Lessons in Chemistry(6)
He opened the door a little wider, stepping inside. “I didn’t ask you to do that,” he said, his voice edgy with irritation. “I told you it was all set.”
“I know,” she said. “But I wanted to give it one last look.” The one-last-look approach wasn’t something Elizabeth liked to do—it was something she knew she had to do to maintain her position on Meyers’s all-male research team. Not that she really cared about his research: his was safe stuff, not at all groundbreaking. Despite a notable lack of creativity paired with an alarming absence of new discoveries, Meyers was considered one of the top DNA researchers in the United States.
Elizabeth didn’t like Meyers; no one did. Except, possibly, UCLA, who loved him because the man published more papers than anyone in the field. Meyers’s secret? He didn’t write the papers—his graduate students did. But he always took full credit for every word, sometimes only changing the title and a few phrases here and there before passing it off as an entirely different paper, which he could do because who reads a scientific paper all the way through? No one. Thus his papers grew in number, and with them, his reputation. That’s how Meyers became a top DNA researcher: quantity.
Besides his talent for superfluous papers, Meyers was also famous for being a lecher. There weren’t many women in the science departments at UCLA, but the few there were—mostly secretaries—became the focus of his unwanted attention. They usually left after six months, their confidence shaken, their eyes swollen, citing personal reasons. But Elizabeth did not leave—she couldn’t, she needed the master’s. So she endured the day-to-day degradations—the touches, the lewd comments, the rank suggestions—while making it clear she had no interest. Until the day he called her into his office, ostensibly to talk about her admittance to his doctoral program, but instead shoving his hand up her skirt. Furious, she forcibly removed it, then threatened to report him.
“To whom?” he laughed. Then he admonished her for being “no fun” and swatted her bottom, demanding that she go fetch his coat from his office closet, knowing that when she opened the door she would find it lined with pictures of topless women, a few splayed, expressionless, on their hands and knees, a man’s shoe resting triumphantly on their backs.
* * *
—
“It’s here,” she said to Dr. Meyers. “Step ninety-one on page two thirty-two. The temperature. I’m fairly certain it’s too high, which means the enzyme will be rendered inactive, skewing the results.”
Dr. Meyers watched her from the door. “Did you show this to anyone else?”
“No,” she said. “I just noticed it.”
“So, you haven’t talked with Phillip.” Phillip was Meyers’s top research assistant.
“No,” she said. “He just left. I’m sure I could still catch him—”
“No need,” he interrupted. “Is anyone else here?”
“Not that I know of.”
“The protocol is right,” he said sharply. “You’re not the expert. Stop questioning my authority. And don’t mention this to anyone else. Do you understand?”
“I was only trying to help, Dr. Meyers.”
He looked at her, as if weighing the veracity of her offer. “And I need your help,” he said. And then he turned back toward the door and locked it.
* * *
—
His first blow was an open-handed slap that spun her head to the left like a well-hit tetherball. She gasped in shock, then managed to right herself, her mouth bleeding, her eyes wide with disbelief. He grimaced as if unsatisfied with his results, then hit her again, this time knocking her off the stool. Meyers was a big man—nearly 250 pounds—his strength a product of density, not fitness. He bent down to where she lay on the floor and, grabbing her by the hips, hoisted her up like a crane lifting a sloppy load of lumber, plunking her back down on the stool like a rag doll. Then he flipped her over, and kicking the stool away, slammed her face and chest against the stainless-steel counter. “Hold still, cunt,” he demanded as she struggled, his fat fingers clawing beneath her skirt.
Elizabeth gasped, the taste of metal filling her mouth as he mauled her, one hand pulling her skirt up past her waist, the other twisting the skin of her inner thighs. With her face flat against the table, she could barely breathe, let alone scream. She kicked back furiously like an animal caught in a trap, but her refusal to concede only infuriated him more.
“Don’t fight me,” he warned, as sweat dripped from his stomach onto the backs of her thighs. But as he moved, her arm regained freedom. “Hold still,” he demanded, enraged, as she twisted back and forth, gasping in shock, his bulbous torso flattening her body like a pancake. In a final effort to remind her who was in charge he gripped her hair and yanked. Then he shoved himself inside her like a sloppy drunk, moaning with satisfaction until it was cut short by a shriek of pain.
“Fuck!” Meyers yelled, pulling his weight from her. “Jesus, fuck! What was that?” He shoved her away, confused by a blaze of misery springing from the right side of his body. He looked down at his blubbery waist, trying to make sense of the pain, but all he saw was a small pink eraser sticking out from his right iliac region. It was encircled by a narrow moat of blood.