She was laughing. Everything she ate, even the unasked-for rye toast on the side, tasted good. Kelly’s eyes were dark and his eyelashes were so long, it was rude. And it was more rude that despite the fact that he had been drinking and smoking, she still thought he smelled good. The diner was filling up with punk kids showing up from the clubs down the street, talking loudly about the show, sweaty, touching their dyed and bleached hair and showing off the X’s Sharpied on the backs of their hands. Kelly paid and they walked back out into the cold night. All the bars were closing in the next half hour, so the sidewalks were busy again with drunk people finding food, tramping home, holding hands. The streetlights were orange-toned and made everyone look more dramatic. Snow flurries took bites out of everyone’s hair and cheeks. The apartment buildings and stores and courthouse looked taller in the semi-dark.
Lena said, “So, I heard you do research studies.”
“This is my nightmare,” Kelly answered, trying to wipe snow off his head. “The contacts.”
“Is it uncomfortable? Or weird?”
“Only when they do experiments where someone else has to take the contacts out of my eyes for me. Other than that, they pay pretty well.” He blew out a breath and the tiny cloud hovered and then fluttered away. “Why do you ask?”
She told him about the letter in the mail.
“That’s not too weird. It means someone probably just referred you or maybe you signed up for a list or something and just forgot.”
Lena shrugged. They were back outside Stacy’s house. The party was still going inside.
Kelly paused. “It was nice meeting you,” he said.
In response, she smiled, leaned in, and kissed him. His lips were soft against hers. Lena had kissed enough people to know that kisses rarely said anything more than Please like me, or I like you, or Let’s have sex. But she hoped that somehow, he could feel the Thank you for helping me not to worry, not to grieve, for a few hours.
“It was nice meeting you too,” she said.
Inside, everyone was still drinking fortified wine.
“It’s great,” Tanya said. “You can drink a cup and stay drunk for the rest of your life.”
Lena nodded. Someone asked her again, Well, what are you doing this summer? It had been only seconds, but Kelly was swallowed up by the party. I’m figuring it out, Lena said. She leaned against the wall for extra support. The wine was turning the insides of everyone’s mouths black, despite the liquid being pale yellow.
Tanya showed her tongue to Lena and said it reminded her of when she was a girl and a kid kept asking her why her teeth and tongue weren’t black. Shouldn’t they be? he kept asking. Did anything like that happen to you? Lena rolled her eyes. “Probably, but I’m happy to say I forgot if it did.”
“We’re dying,” Stacy said, staring at himself in the long mirror next to the front door. His voice was pay-attention-to-me-now excited. “We’re dying.”
Tanya cleared her throat and Stacy automatically apologized to Lena. She pretended to be confused about why he was apologizing to her until he stopped.
“Let’s take a picture,” Tanya said. Lena posed and stuck her tongue out as far as it would go.
3
They told Lena that to maintain privacy, all buildings were disguised as part of Great Lakes Shipping Company. The closest intake office to Lena was only a mile and a half walk from her dorm—she recognized the address when they said it. Most of the building had a rich-person-store feel, like the all-wood toy store and a high-end Taiwanese restaurant that Lena always wanted to try but couldn’t convince herself to pay $25 for an entrée. Great Lakes Shipping Company, the woman on the phone said, was on Floor 2. When you go up the stairs, walk past the drinking fountains, and it’s right across from the olive oil shop, A Living Liquid. It’s easy to miss, the woman said, and she was right—Lena’s eyes didn’t register it the first time, with its gray curtains over the window and the cream-on-white logo.
She walked down to the end of the hall, turned around, and went back. The olive oil shop was brightly lit. Rows of copper dispensers, posters of Italy on the wall. A man was filling up a Styrofoam cup, clearly meant for coffee, with habanero-infused oil. Lena considered going in to try some—there were containers of bread next to each dispenser—and to see if he was truly going to drink it.
It was better to be early, Lena decided, as she walked inside the office.
Inside, a white woman with a haircut that looked as if she had shown her stylist an image of a motorcycle helmet and said, “That’s the look,” was waiting.
“Your IDs.”
Lena fished her wallet out of her coat pocket. The woman was wearing a navy pantsuit with an American flag pinned on the lapel. There was a badge clipped to her waistband. Walking over to her, Lena bumped into a small table and knocked over a stack of magazines. When she bent to pick them up, the woman told her to just leave it. Her tone was as if Lena had spent hours knocking over the magazines and picking them up and straightening them, just to knock them over again, and she couldn’t take it anymore. Lena handed over the IDs.
“Looks good. Now we have some forms for you to fill out.” She led Lena into what might have been the grayest room in the world. Everything in it—chairs, desks, pens, flooring, wall tile, the fire extinguisher—elephant gray.
The strangeness of the room and the woman’s brusque attitude made Lena want to joke, to find a way of rescuing herself from her discomfort. Instead, she reminded herself that now was the time to be pleasant, blank. Don’t be weird. Don’t embarrass yourself. The woman gestured at Lena to have a seat, handing her a clipboard and a pen.
Page one asked for the basics: address, full legal name, place of birth, how she had found out about the study, email address, emergency contacts, have you ever been a participant in any other clinical studies? No, Lena wrote. Page two reminded her that to participate in the Lakewood Project was to consent to a necessary diminishment of her privacy. If you consent to this, provide all your passwords for social media, email addresses, phone passcode. Also provide any potential answers you can think of for standard security questions, such as the make of your first car, the name of your childhood pet, your mother’s maiden name.
Lena coughed. “May I have a glass of water?”
Page four was where the health questions began. Do you have any allergies? When was the last time you had vaginal intercourse? Anal? When was the last time, exact date if possible, that you vomited? Do you have a family health history of strokes, cancer, diabetes? Next to the paternal family heading, Lena wrote, Information not available. Her hands shook as she did it, assuming that when they saw that, it would make her ineligible. What’s the longest you’ve been consistently intoxicated for?
She cleared her throat again. “May I have a glass of water?”
“Please fill out the forms.”
Lena stared at the white paper, let the words go out of focus. The woman’s attitude, the questions, made a small voice in her own head say you are already feeling weird, get out of here. Her grandma had cleaned houses, pulled the hair and gunk out of tubs and sinks, catered on the weekends, babysat, took odd jobs. Worked for people who she said were proof God had a sense of humor. Your grandmother gave you everything. You’re the one in charge now.