Lisa
At my behest, the Porsche accelerated like a damn dream. Jennie was directing me north through the city.
She sat next to me, sunglasses on and a smile hovering on those lovely lips as we cruised. A near perfect Sunday in my estimation.
"Take the next left," she said, nodding toward the traffic light.
The color of South Beach and the bustle of downtown Miami were behind us. Buildings here were less concerned with aesthetics and more concerned with function and durability. Mom and pop convenience stores edged into working-class neighborhoods. Commercial buildings squatted on skinny canals.
"Here," she said, pointing at a long, low building painted bright white.
DIY AHA, the sign read.
I slid into one of the last remaining parking spaces in the lot next to the building.
"Exactly where have you brought me?" I asked, cutting the engine. "Also, I want this car."
"You'll see, and you may not have it," she said, grinning as she climbed out.
"I could steal it," I mused.
She snatched the keys from my hand. "And I could have you arrested."
"What good would that do either one of us? Maybe we could work out a trade?"
She tilted her head haughtily.
The cool queen surveying her subject.
"What kind of trade?"
"Miles for orgasms?" I suggested.
"Hold that thought," she said with a wink, opening the steel door. "Oh, and no pictures. No documenting the next two hours."
"You make doing my job very difficult," I complained.
"Back at you, Manoban."
Intrigued, I followed her inside.
Thoughts of orgasms evaporated from my mind immediately at the squeals of pre-teen girls occupying a large lab-like classroom. There were a dozen of them in white lab coats and goggles. There didn't seem to be nearly enough adults present to contain the unstable, excited energy.
"Jennie!" Girls in blue latex gloves waved in delight.
"Hey, ladies! I hope you don't mind, but I brought a lab partner today. This is Lisa."
"Hi, Lisa," fifteen girls chorused before dissolving into giggles.
"Glad you could come." A woman in a tie-dye lab coat approached. Her safety glasses were on top of her head acting as a headband to her short bushy gray hair. She was wearing Converse sneakers and a wiener dog t-shirt.
"Me, too," Jennie grinned. "Lisa, this is Esther. She's a biochemist and runs things here at DIY AHA. Esther, this is my friend Lisa."
She stumbled a bit over "friend." I was selfishly glad she didn't have an easy label for our relationship.
"A pleasure," I said, shaking Esther's proffered hand.
"I don't suppose there's time for me to take a peek at the data?" Jennie asked her.
"Nope," Esther said cheerfully. "It'll keep." She turned her attention to me. "Let's get you suited up before these girls eat you alive."
--
"And what's the most important rule at AHA?" Jennie asked from the front of the learning lab. She was wearing a white lab coat and safety glasses. Her hair was pulled back in a short tail. Once again, I found the look to be discomfortingly alluring.
"Follow all safety protocols," a new generation of budding scientists chorused back at her.
"Good," she said. "Because we're going to make fire."
The girls oohed.
I wondered what kind of liability insurance Jennie had and if the policy had a rider concerning twelve-year-olds and pyrotechnics.
I watched from a safe distance as Jennie explained step-by-step what she was doing as she poured a small amount of ethanol from a beaker into an empty water cooler jug. She swirled the liquid around and around, coating the inside of the jug.
"Who knows what combustion is?" she asked.
About half the hands in the room shot into the air.
Jennie beamed at her attentive students. "Combustion is an ignition. A rapid chemical combination that produces heat and light. Once it starts, you can't stop it until it flames out."
Her gaze flitted to me and then away again, and I wondered if she thought that what we had was as simple as a chemical reaction.
The energy in the room was reaching a fevered pitch.
Jennie, a showman, held the bottle upside down. The girls gasped with enthusiasm when not a drop of liquid appeared.
"I've just created ethanol vapor. Turned a liquid into a gas. Now, I'm going to light it."
We all watched raptly as she lit a long, thin taper with a lighter. "Arm's length," she said.
"Arm's length," we repeated.
With another grin, she held the taper to the mouth of the bottle, and everyone in the room except for Jennie jumped when chemical flames in blues and oranges shot out and up. It burned fast and bright for a second or two and then vanished.
There was controlled pandemonium in the room. It was a much classier version of the fart lighting experiment my brother and I had performed once or twice in our backyard, and I saw from some of the faces of the parents in the room—mostly fathers—that they were reliving their own gaseous youths.
"But wait," Jennie said, holding up a hand. "The bottle isn't empty anymore."
As she held it upside down, the class watched in rapt fascination as a clear liquid dribbled into the beaker.
"We've made water from fire," she announced.
I could hear every girl in the room decide to become a scientist.
"Now it's your turn," she said, gesturing at the lab tables. "Set up your slow-motion cameras first so you can capture the reactions. Esther, Lala, and I will assist you one table at a time starting from the back."
Jennie claimed her first table and struck up a conversation with her new, young lab partners. Esther and Lala, a six-foot-tall version of Salma Hayek with a PhD in chemistry, did the same.
I loved it. I itched to document the lab, the experiment, the girls. Jennie.
She was resplendent. There was nothing not to be loved.
This was the Jennie Kim that the world needed to see. And she was stubbornly refusing to be revealed.
"Jasmine, hand the beaker to Atlas. Don't throw it." The tall, reedy woman clutching an e-reader sighed next to me. She rolled her eyes at me. "Kids."
"They appear to be having a good time," I observed. I had nieces and nephews, nearly a dozen of them. I was used to kid-related chaos.
"Isn't this the best thing ever? A science club for girls," she continued. "I'm Amal, by the way."
"Lisa," I said. "This is my first time here."
"Oh, your girl will love it. They make science so much fun here. The girls have a blast. And when they turn sixteen, they can sign up to use the lab space for their own experiments."
"Really?" I asked, intrigued. Damn Jennie and her no-publicity decree. This was public relations gold.
"Jasmine's cousin was with AHA for three years," Amal continued. "Now she's at CalTech in the biological engineering program. It's a great introduction outside the classroom. The girls get to work with real scientists in a real lab. With programs like this, they're helping to triple the number of women in STEM fields by 2030."
It was ingenious and, if I had to guess, entirely Jennie's idea.
The deeper I dug, the more attractive she became to me. I was used to a brief, intense attraction to a woman. But it always burned itself out. Uncomplicated. Easy.
Jennie was neither of those things.
I considered her as she leaned over the shoulders of two young scientists. She was beautiful. Yes, in the brains and breeding areas, of course she was attractive. But there was something magnetic about her here. She was nearly giddy, and the girls fed off that excitement.
In the moment, I was sure of two things. One, I was not done with Jennie Kim, and two, it would not end well.
"Which one is yours?" Amal asked, scanning the room.
"The tall brunette with the dizzying intellect," I said, pointing at Jennie.
"Ah. Jennie's girlfriend," Amal nodded approvingly. "I'm very straight—married to a man and all—but I can appreciate your excellent taste. She's some kind of biochemist, right?"
"Something like that," I hedged. Jennie's secret identity was that of a Sunday scientist. Yes, I definitely wasn't even close to being done with this woman.
"Okay, gang," Jennie said, returning to the front of the lab. "Now, let's work on documenting our findings."
Half an hour later, as the future of science filed out of the room, I found the woman who consumed most of my brain power standing before me.
"What did you think?" she asked.
"I think you should have let me take pictures."
"Not everything should be consumed by the public. It's nothing personal."
"On the contrary, it's very personal," I countered. "This is the real you. The one the world would have a hard time tearing down. The one the American public can get behind and fork over their hard-earned dollars for a piece of your dream."
"These girls didn't sign up for that kind of exposure," she said. "I'm here because they're here. Not the other way around."
"Right," I said. "Because you're Jennie the biochemist."
She bit her lip. "I know I can't keep it secret forever and some of the parents have figured it out. But for now, it works better this way."
"You own this place, don't you?" I asked, picking up a pipette.
She nodded. "DIY labs are the wave of the future. They can be more flexible with their protocols than a private lab or one funded by government grants. They can partner with similar labs across the country and tackle massive data sets and—I'm geeking out on you," she said, grinning self-consciously.
"If everyone could see you like this now, they'd fall head over heels for you," I said, running my fingers over the buttons of her lab coat.
"Not everyone," she said, giving me a pointed look.
"Everyone," I reiterated.
"Last Mini Marie Curie is out the door," Esther said, ducking her head back into the room. "You ready for some boring ol' data?"
"Give it to me!" Jennie made grabby hands like a kid on Christmas morning.
"Lala, you good with clean up?" Esther called over her shoulder.
Lala gave the thumbs up and blew a bubble with her gum.
We followed Esther across the hall to the second lab. She flipped on the overhead lights and moved to a workstation with two desktop computers. A fat stack of papers sat neatly next to a mousepad picturing the periodic table. It said, I use this periodically.
Jennie pounced on the report the way a cat attacked a laser pointer.
She pawed through the papers, skimming as she went. Her lips moved as she absorbed what was on the pages.
Esther plopped down on a wheeled stool and waited, a smug smile tugging at the corners of her lips.
"It's there," Jennie said, not looking up from the data.
"It's there," Esther agreed, spinning around to pull up some gobbledygook on one of the computer monitors.
Still clutching the papers, Jennie peered over Esther's shoulder.
"We're geniuses," Jennie breathed.
"Motherfucking geniuses."
I cleared my throat. "Can a layperson ask what's there?" I asked.
Jennie spun back around, a sparkle in her eyes. They were more lighter than darker under the fluorescent lab lights.
"Enzymes," she said.
"I'm afraid I'm going to need more than that."
She practically skipped over to a whiteboard and gleefully grabbed a marker, sketching in quick, confident lines.
"Okay, so when someone has a significant cardiac event, we can measure high levels of certain enzymes in their blood that indicate damage to the heart muscles. What Esther and I and a few teams in similar labs around the country have been working on is finding indicators that can predict a cardiac event."
"And you found one?" I was intrigued by both the hypothesis and Jennie's excitement about it. Her drawing was terrible, but her passion was enthralling.
She beamed. "We found a few. There are currently tests that identify an indication of inflammation, the high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, for example. But we found a specific enzyme that has consistently performed as a measurable predictor of a future significant cardiac event."
"How far in advance have you been able to predict it?"
She grinned, and I felt a warm glow of desire settle in my chest.
"Six months," Esther interjected proudly.
"Six months is adequate time for intervention. For diet and exercise and lifestyle changes. For clots and blockages to be identified and treated. This blood test could be the biggest preventative factor in cardiac medicine in almost a decade," Jennie said. "Best of all, we can do it inexpensively. This could become part of the complete blood panel at wellness checks. Doctors offices could require it for high school and college athlete physicals. We're losing more and more kids to unknown cardiac defects. This could—"
"Save lives," I filled in.
I hadn't known Jennie Kim long. I didn't know her nearly well enough for my liking. But I couldn't think of another person I'd been prouder of in my entire life.
"Exactly," she said. Her eyes danced.
"And you're not going to let me use this either are you?" I sighed.
She crossed to me and playfully hooked her fingers in the waistband of my pants. "Nope."
"This could really push public opinion in your favor," I reminded her.
"Lisa, this is so much bigger than public opinion. This is bigger than Flawless and the IPO. This is entirely separate. I don't want to start cross-pollinating CEO me with Lab Rat me. This is the one thing that I have that is entirely mine. I'm not sharing it with a few million social media followers."
I understood. I didn't love it. But I understood.
"This is impressive," I said, watching Esther scroll through spreadsheets of meaningless data.
"We're just getting started," Jennie said.
Yes. We were.