Chapter 8
JANE
PLAYLIST: RUNNING UP THAT HILL — PLACEBO
“Excuse me, but this is a women’s restroom,” I say to a very stiff suit-wearing man who blocks the door.
“I am aware, Ma’am, but I was ordered not to let anyone enter.”
“Who ordered you?” I ask, slightly annoyed, because I really need to use the restroom.
“I can’t say,“ he says, but at that moment, the door opens and an extremely beautiful, but entitled-looking, young woman with long blonde hair exists, and the man moves out of the way.
I aim to get into the bathroom, but before I have my hand on the door, it opens a second time, and Amelie Degard steps out of it. She looks at me, her eyes widen, I stare at her, and mine narrow.
Her pupils are dilated, she has rose cheeks, and looks otherwise very pale. Without thinking, my hand snaps to her jaw. I don’t know why I do it. I don’t touch people, but I feel this need to grasp her, shake her, make her come to her senses.
“Have you been taking drugs again?” I ask her as I move her head in a way that allows me to check her pupil reaction with the corridor light.
I can see her defensiveness flickering in her eyes.
“So what if?” she says, and for the first time, I see the girl acting her age.
“Who are you?” asked the blonde girl next to her. I dislike her immediately.
“Professor McKenzie, and you better leave,” I say harshly. “You’re coming with me,” I say to Amelie and let go of her. “Get to my office and wait there for me.”
I am already waiting for the blonde girl to attack me, but nothing happens. It’s an awkward moment, and I’m more than glad that Amelie walks away. I use the bathroom, and then catch up with Amelie.
She says nothing, and I am not even sure why I am doing what I do. After what happened on Friday, I should stay away from her. I should keep her at a distance. Instead, I had to run into her and had to confront her.
Now, I have to deal with the aftermath. And the aftermath rounds on me the moment the door to my office is closed.
“Who do you think you are?” she says angrily. “Walking around like you are my mother, policing whatever I do.”
I sit down and take a moment before I answer, because I am two parts angry with her, and one part is envious of her daring, something I could never acknowledge.
I never allowed myself to overstep a rule or a boundary.
I never dared talk back, and she—she just does things.
She’s a doer who doesn't think about the consequences, while I overthink everything until the situation eventually goes away.
She paces up and down in front of me.
“Please, sit down,” I say.
“I don’t want to sit down. I don’t even want to be here. I have a lecture.”
“You didn’t care much about the lectures in the past week; one more or less will not harm your already bad attendance record.”
She stops in her tracks and builds herself up with her fists in her sides.
“Have you been monitoring me?” she asks accusingly, and her eyes flicker angrily at me.
“I have vetted you pre-offer to the extent of asking my colleagues about their impression of you,” I say. “I must say, I was mildly surprised to learn you have been named for your absence.”
She scoffs and turns away, and I almost believe her to leave, but then, she rounds on me with a dark undertone in her voice that implies sarcasm in it.
“Well, if that is an issue, why did you even offer?”
“Because,” I say, and hesitate for a moment.
It is a question I thought I could answer with utmost clarity, and yet, I hesitate.
I could’ve found another assistant. One of my graduate students—they have drive and knowledge.
But I knew she would be the right match from the moment she asked the question.
“Because my research needs a mind like yours.”
She squints her eyes at me.
“You know what I think?” she asks without asking. “I think you’re lying to yourself. You tell yourself this is all for your research, but there is something about me that draws you in. Something you are scared of. Something that ruffles your feathers, but you can’t let it go.”
Heat burns through me. A heat I have last felt when I stood in front of an audience and lost my train of thought.
Heat that chews on the inside of one’s chest and drives sweat on the forehead, because the dread of embarrassment spreads through one’s chest. That kind of heat.
I hate it.
I hate that she somehow seems to be able to see right through me.
I feel backed into a corner. And there are only two things that can happen when being backed into a corner: Endure or attack. And because I cannot have a student back me into a corner like this, I, the professor, attack.
“Says the girl who is running from her past.”
From how I read her, I expected her to explode. The drugs, the emotional heat, the agitation—but I was wrong. So, so wrong.
Her body becomes still. Her gaze dark. She draws her shoulders back and stands tall. Her lips purse nearly invisibly through the lightest twitches of her left cheek, as a dangerous, derogatory one-sided smirk tugs at her mouth.
“Well,” she says in a tone of superiority. “Good luck with your research, Professor McKenzie.”
And with that, she turns and walks out of my office without even closing the door.
I stare after her as she leaves me with the knowledge that whatever happened to her has trained her to be neither triggered nor teased. She has learned to guard her emotions, just like the past she tries to hide.
And while I am angry with her, I also know my curiosity about her is piqued—now more than ever.
In my mind, I return to the day after my 6th birthday, when I found a dead bunny on the road.
I carried it home, bloody as it was, with its open abdomen and its intestines hanging out of it.
My nanny nearly fainted and tried to vanish it, but I insisted on it staying and requested a dissection kit from my mother, who is a well-known neurosurgeon.
And because any interest in the medical field was pushed, veterinary or not, she brought me the kit home. I dissected the bunny into its pieces and mapped it out. Most of all, I was interested in the brain. I did not let go of it and even froze it in our freezer for further evaluation.
It was the first time I can remember that I couldn’t let go until I fully understood. Since then, I have been unable to let go of what I do not understand.
It is a curse as much as it is a blessing, and most of the time, I am grateful for the determination.
In cases like Amelie Degard, it might be my downfall.
It is evening as I close the door to my office and head to my lab. I am about to lock the door when my soul leaves my body for a single moment. A voice rips me from my thoughts.
Stalker, is my first thought
My pulse races.
“Does the offer still stand?” she asks, leaning against the wall next to my door in the dimly lit corridor. Everyone else has already left, and I am, as usual, the last person to leave. I have been so lost in thought that I didn’t even notice her being there.
I exhale in relief.
“How long have you been waiting here?” I ask without answering her question as I lock the door.
“A while,” she says without further elaboration.
I stare at her, gaining information.
She looks sharper, less agitated.
“Come with me,” I say and walk all the way through the corridor, down the stairs, through endless doors until we reach my lab.
I unlock the door with my card. Maybe the most reckless thing I have ever done, but here we are.
“This is my lab,” I say as I turn on the lights, walk to a workstation, enter the password, and scan my iris so everything springs to life.
She walks through the lab with a curious gaze, taking in the screens and other equipment.
I watch her as she walks through the rows. She walks past the laboratory section and stops at the location where the TMS and tDCS devices are stored. Her eyes wander to the visualization screens, where my recent fMRI brain scans are displayed.
She stands in front of them, her head slightly tilted. “What’s the subject’s background?” she asks.
“Twenty-seven-year-old male, imprisoned for life for stabbing three women. The scan was taken after an imagined rejection by a female subject who denied closeness,” I say from where I stand several yards away from her.
“That’s hell of a lit up amygdala,” she says. “Quite enlarged, is it not?”
“It is,” I say, and I know it was the right decision to bring her here. Even though I might land in prison for showing her classified research without clearance.
“What changed between the scans?” she asks as she stares at the second one. “It’s less reactive.”
“Three months of following an entirely new approach designed to stop the hijacking.”
“It’s what you research,” she says and turns to me. “You don’t just want to predict it, you want to cure it. You want to cure evil.”
“Curing is a harsh and perfectionist approach, just as evil is not the right word,” I say. “I would rather refer to it as a reduction of potential triggers.”
“What is the approach?”
“It is a form of re-training neural pathways and rationalized reactions through techniques like meditation, breathwork, and self-awareness to increase frontal lobe development and reduce the activation of the amygdala.”
Her eyes unfocus for a moment, and I walk over to a workstation next to her.
“But wouldn’t that require a subject’s desire to actually change to be successful?”
“It would,” I say, and delight tugs on the corner of my mouth as I pull up a flowchart, but she doesn’t look at it.
“Why would they want to?” she asks and looks me straight in the face.
I chuckle.
“Can’t you imagine a single situation worth changing? Not for, but because the status quo is painful enough, so it requires a subject to change?”
She scoffs and takes a step back, because she, of course, has sniffed the underlying message.
“I am not evil,” she says.
“I didn’t say you are.”
“I’m not in pain.”
“Are you?” I ask, and she bites her lip. “Because from what I see, you’re drowning, and because you are, you try to suffocate yourself before, so you don’t feel powerless when it finally happens.”
Her carotid is pulsating under the skin of her neck. And when I count for thirty seconds following the handle on the clock behind her, I find she has a pulse of 138 beats per minute.
“I’m just having fun,” she says. “For the first time in my life, I’m doing something for me.”
“Are you? Because it looks like you are doing it more for her than you.”
“And what if? What does it matter?”
“Because what you are looking for isn’t found in denial. It’s found in being able to hold the uncomfortable.”
Her chest heaves up and down, faster. Her eyes widen. She is having an intense reaction, a trigger. I know I hit the spot. I am good at what I do. At reading people. Understanding people. Analyzing people. The only question is whether she can override her flight response.
Suddenly, she makes a step forward.
She is so close, her scent washes over me.
Lavender.
Mixed with a sweet perfume that consumes me.
Her eyes strip me bare.
And there is a sensation in me.
A fluttery sensation in my chest.
My breathing flattens.
For this infinite moment, everything around me stands still.
Her eyes break the gaze into mine as they glance at my lips for a single second.
Her hand grasps the side of my face, and then her lips find mine.
A bolt surges through me, as I am ripped of my breath.
Her soft, yet firm and demanding lips on mine.
No one has ever kissed me before.
I haven’t kissed anyone except my own hand to practice it.
And now—she—student—
This can’t be happening.
And I react.
I push her away.
My arms are drawn up immediately.
How could she—
The rules—
Violated—
She looks at me.
Challengingly.
Almost gleeful.
“You should take your own advice sometimes,” she says with a smirk on her face, and I am rendered entirely speechless.
While I just stand there, trying to scramble my thoughts, she places something on the surface beside me, but I don’t even register it. The only thing I process is her scent before she walks away. I stare after her until the lab door closes with its mechanical sound and soft hydraulic hiss.
I just stare at it, before my eyes fall onto my T. rex arms with my clenched fists. From there, they wander to the surface next to me.
A folder on it.
The folder I gave her.
I open it and find the signed NDA in it.
A laugh escapes me as I shake my head in disbelief at her skill.