay,” I told him, leaning into the hug. “I just didn’t see it coming.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” he said. “For now, just keep breathing.”

  * * *

  I went straight for the attic stairs as soon as I got home, and once I made it past the top step, I remembered how creepy it was. The dusty floor was littered with old furniture covered in white sheets. An antique bronze mirror shocked me with my own reflection, making me gasp like I was in a horror film. I tiptoed past the family artifacts, which included a pair of ice skates I’d begged for when I was twelve and then used only twice.

  I found the boxes of research where we had left them, in the attic’s back corner. There were three of them, half-opened and unlabeled.

  If my mom had a system of organization for her notes, my dad and I had destroyed it. Days after the funeral, when we responded to Dr. Araghi’s request for us to come to MIT and collect my mom’s belongings, we tore through her drawers and shelves, dumping all the notebooks into U-Haul boxes, my dad packing the papers so fast you would have thought we were trying to outrun the police.

  Now I wished we had taken our time and been more thoughtful about the process. The boxes were overstuffed with a mess of unlabeled binders and mismatching paperwork. One box seemed to be all spiral notebooks with my mom’s loopy handwriting on the covers. They said vague things like Notes 2 or Work/December.

  Frustrated, I dumped that box over, the notebooks falling to the dark floor, the number of them making me feel like I’d never be able to make sense of any of my mother’s old work.

  But that’s when I saw it—​the One Direction binder.

  We’d bought it together at Target, long before my mom got her cancer diagnosis, when life was simple and we did things like run errands for five hours. We were in the office-supplies aisle because she said she needed a new binder for lesson plans.

  I grabbed the One Direction binder as a joke; it was dusty in the bargain bin, outdated enough that there were still five members of the group on the cover. They all wore suits with blazers, except for Harry Styles, who had on a leather jacket over a shirt unbuttoned to his stomach.

  I expected my mom to laugh at the binder or give me an eye roll, but she grabbed it out of my hands and walked to the cash register while telling me, “At least I know I won’t ever lose this one or mix it up with someone else’s.”

  “Wait, Mom . . .” I said, following her down the aisle. “I was kidding.”

  From then on, she carried it with her to the lab every day. I never thought much about what was in it; I figured she used it for to-do lists and lesson plans like she said she would. If someone asked her about it in front of me, she’d say, “Oh, you mean this One Direction fan item? My daughter picked it out for me!”

  “As a joke!” I’d yell.

  But the binder rarely left her side. She always kept track of it, like it held something essential.

  I grabbed it now and opened the Velcro flap. My breath quickened.

  Inside were papers bound with tiny familiar paper clips. My mom had paper clips in all colors and used them for all occasions—​to affix notes to my lunch, f
or makeshift bookmarks in the Ursula K. Le Guin novels she kept by the bed, and to separate the pages of notes in her research. The fluorescent pink, purple, and yellow plastic tips made a rainbow in the binder.

  I flipped to a random pink paper clip. It was attached to pages that didn’t seem to be lesson plans, but rather charts with dates and numbers. Maybe temperatures and dosages of something.

  Nov. 9/98 degrees/.05; Nov. 10/99 degrees/.05.

  It was from an experiment of some kind, but I couldn’t figure out the specifics.

  Sheet after sheet, more dates and temperatures.

  I was relieved to see that after the first twenty pages or so, there were papers with words on them. Maybe some explanation of what it all meant.

  February 7. Temperature has leveled off at 99 at a dose of 1.5 mg. This dose appears to be almost ideal, based on K’s response and the lack of side effects. No dizziness. If my temperature remains stable, will continue with these conditions.

  It was the pronoun that surprised me: my temperature.

  Whatever experiment my mom was keeping track of in the One Direction binder, she seemed to be doing it on herself.

  I looked at the next page, even more confused by the notes under February 8. The tone was clinical, but she seemed to be writing about sex. She used words like intercourse and libido. Then, in another paragraph, I saw my dad’s name. Kirk initiated . . .

  “What the hell?” I whispered, and quickly flipped to the next page.

  I couldn’t decipher the specifics of the project, but it seemed as though my mom was consuming something—​ingesting some sort of chemical at a dose of 1.5 mg—​that was meant to alter something related to sex or attraction.

  I remembered Cindy’s words. But let’s be honest: this is what your mom was doing before she died, right? Trying to make love last?

  My instinct was to slam the binder closed—​the way one would slam a door if they’d walked in on their parents having sex. I felt nauseated, and I wondered what my mother was thinking when she left this research to me. But I also wanted to know what it was all about.

  I forced myself to turn the page again, which was when I found handwriting that wasn’t my mother’s—​notes on top of my mother’s, with observations and additional questions. It looked so familiar.

  I couldn’t place it at first, but then I remembered where I had seen it before. The squareness of the all-uppercase letters, and the way some words were underlined.

  “You,” I said aloud as soon as I recognized the script.

  I left the other notebooks and papers on the floor and ran downstairs with the One Direction binder in my hands. I needed to take it to the one person who could explain it.

  5

  Ann Markley still worked in Building 68b—​she was supposed to be finishing her PhD and writing her dissertation, like many of the other students in the lab—​but once Dr. Araghi had taken over the lab under his own name, she’d moved herself from the main workspace to a windowless room in the back of the building. It had once been a storage space for equipment, but she’d managed to turn it into a lair for herself, maybe so people would forget she was there.

  The rumor in the lab, according to Yael, was that Ann hadn’t made much progress with her work since my mom died. Her mood had gone from intense to morose. Yael had once heard Ann on a phone call admitting to someone that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to finish it at all.

  Yael didn’t like Ann, and wasn’t quiet about it.

  “She’s a year older than I am, and she acts like she’s some tenured professor, like she’s the assistant in charge here,” Yael had told me. “But she’s not the boss of anyone! In fact, she’s barely doing what she’s supposed to be doing!”

  I understood Yael’s frustration, but it made my chest ache to know that Ann was floundering. Even though her bristling personality had always scared me, my mom had adored her and said she was one of her brightest researchers. Mom had treated her like an assistant. I didn’t like the idea of Ann going from star student to someone who’d give up on her degree altogether.

  I’d never done more than hurry past Ann’s office when I was near the back of the lab, but now that I was here, standing in the doorway, I felt claustrophobic on her behalf, seeing the small desk and chair pushed against the blank gray wall.

  I’d waited until after six, when there were fewer people around, and I found her on a small step stool, tending to the one item that gave the room any character: my mom’s old aquarium. It was perched on a bookshelf that had no books on it. The aquarium was the only thing in the room that made it clear someone worked there.

  Ann wore black jeans and a charcoal long-sleeved T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her pixie-cut hair was so bleach-blond that it was basically white. Since my mom’s death, she’d added eyebrow piercings and a gold ear cuff to the package. She was like a full-size, angry Tinkerbell, her thick dark eyeliner looking like a kind of war paint on her tiny pale lids.

  At my light knock on the door frame, she gave me a quick surprised glance and then looked down, pulling her hand from the tank and toweling it off before returning to her desk.

  “Come in,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I told her, then shuffled toward the fish tank, curious to see whether any of my mom’s fish were still alive. My eyes followed a bright pink fish that swam behind a school of dot-size babies. “So cute,” I said, instantly regretting that I said the word cute in front of Ann Markley.

  Just then, the mother fish opened her mouth and swallowed at least six of her babies whole.

  “Oh, my god, she’s eating them,” I said, turning to Ann.

  Of course Ann Markley’s fish ate its children.

  “Look closer,” Ann responded, looking up from her computer. “Watch the mother. Watch what she does.”

  I tucked my hair behind my ears for a clearer view and watched the fish continue their circular journey. The mother angelfish hurried behind her cloud of children and swallowed some of them again in a gulp. “She just did it again! She’s devouring them.”

  But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, the big angelfish spit her babies back out into the water. She wasn’t eating them; it looked like she was moving them from one end of the fish tank to the other. She was trying to keep them together in a pack. Whenever three or four tiny fish attempted to defect from the school, she swallowed them and then let go, keeping everyone close.

  “She’s just telling them where to go,” I whispered. “She’s . . . herding them.”

  “She doesn’t want them to lose their way,” Ann said. “It’s biological instinct. I’ve had six angelfish, and they all do this.”

  I took a seat in the small wooden chair across from Ann’s desk. “Maybe you should have been a marine biologist.”

  Her response was a cold look, even though I hadn’t meant it as an insult. She leaned back, sizing me up in silence.

  Eager to end the staring contest, I blinked and reached down to the tattered navy backpack between my feet and removed the One Direction binder. It looked even more ridiculous in this office than it had in the attic. Under the florescent lights, Harry Styles’s chest was white. His facial expression looked so goofy that I wanted to put my hand over his face.

  Ann’s reaction to the binder—​the recognition in her wide eyes—​told me everything. For a second, I thought she might grab it from me. She took a short, loud breath and then asked softly, “Do you know what that is?”

  “It’s One Direction,” I said, the words out of my mouth before I could filter them. She scowled.

  “I mean, yes,” I said, attempting a quick recovery. “I know what this—​this binder—​is. I mean, I think I do. I’ve read some of what’s inside.”

  Ann took a sip from the can of cream soda that was on her desk.

  “Did your mother tell you what’s in that binder, or did you read it on your own?”

  “She didn’t tell me—​I mean, not technically. My aunt Cindy told me about it,
and then I found it. You know my mom wanted me to have her research. She didn’t tell me anything, but with the way she wrote her will, she meant for me to know.”

  We watched each other in silence then, my proclamation more confrontational than I intended it to be. Ann’s threatening glare and her twitching silver eyebrow ring made me want to sprint from the room, but I took a deep breath and fused my feet to the floor, not wanting to back down.

  “Cindy told me that Mom was studying relationships.” My voice shook. “I found the binder, and it seems, based on what I’ve read, that you were involved with the research. I saw your notes, in your handwriting.”

  “Yes, I was involved,” Ann said. “I was always involved in her work.”

  It was clear what was implicit in her comment—​that I didn’t deserve the research and that I should have handed it over to begin with.

  “Was Dr. Araghi working on this project too?”

  “Of course not,” Ann snapped. “It was your mother’s work, your mother’s lab. Also, he’d never go off the books for something like this.”

  “Look,” I said, “I know you hate me because of what happened, but Mom was really specific about the research going to me. My dad and I were just following orders, and it was a really hard time for us. It was too much to figure out at once.”

  Ann nodded and softened her shoulders.

  I thought she might say, “Of course I don’t hate you,” or “I totally understand,” but she didn’t. Her face remained blank. Her eyebrow ring twitched.

  “So what do you want?” she asked, placing her elbows on her short desk. “You didn’t come to make small talk—​I know you’ve been working for Dr. Araghi for days now, and you haven’t come to say hello. You must want something.”

  Had she wanted me to come say hello? I couldn’t imagine that she had.

  “I don’t want to cause any problems for you,” I told her. “I’m just interested in what you and my mom were doing, and I’d like to know more about what’s in this binder. I think my mom left the research to me because she wanted me to know what she was up to. I haven’t told anyone about this, by the way. Aunt Cindy said this was private research, and I want you to know that I don’t intend to share this with anyone.”