Eager to Love (3 page)

So on top of these emotional wants and needs
was heaped a much more practical desire. If I stopped having
blackouts, my life would be so much different. And I would be able
to get a driver’s license and everything. As strange as it seemed,
what if cheating
healed
me?

Selfish. No matter how I chopped it up or
framed it or recolored it, I was being selfish. And I knew it. I
knew
it. But I was stuck. Any direction I moved led to
somewhere worse than my current condition, and aside from the
guilt, my current condition was
amazing
.

But oh, the guilt!

Carefully, I peeled Jeffery’s arm off my
body. I pushed aside the body pillow and slipped out from under the
blankets. I stood in Jeffery’s room in the dark wearing only my
panties.

By then my eyes had adjusted, and I walked to
Jeffery’s desk with its blacked out computer monitor and messy
assortment of trinkets. A little rocket ship, a poster of Mount
Everest, some Boy Scout patches. A stack of mismatched journals
with myriad bindings and covers. I hadn’t read those, and I never
would—that would be a greater violation of trust than sleeping with
Giacomo—but I did brush the spines with my fingertips, knowing that
the mind of a boy I loved lay inside them. Beside the journals were
a stack of brochures from the club fair thing Jeffery had attended.
Advertisements for the BCM, Law Club, Engineering Alliance, and a
slew of Greek letter triads. Art Club, Beer Club, Bowling Club, and
even Disco Club. A black, nondescript looking one for something
called the Lower Saturday Union.

I shuffled through these and wondered if
maybe I should get more involved. Maybe I needed both of these
sexual relationships because I didn’t have many friendships. Maybe
if I felt more comfortable around groups of people, all my problems
would just vanish like so much mist.

“Sublimation,” the teaching assistant said,
“is when a solid turns directly into a gas. Who can give me an
example of sublimation?”

“Duh,” said a guy from the back of the lab.
“Dry ice.”

“That’s right,” the grad student said.

He’d introduced himself as Marty Laveau at
the beginning of the lab.

“Dry ice sublimates at room temperature. Who
can give me an example of the opposite, of gas turning into a
solid. Anyone?”

Marty was tall and lean with oversized
glasses that made his eyes look enormous. When I looked at him, I
couldn’t help but imagine a scrawny owl topped with a Shaggy-from
Scooby-Doo haircut. Zoinks.

No one answered. He’d made us all put our
phones in a tub against the back wall to keep us from Googling
anything.

“That one’s harder, right?” Marty said. “I’ll
tell you this: it’s called ‘deposition.’ Anyone? Try to guess. It’s
more common than you think.”

“Frost?” I tried.

“Bingo,” Marty said, pointing at me.

I felt my cheeks burn with the attention.

“Very cool,” he said. “With frost, the
moisture in the air turns directly to solid ice without first
becoming a liquid.”

He continued, segueing neatly into the
experiment we were about to work on through a series of transitions
that I missed because I was busy feeling self-conscious about
singling myself out with that correct answer. I heard Jeff’s
playful mockery in my head calling me by my superhero name.

With the ability to instantly wither at
the slightest hint of social confrontation! Abandons parties faster
than a speeding bullet! More ponderous than a locomotive! Who’s
that alone in her apartment? A bird? A plane? No! It’s…
Introvert Lynn!

By the time I peeked back out of my shell,
we’d already been separated into groups and were weighting pieces
of metal before and after they’d been submerged in various metals.
It was precisely as boring as that sounds.

A guy near the back—the one who’d answered
the sublimation question—said as much.

“Dude, this is putting me to sleep,” he said
loudly. He had a large Raising Cane’s cup with a straw, and he
would sip on it constantly between comments.

“Well,” Marty said. “It’s not all explosions,
of course.”

“It don’t have to be explosions, but I’m
bored as hell,” said the guy.

Marty the Grad Student pushed up his glasses
by the bridge with a single finger. “Well, it might be boring, but
meticulousness is the heart of good chemistry. That, and careful
notes. With these two things, you can work magic.”

Raising Canes guy laughed and shook his
head.

“You’re laughing at me,” Marty said, more a
statement than a question.

“Magic?” Raising Canes said. “Now I know
you’re messin’ with me.”

“I’m serious,” Marty said. “Take this current
experiment. Pieces of solid iron are actually becoming a part of
the liquids you’re soaking them in. The iron is
becoming
a
completely different material, and so is the liquid. Chemistry is a
science of transformation. And, what’s more, the control and
guidance of that transformation. When you can control the way
something behaves, the way something
becomes
… Why, that’s
the closest thing to magic we have.”

“Dude, you need to get
laid
,” said
Canes.

The class burst into laughter.

Marty pushed up his glasses again, his face
bright red. He clearly didn’t know how to defend himself against
such an attack, and I felt sorry for him.

Cane’s guy just sipped from his drink
smugly.

“All right, all right,” said Marty, motioning
for everyone to calm down.

Eventually, they did. And the experiment,
which—magic or not—was still very tedious, continued. Lab lasted
four hours. After the first two, Marty called a break to let
everyone go to the bathroom or grab a snack.

When we got back, everyone just wanted to
grind through the rest of the experiment and be done. Now we were
increasing the temperature of the various liquids with Bunsen
burners, in part to learn how to use different kinds of lab
equipment and practice good safety procedures. The documentation
part of the activity was just as mind-numbing as the rest. I’d been
working in a zombie-like daze for the last twenty minutes or so
when a blood-curdling scream erupted from the back of the
classroom, shocking me into wakefulness.

It was Cane’s guy. He was gripping his wrist
and screaming as he stared at his hand, which was splotchy and
bright red and already starting to bubble over with blisters. Those
closest to him rushed in to help, but the rest of us stood frozen
and staring.

Marty closed his book and stepped quickly to
Cane’s guy, his eyes wide and exaggerated through his glasses. He
rushed Cane’s to the emergency station and turned on the faucet,
which poured cold water all over the guy’s burned hand.

Cane’s guy screamed with new agony.

“What happened?” Marty demanded of his lab
partner.

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “I looked over
and he was just holding his hand in the flame!”

“What?”

“I don’t know!” she said. “He must have zoned
out or something.”

I pushed against my classmates to get a good
look at the burn. It seemed pretty bad. Bad enough to make my
stomach wrench. Although, in earnest, I felt a quiet inkling of
satisfaction to see that jerk get his come-uppance.

Marty called the campus infirmary to come
assist, and he let the lab out early. Once everyone else had left
and Marty was filling out paperwork related to the accident, I
approached his desk.

“Mr. Laveau?” I said.

He looked up from his paperwork and gave me a
haggard smile, his glasses grotesquely magnifying what would have
otherwise been very pretty baby blues. “Some first lab, huh,” he
said. “Please, just call me Marty.”

“Uh, okay,” I said. “Mr. Marty, I’m sorry to
give you more paperwork, but I have a condition that may affect my
performance in this class. I have to ask you to sign this
acknowledging that accommodations can be made for my disability, if
necessary.” I handed him a form. “I don’t need you to sign it
immediately, but I need it back as soon as you can. I already spoke
with Dr. Giacomo, but I thought—”

“Ah,” he said, cutting me off and looking at
me with new interest. “Seager, right? Giacomo told me about
you.”

I stiffened and swallowed hard. A paranoid
flicker darted through my brain about what
exactly
Giacomo
had said about me. Maybe he’d told Marty about how he’d asked me to
strip right there in his office the first time I went to meet with
him. About how I had—in total shock of my own actions—obliged.
About how that was already only the first of several…
encounters
I’d had with my chemistry professor.

“Yeah,” Marty said. “He said you have a
memory thing. That it may be triggered by certain chemicals.”

I relaxed. Of course that’s what Giacomo had
told him. I felt foolish for my own concern.

“That’s right,” I said. “It’s a form of
epilepsy. I’m on medication to reduce the effects, but sometimes I…
well, I guess I misplace an hour or two every once in a while.
Blackouts. It’s not full amnesia because I always remember what
happened later, but the disorientation has affected my schoolwork
before.”

“We’ll be careful, then,” Marty said,
amicably. “It’s really no problem.”

“Good,” I said. “Thank you.” I adjusted my
backpack strap and started toward the door.

“You’re Caleb Seager’s little sister, aren’t
you?”

I jerked to a stop as if pulled by a cord
connected directly to my heart. I turned and looked at him and saw
sympathy on his face.

“You knew him?” I asked.

“I knew
of
him,” Marty said. “He was a
couple of years ahead of me, but when I got into this program, I
walked right into his shadow.”

I nodded. “I know what that’s like.”

“The grad school can’t stop singing his
praises,” said Marty. “With good reason, of course. I mean, he was
brilliant. It wasn’t just because…” He trailed off, realizing
suicide probably didn’t make for polite conversation when you were
discussing the deceased with his baby sister. He coughed and
dropped eye contact, and in that moment, I realized that my
feelings weren’t hurt at all, and Marty seemed somehow very
human.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to rescue him. “I
know. He really was smart.”

“His team made excellent progress on
chemicals related to that Alzheimer’s drug. They say he was just
tenacious. That he’d spend all day and night in the labs, testing
and retesting.”

“My grandfather had Alzheimer’s,” I told him.
“He was a very important person in both of our lives. Like a second
father. When Caleb was in high school, Grandpa started to get
pretty bad. By the end, he didn’t even know who any of us were
anymore when we’d visit him. It was awful. Definitely made an
impact on both of us.”

“That explains Caleb’s dedication,” Marty
said, nodding solemnly. He glanced down at the form I’d given him
to sign and made a forced chuckle. “I guess forgetfulness runs in
the family, then,” he said.

I felt my face contort at the awfulness of
that jab.

Marty recognized his mistake immediately. “Oh
God. Caitlyn, I am so sorry. I didn’t…”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“No, really. That was awful of me. I was… I
was just trying to lighten the mood and…”

I gave him a pass. “No really,” I said. “I
understand. Really, I do.”

Marty signed the form and passed it back to
me. We walked out of the room together, and Marty turned to
activate the electric lock on the door. “That wasn’t cool of me,”
he said.

“Oh wait,” I said. “My phone.”

Marty held the door open, and I rushed back
into the room to grab my phone. The clear plastic tub sat on a
table at the back of the room across from the emergency station.
Mine lay alone at the bottom. I grabbed it and started toward the
door, but I stopped.

We’d cleaned up after lab, of course, and
someone had taken care of Cane’s guy’s area for him. But they’d
missed something. A tiny piece of paper the size of a fortune from
a cookie was wedged and crumpled under the digital scale. I grabbed
it and absently uncrinkled it as I headed to the trash can.
However, when I read what was written on the paper in block pencil
letters, it halted me in my tracks.

The paper said:

BURN YOURSELF

“This is it,” Ashley said, putting her truck
into park in front of a pale blue house off Highland Road.

In the passenger’s seat, I wrung my hands and
stared at the front door, my stomach twisting into a knot.

Ashley picked up on my discomfort, like any
good friend would. “You want me to come in?”

I shook my head. “No, that’s all right. I
think I need to do this alone.”

I looked at her, and there was concern in her
eyes. “You sure?” she asked.

I nodded. “I don’t want to outnumber
her.”

“Good idea.”

“I don’t know how long I’ll be. It might be a
while.”

“I’ve got Fruit Ninja,” Ashley said,
smiling.

“Thanks, Ash. I appreciate it.”

I pulled the handle on the door, stepped down
out of Ashley’s comically large Ford F-250, and started the long
trek to that foreboding front door. I closed my eyes and forced my
breathing to steady. The hot and heavy September air wrapped around
me.

Far too soon, I reached the porch and had no
more steps to take. I looked up at the door, which had long ago
been painted black and was now peeling and flaking. I glanced back
at Ashley’s truck.

I considered bailing. The situation went so
against my personality. Here I was, about to knock on a stranger’s
door and force them to talk about something that was painful to
them. Something that they probably wish they could leave behind. I
thought about how I would feel if someone knocked on my door and
wanted to chat about Caleb’s death. I would feel intruded upon,
violated, invaded. Especially if they were a stranger.