“Grace?”
I look up. “Yes?”
“I was just asking if you have heard anything about your application to Yale.”
Her words blaze through the fog in my head and the image of the e-mail that I flagged but never bothered to read comes to mind. I never told her I applied early to only one school. I stopped caring or remembering at some point. I shake my head no.
She pats my knee again. “Well, I’m sure they’ll be contacting you shortly. A girl with your potential. They would be fools not to accept you.”
I force myself to say the right things instead of letting my mind go down the rabbit hole of emotion. “Thank you for taking the time to write that recommendation. I know how busy you are.”
“Grace, it was the very least I could have done.”
From the corner of my eyes, I see a slight bulging of the floor. I lower my hands to my thighs and pinch the flesh as hard as I can. Keep it together. Small black spiders edge into my vision.
“. . . I want to be frank with you about your progress here at the lab . . .”
I feel them crawling over my ankles and knees. I stand up.
“Grace, are you okay?”
I look around the room. The spiders are gone.
“Grace.”
I feel a tap on my shoulder.
I turn around. “Dr. Mendelson—sorry, I just got dizzy for a second.” I sit back down in my chair.
“I’m worried about you, Grace. You seem anxious lately. Are you faring all right in that big house on your own?”
“Yes, I’m fine. I have midterms, so I’ve been hitting those books,” I say, hoping to sound like a normal high schooler.
Dr. Mendelson stands up and walks quickly behind her desk, but she doesn’t sit. She shifts her weight back and forth from the balls to the heels of her feet as she studies me, her eyes a CAT scan moving up and down.
I wait quietly until she finally stops rocking.
“You are not alone, Grace. I know it can feel that way when you are under all the stress of grief, but we are here for you just like the way your father championed for so many of us at Genentium.”
I press my lips together as a spike of anger slides between my ribs. I am not in mourning. Dr. Mendelson sees my expression and clears her throat.
“I called you in here to talk about your January report about chromosome twenty-two, Grace. Did that come directly from you and not something you heard from another scientist, perhaps? Did you ever inadvertently take some paperwork home or show it to anyone else? Dr. Diaz, your supervising scientist, told me that you had asked her to look further at the data.”
I run both my hands over my face. My mind slowly computes her questions. Is she wondering if I somehow pilfered data from another scientist? What is she asking me?
“Grace . . .”
I lean forward. “I would never take data out of this lab, Doctor. Nor did I work with any other scientist in this lab on work that was specifically assigned to me. I know the rules. I submitted the report based on my own findings.”
“Then Grace, tell me why you asked Dr. Diaz to take a closer look at chromosome twenty-two and in particular the absences.”
I pause before I try to explain, glancing quickly at the floor, which remains flat and shiny as polished wood. I look up and find Dr. Mendelson waiting for my answer.
My knowledge of genetics and science is absolutely zero compared to Dr. Mendelson or Dr. Diaz, but I do know numbers. Have always known numbers.
“When I was inputting the data . . . I started to see . . . the results didn’t make sense. I began to rearrange the figures in my head and—” I pause. There is no way that I can explain how I see numbers floating in space, arranging themselves in the air. Twisting and turning like leaves in the wind until they string together like Christmas tree lights, twinkling and shining so bright that the darkness of the hole, the omission, is too dark to ignore. This is not something anyone would believe, so I keep it simple. “I saw an omission. It didn’t make sense.”
Dr. Mendelson nods, encouraging me to continue.
“I thought I had inputted some data incorrectly, and as I was trying to go back and fix the errors, I noticed a few other errors. But then when I was double-checking the inputs, I saw that they weren’t errors, but rather omissions. The program wasn’t picking up on it because it was looking for repeats on the chromosomes, so I asked Dr. Diaz to double-check my theory.”
It all sounds so implausible even to my ears. How could an intern see something that a sophisticated program or even the leading scientists couldn’t see?
“Grace.” Dr. Mendelson sits down next to me. “I would like to move you over to my team.”
I sit back in shock.
Dr. Mendelson leans forward. “I take it from your expression that you weren’t quite expecting that.”
I shake my head. “But I haven’t even graduated from high school,” I stammer.
“Yes, I am aware of that,” she says. “I like to believe in omens. And Grace, you are going to bring some good luck to my lab.”
“But you’re a scientist. How can you believe in luck and omens?”
A slight rise in the corner of Dr. Mendelson’s lip is about as close to an expression of happiness as I have ever seen. “Oh Grace, have you not seen how much of our work is nothing but religion? Our place of worship is here. Our scriptures and prophets are the texts and scientists who have come before us. We are just as adamant and at times fanatical as any zealot.”
“No,” I protest. “Science is proven. We have results that we check over and over again. We see the way people can change when we develop drugs to help combat the illness. Fevers go down after taking aspirin. These are facts.”
“And what of the
