on duty tonight; I was the one saddled with the walkie-talkie. It lay on the table beside me, and every time it made a clicking sound, I closed my eyes and wished it back to silence. So far, this tactic seemed to be working.
“Seriously,” Gretchen said. “None of this crap we’re studying now has anything to do with being a doctor.” She waved off the chicken and took another gulp of coffee. It was nine o’clock on a Wednesday night, but she was on her second cup from the vending machine downstairs. Her favorite bar had Ladies’ Night on Wednesdays—after we finished, she would go out. “You can forget all of this after the MCAT,” she said. “Just go bulimic, you know? Stuff your brain. Take the test. Purge. Repeat.”
I tried to look reassured so she would quit talking. I appreciated her studying with me, since it was charity, really; she was already a chapter ahead of me in the book. But I couldn’t read and listen to her at the same time. The R/S system also has no fixed relation to the D/L system. For example, the side-chain one of serine contains a hydroxy group, -OH. I turned to the glossary in the back of the book. This was English. This was my native language. There was no reason I couldn’t understand. I was a little warm. I took off my sweater. I looked back at the book. Gretchen wrote something in her notebook. She turned another page.
“Can we go over this again?” I leaned toward her. “I don’t even really understand what chiral molecules are.”
She nodded and drank more coffee. “Chirals aren’t a big deal,” she said. “The book makes it confusing. They’re just, like, mirror opposites.” She put her coffee down and pressed her hands against each other, extending both pinkies. “You just have to be able to, you know, picture what the molecule looks like and flip it around. Like imagine what it would look like in a mirror.” She smiled and wiggled her fingers. Her fingernails were painted a pale and sparkly pink.
That was it, I thought. That was what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t flip molecules around in my head. The atoms drifted apart on the first rotation, and I lost track of what and where they were. I looked back at my book so she wouldn’t see my face. I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me.
“So what are you doing this weekend?”
“This,” I said. I didn’t look up.
“Oh. Well.” She made an attempt to sound pleasantly surprised. “Since you’ll be in anyway…cover for me Saturday? I’ll trade you any weekday you have.”
“I can’t,” I said.
I could feel her looking at me, waiting. I always covered for her when she asked.
“I’m house-sitting.”
“Oh. Cool. For a professor or something?”
I shook my head. She waited again.
“For Jimmy Liff,” I said.
Gretchen’s surprised expression contained so many circles, her round blue eyes, her O-shaped mouth, the doll-like splotches of pink on her cheeks.
“How do you even know him?”
“He works here. He’s a security monitor.”
“I know that.” She raised her eyebrows. “You two just don’t seem like you would be friends.”
I played dumb, but I knew what she meant. Jimmy Liff was a sixth-year sociology student who took his position in dorm security a little too seriously. His dedication to enforcing rules was a little surprising because of the way he looked: His head was shaved. He wore tight white T-shirts, even in the winter. Both his well-muscled arms were tattooed—a snapping crocodile on the left, a series of Chinese characters on the right. His nose was pierced with a silver, bolt-shaped object that looked both heavy and painful. But Jimmy Liff was no anarchist, no rebel. He wrote people up for music turned ever so slightly too loud. He was ruthless with early morning runners who forgot to bring along their IDs. And around Halloween, during a fire drill, he’d keyed open a room and found a small marijuana plant on someone’s windowsill. As soon as the alarms stopped blaring, he’d called the police. There was some rebellion. Someone fearless had painted “FASCIST PRICK” on the door of Jimmy’s orange MINI Cooper as it sat in the employee section of the dorm parking lot.
“He creeps me out.” Gretchen wrinkled her nose. “Why are you doing it? Why does he need a house-sitter?”
“He’s leaving town for the weekend. I guess he has high-maintenance plants.”