“I’m not sure how much more I can push it,” Carter said. He sounded stressed.
They must have been talking about our powerpoint, and my heart sank. We’d worked so hard on it, and now Dr. Carter was saying it wasn’t good enough.
“Well, push it more,” Dr. Klaxton said.
“We’ll get caught.” Carter’s voice had a different tone to it than it usually did when I saw him around Dr. Klaxton – usually he sounded very polite, referential, maybe even a little bit scared. But now he sounded challenging.
“We won’t.”
“But if we – ”
“If we don’t, it’s done. So do it.” The tone of Dr. Klaxton’s voice sent a weird chill down my spine. He definitely wasn’t talking about the powerpoint. So then what was he talking about?
I heard the sound of a briefcase shutting, and so I turned around and walked quickly back to the elevator. I rode it down to the lobby and then back up to the sixth floor.
When I stepped back onto the carpet, my stomach felt like it had turned inside out and my knees were weak. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the up-and-down elevator ride, or because of what I’d just heard.
What exactly had I heard? What had they been talking about?
I started back toward the conference center, this time making sure I made a lot of noise. I coughed, shuffled my shoes against the rug, and rummaged through the papers in my bag.
But when I got to the business center, Dr. Klaxton was gone.
Carter was over against the far wall, his laptop open on the desk in front of him.
He turned when I came into the room and gave me a smile. “Hey,” he said.
“You’re early.”
“I know.” I smiled back and set my computer bag on the chair. “But so are you.”
I waited a beat, wondering if he was going to mention the fact that he’d been meeting with Dr. Klaxton. But he didn’t. “Have you been here long?”
“Nah,” he said. “Just a couple of minutes.”
“Oh.” My voice sounded strained, and Carter swiveled around in his chair so he was looking at me.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.” I searched his face. He was still smiling, but I could see the stress on his face. There were dark circles under his eyes – faint, but they were there. Normally I would have chalked it up to his being nervous about the powerpoint, but now I wondered if there was something else going on.
Stop, I told myself. You’re being crazy. Just because you don’t know what they’
were talking about doesn’t mean it’s something shady. They don’t have to tell you everything.
But still. Something felt off.
“Should we get to work?” Carter asked.
I nodded, relieved to have something to focus on. This whole thing with Justin was probably just getting in my head, making me suspicious of things that weren’t even an issue. It was just another way he’d invaded my existence.
We sat down and started going through the slides, making tweaks and changes, sometimes for something as simple as a color, sometimes adding a whole slide to make things more clear.
When we got to Slide Fifteen, the one that announced our preliminary findings for the first phase of the drug trial, Carter shifted on the seat next to me.
“This is wrong,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I frowned, reading over the slide, which showed that the drug was making people lose weight seventy point four percent faster than just diet alone.
“It’s not correct.”
“It looks right to me.”
But Carter was reaching into his bag and pulling out a sheaf of papers. “It’s not seventy point four percent better,” he said. “It’s eighty-two percent better.”
“No,” I shook my head. “Carter, it’s right.” The seventy point four percent rate of loss was the most important figure we had. It had been repeated over and over and over. It was an insanely good rate, which showed that the drug was very effective when it came to weight loss. Of all the facts and figures we’d been dealing with, it was the one he shouldn’t have forgotten.
“No.” He pulled out a piece of paper and showed it to me. “These are the new figures. We just got them in last night.”
I looked down at the paper while Carter changed the slide. Sure enough, it was a new data set, and the value of success was set at eighty percent more than with just diet alone.
A sourness churned around in my stomach. If this were true – that the drug was even more powerful than they’d already thought – it was cause for celebration. So then why didn’t Carter seem happy? Why had he seemed so tense when Dr. Klaxton was in the room? And why hadn’t he mentioned it as soon as I got here?
“We got more data in?” I asked.
“Yup.” Carter had finished updating the results slide and was now looking at the next one. He’d loaded the powerpoint up onto one of the public computers in the business center so we could both see it on the big screen. His hand gripped the mouse tightly, and for a second, I was afraid he was going to break it.