by Megan Abbott
Almost like she was trying too hard.
It was Senior Achievement Night, and I’d already stepped onto the stage four times—for chem honors, for calculus, for National Honor Society, for the yearbook.
Each time I set my jelly sandals—the same ones my mom threatened to throw into the bushes after my wayward night with Lou and Jimmy and all the beers—onto the shiny wood lip of the stage, I felt sure it would be the end. I can’t explain it. I felt sure that it would be the end of me. Some catastrophe unguessed, some pig-blood prank gone to red mayhem. But it just kept going.
“Class salutatorian,” cheered Principal Oaks, and that was a special one indeed. There was so much clapping I could barely hear my mom’s whistling cheer.
Grave and striking in a long lace dress and pearls against her neck, Diane followed me onto the stage as class valedictorian. She’d already been up there for six, seven, eight other honors, each time returning to a seat beside her grandfather, looking frail in a checked blazer that hung on him, his shirt pressed like for church.
By the time she took the certificate in her long hands, the audience was on its feet. All the clappers seemed to feel this was the climax of a gripping and moving story in which they had played some part.
Settling back in the worn velveteen seat, I watched. Her tasteful pumps, her empty eyes, the shine of her hair, the way she walked, like something unreal and untouchable. Even my mom, fingers looped in mine, seemed to have a choke in her throat somewhere for Diane.
Because—and this was the first time I understood this—everyone always likes the best, wants the most, admires deeply, the girl who’s just out of reach. The girl no one can touch, really. We don’t know why we’re drawn, but it’s unstoppable.
I could see it in their faces: This lovely young girl, so modest and sweet, arrived newly to our town just nine months ago and look what she has done, and we are somehow a part of it. We’ve given her this. Ah, our special girl.
“Congratulations, young lady.” It was Diane’s grandfather, frailer still up close, that blazer of paper-soft linen flapping off his frame. “Diane speaks very highly of you.”
He bent slightly at the waist to shake my hand, like an old-time gentleman.
“We’re lab partners,” I said, feeling myself sweating under my dress. Wishing my mom would get back from the ladies’ room. “And we both run cross-country.”
A flash of recognition in his watery blue eyes; he said he’d seen me running before, out by the highway.
“And just what are you running from, young miss?” he said, winking.
Suddenly, I was laughing, even though I wasn’t sure why exactly.
“And do you know where you’ll go to college?” he asked. “You must have your pick.”
It was all so normal, and I just started talking about how it’d probably be City Tech right here in Lanister, but they had a Podunk chemistry lab with no gas chromatograph and no spectrophotometer.
“Well,” he said, “I bet your mama would like to keep you close.”
“Maybe that’s what I’m running from,” I said, laughing nervously at my own dumb joke.
But Mr. Fleming matched me full-throatedly, as if I were very charming.
And then, before I could stop myself, I kept going, talking about how Diane and I were both waiting to hear about the Severin scholarship, and that would mean I could go to State, and they had a great cross-country team there too.
“Diane’s better than me, though,” I added.
As if on cue, over his shoulder, I saw Diane approaching us slowly, cautiously.
“At running or science?” he asked, reaching his arm out for Diane.
My eyes on Diane, I lost my words in an instant.
“Two marathoners, either way,” he decided, smiling. Diane’s eyes on me.
“Well,” I said, backing away. “I gotta go.” This, I thought to myself, I cannot do. To stand here with Diane and the father of the father she killed. This I cannot do.
“And you, Diane?” he said, turning to his granddaughter with a grin. “What are you running from?”
Diane looked at me, then looked away.
At the reception, Principal Oaks, who’d never said a word to me in four years, pinched my cheeks like you might a prize pig, and Ms. Steen pulled me into a freesia-scented embrace, and Jed Malinkowski, the bushy-haired yearbook editor I kissed once at a ninth-grade party, our foreheads banging, making me see stars, whispered in my ear: A genius with dimples like cut glass. And I felt like a star, a special person for the first time. Back then I knew so little.
“Mrs. Owens,” Ms. Castro said, “watching Kit bloom this year has been a great joy. We always knew she had it in her.”
My mom nodded, smiled, unable to speak, brushing the bangs from my face with trembling fingers.
“And I never said this,” Ms. Castro adds, leaning close to my mom, voice low, “but I hope she gets the Severin.”
After, we sat in the car for a long time, both of us breathing hard, ragged.
“I didn’t really know until tonight,” my mom said finally.
“What?”
“How it was. Is. How you are. What you can do.”
“Mom,” I said, hand out, because I didn’t want her to cry.
“Listen to me, honey.” But she wasn’t looking at me and her jaw was set, locked. “You listen to what I’m going to say now.”
“Mom.”
“You must do for you, okay? That’s what matters here. You must do everything you need to for you.”
I knew then that even though she couldn’t know what Diane had done, she knew what it all meant, Ms. Castro buzzing in her ear all night.
I didn’t say anything. She turned to me, her face dark in the dark car.
“Do you promise me?”
“Okay, Mom.”
She made me say it again, and then one more time.
“You’re going to be fighting your whole life,” she said. “You have to take the chances you’ve got.”
And we were both crying by then, her hands damp on the steering wheel, yet both of us stronger than we had ever been before. Or would be again.
NOW
It’s a relief to be away from Diane, to be in a room of men, a lab stuffed with them, and everything so bare and simple and plain, including the openly jealous glares Irwin’s postdocs are giving me: She’s one of the chosen ones, the one on the grant five times the size of ours.
I’m standing at my bench, earbuds in, looking at my cell cultures through the microscope. Behind me, Zell and Maxim are talking. They haven’t stopped. They no longer care about work now that the competition has ended, now that they have lost, so why not talk?
“So did you see him on Saturday?” Zell asks Maxim. “Don’t you usually come in?”
“Not this weekend,” he says. “Family wedding.”
“So it was just Kit and Shaffer here,” Zell says.
I look up. “And Diane,” I say. “Don’t forget Diane.”
Zell nods, lifting his eyebrows. “I never even knew Shaffer had a girlfriend,” he says, eyes still on me.
“Fiancée,” Maxim corrects. “Knowing Shaffer, she’s some big shot’s daughter.”
I expect it from Zell, but this is new for Maxim. Or is it? I wonder. Now that the team is in place, the mask comes off, and the gloves.
We’re a nest of vipers.
I reach down and turn up the music louder, my fingers pressing my earbuds hard into my ears. So hard I can’t hear anything but my own neurons firing, like static on an old radio.
There is no hiding in the ladies’ room today. When I walk out of the stall, Eleanor is at the sink, touching her face, like she doesn’t quite understand what’s happened to it. That look of fear, panic. It’s as if she’s never felt it before.
“Hi.”
“Hey,” I reply. “I didn’t know you were still here.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Eleanor says. “Not until I find Alex.”
&nb
sp; There’s a new firmness about her now. And a chilliness.
“Do you have family here? Someone to…help?”
“They’re back east. It’s just me and Alex.” She looks at me. “Didn’t he ever mention me?”
I turn the water on, glance away from her. Shake my hands dry. “We don’t really do that here,” I say. “Talk about our home lives.”
She nods. “Mano a mano. With an emphasis on man.”
I pause and then can’t stop myself. “Did he talk about us?”
She looks at me distractedly, both of us moving to the door. “A little. Just little things.”
“Well, there’s not much to—”
“He said you were Dr. Severin’s favorite.”
I stop. “He did?”
She nods again. “And he told me this story about how you won a car once. Some kind of contest for who could keep their hand on it the longest. You made it something like three days.”
“Fifty-six hours,” I say. I’d forgotten I’d shared that story with him.
“He told me that said everything about you he needed to know.”
I swing open the door, trying not to look her. A hard worker, a good little worker bee.
“Well,” I say, “last man standing is sometimes a woman.”
She tries for a smile. “My lab was the same way. Mano a mano, like I said.”
As we step into the hallway, I try to recover. “You’re at a lab?”
“Not right now. I’m on fellowship.”
“Really?” I say. So much for gallery assistant, jewelry designer, trust-fundee, whatever I’d imagined. “I mean, studying what?”
But Eleanor is distracted, looking up, her eyes catching on one of the mounted cameras. Staring into it. This is something some people do when they visit the lab, so I’ve gotten used to it. It has to do with all the cameras, the age-specked convex mirrors like bug eyes. The buzzing and sibilance and the slow shimmy-shimmy of centrifuges, the constant hush. All the visitors fear they’re being watched. Because they are.
“Theoretical physics,” she says finally. “Dark energy.”
“Dark energy,” I say. “We don’t really know what that is, right?”
Eleanor nods, eyes still fixed on the camera. “I had a professor once who called it the bone in our throat. But that’s what I like about it. We keep trying and trying, and getting everything wrong.”
“All those eyes on the sky,” I say, my voice small and breathless. Thinking about the cameras and everything that’s been seen and everything that’s hidden.
“There’s so many questions we try to find answers to. We lead studies, we get these grants, like your grant. All these little steps. But it doesn’t really change anything.”
“I don’t think I agree,” I say. “Our grant—”
“But dark energy,” Eleanor continues, finally looking at me, eyes glassy, sleepless, “we have to figure that one out.” When she talks, I can see the pink inside of her mouth, full of health. “Before it swallows us.”
Back in G-21, no one is getting any work done. Diane, now returned, is filling out her paperwork at her bench. If I squint, I can see her pen shaking slightly in her hand. Juwon has been making phone calls in the lounge, even taking one at his own lab bench a few moments ago, his laptop hot and charging.
“He’ll have a new job by midnight,” Zell says to me, playing with his phone, which keeps making small explosions. “I heard him tell his wife he sure as hell doesn’t intend to spend the next two years shooting ferrets full of testosterone to see how long it takes to make their dicks hard.”
I’ve never heard Juwon say anything like that, or even complain once, but now it seems all our masks have fallen, and do I really know any of these guys?
They surely don’t know me.
Maxim returns from his supervision meeting with news.
“They looked at the lobby camera from Saturday,” he says. “They can’t find any footage of him leaving the building.”
Juwon shrugs. “That’s not that strange. I don’t always go through the lobby. Fire exit, loading dock. It’s hard to get inside the lab on the weekends, but it’s not hard to leave.”
This is true. Fire doors are often propped open by smokers. Sometimes, when I’m over in the more lax academic wing, I exit there. Sometimes, following someone else, I don’t bother to swipe my card.
“Well, they’ll have to look at all the cameras,” Maxim says. “But they’re pretty old. I suggested last year that they replace them. Some are still coated in dust from the last renovations.”
“You see that one in the neuro wing that hangs funny?” Zell asks. “I heard someone bent it so they could have sex in the lab.”
I swear, he looks at me as he says it.
“But what do you suppose he’s up to?” Maxim wonders. “What reason does a guy like that have to fly the coop?”
“Sidepiece,” Zell says. “Old story, ain’t it? Weekend sex jag.”
Talking hard-boiled, like a pair of skells, rather than two postdocs whose only crime is likely Zell’s regularly absconding with Erlenmeyer flasks for his home brew.
Zell grins. “I heard the girlfriend—the fiancée—talking to the head of security. That guy with the mustache that always looks wet.”
“Yeah?”
I can feel Diane looking at me now. Watching.
“She went to Alex’s apartment. His mail from Saturday was still stuck in the slot. There were still old grounds in the coffeemaker. Everything’s untouched.”
“Is that supposed to be a sign he’s gone?” Juwon says, rolling his eyes. “Three months here, guy hasn’t cleaned a beaker yet.”
“Well, the fiancée had a lot to say about it, to the guard, to Severin. You could hear her concerns all the way down the hall. Guess Shaffer likes a big mouth. Or lungs.”
“He’s a lung man, yeah.”
“Maybe he’s one of those guys with two lives,” Zell says, practically rubbing his hands. The lab has never been so exciting for him as it is today. “Back in New Haven, my PI got caught banging two underage Russian girls in a parking structure downtown. They found two hundred thousand dollars cash in his trunk. Turned out he’d been selling trade secrets to the Chinese for years. Sneaking antibodies out of the lab at night in Styrofoam containers.”
“Is Serge off today?” Juwon asks, ignoring Zell. “I need to see if my new embryos arrived.”
It’s hard to believe no one’s asked about Serge yet, but he’s a tech and postdocs don’t think of techs until they need their logs, their tail biopsies. Or unless there’s mice falling from the ceiling. I look down at my cells, cloudy and maybe contaminated, and pretend not to hear, but blood is roaring through my brain.
“Maybe he and Alex ran away together,” Zell says.
“He’s at the dentist,” I say quietly as Diane passes, heading for the door.
“You mean Serge wasn’t Alex’s sidepiece?” Zell says, grinning at me. “I wonder who it was, then.”
It seems like he’s going to say more, but at that moment, Diane drops all her papers onto the floor.
“Sorry,” she says as Zell bends over to help her. Maxim does too.
I watch them.
“Zell, if any of your Alex theories are true,” Maxim says, “it’d be a surprise to me. He doesn’t seem half smart enough.”
“Yeah,” Juwon says, grimmer by the minute. “He’s much smarter when he’s not here.”
Afternoon gives over to evening and everyone scatters. I head for the vivarium wing. Through the windows, I spot two of Serge’s techs closing things up for the day. One of them sees me and waves forlornly.
We miss Serge too, he mouths. At least that’s what I think he says. He knows how often I make excuses to be here. To follow Serge on his rounds. To sit in the quiet, enjoy the classical music Serge pipes through the cages.
But I’m not there because I miss him. I’m there because of that red biohazard bag, that unfortunate meeting, my ankles stippled wi
th blood.
I picture him in the padded dentist’s chair, paper bib and rubber mask. The shush-shush of the gas tank, the narcotic haze darkening his dark, dark eyes. Serge, who gently anesthetizes his brood before tail biopsies, or euthanization. I imagine him leaning back into the starry expanse of the nitrous oxide and worrying about his mice, the fleecy legions of them, and even the rats.
It’s only when I’m sliding my access card into the elevator again that I hear the low, husky whistle. And, out of the corner of my eye, see him. The dark, slender figure, an aristocratic vampire, or the Cat, as Alex dubbed him.
“Serge!” I call out, turning fast.
But it’s a trick of the light, my own reflection on the elevator doors. No one’s there.
In the ladies’ room, in the smeary mirror, my eyes are bagged, saggy pillows, my pupils pinned.
I can smell the chloroform again, even though it’s nowhere to be found.
I sit down on the vinyl bench, a throwback to another era when ladies’ rooms were powder rooms, salons, places where women made and remade themselves over atomizer huffs and confidences.
I close my eyes.
When you’re in the sciences, when you know about things like neuronal biochemistry and the complex interplay between, say, hormones and emotion, you might imagine you have a deep understanding of the mind. Explain to me why I feel this way, think this way, dream this way, am this way.
But consider it: Would you really want to know?
When I open my eyes again, Diane is at the sink, just where Eleanor stood a few hours ago.
“I thought it was gone forever,” she murmurs, her fingers to her face at the mirror. Just like Eleanor, I think. Am I dreaming?
“What? Diane, I—”
“Who told you that I worked in Dr. Severin’s lab before?” she asks, as if we’ve been talking a long time. “I need to know who told you that.”
I look at her. “I saw it on your CV.”