by Megan Abbott
Later, I’d remember the way she summoned me over, like she’d known I’d been following her all along.
“Kit,” she said, her fingertips light on my arm, “look.”
The flyer, stern-looking with a vaguely Germanic font, announced the application deadline for the DR. LENA SEVERIN STEM SCHOLARSHIP FOR WOMEN IN SCIENCES.
“The winner gets a full ride to State,” she said. “Tuition plus room and board. A stipend too.”
“Severin,” I said. “I saw a Dr. Severin at STEM camp over the summer.”
“It’s the same Lena Severin.” She said the name as though she liked how it felt in her mouth, and there was something about the way she pressed her fingers against the poster, like it was a piece of fine-spun silk. “I saw her talk once at the science museum. It meant a lot to me.”
“Me too,” I said, only realizing it now, after Diane said it. There had been something so exhilarating about it, the first woman scientist I’d ever seen and still the smartest.
It was just a few months ago, at the summer science program Ms. Steen had talked me into, even though it was embarrassing having to show my mom’s paycheck stubs to get in free. Six weeks of me racing between the Golden Fry and the lab at City Tech, injecting samples into the gas chromatograph while smelling hotly of chicken grease.
Most of the time, we were just doing grunt work—counting, washing and spinning cells, injecting those samples—but sometimes we had lectures from visiting big-time researchers who explained how they were going to change the world through polymers or a nanotech moisturizer that would speed the healing of diabetic skin wounds.
One was a biochemist, an MD/PhD who wore the highest heels I’d ever seen in real life, shaped like black cones. Her name was Dr. Severin, and with a name like that, you could never be a soft wisp of a girl. No, you were destined to be this.
At first, all I could do was stare at the pictures projected behind her, which were brain scans but looked like something you might see in astronomy or your most deeply felt, late-into-the-night dreams. But then Dr. Severin started talking about the female brain before, during, and after menstruation, which made at least one boy burst into nervous laughter.
I was the only girl in our school’s group of seven STEM scholars, and the boys seemed glad the room was so dark because Dr. Severin’s talk, as scientific as luteal phase and increased amygdala response sounded, seemed to speak to them of all the blood-horrors of being female. I don’t know how many of them had ventured into girl bodies or how deeply, but they had the look of small boys expecting to find teeth between every woman’s legs.
“And isn’t it interesting—significant, even,” Dr. Severin said, looking at the squirmiest guy, the red-faced, white-lipped one down front, “that menstruation is a source of so much horror in our culture?”
The boy nodded grimly, as if conceding something.
“After all,” she added, “to quote Deuteronomy, The blood is the life.”
Which is a line I remembered from Dracula movies.
I loved hearing her, not just because she was a woman scientist and young with a skunk streak in her dark hair and earrings that were little silver scythes, but because she talked with such fervor about her mission: to unravel the enigma—“and plague, really”—of PMS and something called PMDD, which was even worse. In the old days, if you had it bad, they used to just cut out your ovaries to “cure” you. “Snip-snip-snip,” she said, making a little scissoring motion with her hand.
“But how far are we, really, from that?” she asked. “There are still those who deny that these conditions exist. Medical students are rarely trained in diagnosing or treating them. When women come for help, they’re frequently dismissed with a roll of the eyes. Worst of all, research is scant and, frankly, sad. I aim to change that, to stake a claim for the health of women caught in these unbearable snares, prisoners of their own bodies.”
Up on the screen, the last scan hovered, ghostlike. The brain of a woman with severe PMDD. I couldn’t stop staring at its shape, like a strange mushroom you’d find in the woods. All its shadows and hollows—you could almost see a face in it, eyes like caves and a mouth open like a scream.
“So think about that when you decide your own path in the sciences. Think about where you want to go, what dark terrain you want to uncover. The mind, the body, the complicated junction between the two—it’s dangerous stuff. It’s thrilling stuff. What you do will matter.”
When she finished, slapping her laptop shut, a cluster of Severinites, graduate students in versions of her oversize glasses and dustless black attire, followed her from the lecture hall, their dark bodies moving like a snake’s winding tail.
For days after, I imagined myself as one of those chic Severinites, trailing her, joining in her grand mission. By the end of the summer, I’d decided to change my senior-year schedule like Ms. Castro had wanted me to, enrolling in AP Chem instead of accounting, physics instead of communications.
“She was my favorite,” I said to Diane now. “Her whole lecture was about periods.”
“Yes,” Diane said, then, lowering her voice, she said with a sneaky look, “All that blood talk.”
“The blood is the life,” I said, grinning. “The blood is the life.”
Diane smiled widely, the first time I’d ever seen it. A dazzling, even-toothed smile with something wicked in it.
“The boys all looked like they were going to throw up,” she said, covering her mouth, hiding that smile.
From the counseling desk, Mrs. Kreuzer shot us a snippy look, but Diane didn’t see it, her eyes back on the flyer.
“It’s for girls. Just for girls,” she said, palm flat on the glossy paper. “I’m going to apply. You should apply too.”
“But you have to be in the top two percent of your class in science,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s right.”
I can’t pretend I didn’t feel a rush of something come upon me then. Could I? I thought. Because if Diane Fleming thought I could…
“Maybe I’ll apply,” I said, surprising myself.
Diane nodded, as if to say of course I would, and turned back to the flyer, her lips faintly moving as she read the requirements again, committing them to memory.
That night, I ran the numbers on my GPA. I’d have to get perfect grades in my three science courses the first and second quarters. It didn’t seem possible. Except maybe it was.
Before Diane, I mostly just focused on the math of it. I was always good at that, balancing my mom’s checkbook and working the register at the Golden Fry. I guessed I’d be a CPA, maybe, or work at a bank. But lately I’d started to feel like there was more there, hovering. Maybe it was the Severin application. It gave everything we were doing a center, a unifying force. It wasn’t about the grades, but what the grades could get you. Where they could get you. Places no one in Lanister, or at least my corner of it, had ever been.
I asked Ms. Castro at the counseling office about it.
“This is smart, Kit. I’ve been telling you, you can’t apply only to City Tech,” Ms. Castro said, reading glasses low on her sloping nose. “You have to apply to State. Your grades are competitive. Your test scores are strong.”
But in my quieter moments, standing over the Henny Penny fryer at work, my skin feeling tight and crisp as the staggered chickens’, roiling, all I could think of was the students I’d seen at STEM camp. The way they spoke about DNA nanotechnology and super-resolution microscopy, the paper-thin laptops and tablets they carried, and the group of Severinites trailing their chic idol through the sleek auditorium.
“You should really do it, Kit,” Diane whispered to me in AP Chem the next day. “Who in here’s smarter than you?”
You mean other than you? I thought. But there was a stirring in me, a flutter of sparrows in my chest.
NOW
The next morning, I leave my apartment so early, the parking-lot lights are still on.
My heart bucking and boundi
ng in my chest, I tell myself it’s just nerves about the PMDD slots, but I know it’s about Diane Fleming.
Twelve years later, and the thought of her still feels like a living thing in my head. Something humped, pointy-eared, its claws out. Like the thing I used to dream about when I was a kid. That’s your shadow, my mom told me once. You need it more than you think.
The walk helps me shake it off. The wind-whisked highway has a kind of somber beauty at that hour, the concrete streaked with oddities, forlorn trash, a forty of Olde English, the plastic bags wrapped tight around light posts or soaring like doves. On Sundays, there is always at least one woman’s shoe, a stiletto like a vinyl boomerang or a sad kitten heel, crushed flat.
At the lab, I feel better. I always do.
I label bottles. Clean my pH meter. The simplest of tasks, just to get my brain firing, to give me peace. I move as much as I can before drifting to the cell-culture room, where I will soon be hunkered down for hours at the fume hood, my back curled to a clamshell.
There is something beautiful in it. Like when I was little, when my parents were still raising our roof semiregularly, and I’d sit in my room and alphabetize all my books or align my pencils by length in their case. The Beanie Babies my mom always bought me from Rite Aid, their soft necks arched. The pair of bunnies, all ears at the same height, pink nubbins pointing straight.
If everything is ordered, maybe something momentous will happen. Like the relationship, however mysterious to others, between the molecular formula you’d write on the page—C17H19ClF3NO, abstract, so much hieroglyphics—and the wild thing happening in front of your eyes, between your hands.
Nothing else could promise both things, could it? To be so ordered and so out of control.
An hour later, the parade begins. First, Juwon, with his Stanley thermos and shrieking headphones, or Zell, with his pair of tightly wrapped frozen burritos and his TV recaps, or one of the techs, coffee in one hand and slinging on his gray lab coat with the other, his cell phone tucked under his chin. And the fluorescents inevitably sizzle to life (along with them, the usual jokes come: “Why don’t you ever turn on all the overheads, Kit? Were you napping? Developing film? Self-pleasuring?”). The fume hoods hum loud, the storage cabinets bang open and shut. Then comes the vague buzzing of nervous coughs, jaw clicks, mild curses, and the tight jarring energy of personality and bravado starts.
By nine, the place is alive with nerves. Will we find out the PMDD slots today? Will we meet the new lab team member today?
The second question is answered swiftly.
“She’s here,” comes Zell’s whisper. Men can hiss at least as well as women. “Diane Fleming. She’s down by Severin’s office.”
I don’t say anything, which is easy in the lab. Often, we don’t reply to questions, don’t even nod hello.
“She’s just like I remembered,” Zell adds, as if his elevator-riding experience with her were deeply significant. There’s something in his expression. That slack, stubbled, colorless lab-rat face looks newly—maybe for the first time ever—filled with feeling, heat.
“I look forward to meeting her,” I say, “after hearing so much.”
I’m not sure why I don’t say I know Diane. It’s a conversation I’m afraid to start because something in me isn’t sure I’d know how to stop.
She told me, once, the worst thing anyone’s ever told me.
If you knew what she did, you would go running for the door.
Other than my mom, I’ve never talked to anyone about Diane. And I couldn’t tell my mom everything, not even at the end.
I walk down the hall toward Severin’s office, all the flyers and posters and leaflets ruffling as the air conditioner shudders on once more.
The dropped ceilings, the colored signs (BROWN-BAG LUNCH FRI AT 1!), the gust of ammonia, latex. The half-muffled laughter of awkward young men at their lockers.
In an instant, I know time, its passage, is meaningless, and when I turn the corner, I’ll be back in high school, another fluorescent-banded labyrinth, or back in my tiny Lanister bedroom with its shag carpet and the low-tide sink of my twin bed, and it’ll be Diane across from me, her great sweep of hair, the pearls of her teeth, and when she opens her mouth—
“So, just take these and fill them out when you can,” someone is saying, probably Ilene, the lab administrator. “Happy to have you here.”
I’m so close. I’m twenty feet away.
“Diane,” I say.
It’s like those moments when you catch yourself in a store window or a pair of smeary elevator doors without knowing it’s you. Or you see a picture of yourself you don’t recognize, an angle you’d never catch in life.
You know something’s wrong, but you can’t name it, place it. When I was a kid, my mom told me that Mr. Mott, the retired cop who lived down the street, died after slipping in the shower. A year later, I served Mr. Mott at the Golden Fry. It turned out it was Mr. Mertz, the retired insurance agent, who’d died. But I stood there and handed Mr. Mott his chicken on a stick and it felt like I was talking to a dead man, or else a man who could never die.
When she turns, it’s like that. It’s like seeing a ghost, or worse.
But if she’s a ghost, she’s changed. Her body is so thin, a whittled twig, collarbones poking through her pale blouse.
But it’s the hair that confuses me. Gone are those fairy-princess locks I knew so well. Shorn nearly to her scalp, her pale-gold hair is not half an inch long. It’s Mia Farrow–in–Rosemary’s Baby hair, except it gives her not a pixie look but something more striking and grand. Under the hard fluorescents, she’s like a saint mortified. And that blue look we all have—from vampiric lab life—is even bluer, conjuring a tubercular beauty. A sunken glamour.
The severe hair makes all her features jut and tremble. Cheekbones and jaw both knife sharp, and you can see her skull; you can see everything, maybe even her wormy black brain.
Eyes like bruises now, as she turns fully, looking straight at me.
“It’s you,” she says. “Oh, Kit.”
As she walks toward me, all the Lanister High tall-girl awkwardness, the darting eyes and earnestness—earnestness that made you want to cry for her—that’s all gone.
There are diamonds in her ears. Her shoes are finely made, uncreased. No wriggly vein at her temple asserts itself. The pen in her hand is silver, expensive, impossibly thin. Like a tiny, precise wand.
She is the golden girl she was always destined to be.
Except this: I can look in her face and know her for who she is, what she is. A devil, a goblin damn’d.
“It’s you,” she says again, but her eyes show no surprise, which means she’s seen me already or prepared herself to. And practiced her response. Adjusted her face.
“Diane,” I said. “After all this time.”
“I always knew you’d be a success,” she says, her voice jagging ever so slightly. “The smartest person I ever knew.”
She is so close, so close, it’s unbearable.
“Took the words out of my mouth,” I say.
There’s a swinging of doors and the swirl of Dr. Severin’s perfume—mossy and sweet today—and, after a flurry of introductions, Severin pivoting her new hire from postdoc to postdoc: Zell, Maxim, Dr. Irwin’s stubbled disciples, all their boy faces rubbery and grinning, Diane is gone again.
We’re short on lab coats so Diane is wearing hers from Freudlinger’s, logo-embroidered, flame-resistant, expensive. It’s wine-colored, and excessive.
We’re watching her as she stands at the end of the hall speaking to Dr. Severin, the two of them so tall, such high shoes and narrow legs. They’re like gazelles, I think. It reminds me of something, but I can’t hold on to it.
“That coat, Jesus,” Zell says, transfixed.
“Freudlinger’s a showboat,” notes Juwon, chin resting on his thermos as he watches her. “He’s not just doing research, he’s staging Sweeney Todd.”
Alex walks up beside us. I
try to catch his eye, but he’s looking at Diane.
“The blonde in blood red,” he says approvingly.
I look away, trying not to flinch.
“She’s in the culture room now,” Maxim whispers to me. “She didn’t say a word about our shoddy incubators. I can’t imagine how it looks compared to Freudlinger’s operation. He’s got a three-D suspension array system. Real-time PCR detection systems.”
“So why did she leave?” I say, my whisper more like a hiss. “Tantalized by our low stipends and battered spectrometers?”
“She wants to work with Severin,” he says, turning away a shade too quickly. “That’s why we’re all here, right?”
Of course he’s right. It’s what Diane and I always wanted, back in high school, and now.
Within the hour, I’m back at work in G-21, and next to me is Diane.
We stand a half a dozen feet apart at our respective fume hoods for hours, the exhaust pumping noisily, churning. We stand and we work. We concentrate.
At first, I can’t help feeling like we are being observed, as if our history, our shared secrets, hover between us visibly, like a series of stretching strings. But it’s really Diane they’re looking at. That scarlet coat, the fume-hood illuminator making her glow.
Across the room, Zell, with his beady intensity, grips his flask and stares. Juwon occasionally peeks, head tilted in analytical wonder: What makes her so special and how does it affect me? And Maxim, the slickest of the lot, or at least the most accustomed to new hires, offers to “orient” her, but she says she doesn’t need any orienting, but thank you. Zell brings her coffee, but she doesn’t drink coffee. Maxim carries over a cup of tea, but she doesn’t drink that either. Nor the Red Bull that Zell offers next, nor even the water from the glugging watercooler.
