Give Me Your Hand

by Megan Abbott

  “Do you drink anything at all?” Juwon asks, head tilted the other way now.

  “Are you a vampire, is what he means,” says the just-arriving Alex, skating effortlessly over the all-thumbs fumbling of these sad little boys. There’s a wince inside me as I watch him eyeing her. Et tu, Alex?

  But Diane doesn’t respond. I don’t think she even smiles. She gives them nothing. Which, for these boys, is everything they want most.

  Most of them—except Zell, who’s only twenty-seven, a prodigy, and Alex—are attached, some married young and already with a kid or two. You would never know it, though, were it not for the occasional vein of dried spit-up on Juwon’s backpack or the intense drinking some of them do on their rare nights out.

  It isn’t until that moment that I wonder: Could Diane be married? God, could she have a baby? The thought makes my teeth ache, and I steal a glance at her hands, narrow delicate fingers like harp strings. No ring, but most of the others don’t wear rings, all of us changing gloves five or ten times a day.

  Diane disappears before lunch.

  “I saw them leave together,” Maxim says, rubbing his artful stubble.

  “Who?” I ask. For a crazy moment, I picture Alex taking Diane to the Snack Hut instead of me, making sure they give her extra hot sauce like he does with me.

  “Dr. Severin and Diane. I bet she takes her to the French place.”

  My relief is fleeting. Dr. Severin has never invited any of us to lunch, not even Maxim.

  None of us go out for lunch anyway, snarling over cling-wrapped sandwiches in the lounge, microwaved Banquet chicken fingers, pizza rolls, the hot stench drifting from the greasy sack sitting by Zell’s bench while he finishes centrifuging.

  Later, we hear Diane is on a tour of the rest of the lab, the colony room, the cage-wash room. Maybe she’s even touring the neuro lab in the east wing, meeting the brain jocks.

  I don’t see her again that day, even though I stay late.

  I won’t let her think she’s thrown me.

  It’s after eight and Alex and I are the only ones left. Wry, winking Alex and me. We share cold noodles from Panda Garden, huddle by the vending machine, gossiping over stained coffee cups.

  Today I’m more glad for it than ever.

  “Too fast, too fast,” I say. “You’re gonna have too much air.”

  He’s running a flash column, forcing the solvent down a glass tube to separate its components, to make it pure.

  “Always rushing things,” I say. “Did your ex-girlfriends tell you that?”

  “Never with such charm,” he admits.

  There’s one like Alex in every lab. Sloppy, a little slapdash. It upsets Serge, annoys the other lab techs. Equipment perpetually crusted, stain-slicked, his fume hood dusted with silica, his lab coat, which he seldom wears, frayed and graying at the cuffs, sprayed with pinhead holes from the sulfuric acid. Once I found a crushed box of horchata wedged between his bench and the floor.

  We both watch for a moment, the mixture separating itself in the foot-high glass tube, first like an orange push-up, now a tequila sunrise. His moves are deft but careless. Soon enough, the tube makes the tiniest pop.

  “You cracked it,” I say, pointing to the little star in the glass. “Better start over with a new one. It could shatter.” I’ve seen it happen, especially with undergrads, who are always putting too much air in and sending glass into their too-cool-for-safety-goggles eyes.

  But Alex just shakes his head and says, “Been lucky all my life.”

  Then, he goes back to his story, about the time he fell in love with a girl in his orgo class his freshman year of college. A girl with a killer dimple, Sally Woods. Beautiful, he says, and she could titrate like a motherfucker.

  “I was determined,” he says. “I just had to get a game on.”

  “So how’d you pull it off?”

  “Easy. The flame test.”

  “C’mon. That’s for kids.”

  “Not,” he says, voice husky and sly, “if you’re doing it right.”

  I pause, but only for a second. “So show me how you did it,” I say. “Show me.”

  “Are you sure?” he says, slanting his head. “Because it’s been known to overwhelm women.”

  “I’ll try to control myself.”

  All it really is, the flame test, is taking a wire loop, dipping it in one element or another, and holding it in a Bunsen flame. Each yields a different color, a luminous one.

  But what Alex knew then, and still knows, is how intimate the experience can be, lights dimmed, bodies so close, soft explosions of color.

  Because here we are, the lab a blue cave, standing over the lit Bunsen burner together, leaning close against the cool ledge of the lab slab. Everything is fire and magic. The soft hiss of the Bunsen, Alex’s wrist flicking, the loop’s platinum flashing, yielding all the sumptuous jets of color.

  He dips the loop into each sample, one by one, then into the fire. First unfurls the acid green of boron. Then the filmy lavender of potassium. The scandalous violet of rubidium. Lithium’s searing fuchsia.

  “So this worked with Sally,” I say, swinging my hip against his, sister-like but also not.

  “Of course it worked,” he says, maneuvering that loop so smoothly. “On me.”

  He explains how Sally Woods took him back to her dorm room—the smell of microwave popcorn and hairspray, hot-pink string lights draped in a heart over the bed—and made sweet, sweet love to him all night.

  “A happy ending,” I say, feeling a vaguely jealous twinge.

  “Three weeks later, she dropped out of school to follow a guy in a band. His name was Skippy, the unkindest cut of all. Anyway, I never saw that dimple again.”

  He lowers the loop once more—“Let’s see if you can guess this one”—and the flame streaks apple green high as my chin.

  And there it is.

  I look at it, his hand behind the flame, its color like sour taffy, a goblin, the green eyes of a green-eyed monster.

  “Barium,” I say, my voice sounding funny, small.

  Green like the bottle flies that feast on garbage, roadkill, dead things. Green like the ooze from a body bloated then gently rotting.

  So fast it happens, my knees soft as pea tendrils, my fingers clamping onto the lab station’s resin edge, then reaching fast for the sink’s gooseneck faucet.

  A flash in my head of cut-pile carpet, a pair of twitching loafers.

  “Hey,” Alex says, a look of concern that hums inside me like a chord, “you okay?”

  He must see something, something barefaced and awful, because he says, hand on my shoulder, “Listen, how about we ditch this joint? Maybe get some beers?”

  Is it the third Long Island Iced Tea that makes it happen?

  I suggested the Irish place, the grad student hangout, but Alex shook his head.

  “We’re going someplace where no one’s heard of a reagent or spectrometers or peer reviews.”

  So here we are at Zipperz, a year-round-Christmas-lights bar near my apartment. I’ve been inside only once before, to play video poker and drink Jack and Cokes with my cousin Scott who’d come to visit after losing his shipping-and-receiving job for selling buttermouth perch out of his trunk in the parking lot. (I only ever did it after I’d clocked out, he said. You know me. I’m highly regimentalized, like all the Owenses.)

  We’re drinking the Thursday-night special, two-for-one Long Island Iced Teas, which Alex can’t believe I’ve never had before even though he hasn’t either. They come in tall glasses, lemon peel spiraled like curling ribbon, and taste both nasty and perfect, teeth-stinging, sour-smack.

  Alex has all the bar gallantries—You need a fresh coaster? Here’s the hook for your handbag…you don’t call it a handbag? Let me show you the cool, old-timey cigarette machine, c’mon, don’t you wanna pull the crank? And somehow I’ve forgotten about the lab and Diane and the green lash of barium, and we’re talking and talking and laughing, and his right knee keeps jos
tling my left.

  “I don’t get it,” he says, spinning my coaster. A fiddler, a fondler; at work he’s always nudging upward the sleeve on my coffee cup rather than his own, and here he is now, peeling with faintly callused fingers the LADIES DRINK FREE paper bracelet from my wrist. “Why are you so worried? You’re in. You’re a sure shot. You’re the only one I’d put money on for Severin’s team.”

  I fight off the perpetual instinct to offer Thanks, but no, there’s so many qualified…

  Instead, with the blaze of rum–vodka–triple sec–tequila–gin, a five-gun fusillade, charging through me, I say, “She should pick me.”

  “No one’ll work harder,” he adds.

  I look at him. That phrase. No one works harder than you.

  But then there’s a sizzle-pop-pop from the PA system and a stir of frayed shorts and greasy ball caps by the small stage, and, God help us, live music is coming.

  “Maybe I had a chance before,” I say, leaning closer, talking louder, my thoughts blurry and my shoulders sinking. “But not after today.”

  “What do you mean? Little Red Riding Hood? Eh, she—” He waves his hand dismissively. “I suppose a world-class CV means something to some people.”

  The picture comes to me, the way Diane looked today, sauntering down the hall with Dr. Severin like invited royalty, lab coat like an imperial cape.

  “She came up just like me,” I say. “Me plus money.”

  “Then you’ll be fast friends in no time,” he says, watching me more closely now. “You have so much in common.”

  “We don’t,” I insist, louder than I mean to. “And we won’t. And we’re nothing alike.”

  “Got it,” he says, lifting his hands in surrender. “Don’t let Zell hear you. He’ll start making those catfight sounds.”

  He’s kidding but somehow it’s unbearable. He’s light and laughing because he doesn’t know. If he knew, if anyone knew—and suddenly that’s what I’m saying.

  “You don’t know about her,” I insist, my words coming in hard bursts. “I know about her.”

  “Know what?” Alex asks, leaning forward too, one hand on my shoulder now.

  No, no, no. I start counting in my head, counting to clear my head. Behind Alex, the band is taking the stage, stepping over cords, the sizzle of the amps, the whoop-whoop of a few rowdy women, swiveling jean hips. I remember a long-ago night, the only time I ever went dancing with Diane, the complicated pleasure in her eyes, how she started twirling with the song, her hair curtaining, hiding her face, all her bad thoughts.

  “Nothing,” I say to Alex, my voice nearly drowned out by the bray of tuneless guitars, the screech of feedback. “Nothing.”

  And the music swallows everything.

  Saved by the noise, we have another round.

  They’re terrible, Alex mouths, pointing to the band, but in that moment I love them.

  The music is mostly just noise and bombast, but like most bar music, it has the sneaky power to insist, and when the set kicks up, it’s suddenly as if, although I’m not even watching the stage, the fuzzing guitars start cycloning inside us, our faces LED lit, bar stools vibrating, the thrum and vroom from the blasted-out speakers on sticks, and we’re facing each other, knees grazing, fingers touching forearms, leaning in to hear, and I’ve been alone a long time, so many nights, and now here I am, here I am…

  And then there’s the sweet musk of the second Long Island Iced Tea.

  “Twenty-two percent alcohol?” Alex guesses, our heads close so we can hear each other.

  “And seventy-eight percent heaven,” I add. My drunken tell always the same: my tongue searching for a teenage piercing long healed.

  “You swear you never had them before?” he asks again and it’s starting to feel like it means something.

  “You swear you haven’t?” I ask. “But how have you had anything other than single-malt scotch and fine champagne?”

  “Oh,” he says, laughing, “and, what, just Mickey’s Big Mouth and Ripple for you?”

  Before I can pause on that, on whatever idea he has about me, he’s leaning forward, strong hands on my knees, and whispering in my ear.

  “What’s a guy gotta do to get a dance from you?”

  So maybe it’s not even the third Long Island Iced Tea so much as what follows: the frenzied whirl around the floor he gives me after the next song starts, his grip stronger than I’ve felt in so long, maybe ever. The song is that creaky old warhorse about friends in low places that I haven’t heard in a dozen years or more, since my dad’s second wedding, the one to Debra, the real estate agent with the cigarette-crimped mouth and a talent for short sales. He made the band play it, then he took the mike and sang—he bellowed it, oh, did he, slipping in his too-tight rented shoes, landing on the laminate, and nearly bringing Debra down with him. And my mom, who’d been trying not to cry through the couple’s first dance, burst into laughter instead and shouted, hands cupped around her mouth, from the back of the sticky-walled catering hall, He’s yours now, Debra baby! The prize is yours!

  Hearing the song now, as Alex’s arms relax for a spin, loose like a marionette (I want him to pull me close again, just to feel the hard tug), I can almost hear my mom laughing even though she died two years ago, untethering me from all the things that kept me whole and real, and Alex keeps smiling at everything I do or say, some private pleasure over my littlest gesture, my sad little boot scoot, my even–better–than–Sally Woods’s dimple, the way I keep spilling my drink on myself, on him, on everyone because I just will not set it down.

  “I always knew you’d be like this,” he says, mouth sweet with rum, triple sec, sticky things.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, gigolo-dipping me. And he says something else I don’t even hear.

  When he pulls me up again, a dizzying smack of leftover solvents from the lab hits me, sharp and eye-stinging, but I don’t care about anything but the softness of his shirt and the crooking of his fingers in the small of my back.

  And the music slows and we do too, one long, lingering dance to a song I don’t know and will never remember except that it’s big and sorrowful and the middle-aged singer with the frayed shorts and crab-red face suddenly seems like Johnny Cash brought back to desperate, broke-voiced life.

  “This is so much fun I could die,” I say. And I mean it, my chest aching from the smoky air-conditioning and the experience of actual air whenever the back doors open. It’s been so long, I think. So long since any of this. There’s never time for any of this.

  My head is swimming, that’s what they always say in old novels, the sensation of everything around you and in you all at once, and the firm fingertips of a lanky, adoring-me man and the way, when we sit back down, he pounds the bar jauntily for more drinks, More for the beautiful lady! She shall not go undrunk!

  Pound, pound, and then a wink for the stone-faced bartender:

  “A kingdom of Long Island Iced Teas for the queen,” he says.

  I take three long sips, the last one lost to the bar floor, some big-armed passerby in a searing neon-green T-shirt that actually reads BITCH! on the back, his meaty elbow to my rib. Wait, I think, I know—

  But a warm hand on my forearm. Alex.

  “You,” he says, “are as fun as you are smart, and you’re the smartest motherfucker I ever met.”

  “You have no idea,” I say. No idea at all.

  “So stop worrying about Diane Fleming, okay?” he asks. Then, putting one hand on either side of my bar stool, his face so close: “And don’t listen to the other guys. Just because she’s a woman doesn’t mean Severin won’t pick you.”

  My face runs hot in an instant and I can’t guess why he’s decided to spoil things.

  “I know,” I say. “I know. This isn’t about that. This is something much, much bigger.” The words come from my mouth without my actually choosing or forming them.

  “Bigger how?” he says, leaning forward, the heat of him on the
heat of me, and whose heat is greater? But it’s the stage of drunk when you’re not even sure if you’re saying things or just thinking them until suddenly you’re shouting them.

  It comes so fast. A push of feelings in my chest and I can’t stop myself.

  “I know Diane Fleming. From before. Diane. I know her. And I’m nothing like her.”

  His eyebrows lift.

  This time, there’s no stopping me.

  “I know Diane,” I say, and my mouth is humming, “and she’s a really bad person.”

  We’re on the back patio now. The boom-boom-boom of the jukebox hurls itself into an old song I know, from when I was ten years old, headphones pressed tight, rolling around in my bed and dreaming of places other than Lanister, my dander-thick house, the great muddy sweep of the ugly old town.

  “Hey, what did you mean earlier?” Alex asks, and somehow it’s come to this, his hand dancing along the lace edge of my bra, plucking at the tiny pink bow (if I’d anticipated this, I wouldn’t have worn my milk-fed, tenderfoot, junior-miss white).

  “Let’s not talk,” I say, my back arching, body wriggling to get more room, the two of us entwined on one of the Zipperz settees, the rain just starting and no one but us back there. “I’m tired of talking.”

  This is what you do, my mom told me once, wondering about the men, few and briefly, who’d flickered through my life, to avoid everything else.

  What did you mean, Mom? I want to ask, but she’s a sack of ashes now, the saddest and sweetest, and she never was any kind of expert on men, the woman who tangled with my dad for a dozen years, though she saved me from much worse than this.

  (When your mom is gone, the thing no one ever tells you is that the little compass needle inside keeps spinning around and around, never finding north.)

  “When you were talking about Diane Fleming,” Alex says, a long finger under my bra clasp. “A bad person how?”