A/N: This second chapter provides some background on Sara Sidle, who is awaiting her first session (as attendee) at the 50th annual American Academy of Forensic Sciences ("AAFS") conference in San Francisco, California. The third chapter provides some background on Gil Grissom. In the fourth chapter, they meet….
February 9, 1998. San Francisco, California.
Sara Sidle
It was only the first day of the 50th annual conference of the forensic academy (more formally put, the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, or "AAFS," which, despite its name, had members from many countries), and Sara Sidle was already late. Sara Sidle did not enjoy being late. To be fair, though, she was not so much late as she was neither as early nor as prepared as she would have liked. Still, Sara found her lack of preparedness somewhat ironic, given her own control-freak tendencies and, perhaps more significantly, that she had been looking forward to this conference for years.
Sara's control-freak tendencies would probably not have come as a surprise to anyone who knew her history—of course, no one in Sara's life really knew her all that well, and certainly no one in her life knew her history. When younger, Sara had (much to her displeasure) seen several therapists, and she felt certain those therapists would have said her attempts to exercise constant control over her life were the almost inevitable result of the complete lack of control she'd had in her earlier years. When Sara was nine, her already unstable childhood had been completely disrupted (exploded, utterly ripped to shreds) when Sara's mentally unstable mother had stabbed to death Sara's abusive father. Sara had entered the foster care system just shy of her tenth birthday (though she knew her mother's entanglements in the courts had dragged on years longer) and had remained in the system until she succeeded in emancipating herself roughly seven years later.
Before entering the foster care system, Sara had already been a studious, inquisitive, and remarkably bright child. At school, Sara was always collecting gold stars; Sara loved gold stars. Sara's parents had been too busy smiling at the guests at their bed-and-breakfast and fighting with each other when the guests were gone to pay Sara the kind of attention she deserved, though. So Sara had learned to amuse herself. She read voraciously and attended the library regularly; through books, she was able to escape to places far beyond Tomales Bay and the confines of her parents' bed-and-breakfast.
When Sara was very young, she'd read all the tales of princes and princesses. All the princesses had always needed saving, though, so she hadn't really liked those stories. Instead, as Sara got a bit older, she preferred the headstrong orphan Anne Shirley. Sara had not realized that she would soon, like Anne, be without the support of her parents, but she liked that Anne was the kind of girl who would stand up for herself. Sara even tried to convince her parents to call her by her middle name, Ann, which Sara thought sounded much nicer; this did not take off. Regardless, Sara was enchanted by Ms. Shirley and her pigtail-pulling beau, Mr. Blythe. Mr. Blythe was the first Gilbert Sara Sidle would love, but we know he would not be the last.
Once placed in foster care, Sara doubled down. Even at the age of ten, she signed up for as many free extracurricular activities as she could, in part to minimize the time spent at any of her foster homes. Lucky for Sara, she found supportive teachers who would allow her to stay late reading in their classrooms or the library even when no extracurricular activities were to be found.
Sara excelled… well, academically speaking, Sara excelled at everything. Sara had never been tested, but she was quite possibly a genius. She had already skipped a grade, and she was still at the top of all her classes. But she was particularly fond of science (especially physics, as she grew older) and math. They were logical, and they helped explain the world to her.
In high school, Sara became a science nerd. In high school, Sara was queen of the science nerds. She joined all the science clubs, and all the other science nerds worshipped her. In those days, unfortunately the science clubs mostly comprised boys, and the boys (at least at Sara's school) were mostly fairly nerdy, and most of these boys would have had troubles talking to even a marginally pretty girl. And Sara was no marginally pretty girl.
So the science nerds worshipped Sara, and she, in turn, felt safe with the science nerds. They did not threaten her. Sara otherwise often avoided being alone with men or older boys. Sara knew the statistics for kids who'd been in foster care, and especially for girls who'd been in foster care, were, again unfortunately, not great. Sara did not know the exact numbers, but she knew that, statistically-speaking, the odds of her getting pregnant at a youngish age would be very high, while the odds of her graduating from a four-year college would be very low.3 Sara Sidle would not be bound by those statistics. Sara was pro-choice, but she was still not getting herself anywhere near that kind of situation. So she stuck with the science nerds, who not only worshipped but also were quite protective of her. If she never actually formed any close personal bonds with them, that was okay with her.
In her time not spent studying or participating in scientific endeavors, Sara ran track. Sara was tall, with long legs, which gave her a natural advantage, so Sara (as in all her other activities) excelled. Track was also essentially a solo activity, which she appreciated. Sara had previously tried basketball, for which her height had also given her a natural advantage, but basketball was a team sport and involved a bit too much girly comradery for Sara's tastes. This made her feel like an outsider, which she did not appreciate.
The only reason Sara took any time away from science to try basketball or to run track was that she needed a well-rounded CV. Sara needed a well-rounded CV because she was going to Harvard. Harvard didn't know it yet, but it would; Sara knew it.
Sara had chosen Harvard in part because of its reputation (as far as Sara was concerned, Harvard was the best) and in part because, years earlier, when Sara was nine and still living at the bed-and-breakfast with her parents, a guest had left behind a copy of the novel Love Story (adapted by Erich Segal from his own screenplay for the movie Love Story), which young Sara had read repeatedly. Sara had evidently quite liked the tragic tale, and she was intrigued by its most quotable line, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." Sara had felt her family needed a lot more love and a lot fewer situations necessitating "I'm sorry." Sara didn't see the movie Love Story until a decade later when she was at Harvard, watching it along with most of the freshman class; she found the experience somewhat underwhelming. She watched it again on her own several years after that and cried profusely, but she wasn't sure whether that was due to the movie's tragic ending or its association, in her mind, with the lack of love in her own life. Either way, she never watched it again.
Finally (Sara thought it couldn't come soon enough), the time came for college applications. Sara was not willing to get into Harvard by being the girl whose mother killed her father. Her teachers and guidance counsellor encouraged her to mention that she was in the foster system, so she did so. She didn't want to get in on pity, but she was determined to get in. She would also need scholarship money—a lot of scholarship money. Sara had not a cent to her name, and she was not expecting help from any long-lost relations or mysterious benefactors. Anything Sara Sidle was going to achieve in life she was going to have to achieve completely on her own.
Lucky for her—but, no, we cannot say it was luck—happily for her, Sara Sidle, with her perfect grades, near-perfect test scores, well-rounded CV, stellar references from doting teachers, and moving personal essay (which did not mention her parents one bit) was accepted to Harvard, with a full scholarship.
So, at the age of sixteen, having already emancipated herself from the foster care system and given the valedictory address at her high school graduation, Sara was leaving California for the first time in her life. Sara was moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Sara began her freshman year at Harvard in the fall term of 1988, just weeks shy of her seventeenth birthday.4 She was overjoyed to be free of the foster care system, but, though she may once have imagined an adventure awaited her there, generally her time at Harvard was not so very dissimilar to her time in high school. Sara still studied all the time. Most of her time not spent studying was spent working (as a research assistant or wherever she could get work); given that she slept very little, she had more than enough time for both.
Despite all her time spent studying and working, Sara did go to some parties, and she did make some friends, though the friends were not as many or as close as they might have been if Sara had been willing and able to answer simple questions like "What does your father do?" or "Why do you never go home for the holidays?" Many of Sara's classmates often went home for holidays, or just because, or even traveled to what Sara considered exotic locales. Obviously Sara never went home for the holidays (or anywhere else) because she had no home to which she could go, but she wasn't about to tell anyone at Harvard that. She was never prepared to get close enough to anyone for that. Sara also occasionally dated, but those relationships never faired very well either, for largely the same reasons. She had one or two boys she had called boyfriends, but even they had not been particularly close.
While Sara did not form any terribly close bonds during her undergraduate years, she obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Harvard, from which she had graduated magna cum laude after four years. She also had a letter of acceptance from UC Berkeley, where she would be completing her doctorate in physics. Sara was modestly pleased with herself. Some might have considered Sara Sidle an over-achiever, but Sara did not. Sara was very smart, she worked very hard, and she achieved as she expected she should achieve; as far as Sara was concerned, she was par for the course. And now, contrary to all her earlier expectations, and after four years spent never having left the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Sara Sidle was headed back to northern California.
At Berkeley, Sara continued to study hard and to work hard. Sara enjoyed her studies in the Berkeley physics department, and she enjoyed her work as a work-study participant with the San Francisco coroner's office. Sara continued to work very hard, and she never took a day off, until one day someone suggested maybe Sara needed a vacation. Sara had never taken a vacation. The concept was wholly foreign to her. Her parents had owned the bed-and-breakfast, so they had always needed to be home for the holidays. There'd been no vacations in the foster care system. She'd certainly never taken herself on a vacation while at Harvard. Sara thought it a preposterous idea.
Then one of the few people with whom Sara had stayed in contact from Harvard called her. It was a friend from the physics department, who had stayed on at Harvard for graduate studies. A bunch of science grad students were going down to Florida for spring break. Someone had dropped out. The friend thought Sara should take the empty spot—no charge, the person who dropped out had already paid. This all felt somewhat serendipitous (the suggestion and then the invitation), so, on an uncharacteristic whim, Sara agreed.
The friend thought Sara should first fly to Boston for a couple days then fly with them all down to Florida. Sara thought this made no sense; she should just meet them in Florida. But the friend insisted there was a party the night before Sara should attend. So Sara flew out to Boston and went to the party. Unsurprisingly most everyone at the party was a bit drunk; perhaps somewhat surprisingly at the time, this included Sara. So Sara got drunk and made out with this guy she sort of recognized from her undergrad days, and he wasn't the best kisser and didn't have the best personality, but he was pretty hot, and it was still kind of fun, and that was all that really mattered for a drunken make-out session.
Unfortunately they were all still a little tipsy the next morning on the flight (the fact that they had kept drinking all night and onto the flight not helping the matter), so Sara and the guy were still determined to make out, and then he made a suggestion that made her laugh because it was so absolutely not anything she was ever going to do, but then she did it anyway. So that's how Sara Sidle ended up joining the Mile High Club with the in-every-aspect-overrated big man on campus ("BMOC") Ken Fuller on a flight to Miami in March 1993.
The whole thing was so completely un-Sara-like that she was almost a bit pleased with herself, despite how overrated it was. Mostly, though, she felt it was quite certainly the most embarrassing thing she had ever done. (Unfortunately Sara would come to surpass the embarrassment of this encounter over a decade later in another alcohol-related incident.) Sara swore she would never tell anyone about it, and she kept that promise to herself for almost eight years, until she volunteered the information to her boss at a crime scene. She didn't know why she couldn't shut up around that man; it probably had something to do with her being madly in love with him. But now we're getting ahead of ourselves….
Sara otherwise survived spring break and made it back in one piece to northern California, where she was content after a week away to return to her Berkeley physics studies and her work at the San Francisco coroner's office. Sara felt much more comfortable and much more content at either of these places than she ever would on a spring break trip to Florida. But that was perhaps unsurprising. Sara decided that vacations, like Ken Fuller, were vastly overrated.
Eventually, Sara had found she liked her work at the San Francisco coroner's officer so much that she left her doctoral program following the completion of her master's degree in physics and went to work for the San Francisco crime lab. She enjoyed seeing the application of science to real life, and she liked the idea that she helped speak for the victims. Sara specialized in materials and element analysis and slowly but surely worked her way up to the position of CSI Level 2. Of course, when we say slowly, that's only by Sara's standards; she picked up the skills rather more quickly than anyone else at the lab could recall having seen before, and they considered her something of a prodigy. That was nothing new for Sara. Sara read all the forensics journals, conference papers, and textbooks she could find, and, when she learned the 1998 AAFS conference would be held right there in San Francisco, Sara began planning.
Sara had been too junior for the lab to pay for her to attend previous years' AAFS conferences held elsewhere in the country. She had been too frugal to pay for herself. But the 1998 conference was being held in Sara's hometown, and she would have willingly paid her own conference fees. She'd put in her request to attend years earlier, when she'd first learned the 1998 conference was to be held in San Francisco. At the time she was told that time-off requests weren't handled quite so far in advance. Ultimately, though, to Sara's delight, her supervisor gave her the week off to attend the conference and advised her the lab would pay her conference fees. The conference was being held over four days at the Hilton San Francisco and Towers Hotel (the one on O'Farrell, between Mason and Taylor, just a couple blocks off Union Square), hence Sara had only requested four days (technically, nights) off, but her supervisor had stipulated that, if she wanted the time off, she would have to take the whole week (technically, eight nights). He had then mumbled something about Sara never having taken a day off in the several years she had worked for him. Sara had chosen to ignore that comment.
Only now, despite her control-freak tendencies, and because of her job, Sara was, to her mind, late for the conference. She had picked up the conference materials at the beginning of the pre-registration period the night before the conference, as planned. She had been headed back to her apartment with the materials, which she intended to spend several hours reviewing that evening (or maybe that night—switching back to being awake during daytime hours was always a bit confusing). She'd gotten a call from the lab asking if she could come help at a scene for a few hours. Sara wasn't the only one who had taken time off for the conference, and it was an unexpectedly busy day, so the lab was a bit short. As one would expect (and presumably the lab did expect), Sara obliged.
Unfortunately, what had been described as a few short hours of work had turned into a more substantial time commitment. When she was finally done, Sara had no time to go home, so she showered at the lab and put on whatever clean clothes were stuffed in her locker; this happened to be a pair of slightly ripped and faded 501s, a t-shirt from a music festival she'd attended the previous summer at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, a zip-up hoodie, and a pair of red Converse sneakers. She pulled her still-damp hair into a ponytail before it got too curly. When Sara looked at herself in the mirror, she felt certain she looked no older than she had when she'd left for Harvard almost a decade earlier. She put on some mascara and some pinkish-red lipstick, and she hoped that maybe gave her a few more years' credit. It wasn't exactly the impression she'd been hoping to make at the conference.
When Sara arrived at the hotel, she went straight to the conference room where the first session she planned to attend was being held. A few conference organizers and volunteers were in the room, but they didn't seem to mind her presence. She chose a seat in the fourth row, something close to the front but not too conspicuous, and opened the conference materials. Sara was over half an hour early for the lecture, but she felt late. She finally started looking at the materials.
The lecture was entitled "If the Evidence Changes, So Must the Theory: Avoiding Preconceptions and Adapting to Changing Evidence." It was a pretty dull title (Sara had already mentally renamed it "You Can't Rely on Your First Blush"), and one of Sara's colleagues had warned her the speaker himself was rather dull, but Sara was still excited, even aside from this being the first event she was attending at the conference. His presentation style might prove to be a little dull, but Sara already had a high opinion of the speaker, Dr. Gilbert Grissom. He was a CSI Level 3 out of Las Vegas, which had one of the top crime labs in the country, and he was highly regarded both for his specialization, forensic entomology, and for his experience in forensic science more generally. He had been, like Sara, something of a prodigy.
Sara had read several of Grissom's papers and book chapters. Okay, Sara had read everything she could find that Grissom had written, although she was not so keen on bugs and had hence skipped over some of the buggier parts, thus limiting her knowledge of forensic entomology somewhat. Grissom was one of her favorite writers on forensics, not that she was going to mention this if she ever got to meet the man. A lot of the forensics books and papers she read were rather dry, aside from some of the gory details, but Grissom's were not. His included everything from Shakespeare references to puns. Sara thought some people probably found the puns a bit corny, but she enjoyed them; they often made her laugh out loud. And, since Sara rarely read anything other than forensics materials these days, she strangely found the non-scientific references quite diverting.
Sara had not been able to figure out exactly what the man himself would be like. She'd seen a very bad, very fuzzy picture of him included in some materials, but it told her nothing. Based on his accomplishments, she thought he must be in his late 40s or maybe his 50s—at least a couple decades older than she. She pictured him as a nerdy Renaissance man and a before-his-years grandfatherly type. She imagined him making silly puns for his kids and reciting Shakespeare at the dinner table. (In the latter respect, she was perhaps not wrong. If one considered Nick Stokes and Warrick Brown his kids, she was perhaps not wrong in the former respect either.) She thought it regrettable that he was not, at least in her colleague's estimation, a very engaging speaker, but she acknowledged that was sometimes the case with science nerds. She looked forward to hearing him speak nonetheless.
Thus CSI Level 2 Sara Sidle of San Francisco sat, unsuspecting, in a conference room at the Hilton San Francisco and Towers Hotel (the one on O'Farrell, between Mason and Taylor, just a couple blocks off Union Square), awaiting her first in-person encounter with Gil Grissom, forensic entomologist. She could not possibly comprehend what the consequences of that meeting would be.
UP NEXT: NEXT CHAPTER: FEBRUARY 9, 1998. SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA. GIL GRISSOM.
SOUNDTRACK LISTING
Francis Lai. "Theme from Love Story." [Instrumental.]
Francis Lai. "Theme from Love Story" (Finale). [Instrumental.]
