Real Life(19)

“That makes absolutely no sense,” Wallace says. He sounds hoarse even to his own ears, his voice a pitchy jangle. Brigit raises her eyebrows and shrugs. But then her expression tightens, closes slightly. She drops her feet from the desk and rolls in the chair to him. Up close, the harsh light of the lab throws a glare across her dark hair, caught up in a messy bun.

Her voice is low when she speaks. “I think someone fucked with your plates, Wally. I’m not saying I saw anyone. Or anything like that. But I wouldn’t be surprised. Because Fay saw you-know-who here late all week, and you know that you-know-who hates working after five sharp.”

“You-know-who being Dana?”

Brigit shushes him loudly, makes a big show of looking around pointedly. “What do you think?”

Dana, who comes from Portland or Seattle or some more minor city out there. Once, in her early days in lab, Wallace saw her running her protein preps through the wrong column. She had used the kits for a DNA purification. He went up to her and said, as casually as he could, “It looks like you’ve got the wrong box there—it’s an easy mistake, they look so similar, I know.”

Dana put her hand flat on top of the blue-and-white box and frowned at him.

“No, I don’t,” she said.

“Oh,” Wallace said. “Well, it just says DNA prep there, on the side, I mean.”

Dana, her eyes hazel and wide like a cat’s, had pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth three times in quick succession, a disapproving sound.

“No, Wallace,” she said, her voice slow, steady. “I’m not retarded. I think I’d know if I were using the wrong kit.”

Wallace stood there, a little shocked by the intensity of the response, but it was her bench, her experiment. She could do what she wanted. So he backed away from her, his face hot.

“Okay, well, if you need anything.”

“I won’t,” she said.

He watched her for the rest of that day. He was in his second year then, she her first; they were young and still finding their way. What did Wallace know? After all, he’d always felt a little uneasy in the lab, a little uncertain. And he thought everyone felt that way. Insecure. Unwilling to ask for help because it meant baring your belly. He had wanted to say something to her about that, that he knew it could be scary to say you didn’t know something, but that people wanted to help, mostly. He had wanted to be a good lab mate, a supportive person. But instead Dana had drawn a thick, dark line between the two of them. He was one way. She was another. She was gifted. He was not.

But at the end of that day, Dana stood staring at her columns, wondering what had gone wrong. She stood there, staring at the printout of the purity readings, which made no sense, of course. The spec reading said that there was no protein at all in the tube. But she couldn’t understand why. Hadn’t she followed the directions? Simone stood at the end of her bench looking at the data with her. She waved Wallace over, and he went shyly. Night had been falling in a smooth dark veil beyond the window. He saw all three of them reflected there in the light of the lab.

“Do you know anything about this, Wallace?” Simone asked.

“About what?”

“Dana’s results. She says that you mixed up the kits.”

Wallace frowned and shook his head. “No. I think Dana was using the wrong one.”

Simone turned the box around and pointed, and Wallace saw there in the neat print that the kit was the protein one. He felt an inky, slippery feeling inside.

“Did you maybe put the DNA purification reagents in the wrong box when you were doing those simultaneous cleanups? Wallace, you have to be careful.”

“I didn’t,” he said.

“Well, these numbers don’t make sense otherwise.”

“And you tried to warn me,” Dana said with a high yet flat tone. She shook her head. “I guess maybe you felt like you’d messed up.”

“You have to pay more attention,” Simone said. “I know you want to be ambitious and get things done, but you have to be careful.”

Wallace swallowed thickly.

“All right,” he said. “All right.”

Dana put her hand on his shoulder and said, “You know. If you need anything.”

Wallace looked at her. He looked at her, and tried to understand what sort of person she was, but all he saw were the flakes of dead skin collecting in the gingery hair that grew between her eyebrows.

Simone had him sort out the reagents again, in front of her. She made him sort them into two neatly divided groups on his bench. And when he was done, she made him do it again, just to make sure, just to make sure.

“She wasted her whole day on it, Wallace. Her whole day. We can’t lose that kind of time because of carelessness.” Simone stood at the end of his bench and watched him sort out the reagents and the columns, their neat white bottles, again and again. He could have done it with his eyes closed. Because he was careful. “This isn’t to punish you. This is to make you better.”

Still, even for Dana, ruining his plates on purpose seems excessive. She is not entirely malicious, just lazy and inattentive to detail.

“How late?” he asks Brigit. “I’ve been here till midnight at least. Every night.”

“Two a.m.,” Brigit says, and Wallace jerks up from her.