The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(7)
Melanie glanced out the window. She wasn’t about to admit to the class that she found cicadas creepy. One time she had a bat get stuck in her hair while she was looking for a rare beetle in a cave in Tanzania, and another time, in Ghana, she accidentally stepped into a nest of western bush vipers. She’d gotten stung by a tarantula hawk wasp in Southeast Asia, which she thought was the most painful thing there was until she got bitten by a bullet ant in Costa Rica—that felt like having a nail gun fired into her elbow followed by a dunk in acid—but none of that really scared her like cicadas did. Oh, cicadas. The clicking sound from their tymbals, the ones with the red eyes, the way they swarmed and fell from trees and littered the sidewalks. And the crunching. Jesus. The crunching. The live ones underfoot, the discarded exoskeletons. Worse, the sheer number of them. Predator satiation was brilliant from an evolutionary perspective: all the cicadas had to do was breed in such numbers that anything that fed on them just got full. The survivors got on with their business. And then, after a few weeks, they died out, and there was just a graveyard of husks, which was also totally creepy. Thank all f*cking everything that she was going to have another decade or so before Washington had its next big swarm of cicadas. She was going to have to plan a vacation. It wasn’t really an option for a biologist who specialized in the use of spider venom for medicinal purposes to admit to being so afraid of cicadas that she couldn’t go outside when they were swarming.
“But we aren’t talking about cicadas,” Melanie said, realizing that she’d drifted off. “We’re talking about spiders. Even though spiders seem to scare the hell out of people, there’s really almost no reason for that. At least not in North America. Australia’s a different matter. Everything in Australia is dangerous, not just the crocodiles.” She got a low chuckle from the class. In Melanie’s book, a low chuckle near the end of a two-hour morning lecture with fewer than three weeks left in the semester was a victory.
She looked at her watch. “Okay, so for Wednesday, pages two twelve to two forty-five. Again, please note that this is a change from the syllabus. And to that we say,” Melanie held her arms up and conducted the class as they said it along with her, “don’t let the bedbugs bite.” She watched the undergraduates shuffle out of the auditorium. Some of them looked a little dazed, and she couldn’t tell if it was because of the early start time of the class or if she’d been droning again. She was a world-class researcher, perhaps one of the best at what she did, but even though she’d been working at it, lecturing was not her strong suit. She’d been trying to make her teaching more dynamic, throwing in jokes like the one about Australia, but there was only so much she could do for a three hundred-level course. Mostly she just hunkered down in her lab and dealt with graduate students, but part of the deal she’d struck with American University was that every second year she’d also teach a lecture class for undergraduates. She hated tearing herself away from her research, but if the price of a full lab, research assistants, and a team of funded graduate students working under her direction was that every two years she had to tell a class of nineteen-and twenty-year-olds that the spiders that stowed along in banana shipments were rarely dangerous, she’d live.
She looked down at the screen of her tablet, which mirrored the pictures on the screen at the front of the room. She had a soft spot for the Heteropoda venatoria, the huntsman spider. Partly it was because she’d had her first huge research breakthrough—the kind that made her what passed for famous in her field and got her this appointment and the subsequent grants and funding that kept the whole thing humming—working with Heteropoda venatoria, but if she was being honest, it was also because the first time she’d encountered a huntsman spider, her first year of college, her professor, in his thick accent, had described the spider as having a “moo-stache.” Melanie liked the fact that there were spiders out there in the world with mustaches. In grad school, she’d dressed as a Heteropoda venatoria for Halloween and it had gone over well with her friends who were also working on their doctorates. Nobody else had gotten the joke, though. Most people thought she was trying to be a tarantula or something and couldn’t figure out the mustache. She’d given up on spider costumes two years ago at a Halloween party, when she’d overheard somebody referring to her as “the black widow.” The joke, if it was a joke, hit home, because the truth was, despite her husband’s job—her ex-husband’s job—she was the one who hadn’t been available to Manny, who had spent so much time in the lab that their marriage foundered.
She shut off the projector, slipped her tablet into her purse, and headed out of the classroom. As she opened the door she decided to stop on the way back to the lab and pick up a salad. Something fresher than the sandwiches she usually got from the vending machines in the basement of her building. You could taste the preservatives with every bite. Actually, Melanie thought, it was probably just as well that the sandwiches were loaded with preservatives, because she wasn’t sure anybody other than her ever ate them. They needed to last awhile in the machine. Even her most dogged graduate students either brought their meals from home or took the extra five minutes to walk across the quad to get something that didn’t have to be purchased with a fistful of quarters. Speaking of dogged graduate students . . . She came to a halt as the door closed behind her.
Three of them were standing outside the classroom, waiting for her.