Prologue
Sunlight streamed through the tall windows on the left side of the classroom, a taunting reminder to the students within of the beautiful weather they were missing. Though outside people talked and laughed, playing catch or dozing off in the warm afternoon air, inside the room all was quiet. Silent, in fact, save for the scratching of twenty-three pens against twenty-three pieces of paper and the occasional rustle as the professor, feet propped upon his desk, turned the page of his "National Geographic."
Erin Hirsch stared down at her paper, barely aware of the ferocity with which her pen skimmed over the surface of the test, trailing numbers and symbols as it went. Except for a pause now and then to punch some numbers into her calculator, she worked ceaselessly and effortlessly, not a decimal out of place. She never hesitated, never second-guessed herself, never reached for the white-out that she knew she'd never need. Chemistry simply came easily to her, easier than anything else in the world.
It hadn't always been that way, of course. In high school she'd struggled with, nay, nearly failed at even the most basic concepts that the class had to offer. Her head had been a jumble of orbitals and lone pair electrons, Lewis diagrams and Bronsted-Lowry acids, none of which she could keep straightened out long enough to force them onto a test or lab report before they twisted and convoluted themselves even worse than before.
Yet she had loved it. Something about the mystery behind it, the notion that she was learning, or at least attempting to learn, the inner workings of the universe held an inexplicable draw for her. So she worked. She worked long into the night, every night, memorizing and practicing and anticipating the day when it would all click, would all make sense.
Her hard work had paid off. Erin looked around the room at the agonized faces of her classmates, each with a look of suicidal desperation splashed across their features. More than one of them was frantically scribbling out what looked like an entire page of work, while she could distinctly hear the girl in the back corner sniffling, clearly on the verge of tears. She turned back to her exam, focusing in on the last problem and beginning to copy the equations when her hand gave a jerk, sending a stray line of ink flying across the page. Annoyed but not concerned, she reluctantly grabbed the bottle of white-out from the corner of her table. No sooner had she wrapped her hand around the small white container, however, than her arm jerked again and the white-out fell to the floor.
Feeling all eyes turning towards her, she gave a sheepish look of apology before reaching down to grab the bottle from where it lay beside her foot. In an instant, however, she had tumbled out of her seat and onto the hard tile floor. She could feel her entire body shaking, the pain worsening as her eyes rolled up into her head. Voices were echoing in her head, words like "seizure" and "ambulance" floating around her until all was black.