*
As winter got colder and the semester went on—and with Omar’s ring on my right hand instead of my left—I stayed ahead of my work in the lab thanks to the extra hours I put in. I visited Professor Kaufmann’s office a few more times, too, though usually about stuff I read for my bio lecture or even for calculus: it was helpful to get her take on things like parametric equations or the Krebs cycle. Ethan’s Happy Hours became part of my week the way another class would. Other people did materialize, and in time I became one of what the group called the Regulars, even without the after-work beers. Leidy’s calls dropped down to once a week when she got tired of leaving messages with Jillian, but even the weekly calls felt stilted and tired—she was annoyed that I’d asked to schedule our calls for a standing time instead of her calling whenever she wanted or needed. Scheduling shit like a white girl, she said, but I knew she was just mad, that she’d get over it. It didn’t matter that things were off between us: I saved my real worries for Omar, who I could call as late as one or two in the morning when I’d get back from lab, and who I made check on my mom and sister at regular intervals so that I could shrug off my guilt long enough to get lost in my work.
She get trampled in front of his house lately? I’d ask, making it seem like a joke though I dreaded what he might say. He’d laugh and answer, Nah, she ain’t doing that anymore.
Good, I’d say, thankful—but more than anything relieved—that my mom’s adventures on the streets of Little Havana were dying down now that the legal battle over Ariel was so stalled and convoluted it was no longer fun being involved. Don’t worry about her, Omar said week after week, and as my first set of exams came up, I was grateful for the permission to scratch her off the list, to put her out of my mind by believing she’d given up.
27
WHILE WAITING TO HEAR HOW I’d done on those exams, I got an e-mail from Dr. Kaufmann. We weren’t getting our grades back from her that way—that exam had been a lab practical, so we already had some sense of how we’d done—but my history with e-mails from professors was not good, and even though we talked in lab and during her office hours, she’d never e-mailed me before. My hands shook as I swerved the cursor to open it.
She wanted to meet with me outside of class; she had something she’d like to discuss one-on-one. The e-mail was written with the same troubling vagueness as the one I’d received months earlier from my writing seminar professor, but this was much worse: this was Dr. Kaufmann. This was a class required for my major. And this—whatever I’d done—would be strike two, and no matter how understanding the one woman at my hearing had seemed, there was only so much Rawlings would tolerate.
I scanned my mind for what this could be about. Had I left a supply closet or fridge unlocked? Had I open centrifuged one of the specimens she’d asked me to look at when it was supposed to be closed centrifuged? Had she glanced over my shoulder at my class notes and seen the list of embarrassing questions only I seemed to have and which I’d scribbled under the heading Things to Look Up Later? I’d been so careful around her so far, hoping to make up for all the times I raised my hand and revealed how little I knew, all the times she caught me pretty much fondling the equipment—the elegant pipettes, the test tube racks that kept everything snug and in place, the magical autoclave incinerating all evidence of use and making everything perfect over and over again. It could’ve been any or all of these things: she was so smart that I was certain she’d put these observations together and conclude, long before I figured it out, that though I was eager and good at keeping contamination at bay, I wasn’t cut out for the hard sciences. I wrote her back, composing my e-mail in a word processing program first to make sure the green squiggly line of grammar impropriety didn’t show up under every clause, and confirmed I could meet with her Monday at noon, right after class. She wrote back a cryptic, That will be more than fine.