Chapter 1: If I Can Understand It, It Cannot Hurt Me
The tentative scuffing of her shoes changes when she enters the lab. Her steps become surer, less timid reaffirmations of her existence and more extensions of it. When she's in the lab, she can test the equations and chemical formulas that swirl around her and build themselves in her brain. Ideas can be examined and proven and explored; concepts and facts can be tested and pushed to their limits. For a minute, she can see the truth of things – and the lab is her sanctuary.
Except when it isn't. These days, it's hard for her to lose herself in the chemistry of nature and the nature of chemistry. She used to fall into science and math as an escape, a way of making things make sense. Now that the hours in the lab are the only part of her life that makes sense, she feels trapped. She wants more. And she knows that her days of combining and calculating are numbered in a way that stands out more than the problems she is assigned to solve.
When she walks into her house, she is greeted by the guttural sound of her father shouting curses. A compact, burly man, his short hair mussed, he is gesticulating wildly at her glowering brother, who, dressed in faded jeans and an oversized band t-shirt, has draped himself against the wall. She wonders for a moment how he can manage to look both disdainfully unaffected and completely furious at the same time, and is relieved when they don't look up at the quiet 'snick' of the door closing. In fact, they barely notice as she avoids their jabbing arms and slips past them to creak quietly up the stairs, lugging her backpack behind her.
Sighing as she reaches the top of the first flight of stairs, she turns and treads lightly past her parents' room. The sound of her mother's sobs echoes quietly behind the closed door. She pauses briefly, wishing she could fix her mother's pain, wishing she could solve her family like an equation, or at least balance the shitty parts with joy.
Knowing she can't, and knowing her wordless wishes don't change anything, she slumps heavily up the second flight of stairs. Reaching the small, dimly-lit landing at the top, she fumbles with the knob separating the third floor from the rest of the house, shoves the door open, and falls into her room. Landing in a tangle of papers and limbs, she pushes the door shut with her foot.
And then there is silence. Broken by the rustling and shifting of papers as she picks herself up, but still thick in the air, pressing in on her as she puts her backpack on her desk. She slips her folders into place, putting sheets of scribbled formulas back in binders where they can be momentarily contained. Eyes closed, she stops herself from looking them over – she won't fall down that particular rabbit hole tonight. There is too much to do.
Walking briskly over to the lamp, she flicks it on with an impatient twitch of her fingers. Home. A sloping, low-ceilinged room, walls a tired shade of grey, with deep grooves in the faded hardwood floors. It's a comfortless place, but it's hers. The iron frame holding the lumpy bed, the peeling wooden bedside table, the scratched secondhand CDs on a foraged shelving unit – all hers. An ancient discman, now hers, handed down from her brother. Her washed-out lavender carpet, an attempt to add brightness; her scrappy curtains covering a tiny window; her old desk filled with various bits of paper, notebooks, and other supplies.
She pulls the folding chair closer to her desk and unzips her backpack. It holds an ordered explosion of colorful folders and binders, pencil case and notebooks, everything she needs to pass as normal. Weeks of work at the local pet store, saving her meager paychecks, and she used it on school supplies at the Target by their house.
Pulling her computer out of her backpack, she turns it on. It took her a year to save up for it, but it was worth all of the overtime – a sleekly beautiful piece of technology that she could explain down to the last wire. Although chemistry is her passion, she is good at pretty much anything involving math and science. If only my teachers felt the same way, she muses ruefully. If only I didn't keep correcting them and proving the textbooks wrong. If only I did what they wanted me to, instead of figuring out a different way to do it. Even if that way is more efficient. And uses less material. And is just generally better.
And then she reminds herself that sass doesn't get her anything but a slap, and gets to work. An English paper she's been putting off, three chapters of Great Expectations and the writing responses that go along with them, a few minutes reviewing Spanish flashcards for the upcoming test…
Three hours later, she emerges, drained. Looking at the cracked face of her alarm clock, she sighs, walks downstairs to grab a granola bar for dinner, and wishes things weren't so difficult. Her parents are arguing now, her brother has slammed out of the house, and she is invisible again. It's safest this way, but that doesn't mean she likes it. She resents always going unnoticed unless she does something wrong, but she has taught herself to fly under the radar anyway. It's easier, and that way she doesn't have to share her hell with anyone else.
Still, no matter how vehemently she denies it, she's lonely.
Decent grades - B average - and acting normal enough to pass as such, a job at Emma's Pet Store in which she is a slightly-above-average employee, and nothing else. She has nothing but the dreams she holds on to and the facts she creates to keep her company, and she has almost destroyed her dreams with calculating their probability. Her few cherished wishes are rumpled around the edges and creased with bearing the weight of her silence.
She crumples the wrapper in one hand, tosses it into the trashcan in the corner. Deciding that she's done enough for one night, she pulls her secret science binder out of her backpack. Browsing the sections of handwritten ideas until she can't focus her eyes, nodding heavily with sleep, she slides her latest calculations into the binder on her desk and drops her head onto her pillow.
Her sheets are scratchy against her legs, cheek chafing against the roughness of the pillowcase. She sinks into the bed and waits to fall asleep, waits quietly for morning to come so that she can start over, biking to school in the cleanness of the early hours and hoping that they will clean her, too.
The last thought she has before surrendering to the insidious tendrils of exhaustion is that she wishes magic was real. It's a strange thought for an aspiring scientist to have, for someone who worships the solidity of understanding and scorns anything that isn't provable. But her dreams are filled with things she cannot change in real life, and she knows that the child in her still wants the impossible to be attainable. Magic, facts, science... they are all ways of understanding things. And if she can understand it, it cannot hurt her.
Sleep is brief and filled with jumbled impressions. She wakes to an unfriendly breeze sending shivers through her thin comforter. Shuddering, she curls up closer to herself before a thought sends her jolting out of bed, lurching over to her lamp, flicking it on with trembling fingers, and staring, open mouthed, at the fluttering of the scrappy curtains.
What the hell?!
The window, stuck shut for as long as she can remember, is open.
And a glowing light is peeping through the crack.