It was the spring of my sophomore year of college, the first Monday of the first week of classes. I was a biology major, but I was required to take one more semester of organic chemistry, which anyone can tell you is a bitch. By far the worst experience of many a college career, renowned killer of GPAs, the crucible that separated the truly hardcore from the mere mildly-inclined. I was about to face the dragon that guarded the sleeping beauty, and I was armed with only an AP credit of one semester of introductory chemistry.
I walked morosely into the classroom, my head down, not even looking at my fellow academic prisoners. I grabbed a seat near the back, and prepared my brain to be assaulted by equilibrium constants and electron orbital diagrams. I recognized a few faces as everyone shuffled into the first few rows - a couple people from my intro biology course, and another girl whose name I couldn't remember who occasionally worked in the biology department greenhouse with me.
"OK class, let's get started," called a voice up at the front of the class. A woman's voice. A
young
woman's voice. "My name is Lin Sakayumi, and I'll be your TA for this class. Everyone sit down." An Asian name, but not an Asian accent... interesting.
And as the stragglers and chatters sat, I got my first glimpse of Lin. She was tiny, maybe five feet two, and slender, maybe a buck ten. She was younger than I expected - though to be honest I would have expected an older man, perhaps one who had been teaching this class for thirty years - late-twenties I guessed, though sometimes I had a hard time telling age with Asian women. Her black hair was cut just below her chin, and pulled back behind her ears to frame her round face. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth narrow. She was wearing a fuzzy maroon sweater and a denim skirt underneath her unbuttoned lab coat.
I'd never really thought of myself as having a thing for Asian girls - my previous girlfriends had all been white girls - but Lin struck me as
beautiful
. Not necessarily like a supermodel or anything, but she seemed
genuine
. I mean, I was kinda turned on, and she hadn't even done anything more than introduce herself. And as she began to go over the syllabus, I noticed how gracefully she moved. I just sat there, watching her mouth, not even listening as her lips opened and closed, her tongue darting between her teeth -
"Joe!"
I started, looking around. Almost everyone was turned around in their seats, looking at me. I felt a wetness on my chin, and realized I had literally been drooling. I dragged a fist across my mouth, wiping my face dry.
"Sorry?"
"Are you Joe Connors?" Lin asked slowly, eyes wide, perhaps questioning my grasp on the English language.
"Yes?"
She checked my name off the list in her hand, and kept on going. Taking attendance. I blushed, and tried to hide my flush by bracing my elbows on the table and resting my cheeks in my palms. So much for first impressions.
For the rest of class, I kept my eyes down, taking notes, not drawing attention to myself. Lin was actually quite a good lecturer, not moving too quickly or too slowly, but giving a good review of various functional groups and standard organic chemical naming protocols.
At the end of period, she passed out a signup list for duties to perform and equipment to maintain for the hands-on lab portion of the class. And of course, since I was at the back of the room, I got the last job available - refilling the liquid nitrogen for the cold trap.
"You win the prize," Lin told me as I brought the sign-up sheet back to the front of the class while everyone else was packing up and filing out the door. "The liquid nitrogen has to be checked every 8 hours on the dot, and can never be allowed to dry up. It gets too hot, oxygen condenses, BOOM - no more lab, no more building, lots of lawsuits." She moved her hands animatedly while she talked. I was almost overcome with her adorableness. "You'll need to come by the lab tonight at midnight so I can show you what to do."
I just nodded, avoiding eye contact, desparate not to make a fool of myself again. I wrote down the room number and the time I was expected to meet her, and booked it.
**********************
It was 11:45, and I had to run out of my dorm to make it to the chemistry building. I'd accidentally fallen asleep, and only my roommate staggering back through the door and knocking over a stack of books kept me from missing my appointment altogether.
He grunted in apology for knocking over my books, and immediately flung himself onto his bed and started snoring almost before his head hit the pillow. I looked at the clock, jumped up, and dashed out the still-open door, shutting it behind me.
The chemistry building was halfway across campus, about half a mile away, and I ran as fast as I could, stopping thirty seconds away to catch my breath before I walked in the door. I caught the elevator up to the fourth floor, and opened the door at 12:02.
"You're late!" Lin called from the back corner of the lab. She was sitting on a stool with a notebook in her hand and a purple pen tucked behind her ear, wearing square glasses with thick black frames that she hadn't been wearing earlier. She had also changed her skirt for a pair of what appeared to be hospital scrubs, rolled up around her ankles so they wouldn't drag on the floor. The nerd factor was astounding, and I felt a stirring in my groin just looking at her.
The lab was fairly small, maybe ten feet by fifteen feet. A lab bench met the center of the wall to the left of the entrance and split the room down the middle, forming a U-shaped walkway around it. The outer walls were cluttered with writing desks and cabinets full of papers and various reagents. On the opposite wall, at the end of the lab bench where Lin sat was a glovebox, an expensive piece of equipment. It was an airtight chemical hood workspace for reagents that could not be exposed to regular atmosphere. There were arm-length gloves protruding inside out from the front of it, so that you could put your arms in and work inside the enclosure.
Lin hopped down from the stool and waved me over to a row of horizontal pipes at eye level over a bench full of labeled reagent bottles and empty Styrofoam buckets. She put on a pair of thick rawhide gloves as she approached.
"This is the cold trap," she told me. She unscrewed a metal canister hanging from one of the pipes and showed it to me, basically a hollow thermos with vapor rising from the bottom. "You can't see the liquid nitrogen because it's almost empty, but it should be at about this level, where my finger is. What you'll need to do is refill the canister from this dewar here in the corner. It's heavy, so try not to lift it, just tip it as far as you'll need for the liquid to start to pour. And be careful, don't spill any - if you get it on your hands or spill on your feet, you could lose them. This is routine work, but still dangerous, so don't lose focus. That's how people die in laboratory accidents, they get complacent."
She took off the thick gloves she had on, and passed them to me. I put them on, and the insides were still warm from her hands.
"Now, set this thing on the ground, and let me see your technique. That's right, nice and slow. Careful, don't let it overflow! Ok, now pick it up and screw it back in right there. Good."
I was kind of enjoying the way she told me what to do. I thought to myself,
I could get used to taking her orders
. I took off the gloves and set them on the lab bench, looking down at her face. The top of her head came to about my mouth, and she had to tip her neck up to make eye contact.
"I think you can do this, Joe. Just don't forget to check it every eight hours - eight AM, four PM, and midnight, every day for the next week or so. We'll be switching duties every week, so no one will be stuck doing the night shift for very long. Let me know if the dewar gets low, or anything looks wrong, or if there any issues. I work here in this lab every day, so you can probably find me if you need to. Questions?"
I shook my head.
"Then I'll see you Wednesday in class."
**************************
For the next two days, I was up at the crack of dawn (or the crack of 7:30, which is too damn early for a college student anyway) so that I could refill the liquid nitrogen canister in the lab. Every time I popped in, the place was deserted; if papers on the desks hadn't been shuffled, the trash cans slowly filling up, and the reagents moved around in the glove box, I would've wondered if Lin really worked there.
Life went on, and I stayed marginally busy between reading for O-chem, my biology class (entitled Prokaryotic Genetics, woot woot), and the required introductory English and foreign language classes (God bless the liberal arts).
Class on Wednesday came until I even caught a glimpse of Lin again. She looked a little pale and puffy, like she hadn't been sleeping well. She still gave an excellent lecture though, on Michaelis-Menten kinetics and how they could be used to experimentally determine optimal reaction parameters. It was riveting, let me tell you.
As we all prepared to leave, Lin called out, "Hey Joe! Stay here just a second, I need to ask you something."
Curious, I grabbed my jacket and bag and moved up towards the front of the classroom. I had fun for a minute, imagining the things I would agree to if she only asked...
But instead of my racy daydreams, she simply said, "Are you doing okay with the liquid nitrogen? Have you run into any problems, do you need any help?"
"No, Dr. Samayuki," I answered. "Everything's going fine, no problems."
"OK..." She flushed a little. I got the feeling that she was working her way up to asking me something. And then without warning she just burst out, "I need you to do me a favor."
Were my fantasies really that far off-base? "What do you need?" I asked, sitting on the edge of the table, imagining that I looked suave and sophisticated.
"I've been swamped writing this grant application, and I've run into a bit of a problem. I need to do another experiment ASAP, because the deadline is Friday. Tomorrow there's a demonstration scheduled in the lab, so I won't be able to get in to work. What I need is to pull an all-nighter, tonight."
