© Christina Hadfield
SOPHOMORE YEAR
If only her coworkers had a shred of common sense to them, she wouldn’t be bustling around all the time in a bitter mood. But as it was, she had asked that blasted man in room 314 for buffer nearly two hours ago, and it wasn’t that she needed it immediately, but she wanted to get on with her experiment and she hated when her grad students just stood around twiddling their thumbs.
It was the move. In her old office, at home and comfortable in the chemistry building, she knew where everything was, and she had keys to every supply closet around. But the biology building, the blasted biology department that lived off an unwritten code of ethics, where doors that should have been locked weren’t and those that were, no one had a key for, and undergrads, blasted undergrads, were permitted to do lab work unsupervised, also moving around things and losing things and contaminating things.
Dr. Morgan flew down the hall in a fury. She didn’t know the man’s name, but she knew his face, and if she ran into him now, she’d wring his neck. She vowed that as soon as she had that buffer, she’d lock it up in her office because if she ever had to go on a blasted scavenger hunt again—
There were students in the hall, but they shoved back out of the woman’s way, noting the fury in her eyes. She saw the professor just down the hall, walking away from her. He was a shorter, more charismatic man who’d rather spend his time conversing than working—like Dr. Greenwood, Dr. Morgan thought a bit bitterly. He was with a student, not that Dr. Morgan paid that any mind.
“Hey!” she snarled.
The man paused and turned, taking in her appearance, and he had the gall to grin, as if they were buddies. “Ahh, Dr. Morgan, fantastic seeing you!” he declared, seemingly oblivious to the fact he was ignoring her request in favor of frivolous conversation with students.
She approached him, fully prepared to demand to know the location of the buffer, but he cut her off.
“Dr. Morgan, we were just discussing your research work!” he continued. “It seems my research assistant here has taken quite the liking to your work. I do hope you won’t steal her away from me!”
Dr. Morgan’s eyes snapped to the student standing beside the man, and she paled, if only slightly.
“Hello, Dr. Morgan,” Tess answered a bit meekly.
Of course it was Miss Stanford, the only person on all of campus Dr. Morgan couldn’t seem to avoid no matter how hard she tried.
“You need the buffer solution,” Tess stated a more confidently. “Dr. Logan was telling me about it. I’m sorry I distracted him. I wanted to show him the results of my experiment.”
“It’s looking fabulous too,” the man—Dr. Logan—added. “I got so excited when I saw the gel, I started going on about possible next steps and well, time flies when you’re having fun. I need to run over to the medical campus to review some things and grab a couple of notes—”
“The buffer, Dr. Logan,” Dr. Morgan declared with a frill of distaste. To the man’s credit, he did seem a bit embarrassed.
“I can get it for you,” Tess spoke up, which was an even more horrid suggestion.
“It’s not just a standard stock solution—” Dr. Morgan quickly tried to explain, but the gall when Dr. Logan interrupted her again.
“Tess here is very smart and chemically literate,” Dr. Logan stated proudly. “She’s the best on my team and only an undergrad… fantastic! The mix recipe is on my desk in lab, Tess, I’m sure you can work out the ratios.”
“Of course,” Tess answered with a nod.
“Alright, I’ll catch you tomorrow then,” Dr. Logan told his student, then he scurried away, calling back over his shoulder, “So very good to see you again, Dr. Morgan!”
Tess looked at Dr. Morgan, that bashful, yet slightly cocky smirk to her lips that Dr. Morgan couldn’t quite decide if she despised or found a bit alluring.
“Well, shall you come supervise, or do you trust me enough to just bring it to your office?” Tess questioned.
“Trust you!?” Dr. Morgan scoffed. “Of course I’m supervising. Get on with it!”
“As I figured,” Tess replied, and she didn’t at all seem put out by that.
Begrudgingly, Dr. Morgan admitted that her graduate students could learn a thing or two from Tess. They shouldn’t cower under her watchful eye; it was simply that her work required the absolute highest accuracy.
Tess led Dr. Morgan back to a lab space that she honestly didn’t know existed. The biology building was such a maze. She watched Tess from the side as she worked, as she did all her grad students, and she expected the girl to shake and second guess herself and inevitably spill something, as that seemed to happen daily in her own lab. But Tess wasn’t like that at all.
The girl spoke out loud every step, every measurement, and every conversion she did, as if she knew Dr. Morgan would want to hear and double check her calculations. She was completely calm, took her time and didn’t rush. And when Dr. Morgan rudely corrected a simple multiplication error, Tess didn’t start crying, rather, she laughed!
“I never was good at my eights,” Tess chuckled.
Something felt… different about Tess. Dr. Morgan found she couldn’t quite place the feeling and it made her outrageously angry that she might… not exactly mind the girl. But that was absurd! She was just a stupid undergrad!
When Tess finished the buffer, Dr. Morgan snatched it from her hands, grumbling about courtesy and time management, and then she left without so much as a simple thank you, hurrying back to the safety of her own lab.
Two days later, Tess was back at Dr. Morgan’s office. Her backpack was slung up on her shoulder and she was carrying a binder full of papers. At first, she thought the office door was shut, but as she neared, she realized it was actually open, just a crack. Without preamble, Tess shoved open the door and crashed into the office. Dr. Morgan tensed at the surprise interruption, but before she could compose herself enough to retort, Tess flung herself down on the couch and pulled a sandwich out of her backpack.
“What are you doing?” Dr. Morgan questioned, looking at Tess as if she couldn’t possibly comprehend the girl.
“I’m eating lunch,” Tess answered. “I have class soon. There’s not enough time to go all the way back to the dorm, but there’s too much time to just loiter in the halls. I usually sit in the front lounge, but it was absolutely packed today. I just needed a place to sit.”
“And you chose my office?”
“You have an entire sofa which you aren’t even using,” Tess replied, as if it were the simplest thing in the entire world.
“Well I’m busy, working, and you’re interrupting me.”
“Don’t mind me.” Tess focused on her sandwich, opening up her binder and flipping through her homework papers, purposefully ignoring Dr. Morgan.
“Get out of my office,” Dr. Morgan declared.
“No.”
Dr. Morgan was stunned to silence, but only for a moment. “What do you mean, no?” she snapped.
“I mean, I’m quite alright staying here, thank you,” Tess answered with a nod.
The older woman worked her jawed angerly, but after a moment she just turned back to her work, though bitterly. She was grumbly but needed to finish several things by the end of the day, and she didn’t have time to be arguing. They both sat and worked in silence, and for a while, it seemed there weren’t going to be any issues.
But then, quite suddenly, Dr. Morgan slammed her fist down on her desk and let out an annoyed huff. “Must you chew so loudly!?” she snapped.
Tess stilled her chewing, roughly swallowing the bite in her mouth. “I don’t chew loudly,” she defended. “I bet you chew the exact same as I do.”
“What does that mean?”
“I guess I’ll have to bring you lunch sometime,” Tess answered with a shrug, “so we can test my hypothesis.”
“I don’t have lunch with students,” Dr. Morgan answered bitterly.
“Not even for science?”
“How ridiculous of you to suggest that something so frivolous is science!”
Tess smiled and Dr. Morgan realized, shocked and bewildered, that the girl was… teasing her, riling her up for entertainment. It was disgusting. Dr. Morgan’s lip curled in contempt. She turned away with another huff and Tess went back to her sandwich. After a moment though, Dr. Morgan simply couldn’t stand the girl’s presence any longer. She stood, exasperatedly, and demanded Tess leave.
“This is ridiculous!” she huffed. “You can’t just invite yourself into a professor’s office and stay as long as you’d like.”
“You didn’t kick me out,” Tess answered, making no move to leave.
“I—I told you multiple times to leave!” Dr. Morgan protested. She was mad at herself for letting the girl get under her skin, causing her to stutter. You couldn’t very well be intimidating while stuttering!
Tess also noted that Dr. Morgan seemed a bit flustered, and she found that very entertaining.
“Yes, so you said,” Tess commented, “but it’s not like your actions are backing up your words.”
“What are you implying?”
“I mean, kick me out if you want me to leave. And I do mean literally. Just telling me to leave clearly isn’t going to work.”
“You’re insufferable!” Dr. Morgan snapped.
“Your threats are empty,” Tess shot back. “You have everyone cowering around you, but I’m starting to figure you out. You’re a lot of bark but very little bite, and I happen to not mind barking.”
Dr. Morgan’s anger was growing, though it was mainly out of frustration and the fear of just how accurate Tess might be.
“Leave!” she demanded, doing everything in her power to sound threatening. She pointed towards the door emphatically. “Now!”
Tess, very leisurely, picked up her backpack and stood. “I’m heading out,” she stated dismissively. “Not because you said so, but because my class is starting soon.” As she slipped out the door past Dr. Morgan, she turned back with a smirk—that same infuriating smirk. “See you tomorrow, Dr. Morgan,” she said.
“See me—wait!” Dr. Morgan shouted, but it didn’t matter because Tess was already gone.
Dr. Morgan was seething. There was hardly a day that went by that she wasn’t seething, especially since they stuck her in the horrid, horrid, biology building. She was especially hard on two of her graduate students, who messed up a high school level reaction, and from there she snapped at everyone she passed.
The department meetings happened to fall on the same day, which with chemistry was mildly tolerable, but the biology department meeting! The chair had the audacity to suggest she partner with a biology professor to finalize the bio-chem core. The only enjoyment she found from that entire meeting was that every bio professor the chair asked to partner cowered back and muttered out some feeble excuse as to why they couldn’t, until Dr. Kemper snapped and declared, “She doesn’t want a partner in the first place, so why should we waste our time pretending to help?”
Yes, Dr. Morgan thought, some of the biology professors were finally starting to understand how she worked. That was why she missed the chem department. They knew her, they didn’t question her.
After the meeting, she overheard the chair ranting to several other professors, and it made her smirk, if only slightly. Dr. Marlow was staring at her though, so she snapped at the other woman, and she was pretty sure she heard Dr. Kemper cursing under her breath.
There seemed to be a plethora of students in the hall that day, and she yelled at every single one of them about something. They practically ran from her, and there were whispers going around to avoid the biology building at all costs; Dr. Morgan was in a real bitter mood.
Dr. Morgan’s bad mood only grew when she saw that one student, Tess Stanford, who was so good at pushing buttons, and that smirk, that unbearable smirk! Dr. Morgan clenched her fists as if ready to give the girl a real piece of her mind, more so than she had ever done before, but as she approached the students from behind, she overheard their conversation.
There were two girls with Tess, and they were whining about their intro chem grades, so they were undoubtedly freshmen.
“I wish you were a chem lab TA instead of a bio TA, because I’d bet you’d make lab actually bearable,” the one girl muttered out. “My friend got kicked out of lab last week because she accidently broke an empty beaker. The whole class begged our TA to just clean it up and not say anything, but he was emphatic about rules and kicked her out! Like, yes, I understand working for Dr. Morgan would be a nightmare, but you surely wouldn’t have been so impossible!”
“I can’t stand Dr. Morgan!” the other girl gasped out. “Yes, lab is a righteous nightmare, but it’s not even the class, it’s just her as a person! She’s the most awful person in the whole world! God forbid you even try to get to class in this building, because she’s always lurking, waiting to tell you how much of a disappointment you are and snap at you about nothing. But it really wears and beats a person down! She’s just… nasty!”
“I wish they’d just fire her,” the other girl huffed. “No one, and I do really mean no one, likes her at all. Why bother keeping her around?”
Dr. Morgan clenched her fists and moved to jump out in front of them, prepared to make true exactly everything they just said about her, but before she could, Tess said something that made her freeze in place.
“Dr. Morgan isn’t a bad person,” Tess corrected softly. “In fact, she’s actually quite the lovely person. Maybe if you weren’t always talking bad about her behind her back, she’d be nicer to you.”
“I can’t believe you’re standing up for her.”
“I’m not condoning or excusing all of her behavior… I’m just saying that she isn’t all bad, not as bad as everyone is always making her out to be. She has her bad moments, just like we all do. Her talking down to someone is very similar to you talking bad about her. We all have our moments… but no one is all bad.”
The freshman seemed to contemplate what Tess said before sighing. “You’re right, I shouldn’t be bad mouthing people behind their backs,” she finally admitted. “I can’t say my opinion of her is going to change, especially since she’s never done anything to warrant that I think differently… but I’ll be more careful about what I say.”
Dr. Morgan slunk back into the shadows of the hall. Why would Tess defend her like that? Yes, Tess was perhaps a bit more daring than her peers and more difficult to intimidate, but that didn’t mean Dr. Morgan treated her any differently than she did the entire student body. She treated Tess just as badly as she treated everyone else. Tess had no reason to say something so, so positive! And what was worse, Dr. Morgan couldn’t decide if she appreciated Tess’s comments, or if she despised the girl even more for not cowering away like everyone else did.
Dr. Morgan’s relationship with Dr. Greenwood was different and quite complex. They met, for the first time, years ago, back when they were both undergrads in college themselves. They didn’t go to the same college, that wasn’t how they met. Instead, they met at a pride rally, back in ’95, and spent the majority of an evening furiously making out in a bar bathroom. That evening sparked a very passionate, though short-lived romance, full of sex, alcohol, and the occasional narcotic.
Their relationship, however, could never have worked long term. Dr. Morgan, even in her younger years, was emotionally hardened and emotionally unavailable, and Dr. Greenwood tended to love with her heart on her sleeve, one of her favorite pastimes being talking about her emotions. They broke off their engagement with little bitterness, then went their separate ways and lived their own separate lives. That is until they ran into each other on campus fifteen years later and realized they both worked for the same university.
In the time they were apart, while Dr. Greenwood had fallen in love and maintained a steady partner, Dr. Morgan remained a lone wolf. She was content meeting strangers at bars in a fury of impatient hands and longing for companionship for only the night, leaving before the sun rose, before things could get complicated. She hadn’t dated anyone since Dr. Greenwood, hadn’t wanted to date anyone. When they reunited, they met for coffee and caught up, both lying when they said they were entirely happy.
They worked better as friends, that much they both agreed. Their personalities contrasted in almost all regards, but it made for engaging discussion that they both enjoyed. Dr. Morgan was very literal, a glass half empty type, who didn’t much believe in the point of being nice to everyone for no reason. She ruled by the laws of the natural world and scientific evidence, didn’t have time for feelings and philosophy. Dr. Greenwood, on the other hand, loved a good metaphor, saw her glass as half full, and based almost all her decisions off how she felt in the moment. She believed in helping everyone and putting others before herself. She was also very, very convinced there was a ghost living in her flat, which Dr. Morgan scoffed at, but she made Dr. Morgan come over and help her burn sage, listening to Dr. Morgan grumble about the ‘lack of scientific validity’ the entire time.
They were similar in some regards though. They were both entirely absorbed in their work. Dr. Morgan spent her days laboring over lab work, cursing out graduate students for sloppy details, and drafting up papers. Dr. Greenwood also drafted up papers, spent time reading and re-reading the classics, and spent so much time socializing with her coworkers, debating literature, that she was always running, at minimum, five minutes late.
Before last summer, they saw each other when they could. Dr. Greenwood was always the type to, whenever they bumped into each other on campus, go, “Oh, Margaret, we’ve just got to have coffee soon and catch up! We haven’t seen each other in ages!” But then she’d never be heard of again for weeks. Dr. Morgan was the type, who, after getting tired of Dr. Greenwood’s feeble planning skills, would simply send a text that Dr. Greenwood better be home, and then five minutes later she’d be knocking on the door. It always seemed to work out.
Summer changed a lot about their friendship, however. Infrequent, casual meet ups turned into near daily events, Dr. Greenwood sobbing hysterically into Dr. Morgan’s arms. They could never quite figure out why her partner just up and left, and Dr. Morgan was sure to tell her friend that she was amazing and had done everything right, but deep down, Dr. Morgan had a hunch. And that hunch was the same reason she remained single.
They were both two women in love with their work, and when one loved academics, there’s little room left to love anything—or anyone—else.
Since summer, the initial agony of heartbreak had mostly died off, but by then, they were both too entirely used to each other’s company. They continued meeting regularly, lounging at one or the other’s house, sipping wine and watching movies or playing cards, sometimes just gossiping.
On one particular night, they were at Dr. Greenwood’s flat. The English professor had downed far more wine than the chemistry professor and was sprawled uncomfortably across the couch. Nearly an hour ago Dr. Morgan slipped from the sofa and took up residence in a chair because she was tired of getting kicked. And now, Dr. Greenwood was practically upside down.
“So, you see, that’s why I was so floored when he suggested in class that Oscar Wilde was straight! I mean, we read an entire gay novel from him!” Dr. Greenwood declared. Her head was back, sitting so tilted she was making a complete spectacle of herself. Across from her, Dr. Morgan sat primly, staring down into her wine, hardly listening.
When Dr. Morgan didn’t so much as laugh at how absurd her story was, Dr. Greenwood sat up and looked to her friend. “What’s gotten into you lately?” she asked, reaching out so that she kicked at Dr. Morgan’s knee. “What’s on your mind?”
“What? Oh, nothing,” Dr. Morgan muttered, forcing herself to relax back into the chair slightly. “That was, yes, quite absurd, what you said.”
“No, there’s definitely something on your mind. Tell me,” Dr. Greenwood demanded.
“It’s nothing, really.”
“Spill.”
“It’s just… well I have a problem.”
“Okay, explain.”
“It’s a problem with a student,” Dr. Morgan admitted.
“Yes, you always have problems with students,” Dr. Greenwood commented, then she laughed when Dr. Morgan shot a glare her direction. “I’m sorry, I know, they’re all incompetent and never listen. Which of your Ph.D. students fumbled the ball this time?”
“It’s not one of my grad students… she’s an undergrad.”
“Oh?” Dr. Greenwood gasped, sitting up even fuller, suddenly much more invested. “Don’t tell me something crazy happened in the intro lab.”
“No, I—she’s not in any of my classes or my lab, and well, that’s mostly the problem. She has absolutely no reason to engage with me, and yet… I find I can’t escape her.”
Dr. Greenwood was silent for a moment while she processed this information. “So she is… an undergrad… who is simply a student but with no current direct relation to you, and she, what, keeps trying to talk to you?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Greenwood burst out laughing. “You know, the average person is friendly and likes to conversate.”
“But not with me!” Dr. Morgan practically barked. “I have spent years perfecting my reputation and image on campus so as to avoid all frivolous wastes of time. And everyone up to this point has listened and learned quite well, but this student, she just isn’t getting the message!”
“You aren’t as heartless as you pretend to be. Perhaps she’s just more observant than others and noticed it’s all a façade.”
“It isn’t a façade, it’s who I am.”
“Who you like to be to everyone you encounter, except to me, because I knew you before all that. This student, what does she talk to you about?”
“She’s tried to bring up my research, of course, but it’s less what she talks about and more how she just keeps invading every aspect of my working life.”
“What’s happened?”
“She barged into my office the other day!” Dr. Morgan exclaimed. “Even when I told her she was not to come in, she came right in, sat down on my couch, and started eating lunch as if it were something she did every day! And no matter what I said, she just wouldn’t leave!”
“Maybe she just needed a place to sit,” Dr. Greenwood suggested. “You know the lounges get overly packed around lunch time. And maybe the crowds get to her. Maybe your office was just more peaceful, and it’s not like you were using the couch for anything, surely.”
“The point is she just invaded, uninvited, and didn’t seem to care!”
“I think you’re just upset that your scare tactics aren’t working so well on her.”
“It isn’t just that,” Dr. Morgan muttered. “She… well I overheard her in the hall the other day, and she said something about me.”
“Oh, a new insult?” Dr. Greenwood said with a playful smirk.
“No. She was with a couple of freshmen who were really just going off on me.”
“As they do,” Dr. Greenwood commented, nodding, and she took another drink of her wine.
“And she… defended me. She stood up for me against what they were saying. She said that I wasn’t a bad person, that I was, actually, a good person. And she told them they oughtn’t talk bad about someone behind their back.”
Dr. Greenwood observed how confused Dr. Morgan seemed to be, and how she must have been toiling over this information for quite some time. Slowly, she leaned forward and rested her hand on Dr. Morgan’s fidgeting knee.
“Margaret, dear, she’s right. All those things she said? Entirely true.”
“But I’ve been nothing but horrid to her,” Dr. Morgan muttered. “I’ve treated her just as badly as I treat everyone else, never treated her any differently, never gave her reason to believe I was better than all that. Why would she defend someone who’s treated her so awfully?”
“It’s a bit perplexing,” Dr. Greenwood answered. “Maybe that’s something you’ll just have to ask her yourself.”
“I would never!” Dr. Morgan immediately snapped.
“No, I didn’t think you would. Doesn’t mean I’m not right, though.”
It wasn’t that Tess had intended for such a thing to happen. They were simply running a crystal purification in orgo lab, just a general, average, run of the mill lab. They were required to work alone and not ask questions, just like in the intro chem lab, and so Tess was just minding her own business, following the procedure best she could, hoping she wasn’t messing up.
She was quite happy when things precipitated out of solution, only because several students hadn’t managed any product, and their grade was directly dependent on how much product their reaction produced. She collected the crystals into a little vial for next week, and raised her hand, as she needed the TA to check off that she had indeed gotten product. She didn’t expect the TA to gasp at her vial, didn’t expect the TA to exclaim that she had beautiful crystals, possibly a perfect purification that the chem TA’s only dreamed of being able to complete. She didn’t dream that the TA would call all her classmates over to look at her perfect crystals. And she especially didn’t expect for the TA to run out of the room with her crystals, clamoring on about needing to show the lab coordinator.
“Dang,” Kai muttered from her adjacent lab station. “What did you do?”
Tess shrugged. “I just followed the procedure. I… I mean it’s pretty cool they came out so well, but I don’t even know if I could replicate that.”
“Sounds like you’re going to be the talk of the chem department this week,” another student commented.
A day later, Dr. Morgan was back in the chem building, inspecting some lab equipment that a student claimed was faulty.
“Nothing wrong with this,” she muttered under her breath, “you’re just an idiot who can’t use a thermometer correctly.”
“Dr. Morgan!”
She stood and spun to face the door, the lab coordinator for the organic lab standing in the doorway. She had to admit that out of all her coworkers, she tolerated him the best. They exchanged pleasantries, as they hadn’t a chance to simply talk for a while, and she politely answered his questions about what it was like having an office and lab in the biology building.
“So, how’s orgo lab going?” she asked, again, mostly out of politeness, as she needed to get going.
“No major disasters yet, knock on wood,” he answered. “They just did crystal purification this week and oh! We had one student with just a perfect purification. She got nearly a one-hundred percent yield! And from only a sophomore! I think she’s a bio major too, of all things. I’m hoping maybe we can convert her to chemistry. You have to see these crystals though, Margaret, truly, they’re beautiful.”
She followed him back to the labs where he used a master key to unlock the student’s drawer. He pulled up a vial and passed it to Dr. Morgan, rattling on about the details of the experiment, and yes, she had to admit, it wasn’t an easy purification, especially for a basic lab full of mostly biology students. The crystals were, really, quite spectacular. She, herself, even had difficulties with certain compounds. And her grad students could never! Yes, they really ought to try and convert this student to chemistry, she seemed to have such a knack for details and—
Dr. Morgan read the name written in permanent marker on the side of the vial. T. Stanford… Tess Stanford. She felt her stomach constrict at the mere thought of the name, the mental image of the girl, that girl, with her flippant ignoring of personal boundaries, her too big heart, and her obnoxious, unbearable, smirk.
That evening, Dr. Morgan called Dr. Greenwood.
“We’re going out Friday,” she stated with absolute authority. “I need to get trashed and I need to get laid, immediately.”
“Sounds like a blast,” Dr. Greenwood replied.
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