I spit out my bagel and tried to call on some of my experience as a high school soccer player to knee it up and into my half-open bag. All I managed to do was knock it away, where it landed on edge and rolled under the couch. “I don’t need a personal escort,” I said. “But thanks.”
“No,” Niles said. He was coming down the stairs as he spoke. Niles was the kind of tall that meant he had to duck his head to get through doorways. He was also so rail-thin that he could’ve probably walked through a fence by turning sideways, too. He had big, expressive eyes and a shaved head. “You shouldn’t be walking home that late by yourself. You at least need something. Do you still have that pepper spray Mooney gave you?”
I felt like my shoulder and arms were going to disintegrate if I had to stand there holding my stuff any longer than necessary. “I know you guys mean well, but seriously. I don’t need a squad of over-protective, freakishly tall little brothers. I’ll be fine. I promise.”
Zack and Niles shared a disapproving look on my behalf.
I let myself out before they had time to argue more. As much as I appreciated their concern, it all only felt like a reminder of where I was. Thirty, still living in college-style housing, still trying to make a name for myself in my field, and still a student.
There was also the ever-present, ever-depressing thought that I was spending the twilight of my most datable years with my eyes glued to microscopes and my nose buried in books. I worried I’d wind up achieving all my goals only to find there was nobody who was still waiting around to share my life with.
But I did what I always did and shoved those concerns down to my core where they could fester away in the background.
I sat through my advanced hematology lecture while furiously scribbling notes. I crammed for a biomedical theory test in the brief break between classes, inhaled my lunch while watching an online class lecture on my phone, and finished the day off by falling down a small flight of stairs in front of an army of sorority sisters practicing some kind of cultish chant.
I rode the bus to what I liked to think of as an internship, but my graduate professors not-so-kindly called a “borderline illegal enterprise where I was more likely to catch a deadly pathogen than contribute to my thesis.” If my translation was correct, they didn’t approve. But most of them saw my particular field of interest with blood as an insult to the field. I wasn’t supposed to want to modify blood. It didn’t matter if it could help people, what mattered is that it simply wasn’t done.
At least some people didn’t share their belief, even if it did mean I had to resort to unpaid work with a woman nobody took seriously.
I let myself in the rickety fence in front of Anya Yuvinko’s house. It was nestled in a residential section of downtown on a pretty street. The black paint, crumbling stucco, and long-dead plants made it function more like a wart on an attractive girl’s nose.
I found Anya in her basement, like usual. She had several centrifuges spinning down vials of blood and she was hunched over a microscope.
Anya used to be a leading researcher relating to all things blood and hematology in Russia. Some sort of falling out had occurred, and she’d more or less fled to the states. Now her sole focus in life was finding out how to splice human blood with cat blood. She… really wanted cat ears. I wished that was a joke. Regardless of whether Anya had lost her mind, she had all the equipment I needed and none of the pretentiousness to stop me from doing my own work.
She was in her late forties with short blonde hair she cut choppily herself. She usually worked in bath robes, moo-moo’s, or whatever else she could find.
I set down a few cans of ravioli and instant noodles on the desk by the stairs when I came down. She never acknowledged the food I brought, but I also never got the impression she really left her house. Sometimes I wondered if she’d just starve to death if I didn’t bring her something to eat.
“You will extract plasma now,” Anya said in perfectly annunciated English. She had no hint of an accent, but she frequently struggled with grammar in ways that made her either difficult to understand or accidentally hilarious.
I got some of the menial tasks she needed help with while my mind picked over my own plans for the day.
If I had to describe my academic interests in layman's terms, I’d say I was basically obsessed with blood. Not in a creepy, I take baths in the stuff kind of way, either. My interest was because I felt like the healing potential of blood still hadn’t been unlocked. My dream was to find a way to make a sort of synthetic super-blood we could inject into ourselves to fight off infections and disease before they started. Anya was just one unconventional step I’d had to take in my pursuit of that goal. The other was the fact that I hadn’t so much as been on a date in at least five years.