I said each word into the microphone, not quite hitting any sort of beat. I did manage to say the final phrase, “like, ever,” at the right time and with a little bit of character. That much I could do.
The Barders cheered, and I felt my legs get solid as I relaxed. I even sang the final chorus with him, keeping my microphone as far from my mouth as possible.
“See? No real singing,” Asher said, and pulled me in for an unexpected hug when the music ended.
“You’re a good Taylor,” I said.
“So are you,” he said, and then let me go and walked toward the bar. Even though he was only twenty, he’d somehow avoided the fuchsia bracelet for patrons under twenty-one. I was still flushed and shaky from being onstage, and hurried back to my seat before any more attention came my way.
Bryan held up his phone. “I filmed that. I filmed it, and I’m going to watch it every day for the rest of my life.”
“I thought I was going to pass out.”
“You were awful. You sounded like a fucking robot, and I loved it.”
The music started up again for Kimberly Katz, who was back onstage looking somber as the music got louder and I recognized the song.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Bryan . . .”
“Nope,” Bryan answered, shaking his head. “We’re not talking about it.”
As she started with the first line of “Let It Go,” Bryan whispered, “Fine, we can go home and watch something. But I pick the movie.”
Just before we made it out the door, I spotted Asher at the bar and smiled. He raised a drink in my direction and winked.
Hours later, after we had finished watching television with my dad, Bryan went to the guest room and fell asleep, and I went back to my room and opened my laptop.
I still hadn’t responded to Whit’s email—it seemed there wasn’t much to say, at least not yet. But tonight he had emailed again. I took a deep breath as I clicked on the new message, which appeared to have been sent at eight.
Hey, maybe you don’t want to hear from me, but I am worried and thinking about you. I know tonight was supposed to be our big night, and maybe it’s stupid, but I wanted you to know that I hope you’re doing okay. I hope we can talk at some point. I would really like to be friends.
Our big night, I said to myself, checking the date on my phone.
“July tenth,” I whispered.
Whit had moved into his apartment today. The roommates were gone for the week. I was supposed to sleep over. We were supposed to have sex. We would have been having it right now, maybe. I fell back onto my bed, thinking of how I might respond to the email.
I heard my dad rattling around in the kitchen, but I couldn’t talk to him about this. Something told me that if I mentioned that Whit had reached out at all, my dad would be as miserable as I was. When Whit came into our lives, it was like my dad needed him as much as I did. They met on our third or fourth date—it was supposed to be a romantic evening; at least that’s what I had planned for. Whit and I hadn’t even kissed yet, but I figured that “Let’s sit around and watch a movie” was code for that, so I was nervous and excited and couldn’t sleep the night before. Whit arrived at the house and I was ready to pounce, but before we could head to the flat screen to settle in, my dad, incapable of reading a room, invited us to go outside to play with the telescope.
“I’d love to,” Whit had said before I could decline.
The next thing I knew, we were all in the backyard taking turns with the massive telescope. Whit was into it, or at least pretended to be, as my dad talked about the meteor shower he was able to catch at Aunt Cindy’s the week before.
After an hour passed, I accepted that the night had become a family affair. Whit listened to my dad talk about the middle school science curriculum, our family vacations, and a bunch of other topics that no one would possibly want to hear about. All I kept thinking was that Whit was so kind and enthusiastic, and that it was the first time my dad had been engaged in a conversation with a stranger since my mom had died.
I hit reply and typed, Thanks for thinking of me, because at least he had.
12
Ann guessed that it would take a few days to get the Kyle serum out of my system. It was a bit of a guessing game.
My mom’s notes showed, based on blood tests and other indicators such as temperature, that she was back to her normal numbers after about a week, but Ann and I hypothesized that it took longer for her to clear the serum because she had been absorbing it daily for more than six months.
Her research suggested that, when taken sublingually over time, the mix would build up in the system for a cumulative effect. My work had been short-term, so after forty-eight hours or so, it felt like I was back to normal. I had trouble describing exactly what I meant by “normal,” but once the serum was flushed from my system, it felt like the inside of my body had been reset. My sweat felt pure. It was probably all in my head, but I felt like my insides were lighter and cooler. I could prove that last part, at least, as I was back to my usual 98.7 degrees.
Another piece of evidence was that I slept a ton during those first few days off the formula. Almost twelve hours a night, two days in a row. I knew this might happen based on my mom’s notes. On Day Four, I felt like myself again and was back to waking up with ease after eight hours.
Ann agreed that my body had probably restored itself, but she demanded a weeklong break before we moved on to Phase Two of the project. She said it would make the experiment more legitimate, and that the extra time could be used to evaluate the research and consider the second subject.
The break gave me too much time to consider my next steps with Whit. It also forced me to think about what my mom had planned to do with her own research long-term. I wondered whether she intended to stay on the serum forever to maintain whatever it was doing for her and my dad.
It was a sad thing to think about—the idea that maybe my parents weren’t as happy as I thought, and that my mom believed she needed this kind of science to maintain her marriage.
Standing in front of Building 68b, wishing I didn’t have to go inside and focus on transcription, I wondered what it would be like to have to hide in the bathroom every night, dripping a potion under my tongue for the rest of my life to prolong Whit’s interest. Maybe my mom could pull that off, but that wasn’t possible for me. I wouldn’t want it to be. The goal here was to remind Whit of what we had and to get us back to where we were so we could keep going.
Kyle was officially back to work since taking two days off after Reaction One (R1), which is how Ann and I now referred to the hookup in our notes. I liked calling it R1 because it glossed over what had happened—that I had used a serum to hook up with one of the first friends I had made at school.
Those first three days after Kyle had returned to the office, I’d smiled but kept my distance, mainly afraid that my pheromones were still a match and that I would only make our situation worse. We had taken one whiff walk as a threesome, because it was the routine. The night felt normal—like R1 hadn’t happened—until Yael went to the bathroom at the restaurant, and Kyle and I just sat at the table silent, keeping our mouths full of shrimp skewers until Yael returned. We didn’t even make eye contact.
Now that I was confident that the serum was out of my system, I flashed a friendly smile at Kyle before getting comfortable at my desk. He smiled back and then resumed cleaning test tubes. Yael muttered a quick “Hey,” and kept her head buried in her laptop.
“What’s up?” I asked both of them, my voice breezy as I tried to read the energy in the room.
“Someone changed the temperature of the incubator last night,” Yael answered, her voice intentionally loud enough for neighboring workstations to hear. “And now I am a day behind, and I might as well have not come in over the weekend because I have to prep this nonsense all over again.”
I relaxed as Yael continued her monologue about how she came in to find her neatly prepped and marinating materia
ls ruined by a ten-degree temperature alteration. This was the most common fight in the lab; there were dozens of researchers in all stages of their work and degrees, sharing the same sorters, cooler, and storage areas. They were bound to occasionally and unintentionally mess with one another’s materials while tending to their own experiments.
Yael’s rant was long and laced with harsh words, but I didn’t get the sense that the culprit was even around to hear it.
“. . . And whoever it was, maybe you should think about how it would feel to come in and find your warm materials nice and cold, because I could arrange for that!” Yael yelled a bit louder, to mark the end of her tirade.
“Hey, we should go get bubble tea tonight,” I said, hoping that one more outing with Kyle would mean I could start texting him again. I missed our daily back-and-forth, and all his games and roommate commentary. I waited and watched as he continued his work.
“I can’t. I’m going to yoga,” Yael said. “But you guys should go.”
I turned to Kyle.
“Sounds good to me,” I said, hopeful.
“Depends on what I can get done today,” he responded without turning around.
“Okay,” I responded, smiling like I took his words at face value. “Keep me posted.”
Later, Yael broke the silence by closing her laptop and removing a yoga mat from under her desk.
“She’s becoming a yoga person,” I said, testing Kyle as Yael ran out. “I don’t know if we can be friends with her anymore.”
The desperation in my voice made me want to hide under my desk.
“I think it’s sort of cool,” Kyle shot back. “I might go with her next week.”
I saw that he was closing his backpack, preparing to leave.
“You’re done already?” I said, my voice too high. “Does that mean there’s time for bubble tea?”
“I think I’m going to meet up with a friend who’s back on campus for the week. We’re going to see if we can get last-minute tickets to the game.”
“What kind of game?”
“Red Sox,” he said, looking at me like I was an alien for not knowing. He’d never mentioned liking baseball before.
He gave me a long look then, his right hand grasping his workbench like it was the edge of a cliff. I scanned my brain trying to think of something to say, anything to change the mood.
“Have fun,” was all I could come up with.
He looked away, like he was disappointed.
I should have chased after him and told him I was confused and sorry, and that I wished the kissing during the movie had never happened because I should have never put our friendship at risk. I wanted to ask why he seemed so casual about the whole thing when clearly he wasn’t. But instead I just stood there.
Then, all of a sudden, I was desperate to see Whit. I longed to be comforted by him—or to yell at him for setting off this chain of events that had messed up my world.
I grabbed my phone and did what Bryan had forbidden me to do for weeks now. Alone in the lab space, I opened a browser and typed in the name Andrea Berger.
All I knew of her face was what Bryan told me—that she looked like Genevieve Moran from our high school. But I needed to know more.
I sat on my stool, settling in for some research. At first, there was little to discover about the woman who had stolen Whit’s heart. Most entries for Andrea Berger led me to older people in other parts of the world.
When I narrowed the search by typing Andrea Berger and Boston University, I saw a few social media accounts and several student newspaper articles about her work in the film department at the school. There were also race times, which I clicked on first. Andrea Berger had run a half-marathon in California in under two hours. I glanced down at my short legs.
My hands shook as I clicked on one of her profiles. The first photo showed her frozen, mid-laugh, as she was being nuzzled by a large black cat.
“Dammit.” I shouted the word at the computer screen loud enough that Tish peeked her head in from the front office.
“Everything okay?”
“It’s fine,” I spat. “I stubbed my toe. It’s nothing.”
Tish disappeared back to her desk, and I grabbed my elbows to control my panic. Whit had grown up with two cats, but I’d always been allergic. He had made jokes—at least he said they were jokes—that by being with me, he was condemning himself to a life without his version of man’s best friend. Andrea Berger, however, was cat-friendly. Her face looked bright and rash-free as the feline covered her face in saliva. I’d be covered in big red hives.
The photo also showed that she had very straight teeth and auburn hair. The picture was mostly of the cat, but I could tell that Andrea Berger was fit, her thin, muscular arms jutting from her tank top.
I toggled back to my search results and saw that about three entries down there was another social media account, so I clicked again.
It was a worst-case scenario. She was a frequent poster, at least once or twice a day, her life spelled out like a diary entry. Everything she had been doing over the last weeks was chronicled in small bites.
Her bio said simply, We fell in love, alone on a stage. It was ambiguous, but I jumped to the conclusion that it was a reference to Whit. They took classes together. On stages. Sort of. For a second or two, it felt like someone was standing on my chest.
I threw my arms up to my head, and my elbow knocked a burette that someone had left near my bench, causing it to fall to the floor.
“Dammit,” I said again, leaning over to pick it up before someone saw that I had dropped expensive lab equipment.
“Maya!” Tish ran into the room. I must have been louder than I thought. “Sweetheart, are you sure you’re all right?”
“Sorry, sorry,” I said, clutching the glass measuring tube. “I didn’t break anything.”
“It’s okay if you did. Just be careful, okay?” Tish made her concerned-camp-counselor face and then disappeared to her desk again.
I turned back and tried to steady my breathing. I mumbled Andrea Berger’s bio aloud, like I could decode it. “We fell in love, alone on a stage.”
“Arcade Fire,” a voice said behind me.
I turned around to find Jawad, one of the guys in the lab, standing a few feet behind me.
“What?”
“I’ve seen them four times.”
“What?” My voice was shaky and loud.
“‘We fell in love, alone on a stage.’ Those are Arcade Fire lyrics.”
“Are you kidding me?” I asked.
Jawad looked confused.
“No. I’m not.”
I tried to decide whether this decoding of Andrea Berger’s profile made me feel better or worse. Perhaps the falling-in-love-on-a-stage thing was not about Whit. Maybe she was just a big Arcade Fire fan.
But that was worse.
Arcade Fire, one of Whit’s favorite bands, was also an inside joke in our relationship.
One night, not long after Whit and I started dating, he and Bryan were at my house, watching television. Arcade Fire was the musical guest on a late-night show, and after a few minutes of listening to their performance, Bryan proclaimed in his most authoritative voice, “This is horrendous.”
“They’re fantastic,” Whit had said.
“Nope,” Bryan replied, shaking his head, “This is nonsense, just like every hipster band you listen to. That one idiot is playing a zither. Look, Maya, that’s a zither.”
I looked away, trying not to laugh as Whit adjusted his position on the couch and got defensive.
“These people, they make real music, with instruments,” Whit said. “All you listen to is . . . people like Justin Timberlake, someone whose music is a direct rip-off of what’s come before him.
“I mean, this,” Whit continued, pointing to the television, “this is new. This is actually original music.”
“You do not say that,” Bryan snapped, his eyes serious. “You do not say that about Justi
n Timberlake.” Bryan pointed at the television then, where Arcade Fire’s frontman now looked directly into the camera, like he was listening, “This is what is wrong with music nowadays. The singers can’t sing. And what was that nonsense you made me listen to the other night?”
“Interpol.”
“Whatever. Interpol. Yes. Boring. These bands—it’s all a pyramid scheme. You’re being manipulated in some sort of alt-rock pyramid scheme invented by guys with beards who believe that they have the right to your time and money even though they’re just standing there, mumbling or playing a goddamned zither, without even knowing how to use their voices. Singing counts for something!”
Whit paused, clearly unable to come up with anything to say. Then Bryan started doing an impression of the lead singer that was ridiculous but kind of accurate, and even Whit was laughing as he pelted Bryan in the head with popcorn.
After that, Bryan and I called all of Whit’s moody music “zither-rock,” and when Whit bought tickets to Arcade Fire’s Boston show months later, I whispered “pyramid scheme” in Bryan’s ear and he couldn’t keep a straight face.
Now Whit was with a girl who referenced Arcade Fire in her social media bio, and the lyrics made reference to falling in love on a stage, which is where she had probably met Whit, on a stage at Boston University, while I had been a clueless high school senior daydreaming about what life would be like with my boyfriend after I finally graduated. I put my head down on my workbench and tried to steady my breathing.
13
Whit had taken me to this theater space before. He liked to have his film-major friends read drafts of his scripts here while he sat in the audience and made notes for himself. The seats were arranged as bleachers, like the kind you’d find in a gymnasium. The sides were covered by black sheets that hung haphazardly to hide props.
Like a zombie unable to control my own path, I had traveled there straight from the lab. Andrea Berger’s most recent social media post had read Black box read-through!!, so I knew she’d be here.
Chemistry Lessons Page 11