Chapter Text
The first time Mel meets Him — not God, obviously. It’s just a very specific guy. The Guy, if you will — she’s hyperventilating — or her quiet, lowkey version of that — in the kitchen of that floor. She didn’t mean to end up there, not really, but she felt the rush of panic coming in and looking for escape — as is routine when the white flash of fear hits her — she opened the first door. Which turns out to be the small resting area for Ph.D. students. Or the professors. She doesn’t really know. It had a bunch of cupboards, a coffee pot and a couple of pamphlets stuck to the board right next to the paper cups. It’s nothing fancy but the tables and scattered chairs concealed her enough so she just crouched down behind them and hugged herself tightly until the panic passed.
She did what she has been doing ever since she was a kid and dad was screaming too loud and mom told her and Becca to go to their rooms and close their eyes and count to one-thousand and then she’d come and get them. She doubted she could get to one-thousand then — if she does get to one-thousand, that would mean she’s missed her entry interview which is good for no one — but she just wanted to breathe.
So, this is how Mel meets The Guy. well, she doesn’t exactly meet him because when she hears the door opening and closing, she goes as stiff as a cardboard and presses her eyes tightly. In her mind, if she can’t see him, then he will probably miss that there’s a human person tightly coiled into a ball behind the table. But apparently he doesn’t because she hears him running into a chair and presumes he jumps up, hitting his knee against the table because he hisses, “Fuck — what are you doing here?”
What is she doing here?
She’s here for her interview for the doctorate position in Dr. Al-Hashimi’s research lab — an interview she has spent a long time bartering and preparing for. An interview that took her and her sister out of Ohio for the first time, all the way to UPenn — an interview for a position that doesn’t pay much and that Mel fears the hell out of because she keeps worrying about how she’ll pay for Becca’s living accommodations but she still really badly wants to get because this is the work that is important. The thing that matters the most to her — the thing that no one else will do.
How is she going to explain all that to the deep voice? She can’t.
So, she says the next true thing. “Hiding.”
“Are you new here?”
“Sort of,” she sniffles, her forehead still pressing hard against her interlaced hands as she hugs her knees closer to her chest. “Sorry, am I interrupting your break?”
“Sure,” the guy clicks his tongue.
“Sorry,” she repeats, trying to get herself to get back up. “I’ll be out of here in a second — I just need to—” She’s sure she put her glasses somewhere on the floor close to her but as she tries to scramble for them, they seem to have disappeared. Becca did tell her that it was best if she wore her contacts but contacts make her feel weird — she feels like she’s holding her eyes on her fingers and when they’re inside, she just wants to claw at her eyes to get them out. Glasses, though, get lost easily. “Sorry,” she repeats again.
“Why do you keep apologizing?”
She shakes her head. She doesn’t know — it’s a bad habit. “I’m sorry, I don’t know,” she admits, shaking her head, the overwhelming feeling too much to handle, her whole body tingling. “I just—” she shakes her head when words fail her. “I get like this when I’m nervous. I have an interview.”
“Huh,” he hums and from the noise, Mel can tell that he’s sitting down. She tries to blink away the tears and look at him but everything is blurry. “With who?”
“Dr. Al-Hashimi,” she says. “I’m interviewing for a position in her lab.”
“Yeah, she’s a great scientist,” the guy concedes.
“Oh, you’re a Ph.D. student, too?”
“So,” he ignores her question, “why are you hiding then? I mean, if you have an interview?”
“Because,” she takes a deep breath, “I get like this before important things. I don’t know — I can’t be sure if I belong.”
“Why do you want the position?”
“Because…” she trails off. So many answers jump into her head. Because I want to find the answer to this one question — an important question. I want to make it so that no one has to feel what me and my sister felt. Because it’s important to me and this is the only thing that I’m really good at. “Because I have a creative mind and I can handle a rigorous schedule and I think UPenn is the perfect–”
“Not the answer you rehearsed like three thousand times last night,” he sounds bored and unimpressed when he interrupts her. “The real answer. Are you here because you didn’t get a position in the industry? Or because you fucked up your MCAT and you were like, might as well pursue higher education so they don’t think I’m a failure or—”
“No!” she interrupts before he can go on, “I want to be here. I fought to be here.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to find something out,” she admits, finally, her throat a little dry. It always makes her uncomfortable to talk about this. “Something important. Something that if I don’t, I don’t think others will. An answer.”
For a few seconds, the guy doesn’t say anything. She tries to narrow her eyes in the hopes that the blurry vision will clear up and she’ll make out more than the silhouette of his body. Then, some shuffling and she can see that he’s standing up — he seems tall. For some reason, even though she can’t quite make out any details of his face, she feels like his stare is burning a hole in her skull so she looks down. Where are her damn glasses? The door clicks.
“It’s a good answer,” he says, making her freeze for a second. “The best answer, actually,” he adds. Mel feels her face heating up. “They’re on your right. Like — three steps to your right. I don’t know how you knocked them over there.”
“What?”
“Your glasses,” he says, an amused edge to his voice. “Good luck— What was your name again?”
“Mel,” she says, scrambling to her right, picking up the glasses and putting them on the bridge of her nose.
“Good luck, Mel.”
“Thank you—” she looks up just as the close swings shut behind him, alone once again in the room. “Stranger…” she finishes the rest of the sentence, speaking to no one at all, letting out a sigh. Her glasses are smudgy, probably her eyes are, too.
But she can’t hide out here anymore.
She has a good reason. She just needs Dr. Al-Hashimi to hear her out and what better place to make her do that than a scheduled interview.
That she’s already three minutes late to.
The rush doesn’t give her time to overthink or to wonder about the stranger. Maybe he was a grad student, too — maybe she’ll run into him and he’ll ask about how the interview went and she wants to be able to boast that she aced it. Maybe they’ll work at the same lab and—
She can think about all that later.
For now, she has a very famous professor to impress. And so, she does.