The young man sat quietly Indian style in the floor of the hallway of the old building. There were others talking and carrying on conversations, friends and strangers alike. College kids need no impetus to carry on small talk. It’s not the same as adult talk. Weather very rarely gets mentioned, as does politics. Music, the latest frat party, the goings on in the student union among the few students who really did live on campus. Anything was fair game among college kids waiting for a crusty college professor to come sauntering in and unlock the door. First days were always like this, and as usual, he was the first one in the hallway. Students begin filing past him to pull up their own piece of the concrete floor, the first ones taking their positions quite far from him. He figured that the least likely place for people to sit would be right by the door to go in and he was right. The hallway became quite crowded before anyone even came close to his position. He still didn’t see anyone he knew. That seemed to be a requisite for conversation these days. He never was much good at chatting it up with strangers. Not since he left his hometown. It was just different in the city. People had different expectations here. Different agendas. There was so much to do, and yet he still found himself in his dorm room alone every weekend. Didn’t seem strange to him, but it did to a lot of others. He didn’t mind though. He had been called lots of different things in his short life. He just kept to himself and let the rest of world sort of roll off of him. Like water off a duck, his dad always said. Like goose shit out of a goose, his buddies rephrased it.
He saw the first familiar face as it peeked over the top of the stair well. The bouncing red hair was the first thing he noticed and couldn’t seem to take his eyes from it. The he got a closer look at her eyes and realized it was someone he knew. He willed her to look at him, more because by now, he was the only one in this dreary hallway that wasn’t talking with someone else. That and the fact that there was some unused concrete almost directly across from him. He needed some conversation, and he knew her, so what the hell. He tried to bend his mind around hers to make him see him, and he felt like he could move mountains when that look passed across her face, spreading downward from her eyes. He was surprised when her eyes did indeed meet his and she smiled briefly in slight recognition. Heavy emphasis on the word slight, but it was there all the same. The kind where you recognize someone even if you don’t know exactly who they are. He would take whatever he could get.
“Hey,” she said, in the universal language of recognition all over the world.
“Hey,” he said back to her. At least they were speaking the same language. She tossed her books on the floor near the empty spot, crossed her legs and sat down. She was still smiling. He racked his brain for her name, but it just wouldn’t come. The least he could hope for was that she knew his, but reality told him her brain was crunching waves in a similar manner for the same reason. At least they were thinking alike. He was always the optimist.
He opened his mouth so more of that common language could emerge.
“What’s up,” he found himself saying. And immediately regretted it. There were so many things on his mind to talk about.
“Not much…you?” They were talking.
“You got this lab, too, huh?” Man, he was full of this brilliance today. Inwardly, he groaned to himself.
“Yep. Wanted this one. Only meets once a week. This way, we don’t have to come over here twice a week.”
“Noon to three seems like a long time,” he said.
“Shit happens,” she said. “At least we’ll get it over with on Monday.”
“True enough,” he said. He was really slaying ‘em with this banter. He was taken with her eyes, even though the only time he had really seen there were as she was coming up the stairs. He forced himself to look at her eyes. They were staring at some imaginary stain on her backpack, but the instant he looked at them, they locked on his. She began to speak but he didn’t hear anything. What happened in his chest completely caught him off guard. He felt like he was at the top of a ferris wheel and it had stopped moving. It seemed like all the kinetic energy in the world no longer existed and were resting somewhere between his heart and his stomach. The moment faded quickly as he realized he might be staring and with the connection between their eyes broken, so did the world begin to move for him again. That was really weird, he thought. He began to make out her words again.
“So who do you have for the class?”
More brilliance emerged from between his lips.
“Lewis. Who do you have?”
“Waldecott,” she said, as his heart sank a little. Why do I even care, he thought. He couldn’t shake that feeling from only 20 seconds ago. His brain still hadn’t deciphered it yet. But he didn’t have time for that just now. There were still idiot noises coming from the Idiot Alien living somewhere in his body between his vocal cords and his mouth.
“It won’t be so bad,” she said. I’m just a little scared. I never was much good at this stuff in high school.”
“It’ll be OK. There’s so many of us, maybe it won’t be too hard.”
“I hope you’re right,” I managed to spit out, over a tongue the size of a small Eastern state.
Minutes stretched into longer minutes, as they both waited for someone to unlock the door to let us flock in like a bunch of cattle. She fiddled with something inside her backpack as sat and fought the internal battle of awkward silence or sounding like an idiot. Seemingly against his wishes, the latter was winning. He caught a glimpse of some CD’s in a zippered pocket. She noticed his noticing. To his surprise, she spoke first.
“You like Smashing Pumpkins,” He had no earthly idea what she was talking about. All that was going through his mind was images of Gallagher from videos he had watched ages ago with his sledgehammer and various kinds of fruit. He had no idea he had a band.
“Yeah, he’s pretty cool,” he said. She laughed for some reason. He knew he had said something stupid but he had no idea exactly what it was.
Before this moment, he could have sat in this hallway until the class was supposed to end. Now he was begging for someone to come unlock the door and let them in, anything to give him something else to talk about, or at least put an end to this sad excuse for conversation. He felt awkward in a way he never had before, and there was really no reason for it, but it was there all the same.
A single door slammed on the far end of the hallway, and footsteps began their way toward him and toward the door he was in front of. Students begin standing up as the man passed, stretching out and picking up bags and binders. The door was rattled open, and moved in. There were no chairs in the lab area, so they were all expected to stand. This being the first day, maybe he wouldn’t keep them long.
He took a spot and left his bag on the floor by his feet. He turned around and found that the girl from the hallway had found a spot beside him. Her bag was in the floor, too, and she was looking toward the front where the old man was fidgeting around with some papers. He caught her attention over the noise and bustle of all the student still moving in and cast her a goofy grin, but she either missed it or chose to ignore it. He was glad, because he wasn’t sure what her seeing it would have conveyed. The people finally stopped filing in and he could barely hear as the old man began calling names. Name after name was called as smart-alec boys said “yo” and “what’s up” and laughed like they had just heard the funniest joke they had ever heard. Even though he thought he knew the answer, he often wondered if he was as immature as they were. He didn’t feel like it most of the time, but he sure could make some bad decisions at times. His parents were constantly telling him, “You never think before you do something,” and “You’ve got a head so use it.” He never purposely made bad decisions, he just found himself on the back end of a bad decision before he knew it.
The names kept rolling off, but he was listening only with half his brain. He cut his eyes toward her and she was standing there. Somehow a piece of gum had materialized in her mouth and she was chewing. He thought to himself that it was a graceful chewing, more of a caress of the gum with her teeth rather than a rude chomp.
While she was paying attention to the professor still calling out names like Ben Stein on Ferris Bueller, he looked at her more closely. She was close to his height, which was not tall, but more of what he liked to think of as average, even though in reality it was just a tad under the line. Not many things in his life was average, and if he could get by with calling something average, then he was going to do it. Her dark hair fell just about her shoulders and was straight with just that little curl at the end. She was smiling at something else now…not at him, but something happening elsewhere in the lab room. He could see the corner of her mouth turned up just a little more than normal, but it seemed to him that her smile was always there, just under the surface and so easily given. A smattering of light-colored freckles dotted across her nose, although he couldn’t see them very well from here. He remembered them more clearly from the hallway.
The names kept coming, although he noticed that the end of the alphabet was coming. He leaned over to put his elbow on the lab table, growing tired of just standing there. A look around the room and similar postures by most of the others told him he wasn’t the only one. He cut his eyes sideways again to try and see what direction she might be looking so he could look at her again. She had her hands on her hips and one black-and-white sneaker propped up on the other one. Before he realized it, he was staring again. She turned her head in his direction and caught him offguard. He suddenly became amazed with the workings of the sink and how the water spigot was made. Amazing how these stainless steel faucets got all the way over here from Taiwan
What was his deal? What was he scared of? She was just a normal person just like he was. If he wanted to look her way, it’s a free country, right? Why did just looking at her make him feel funny inside? That moment in the hallway was still on his mind. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. He wanted to look her in the eyes again just to see if he would feel that rush again. It was the strangest thing he had ever felt in his life. All at the same time he felt guilty for trying to look at her, but there was something inside him that told him he could not go on living if he couldn’t find a way to look in her eyes just one more time. His strengthened his resolve, or at least he strengthened what he thought might meet a weak definition of resolve and looked at her again, willing her with his mind to catch his stare again. Seconds passed. Seconds turned in a time lapse, where one seconds turned into two seconds. She seemed to sense she was being looked at, and turned her head to catch his eyes. Here it comes, he thought.
In that moment between conscious thought and the brain’s control over the muscles, he found himself head straight down staring intently at a row of beakers placed neatly toward the back of his own lab table. 100% pure glass. Interesting. Wonder what glass that isn’t pure is like? Good grief what was wrong with him? He couldn’t even bring himself to meet her stare. Now he was beginning to feel goofy, all hunched over reading the fine print on scientific equipment.
The name calling stopped and the professor was mumbling some basic instructions about first one thing, then another. Two lab assistants began handing out papers and he vaguely heard the words, “In todays lab folks…” Oh brother, he thought. This means we’re not getting out early. Great. In here till three. This time he looked at her and she was looking back at him and rolled her eyes. He smiled back at her like she was a headline act at the Comedy Club. He still felt goofy, but she smiled back and he felt his face getting warm. The lab assistants and the ensuing paperwork begin making their way toward them. He took the required amount and passed the stack on down the line. He nearly dropped the papers as he saw her smile at the lab assistant that was making his way down her line. What? She can’t do that! That smile was supposed to be mine.
His brain stopped all logical reasoning as he slammed on the cognitive brakes. Reality began to set in. He barely even knew this girl. And what was that small pain he felt somewhere in his throat as he saw her smile at someone else. He began to argue with himself why he felt this way. For some reason, when she was smiling at him, everything seemed right as rain. It felt natural, like the world was spinning in the proper direction. Still, it wasn’t right for him to feel was it? For the first time in a long time, he began to realize there had been a shift in his world. The problem was he had no facts to go on. He was a pretty scientific person by nature, and in his world, there was a logical reason for everything. Had to be, or it was part of a fantasy world where anything could happen. This wasn’t fantasy; his feelings were real. The problem began when he tried to decide what those feelings were.
He realized that he was still looking at her and she seemed to be busy and he wondered what she was doing. “This is a class,” his brain screamed at him. Whatever she’s doing you probably need to be doing, too.”
He finally looked down at the papers in his hand. Inventory. First thing was to find all the appropriate equipment had been laid out for them. His table looked like something from a science fiction movie with all the flasks and beakers spread out. He began to read the names of some of the items on his sheet and realized that he had no idea what some of the parts were at all. Erlenmeyer? Mortar and pestle? What the hell was this and what language was it? He searched through the parts he could recognize and begin to slowly check them off, even checking some of the stuff that he had no idea if such equipment even existed. To him, it looked like some of these names had been invented only minutes ago.
A tap on the shoulder. He turned and it was her. Time stopped and he begged his brain to make him at least sound like he could speak.
“What’s an Erlenmeyer flask,” she said. “How are we supposed to know if we got one if we don’t know what it is.” She sounded exasperated.
“Oh that,” he replied, trying to sound bored. “That’s one of these.” He held one of smaller ones up.
“Says here you should have a couple of each size.” He tried to sound as if he was born with an Erlenmeyer flask in his hand, rather than the truth of the matter being that he had seen those exact words written on the bottom of one of those ugly glass things.
“Wow. Thanks…I guess I do have a couple of those.” Score one for literacy and quick thinking. He wanted there to be some awe in her voice, but the more he thought about it, who would be impressed that he knew what an Erlenmeyer flask was? His high school chemistry teacher? No one cares about that. Not a very marketable skill. Still, he played her comment over again in his head, and tried to pull out every inflection for some trace of her being impressed. He told himself it was there, but he could talk himself into believing just about anything. He decided to ignore it.
The lab continued; he worked himself into mediocrity checking first one piece than another, moving more slowly than he normally would. He would look down and see his paper full of checks to show that he had all this critical pieces the year, but he couldn’t remember filling them out. He was going through the motions, hindered by his own emotions.
People began to finish with the initial inventory and one of the lab assistants took over. He began to speak and gave instructions that were written on one of the sheets that all the students already had. He did make a mental note that the assistant that was doing the talking was not the one that “she” smiled at, so he didn’t have any problems listening to what he was saying.
“Atomic number blah blah this,” he said, and “ten to the negative 8 power mols of this substance.” He was speaking, but Martin wasn’t really listening. He swept his blonde hair out of his eyes, naturally taking stock of how his gel was holding up. Stiff but not too stiff.
“I don’t normally even care about my hair,” he thought to himself. “Why the change now?” He knew the answer and suddenly felt very self conscious. He knew he was carrying a few extra pounds, but never till that moment did he feel like one of those people you see on TV…the ones they have to remove the roof from their house and lift them out with a helicopter. He looked down at his grimy boots and wished that he hadn’t worn them. He had worn them every day now since he had college…they had been with him for a couple of years now, but as he looked down at them, they seemed to be screaming the word “slob.” Even the Wranglers he was wearing today was not the good kind with the plastic tab on the back right pocket. These were the Rustler model straight from the high-class shelf at Wal-Mart. He had just left work and hadn’t bothered changing. Never before had he put much thought into what he wore. If it fit and didn’t smell too bad, it was good enough for him. The washing machines were up 3 flights of stairs in the dormitory where he spent most of his days (and nights) and often neglected his laundry until the last possible minute. He found himself wearing his cleanest dirty shirt more times than not.
He noticed that the lab assistant was through talking and people were moving and milling around him. He thumbed through his lab manual to read the instructions that he had missed and tried to work up enough motivation to get started. He wanted to look at her to she what she was doing, but in his mind, she was mulling over the same negative thoughts that he had been and he felt very dirty and more than a little bit disgusted by himself. For the first time that day, he repressed the desire to even peek at her. He sorted through the instructions and tried to decipher what he was supposed to be doing.
A few minutes passed and he hadn’t done much of anything except try to find out what the word “assay” mean and tried to turn off his inner gigglebox at the word “stopcock” that was being used so many times in the lab manual. He began to separate out the parts he thought he needed from the ones he had no use for. He glanced down at his watch and inwardly sighed as he realized he had 2 more hours left.
He began to work on his own, moving from station to station as everyone was doing, weighing this, squirting this, tweaking that. It was enough to make him feel like a robot.
“Hey, how much reagent did you at,” a voice spoke from behind him, a voice that had a great affect on both his stopcocks. Her voice.
“6 milliliters,” he said. That’s what the instructions said, so that’s what he did…just like a good robot would do.
“Damn it!” she spat. “Why in the hell did I add 12?”
“Well, the other 6 goes in right at the end,” I told her.
“Shit,” she was still spitting. “Shit, shit, shit. Now what am I going to do? And where does it say you add the six at the end. He pointed to the spot in the manual. Hated to be the bearer of bad news, but he pointed just the same. He was such a perfectionist and had such an obsession with telling others the correct way to do things, he hadn’t even realized that she was looking over his shoulder at his manual to the place he was pointing. Her face was only inches from his and suddenly, a chill came over him. He went from being a confident student to a shaking adolescent in 3 seconds flat. He was suddenly uncomfortable with this invasion of his space, but at the same time wildly confused by his body’s response. He swallowed hard to try and shove down a wave of self-consciousness. He wished he had remembered to brush his teeth. He had never brushed his teeth at 1 in the afternoon, but as long as he was wishing…
She was staring intently at the manual, her head still close. She began shaking her head slowly and then put it down on my table. Her hair brushed his cheek on the way down to the cold, hard surface. Another chill rippled up and down his arms.
“Damn it all to hell,” she said, more loudly this time. “Now what do I do. I don’t want to have to start over.”
His brain began to fly, first one place, then another. Come on, he thought. Think of something.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “If your solution is twice what it should be and mine is still normal, you could just cut yours with what I have left of mine.” She sighed aloud. A long, heavy sigh.
“How would that work? Wouldn’t that screw yours up?”
“Not if we were careful, I don’t think.” I told her.
“I hope you know how to do this, cause I don’t have a clue. I screwed up the first time.”
“Well,” he said, as he noticed she was looking into his eyes this time. He stopped for a minute and stared. Her eyes were a deep green with little flecks of brown in them. He had never thought of even trying to describe a pair of eyes as perfect, but these were beautiful. But it was more than that…they were looking through him instead of at him. They were paying attention to him. That was unusual in itself. Ok, sure, he was trying to get her out of a jam, but she was still looking at him.
“If you trust me, I’ll try it,” he said.
“Why not,” she said, with that same smile he had elicited in the hallway. “Let’s try it.”
Never before in his life had Martin wanted something to work out. The bad part was this was his first time in a lab, and he knew close to nothing about these funny-smelling chemicals and the word assay was only funny because it began with the word “ass.”
He begain playing with his own mix. He actually hadn’t added anything to it yet, so with one hand he began adding drops and with the other hand he fingered his lab manual looking ahead for a clue as to what the desired outcome might possibly be. When he found what he was looking for, he close the manual and began swirling it around.
“Hand me your flask,” he asked her. Trying to be polite while at the same time trying not to panic. She responded with a look on her face that made him wilt. A look that said “there is no possible way this could work.” Maybe he was reading way too much into it. He didn’t have time to analyze anything that emotional, at least not yet.
“Hand me your flask,” he asked her. Trying to be polite while at the same time trying not to panic. She responded with a look on her face that made him wilt. A look that said “there is no possible way this could work.” Maybe he was reading way too much into it. He didn’t have time to analyze anything that emotional, at least not yet.
He found a funnel from the back of the table and poured the liquid from his flask into hers. He opened the manual again and began to scan the instructions.
“Ok,” he told her. “now hand me that red stuff in that squeeze bottle from your stash,” he pointed to a spot on the lab sheet that called for the red stuff. She did as he asked and he began to swirl the liquid around, but nothing happened.
“Shouldn’t it be turning blue,” she asked him. “That’s what it says in the last step.”
“It’s supposed to,” he told her. “Swirl it around.” The blue color was not the bright cobalt blue it should have been. Instead it was more of a dull pond-scum green with some red drops mixed in.
“Oh well, you tried,” she said, and seemed to genuinely mean it. He was heartbroken. She was looking into his eyes again and he felt that far-away feeling began creeping up his spine.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he really meant it. But it was her project, not his, that was screwed up.
“Look at it, look at it now,” he whispered loudly to her as he pointed to the flask she had pretty much thrown down back on her table. Some of the pond-scum green was changing into a color that could actually be called blue.
“Holy shit,” she said. “Did it work after all?” For a split second, he was disappointed in her lack of confidence in his abilities. That didn’t last very long. It began to fade very quickly when she hugged him. The chill in his spine spread to his whole body and he almost began to shake. He thought that might be a little awkward, so he put all that energy into smiling like an idiot.
“I can’t believe it worked,” she said.
“I can’t believe you doubted me,” he shot back. More confident now, but that was more of a smart-alec comment that he would have made to pretty much anybody else in the lab, especially another guy. He bit his tongue so hard he thought it would bleed, and wished that remark would crawl back into his gut where it came from. She didn’t seem to have noticed.
“Now what about yours,” she said, as the color in her flask became a brilliant blue the more she swirled it around. They glanced in unison at his own flask. It was evident that there were no miracles about to take place anytime soon.
“Um…I think it will work out.” He had been so determined to make hers work that maybe he had added a bit more to her flask than he had meant to. The wrong coloring didn’t bother him so much as the fact that it was obvious that his flask was about a quart low. The lab assistant’s booming voice came over the miscellaneous noise of the lab.
“Start wrapping things up. We’ll be coming around to check the coloration of your solution as soon as everyone returns to their stations.” He took his position in the front and the other lab ass moved to the back, toward where they were. Not only was he going to have no color, but it appeared that he wouldn’t even have the right amount of fluid. This was not a good start. He might as well not have even tried to read the instructions in the lab manual.
He looked around, first one way, then the other. Everyone was back to where they were supposed to be and there was no time to go all the way to the front to get more solution.
“Another great decision, Martin,” he thought to himself. He continued to look around until his eyes met the sink. The lab ass was getting close, so he put his flask under the spigot of the sink and filled it to the appropriate level with the most scientific fluid of all…pure D water.
“What are you doing,” she said. The look on her face was quite stunning. “That will never work.
“I know that,” he said. At this point and time it didn’t matter, and the lab ass was already to her station, so that conversation was officially over. He overheard the lab ass telling her she had a good coloration, Lynn
“No color I see. Wonder what part of these instructions you missed,” he said.
“I think I added to much mumblecolormumble and didn’t assay the mumblemumbleliquid,” he stammered. It didn’t make much sense to him either.
“You’ll find yourself much more successful if you’ll read all the instructions and make an effort to follow them next time,” he said, as the words dripped from his ugly Roman nose.
“Yes, sir” he replied dutifully. “I didn’t do it right at all,” He smiled all-knowingly and moved on. Martin finally took a breath, one that he didn’t realized he even needed until that very moment.
He looked over at Lynn
“Well, what did he say,” she questioned.
“Aw, nothing. Said I could have done better. That’s ‘bout it.”
“I don’t know what to say…I appreciate you helping me. I had know idea you knew what you were doing,” she said.
“I’ve messed around with some stuff, not much,” he said, as he tried to take himself back in his life to a time when he had done things like this. He hadn’t. Ever.
“Well, I’m glad you had. You saved me today.” More chills. Could you get the flu in hot weather?
“Let’s clean this mess up and get out of here,” he said. She was smiling even bigger at him now. It made his skin crawl, but in no way did he consider this to be a bad thing. She turned back to her table, but he kept looking at her. He breathed out and began to clean his own.
He was almost done 10 minutes later when she appeared in front of him with her backpack over his shoulder.
“Hey, it’s a little early for supper, but we could go hang out in the caf and see if we couldn’t get next week’s lab work out. It looks harder than this one.” She was laughing when she said the last part. He could think of no reason to deny the request, and every reason to say yes. But nothing came out of his mouth so he just nodded.
He followed her of the room and was right behind her down the stairs. He caught up to her side as the left the dark, dank halls of the Science building and squinted against the afternoon sun.
“One lab down, 15 more to go,” he said. He had no idea where that came from, but he kind of liked it. The first intelligible thing he had said to her all day.
“Thank goodness,” she said back to him. Still smiling. The smile that he felt was reserved just for him. Or if it wasn’t, the one that made him a little weak in the knees.
Then began their trek across campus to the cafeteria, although he didn’t feel his feet hitting the ground with each step. He had read about this happening, but he was experiencing something he had never felt before. He still didn’t know exactly what it was, but he was pretty sure it was a good thing. When he thought about the trip across campus, he was usually wishing it was closer. He found himself wishing for the first time in his memory that it was 20 miles away. He made small talk, and she talked back the entire way, with the sun on their back, a lab class behind them, and who knew what ahead of them. To him, though, the future didn’t matter. He had another minute of his life, content to just to walk by her side.
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