black girl he’d ever asked out, if he was checking some kind of box off his list of new and exotic things he’d like to try, like the Korean food in front of us, which he had already given up on.
“Huh,” he said. “Sounds interesting.”
Maybe he’d expected something different. There were only five women in my lab of twenty-eight, and I was one of three black PhD candidates in the entire med school. I had told SoCal Surfer that I was getting my doctorate, but I hadn’t told him what I was getting it in because I didn’t want to scare him away. Neuroscience may have screamed “smart,” but it didn’t really scream “sexy.” Adding to that my blackness, maybe I was too much of an anomaly for him. He never called me back.
From then on, I told dates that my job was to get mice hooked on cocaine before taking it away from them.
Two in three asked the same question. “So do you just, like, have a ton of cocaine?” I never admitted that we’d switched from cocaine to Ensure. It was easier to get and sufficiently addictive for the mice. I relished the thrill of having something interesting and illicit to say to these men, most of whom I would sleep with once and then never see again. It made me feel powerful to see their names flash across my phone screen hours, days, weeks after they’d seen me naked, after they’d dug their fingernails into my back, sometimes drawing blood. Reading their texts, I liked to feel the marks they’d left. I felt like I could suspend them there, just names on my phone screen, but after a while, they stopped calling, moved on, and then I would feel powerful in their silence. At least for a little while. I wasn’t accustomed to power in relationships, power in sexuality. I had never been asked on a date in high school. Not once. I wasn’t cool enough, white enough, enough. In college, I had been shy and awkward, still molting the skin of a Christianity that insisted I save myself for marriage, that left me fearful of men and of my body. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.
“I’m pretty, right?” I once asked my mother. We were standing in front of the mirror while she put her makeup on for work. I don’t remember how old I was, only that I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup yet. I had to sneak it when my mother wasn’t around, but that wasn’t too hard to do. My mother worked all the time. She was never around.
“What kind of question is that?” she asked. She grabbed my arm and jerked me toward the mirror. “Look,” she said, and at first I thought she was angry at me. I tried to look away, but every time my eyes fell, my mother would jerk me to attention once more. She jerked me so many times I thought my arm would come loose from the socket.
“Look at what God made. Look at what I made,” she said in Twi.
We stared at ourselves in the mirror for a long time. We stared until my mother’s work alarm went off, the one that told her it was time to leave one job in order to get to the other. She finished putting her lipstick on, kissed her reflection in the mirror, and rushed off. I kept staring at myself after she left, kissing my own reflection back.
* * *
—
I watched my mice groggily spring back to life, recovering from the anesthesia and woozy from the painkillers I’d given them. I’d injected a virus into the nucleus accumbens and implanted a lens in their brains so that I could see their neurons firing as I ran my experiments. I sometimes wondered if they noticed the added weight they carried on their heads, but I tried not to think thoughts like that, tried not to humanize them, because I worried it would make it harder for me to do my work. I cleaned up my station and went to my office to try to do some writing. I was supposed to be working toward a paper, presumably my last before graduating. The hardest part, putting the figures together, usually only took me a few weeks or so, but I had been twiddling my thumbs, dragging things out. Running my experiments over and