Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Iborrowed my mom’s car and drove Sarah to our nearby mall. After we exhausted ourselves shopping for clothes that we had to have, we decided on pedicures. I was currently sitting in a chair, my feet being massaged, while thoroughly enjoying myself. I needed this weekend away from school.
“George wants me to go home with him over Thanksgiving to meet his parents,” Sarah said.
“But I don’t know about that. It seems so major.
I mean, George and I don’t go to the same school.
We don’t live in the same state. It seems silly for me to meet his parents.
Am I being totally lame?” She looked at me, her eyes wide with panic.
“No. What you’re saying makes sense. Once you graduate, if you don’t intend to carry on a relationship with him, then why bother?” She still had another year to go. A lot could change in that amount of time.
“Exactly! Thank you.”
“So…what’s the problem? Is George pressuring you? Is he upset that you don’t want to go?” It felt so good talking about someone else’s issues for a change.
“The problem is that I’m second-guessing myself and questioning my decision not to go.”
“That’s because you like him.” While all rational thought told her she shouldn’t bother trying to have a long-term relationship with a man like George, her heart said otherwise. I could tell Sarah really liked him by the way she lit up whenever she mentioned his name.
“I do.” She sighed. “But he won’t consider moving to California, and I told him I’m moving home and going to grad school there. Period. No exceptions. Especially for a man. I won’t do it.”
My phone beeped. I glanced at it, expecting a text from my mom about dinner, but it wasn’t from her.
Adan
Did you see the email?
My hands started shaking. Without responding to him, I opened my school email and saw I had a message from Teagan. I opened and read it.
Laney,
Thank you for giving me the challenge of looking into the unknown substance you provided.
As you requested, I ran a test to see if it was insulin.
The test came back negative. I had one of the doctors I do research under take a look at it as well.
He concluded the same as me, that whatever it is, it’s not insulin.
Let me know if you need details on the test I ran or on anything else. See you in class on Friday.
Teagan
“Are you okay?” Sarah asked.
I looked at her, dumbfounded, my mind blank. What the actual fuck?
In a daze, I sat there, unable to comprehend what Teagan had just revealed.
As I got my toes painted, her words kept replaying in my mind.
Not insulin. Then what in the hell was I putting into my body every day?
The part I didn’t understand was why my parents were lying to me about it.
I wondered if I even had diabetes or if they were lying about that as well.
But why lie in the first place? It made no sense.
And Rowan had been right about it.
When the woman finished, I put my shoes back on, paid, and walked out of the nail salon all without having uttered a single word. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, I would unleash a scream. Or cry. Because I wanted to do both right now.
Sarah pulled me over to a bench and forced me to sit down. “You have to tell me what’s going on,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
I needed someone other than Rowan or Adan to talk to about this. Someone not directly involved who could offer me advice. So sitting there in the middle of the mall, I told her a condensed version of everything.
“Wait, what?” Sarah shook her head. “I can’t figure out how Rowan got involved in the first place. It’s weird. But I guess I’m glad he did. Although, why would your parents lie to you?”
“I have no idea.” A thought occurred to me. I pulled out my phone.
Laney
Is my insulin ready?
Mom
Yes. I plan on grabbing it from the lab tomorrow before I take you and Sarah back to campus.
Laney
We’re done at the mall and are about to head home. I’ll grab it on my way back to the house. That’ll save us a trip tomorrow.
Mom
The lab is locked and the security is set.
Mom hadn’t flat-out refused to allow me to go to the lab I’d gone to hundreds of times over the years, but she hadn’t agreed that it was a good idea either.
Laney
I have a key and I know the security code. I’ll make sure to lock up and reset everything when I’m done. Sarah is a pre-med major and I want to show off your lab.
Mom
Okay. I am conducting an experiment in the back room so stay out of there.
Laney
You got it. Should we pick up a pizza on our way home?
Mom
I’m making a lasagna so just head home after the lab.
I turned to Sarah. “We’re leaving. And we’re taking a detour on the way back to my house.”
Before today, I’d never considered that Rowan was telling me the truth.
Even when Adan begged me to just think about it, I’d only gone along with him and given my insulin to Teagan to prove Rowan wrong.
Never in a million years did I think it would prove him right.
And now here I was, entering the code to get into my mom’s lab.
It was at the end of a single story building in a business complex.
And I was here to…what? I didn’t even know.
But now I was questioning everything. Since my mom made my insulin in her lab, it seemed like a good place to look for answers.
With my mind spiraling out of control with different possibilities, I needed something concrete.
I needed proof. A reason for everything to make sense.
Sarah and I entered. I closed the door and disarmed the alarm.
“I get that your mom is a geneticist,” Sarah said, looking around the tiny lobby which consisted of a reception desk and a couple of chairs. “But how does she make her money? Does she sell a product?”
I went over to the other door, the one leading to the actual lab, inputting the code. When it unlocked, I opened the door and turned on the lights.
“She does research for private organizations. They’ll hire her to look into something for them.
She’s been hired to look at crime scene evidence before.
” This room looked like a high tech lab you’d see on a college campus.
This was where my mom spent all of her time working.
A door at the far end led to a closet-sized room where she ran experiments with critical elements.
Meaning, they were usually dangerous. She had additional safety measures in that room.
Things like added ventilation and automatic sprinklers in the ceiling for fires.
“This facility is impressive,” Sarah said, meandering around the room.
I went over to the fridge and opened it. There was a shelf dedicated to my medication. I pulled out the tray and set it on one of the lab tables, wondering what was really in these vials. I grabbed one of the coolers my mom had stashed in the cupboards and started filling it.
“Are you going to keep taking that stuff?” Sarah asked.
Without pausing, I whispered, “My mom has cameras in here. I need you to act normal.”
“Okay,” Sarah said. “Are we just taking this and leaving? I kinda feel like we should do something while we’re here.”
“Like what?” With the cameras, there was only so much I could do.
She shrugged. “Test something. Look at your blood to see if we can tell what it is you’re really injecting into your body. I don’t know. Something.”
Even if my mom wasn’t watching the security footage right now, everything was being recorded and saved.
At a later time, she could come back and watch this.
I needed to be smart and not do something rash.
Like take a broom and start destroying stuff like I wanted to.
I needed to keep my anger in check so I could start learning the truth.
I finished and zipped the cooler, replacing the tray into the fridge.
“Why’d you want to come here if you didn’t intend to snoop?” Sarah asked.
I wasn’t sure how to say this. “I’m going to run an experiment.”
“What type of experiment?”
I set the cooler by the door and came back over to the lab table.
The first genetics lab I’d done with Adan had tested our DNA.
Our samples had both come back as non-human.
At the time, we laughed and said there must have been an error.
We redid the lab, and it was human the second time.
I didn’t remember seeing Adan actually put our DNA into the machine for testing.
What if he’d done something to make sure it came back as human?
I shook my head. My mind was getting the better of me.
Of course I was human. It wasn’t like I was some alien or a robot.
Rowan was making me insane by questioning everything.
Rationally, I knew I was human, and my mom probably had a nice, easy, simple explanation as to why my medicine wasn’t actually insulin.
“Laney, are you okay?”
“Just for shits and giggles, we’re going to test our DNA.” I went over and got the supplies we needed to perform the simple lab.
“Won’t your mom wonder what we’re doing?” Sarah asked.
“I’m showing you a basic lab since you’re a pre-med major. Pretend like you’re asking all sorts of questions so I can explain things to you.”
We each swabbed our cheeks, then put our saliva in vials, swirling them.
Then I stuck each of our vials into the heat block cycler.
After ten minutes, I took them out and put them into the centrifuge for two minutes.
After that, I put them into the Thermal Cycler and set the timer for thirty minutes.
While that was running, Sarah and I poked around the lab, looking at various things my mom had going on.
Nothing looked too exciting. When the timer went off, I went over to the samples and looked at them.
They were different. One was human. One wasn’t.
“What does that mean?” Sarah asked. “Laney, look at me. What’s going on?”