Fatal Reaction

either went to work in the mines or in the poultry processing plant after they left school. When people where I come from talk about higher education they’re usually talking about beauty college. High school wasn’t for getting an education anyway, it was for getting drunk and partying, two things I was plenty good at. At some point during my senior year, one of the guidance counselors talked me into the taking the SATs. Hell, I wasn’t even sure what they were for. But it turned out that I scored real high—high enough to get a free ride to the University of Virginia.
    “What the hell, I thought. Can’t be worse than staying here and plucking chickens, so I figured I might as well give ole U.Va. a try. Well, I’ll tell you right now, I hated it. All the other kids treated me like trailer-park trash— probably because that’s what I was. By the end of orientation I had pretty much decided I was going to flunk out. With that in mind I didn’t pay much attention to signing up for classes. Hell, I figured I wasn’t going to be around for much longer so I picked them by the alphabet. You know, like ordering from a Chinese menu, I took one from column A, one from column B.... I ended up registered for anthropology, ballroom dancing, chemistry, and data processing. I told myself I’d go to each class for a week just to see whether there were any guys worth sleeping with. The rest of the time I concentrated on getting drunk.
    “I stuck to my schedule so I didn’t get to chemistry until the third week. That Monday I went to class and took a seat in the back row and started scouting out the guys. It was pretty slim pickings, let me tell you—worse than ballroom dancing. I’d practically made up my mind to get up and leave then and there when the professor went up to the board and started drawing atomic orbitals. Of course, at the time I didn’t know what they were, but that didn’t matter—to me they were absolutely the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.
    “From that moment on I forgot everything else, how geeky the guys were, how miserable I was at college.... The orbitals were a revelation. Not only were they gorgeous—those big ovals of colored chalk—but I understood them. I understood everything the professor said. It was amazing, like going to another country and discovering that somehow you already speak the language.
    “When the lecture was over, all I could think of was that if this was chemistry, then chemistry is what I wanted to do, what I had to do. I ran right over to the bookstore and bought the textbook. Oh no, I thought, this is where it’s going to start getting hard. I lay down on the bed and every time I started a new chapter I’d say to myself, okay, now this is where I’m going to not understand it. But that never happened. I read that whole book from start to finish that night. I just couldn’t get enough of it.
    “In four years I took every undergraduate and graduate course offered by the chemistry department. I took most of the biology and physics courses, too. When I graduated, they couldn’t figure out which degrees to give me since I’d fulfilled the requirements for about four of them. And yet, you know what happened when I got to graduate school? I had to fight with guys like Michael Childress to work in a halfway decent lab. In every class, I had to put up with pencil-necked dweebs not listening to what I had to say because I was a woman. Believe me, if I’d been a man they’d have treated me like the fucking messiah.”
    “You don’t think they might have been a little put off by your rather unconventional style?” I ventured, no doubt sounding like a female version of a pencil-necked dweeb.
    Lou Remminger tilted her head back and cackled. “You don’t think I dressed like this when I was in graduate school, do you? Hell, it’s taken me years to get pissed off enough to start dressing like this.”
     
    When I got back to Danny’s office I was surprised to find Elliott Abelman sitting behind the desk systematically going through the drawers. I wanted to say something clever, but I couldn’t think of anything, so instead I just stood in the doorway watching him. He was wearing a blue dress shirt, open at the neck, and the soft mop of his brown hair flopped across his forehead like a little boy’s as he peered and rooted through the various compartments of the desk. At some point he must have sensed he was being watched because he looked up