Lab Girl by Hope Jahren Read Free Book Online Page A

your hair back tight”—Lydia interrupted my daydream by dangling an industrial rubber band in front of my face—“and you better get used to yourself without makeup. I bet you think that I look like this hell all the time,” she mused with a grim smirk. Loose hair, nail polish, jewelry—none of these were allowed in the pharmacy, as they presented additional surface area that might harbor contamination, and so I adopted the frazzled “natural” look that you so often see in hospital staff, and I have kept it to this day.
    The employee pool was about evenly split between preprofessional students and career technicians, but I didn’t fit in with any of them. Like the students, I had classes and exams to worry about, but like the techs, I worked way too much, because I just needed somewhere to be. Lydia was what was called a “lifer” within the pharmacy laboratory, which meant she was already there when anyone queried had been hired. While I stowed my backpack, Lydia notified our supervising Pharm.D. that she was going to teach me the differences between the drugs in the stockroom, where they were shelved according to their chemical formulas. I was only mildly surprised when she walked right past the stockroom and toward the courtyard instead.
    Lydia was famous for two things: her breaks and her rides. She would take all of her breaks during the first ninety minutes of each of her eight-hour shifts and attempt to smoke the three packs of cigarettes that she would have consumed across eight hours had they been leisure time. Smoking sixty cigarettes in sixty minutes requires no small amount of concentration, and even though it was easy to locate her in the courtyard, she was generally too occupied for conversation. During the second hour of her shift, Lydia was extremely alert and productive, but it was generally wisest to give her a wide berth about five hours later, when any perceived slight could really set her off. During the last twenty minutes of her shift, even the pharmacists avoided her as she sat stiffly watching the clock, clutching a sterile needle in her shaking fist.
    It seemed out of character, but if you were female and worked a shift with Lydia that ended at night, she would insist on giving you a ride home. An incoherent string of snarls about “asshole rapists” was the only explanation that we ever got for her strategic generosity. It was hard for me to picture these rapists, dressed for the twenty-below weather and circling the hospital in a holding pattern until 11:00 p.m., when a fatigued herd of nursing-student prey would stagger into their hunting grounds, but in that part of the country we didn’t have the kind of Januaries where you turned down a ride for any reason.
    Once released from the gas chamber of secondhand smoke that also served as Lydia’s car, you had to strip off your scrubs in the hallway in order to prevent your apartment from smelling like the coal miners’ union hall for a week. Lydia never drove off until she saw you go inside and flash the porch light on and off. “Blink it more than once if somebody needs their balls ripped off,” she instructed us maternally.
She did not replace my mother; no one could do that; but she came into a vacancy in my heart, which closed upon her,
I remembered from chapter four, and smiled to myself.
    When—during my first hour in the pharmacy laboratory—Lydia and I got to the courtyard, we sat down in the metal chairs at one of the outdoor tables. She pulled a pack of Winston Lights out of the fold of her sock and thumped it three times on the heel of her hand. She slid the pack over to me as an offering, and lit her cigarette with the communal lighter that was kept chained to a branch of a little birch tree that was serving hard time planted in cement. Lydia put her feet up and took a long drag with her eyes closed. I played with her pack of cigarettes, first shaking them out and then reloading them, although I didn’t smoke.
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