“There’s a free machine down the hall, past the C block offices.”
He smiles and nods at me, but doesn’t budge.
I go back to my math. He continues to click his tongue. There is such a slurping quality to the noise, I swear if I look up right at this moment I will find him making saliva bubbles with his mouth. I sneak a peek. He has turned his back to me.
“Do you mind?” I say.
He turns around. “What?”
I try to find his badge, which would tell me his name, but of course, he is too cool for requirements. “Could you stop making that noise?”
“What noise?’
“That clicking.” I wave at my mouth and refrain from using an adjective to elaborate my disgust.
He presses his lips together and brings his finger up to his shocked face in a shushing motion. Jerk. I turn back to my math. And on closer inspection, I realize that his tan is not fake but real. The huge amount of peeling on the bridge of his nose, which I didn’t see earlier in the dim lights of the elevator, attest to that. He must be a new lab tech from the state university. A group of them just started working on some work-study program.
He clears his throat.
I don’t look up.
He starts talking anyway. “Is there a special feature on this machine?”
“What do you mean?” I ask, still scribbling away.
“Dr. Mendelson specifically underlined centrifuge number five on my instructions.”
Now I look up. “Dr. Mendelson?”
He is checking out the machine, scanning the buttons. Dr. Mendelson doesn’t let just any tech work with her. She is very specific about her team. In fact, you have to establish your brilliance before she even asks you to clean her equipment. Sunburn looks too young and definitely not brilliant enough to be taking orders from Dr. Mendelson. He finishes his inspection and steps back.
“What’s so special about number five?” he asks.
I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear and think about whether or not I will answer him. Not everyone deserves to know everything. I continue to go over my homework, sitting in silence as though we are playing chicken to see who speaks first. He holds something out to me. I slide my eyes over. Bazooka.
Goddamn it, I love these hard-as-hell pieces of gum that make my jaw hurt so bad after five minutes of chewing that I start to believe I have TMJ. But they come with a comic, and how can anyone resist that? I take the gum.
He leans back against the wall and crosses his arms. I carefully unwrap the gum and pop it into my mouth as I look over the comic of the blond boy with an eye patch.
Not everyone knows how Dr. Mendelson has certain attachments, superstitions as it were, about the machines. This one, number five, Dad had it shipped over from the Salk Institute when he recruited her. Part of the sweetening package.
Sunburn makes that awful noise again with his mouth. I slip the comic into my lab coat pocket to read over later when I don’t have to deal with a certain impatient slurping person.
“It was involved in helping her locate the repetition in the gene for Huntington’s,” I finally tell him.
He raises an eyebrow. “She definitely has her quirks,” he says, “but with a mind like that, how can you not?”
I return to my math, chewing my hard-earned reward with some effort when I feel his eyes on me again. This time I refuse to make eye contact.
“Hey.” Sunburn snaps his fingers. “We’ve met before, right?”
I ignore him.
“Where did we meet?” He directs the question more to himself than to me.
I can feel him leaning down as though he is getting ready to sit on the floor beside me. I check my watch again. Two more minutes.
Sunburn lowers himself down next to me and sits cross-legged, his hands in his lap, palms up. I see a large scar slashing across one palm and continuing over to the other as though someone pulled a sword blade through his hands. He catches me staring and balls them up into loose fists.
“It’s so quiet out in the halls. It’s kind of funny that they leave the machines out here,” he says.
I have often thought the same thing.
“But I like it,” he adds. “It’s the only time I get to think. When I hear the hum of the machines and wait those last few minutes for the cycle to finish. You know?”
How many times have I found myself just standing here, staring at the swirling drum, caught in the cage of my thoughts?
“The cycle times,” I say awkwardly. “Sometimes it’s too short to leave and come back, so you just end up hanging out.”
“It’s kind of a limbo place as you wonder what the results will be,” he says. “Anything could happen.”
I shrug. “Or nothing at all.”
Our eyes meet as I finally look up from my notebook. The blueness startles me.
“I know I’ve seen your face somewhere. Damn. I hate that feeling of knowing it’s on the edge of your brain. Did you have shorter hair before?”
The timer on the centrifuge machine beeps three times in quick succession. I close my notebook and grab my tray as I stand up.
“Do you ever hitchhike? I give lifts to people sometimes.”
I shake my head, open the lid, and begin removing the vials and loading them onto my tray.
Sunburn scrambles up and gazes down at my badge.
“Grace.” He snaps his fingers. “I saw your picture . . . at your house! I knew I recognized you.”
I slowly place the last vial into its slot on my tray.
“Your father—he was the one who recruited me. He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. You know what I mean? He came all the way to Australia where I was on vacation, just so he could talk me into coming for a visit and interviewing. Can you believe that?”
Dad recruited Sunburn? So he wasn’t from the university. A junior postdoc? Sunburn isn’t
