Page 54 - Vol. V #6

A Ghosting
bby’s specialty involved protein interaction,
A tittering of laughter shook her from staring at her phone. There were other people working in the lab, of course, though their schedules had grown opaque to her. She was in her second year and while initially close to her peers, like mag- nets they had eventually exhausted their polarity, drifting apart so that now—even in forced social situations—Abby found it hard to find the en- ergy to engage them. After a handful of awkward house parties where people stuck to the cor- ners of the room, holding red cups and sharing the same well-worn college anecdotes, she just couldn’t be bothered anymore.
to see which protein signifiers turn on when they interact with stimuli. The experiments re- quired a great deal of repetition, preparing slides, cleaning pipettes, maintaining controls, etc. The goal, of course, was to find a physical relationship that everyone outside her lab could see. Then, she wouldn’t be the only one pointing to the thing and marveling at it, but others would join her, like witnesses of the same shooting star.
The paper’s deadline was two weeks away. Months of largely being ignored by her advisor and now a deadline. In the time crunch, Abby found coffee had betrayed her, now granting
her only a dull crown of a headache. Most of the morning was spent working through emails and preparing slides. Outside, the fog had rolled in and obscured the July day. A construction crane heaved and beeped in the distance. There were minutes where she would be waiting for a timer to go off or an email reply. It was amazing how something as reflexive as checking her phone for missed texts could feel like teetering over a cliff. When a boy didn’t reply, it was like the solidness of the world had slipped between her fingers.
A couple were talking about the role playing game they played together. Both wore glasses and were somehow the same height, though the guy in the relationship had a faint mustache that reminded her of a child’s crayon approximation of facial hair. She heard another lab tech in the back, likely the third year who people referred to as “The Mime” because he never talked and was somehow annoying about it. The morning blended into the afternoon; she took lunch at the university cafe and late in the afternoon, stepped outside for a cigarette and watched the crane work, trying to determine what, if anything, had changed from the previous day at the con- struction site.
Texting reminded her of a game she used to play with a classmate as a child. They’d sometimes slip into her mother’s dark cedar closet, beyond the fur coats and winter blankets. They called
the place “Terabithia,” after the imaginary world from the children’s book. There, the two eleven- year-olds would confess secrets—who liked who, what they’d dreamed about, where they think their parents went when they slept. Abby could still smell the mothball-choked silence as she waited for her neighbor to respond to her latest confession. Now, after she sent a text response, she felt the familiar itch of a wool sleeve on her neck, the same worry that the person she was talking to had quietly slipped out of the closet, leaving her alone to talk to herself.
The previous Friday, Abby had showed up with a bottle of wine at the appointed time. Jim an- swered the door. He was dressed in a tight sweat- er and dress shirt and this made him look ten years older than he actually was.
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“Don’t worry about it,” Rachel called from the kitchen. She was deploying hors d’oeuvres on a
“Abby! So good to see you,” he said. They hugged and she tried to read if his greeting was genuine.
“You too, and sorry to kinda, sorta be crashing your party,” she said.
chriStian holt