Rated M for language and possible shmexiness later.
"No, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that, and I'm just…. Hrmm." Grunt.
She fiddled with greasy, limp at the top and dry at the bottom, red-copper hair and breathed through her stuffed up nose in bursts. It almost sounded like Jingle Bells.
"Shitcrackers."
"No, I don't want to do that either… Oh my god. What is wrong with me? I just keep talking…" She leaned in closer to the mirror and gave herself a crazy smile. Yes, that is you. That is what you are now.
Holy crap, Christine, shut up, you're so morbid, what the hell…
She took a step back and forced herself to look down. Dirty sink. Well, clean on one side, her side, but her dumb roommate had crap all over the other side. Dirty bathroom floor. Uck.
It was lonely there. It was lonely and blank and she didn't really like it, and she found herself desperately searching through any online TV show she could find for free and watching it, alternately lying on her bed and sitting up, back and forth, as the vinyl mattress cover crinkled and grew sticky and the sheet she'd sewed together for a sleeping bag crumpled down by her feet.
This stupid internship job was pointless, and all she wanted to do was go home, go back to school, something. But she was here, somehow at a school capable of paying sixty poor undergrads' salary and room and board. I mean, what the hell. It was a frequent thought. She was being paid five hundred bucks a week to work for four hours a day. And in a recession.
It wasn't like she didn't need it. It was just that she wasn't needed, and she needed to be needed. And her apartment was a blank white little room with two other roommates she never saw, and on the empty walls and in the empty rooms her pathetic loneliness and complete powerlessness over it made her feel crazy when something on Futurama cracked her up and she laughed too loud and too long. And she talked to herself because there was no reason not to.
And she thought, is this real life? Is this a life away from your family? Is this what will happen to me when I graduate?
It wasn't like she hadn't tried. She'd joined a running club, but they were all in their thirties and she hadn't turned twenty until a week ago. And she'd tried to hang out with her roommates, multiple times, but while they always said things like "anytime you need anything, just let me know", and "yeah, I'll have to take you there, we could get a bunch of people together, it'd be great…" they never followed through, even when she did need something and did let them know. Um, alright. Bitches.
Finally, a well timed racial comment—can those be well timed? Really, a wealth of racial comments, from one roommate and her friends, made Christine give up for good on that effort. She only wished she had swallowed her naïve shock and said something about fat bitch stupid ugly face's remarks before leaping out of the car after that grocery trip.
Damn, I must have some anger issues.
…And now one less person available to help me buy fruit. Shit.
After spending a considerable couple of days venting over the phone to her dad in equal anger and shock, she bought a bike. Problem somewhat solved. But lesson learned.
A. People are still assholes. The things you think don't matter still do, and what can you do? You can say the things you want, and you can spend lots of time thinking about things that would've been better to say, but anyone already that self-superior isn't going to be changing anytime soon.
B. You are alone. You are very alone here.
The two crap roommates had boyfriends, and luckily the racist one seemed to be living with hers, because she was seen maybe once a week. When Christine had gone to racist girl's boyfriend's apartment, she'd seen racist girl's food in his fridge. Pathetic. I'll never be that dependent.
…I'll never be that dependent.
And the other would talk to anyone who would listen, on and on, and Christine wasn't sure whether to pity her or intensely dislike her for her selfishness and her unavailability whenever Christine ran out of, say, food, or toilet paper. There was a week spent using Starbucks napkins.
It was a tiny branch of Louisiana State University in Lafayette, Louisiana, and it was only May and already hot. Christine was used to rainy Oregon summers and this was not that. The heat rose off the pavement and prickled against her shaved legs as she went from lab to lab. She frequently wondered what people did before air conditioning. She also wondered why people here loved the AC so damn much, because inside it was freaking cold. Anyway, the point was, the lab she was stuck working in wasn't within walking distance of any source of toilet paper, and she didn't have a car.
Christine stepped into her room, absently patting the top of her head. She sighed and hummed a bit of an unknown song, stood frowning for a moment, then went back into the bathroom. Every time the light in the bathroom turned on, the fan went on with it, growling up in the ceiling.
"Shut up."
She picked up her forgotten coffee. Swig. Peered at her hair again. The power of the almighty bobby! Grease hidden!
You just called your pins bobby.
Yes, we're on a first name basis.
I'm going crazy. Hahahahaha.
Christine stepped out of the bathroom, happily shut off the loud light/fan combo, finished her coffee, grabbed her backpack, made sure her safety goggles were inside, stepped back into the bathroom to brush her teeth, grabbed her backpack again, and finally left her apartment.
She hummed along, an occasional skip in her step, and this was the paradox that was Christine Daae, the thing that she could never understand and therefore believed no one else could. And she knew she'd never be loved, despite how she longed for it, because she was terrified of it, and despite her sadness and frustration she walked happily to work, and she didn't know why.
XXXXX
Dr. Kelly ran the bioengineering lab Christine worked in, and he terrified her. All the more so because she didn't know why, especially when he tried so hard to act like they'd known each other longer than the two weeks she'd been there.
The lab was in a big brick building identical to the four other brick, Spanish-style buildings spread over the small research campus. Four rows of countertops crouched in the middle of the room where Christine worked, shelves rising above them crowded with boxes of pipette tips, glass bottles, pH meters, deionized water, various science-y things. Every day Christine cleared a six inch spot on the black formica counter and left her notebook there. A place of her own. The first week she spent a lot of time migrating from one aisle to another, scanning the crowded shelves for a brown chemical bottle that looked just like ten other chemical bottles. The grad students in the lab avoided giving her the time of day. She returned to her silent apartment after minimal work each day and felt low and crushed and useless.
And when she put her sample in the fridge instead of the oven, Dr. Kelly looked shocked upon hearing she didn't know any better and said, "You don't know what the oven is? You know. The big box thing. …Smaller than the fridge, of course, but not cold?" And the grad student next to him laughed.
Christine knew he was just joking, knew the grad students in the lab had some sort of adulation for him, for their "Kelly", but from that moment on she was scared of him. She couldn't talk to him without her face turning red. Which made her dislike him more, as well as herself.
When she told her dad about what Kelly had said, he simultaneously laughed derisively and sighed and said, "Oh, he's too familiar." And she supposed that was true. None of this was familiar to her. This was her first summer away from home, first time in the lower half of the country, first real science job, and it was not how she expected it to be. She constantly felt her lack of knowledge being thrown in her face, from the way the grad students would stare at her and patronize her when she didn't know how to use a machine, to the way their voices grew curt whenever she asked a question. Great fucking Scott, if you didn't want me here, why did you select me to come here then?
At least she finally understood her project at this point and had no need to intrude on the other students' godly forms of thought. She was just repeating a procedure already detailed in a published paper and adjusting it somewhat. Initially surprised at the lack of original research she was going to be allowed to do, now Christine didn't know whether to be relieved or insulted by it. She could never show up if she wanted and no one would care, and she'd still get paid. How pointless! What a waste! But she had nothing better to do, so what the hell.
Her assignment was to coat a nanoparticle in silver through a series of chemical reactions and then show that it could successfully kill bacteria. The reaction took several days to finish, and then she had to check if it worked with the giant electron microscope in another building. She could easily envision the next four months of her summer stretching out in a constant loop: react, visualize, repeat.
All the more reason to hop on that bike and pedal her heart out, until every undiscovered corner of Louisiana was seen and she could at least say she'd learned something, and therefore wasn't as incapable of thought as everyone else in the lab seemed to think she was.
"Christine."
"Ye-esss?" Through the shelf above the counters she looked at Dr. Kelly. He had his typical khaki shorts on, a big man who still looked somewhat childish. Short hair, expression always a little perturbed, but in a funny way, as though he was overreacting to someone's unusual joke. He often went out with other students in the lab on Thursday nights and got drunk. Christine thought it was weird. She kind of wanted to come with.
"I've been thinking—" His voice jerked off and he asked, "How is that trial going?"
Startled, the uncontrollable blush seeped up. Feeling it and seeing the way he registered it and tried not to acknowledge it made it worse.
"Um—It's, ugh, it's good, I'm just adding more silver nitrate to this fraction now so—because the other one wasn't fully coated? So I thought it needed more? I'm not really sure—"
"Why are you doing that?"
Didn't I just tell you? Blush worsening. She looked at the test tube for something else to look at. Hard breath. "The other sample, when I imaged it, had some silver on it but it wasn't completely covered. So I thought it—increasing the amount of silllll-ver would increase the coverage."
Kelly nodded decisively. "What I was going to tell you earlier, and I think it would help with that issue too, is that if you use the DLS in Middleton, you could tell the amount of silver coating the particles without using the microscope every time. So you can just head over there today and run those."
Nodding like she knew what was going on, Christine said, "Yeah, okay great, that'd be really helpful. Okay. Thanks."
And Dr. Kelly turned and left, and Christine didn't want to question what was apparently so well known, but she sucked in her stomach with a brave breath and at least asked where Middleton was.
Building two blocks from this one. Can't miss it. Go straight.
Sheepishly, "Thank you." And she held her head high until she was out the door.
XXXXX
Oh beautiful blast of air conditioning, to what do I owe the honor? Ahh. Heat pricked skin relaxing.
She stood in front of the building directory and for a moment vainly pursed her lips in a faux natural pout, studying her reflection in the glass framed list.
You will never have that.
Why do people say I'm pretty? She thought. This wasn't a vain thought, unlike her expression. Christine factually thought she was pretty, too. But there was something wrong with her, she knew, in some way that she had yet to figure out how to change, which kept people from attaching to her, which kept her distant-pretty, uncaring-pretty—never striking. Blending in, so that she wasn't actually attractive at all. So why did people say it? Were they all lying? Don't be ridiculous.
DLS ….. RM 514
She slipped into the elevator and felt the initial pull of gravity on her intestines at the box moved upwards, then the lift in them as the elevator slowed down.
This hallway was not like the entrance hall to Middleton. The entrance had been bright, window filled, skylights above the center display case. This hallway stretched long and dark across the building, only one door visible towards the end on the right, and only because the hollow it created was darker than its surroundings. The fluorescent lights flickered yellow and gold dimly. The air smelled of old books.
Her sandals tapped as she headed towards that far door, sound waves bouncing off the walls as she walked between them, and she pictured their reverberating moldy shape, like old men struggling through the gloom to protest at any disturbance. But she defied them and continued on.
RM 514.
She turned the handle and pushed the heavy door open.
Inside, it was similarly dark and dank, and dust motes swirled hazily in the veiled light coming from an upper window. The room was large, with the black countertops that seemed to be the research center's trademark in rows through the middle. Those in front of her were fairly clean, but the further left she looked, the counters became messier, papers and vials and books and boxes and different types of machines piled on their tops. To her upper right, a balcony looked over the dusty scene, dim and probably equally dirty, but it was impossible to tell in the dark.
It was kind of beautiful in a way, how everything seemed to be abandoned and left carelessly to gather dust. Christine moved toward the window in the middle of the room and slowly parted the hazy curtain to look out. Fields and oaks shimmered beneath her in the heat, the red roofs of two other buildings visible in the distance. She stood there for awhile. She knew it was vain, but she wondered what she looked like right then, at that moment; if it was like a scene from a movie, her back turned to the camera and just her eyelashes visible in the scattered sunlight. She closed her eyes.
"Can I help you?"
Christine jumped and dropped the curtain and gasped and the triangle of light she was letting in swung shut. She looked around, up at the balcony, into the far corners, but she saw nothing.
"Are you deaf? Is there something I can do for you?" Arrogant. Annoyed. And oh, so odd, so…
Please review!