2. Introduction to the Cell and Cell Membrane
INTRODUCTION TO THE CELL AND CELL MEMbrANE
*Samantha*
There was a scrabble of keys, a sigh, and then the shuffle-shuffle of sneakers. Diya. Even before she creaked open our bedroom door, I could smell the ghost of antiseptic that always trailed her home from the ER.
“Samantha?” she whispered, voice raw from twelve hours of telling drunk NYU kids that their insides would stay inside if they’d simply stop doing shots for five goddamn minutes.
I rolled over, exposing my face to the icy air, and grunted. “In the flesh. What’s up?”
Diya poked her head in. Even in the dark, I could see the reverse raccoon marks from her safety goggles. “Sorry I woke you,” she said, genuine remorse in her tone. “I think I’m just so tired, I’m confused. I keep telling myself not to talk, and here I am, still talking.”
“S’okay.” I turned and buried my face into my pillow, letting it muffle my next words. “I should get up. I should get up. I should get up.”
Motivated by the power of self-talk, I sat up in bed and cracked my eyes open.
Already removing her scrubs as she crossed the room, Diya tossed them into the laundry basket with one hand.
She’d mastered the art of undressing without ever being technically naked; a hoodie materialized over her tank top before the scrubs even hit the basket.
“You should go back to sleep. It’s not even six. ”
“I’d have to fall asleep for that to work,” I said, and then yawned. I knew myself and my terrible relationship with insomnia enough to know more sleep was now impossible. “I’ll just get up and go to the lab early.”
Diya grunted and plopped onto my desk chair. “Why am I sitting here?”
“You need a shower and you don’t want to get in bed until you’re clean,” I filled in.
Diya let out a tragic sigh and blearily blinked around the room. “But the bathroom is so far away.”
Her eyes drifted, but then she did a double take, frowning at something on my nightstand.
I followed her line of sight and cringed.
Our early-morning, sleep-deprived repartee would now be derailed by the bright, accusatory rectangle of the wedding invitation on my nightstand.
I could see in the dance of her dark eyebrows on her forehead the train of her thoughts.
“What’s that?” she asked, tilting her head. “Are you getting married?”
“It’s junk mail.” I snatched it from the nightstand and folded it in half. “You’re hallucinating. Take a shower. Go to sleep. Dream of your mom’s rogan josh.”
“No, no. I know myself. I don’t start hallucinating until I’ve been up for seventy-two hours.
That was your name on there. Who is the guy?
Is it the Stanford guy? I hate that guy.
Or the one who did CrossFit? Please tell me it’s the CrossFit guy, I miss his shirtless sleepovers.
Oh! The lawyer guy, the one you went to law school with who keeps making us dinner. Or the rower? Eric? Is that his name?”
“None of those,” I said, shoving the folded invite into my backpack on the floor next to my bed, where it could no longer radiate weirdness throughout my personal space.
“Just an old family fri—” I stopped myself from saying friend.
He might’ve been my friend when we were little, but we were strangers now.
And, obviously, no one else in his family had ever been a friend to me.
“Someone I used to know playing a joke.”
Diya made a skeptical face but let it go. Apparently, she was too tired to chase the scent of gossip.
“I’m heading out early,” I said, flipping back my covers. “Have a project due and the sequencer is actually free before eight.”
She nodded, her head tilting back as she succumbed to a massive yawn.
Standing, I hunted around my room and threw on the least-wrinkled pair of jeans I could find, a Genetics Bowl Champion tee, and a cardigan that might’ve been trendy seven years ago but now existed solely to telegraph “harmless grad student” to the outside world.
I finger-combed my hair into a haphazard bun and grabbed my bag.
Leaving Diya to her dozing, I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and called it good.
After I put on my coat and slung the backpack over one shoulder, I caught my reflection in the mirror by the front door.
When I was on the tennis team in undergrad, I’d been told a few times that I resembled a young Anna Kournikova, the infamous Russian tennis pro.
This was back when I worked out daily, was outside in the sun often, and still dyed my hair blond.
I definitely preferred the light brown of my hair color now.
My thoughts must’ve still been preoccupied by that stupid fake wedding invitation because, in my quick assessment of my reflection, my brain told me I looked like someone who could plausibly be a mail-order bride, but only if the groom had specified “bargain bin, will not arrive as advertised.”
The thought made me snicker.
Yes, yes. Make it all a joke. Everything is a joke. Life is so much nicer that way.
* * *
By 6:00 AM, the city was running on three-quarters power.
I could actually enjoy a sidewalk without having to weave through a marathon of tourists and startup founders on electric scooters.
The air was crisp, and even though I could see my breath, I left my hands exposed.
The summer had been so hot, I was still enjoying the cooler temperatures of fall.
Central Grounds, my favorite coffee shop, operated on the theory that coffee should taste like coffee and be better than good. The line was mercifully nonexistent, and this small win buoyed my mood.
My barista—Kevin to his friends and regulars—smiled sympathetically when he saw me. “Rough night?”
“You have no idea,” I said, rubbing at my temples. “Quad-shot Americano, please.”
“On the house if you can recite the Krebs cycle backward.”
I blinked. “You know I can.”
“I know you can, but I want to see if you can do it before coffee.”
“Fine,” I said. “Malate, fumarate, succinate, succinyl-CoA, alpha-ketoglutarate, isocitrate, citrate, oxaloacetate.” I stopped for a second. “Wait. I started with malate. That’s not?—”
“Impressive enough,” he said, waving it off. “Nobody ever gets that far.”
I grinned, because it felt good to be a monster at something.
He slid the coffee across the counter with a nod of respect. “Make good decisions.”
“I shan’t.” I tipped him, grabbed the drink, and inhaled it.
Ah. Coffee.
I loved coffee so much. I’d always liked coffee, but now I loved coffee. It was likely the closest I would ever come to a committed relationship.
Armed with my favorite thing on earth, I beelined for my department building.
The NYC campus was close to the university’s research hospital, a collection of structures cobbled together by whatever real estate happened to be available during the dot-com crash.
The genetics building, my home for the next indefinite period of time, was a neoclassical monstrosity complete with white columns made of cement and fairly decent scrollwork, considering the building was less than one hundred years old.
Gulping the last of my coffee, I would’ve been perfectly content to marinate in my own productivity until noon.
But as I turned onto the sidewalk, an unusual sight pinged my situational awareness.
A new stranger—a genuinely remarkable-looking fella—leaned against one of the entrance columns with an aura of extreme confidence.
He wore an obscenely nice tan overcoat. The kind you see in European cologne ads, probably cashmere.
It was unbuttoned and therefore open, revealing his all-black attire beneath.
Black turtleneck, black pants, and black shoes shined to a mirror finish.
Unlike mine, his hands were ensconced in leather gloves.
Currently, he checked his phone, then pocketed it and stared straight ahead. If this were an undergrad psych experiment where one rated an individual’s attractiveness on a Likert scale, I’d have categorized him as “dangerous levels of hot.” So, a 5.
The part of myself that was still somewhat aware of my outward appearance wished I’d brushed my hair this morning.
Hell, I wished I’d done literally anything other than roll out of bed and slap on the first clean-ish T-shirt I found.
But ... whatever. Who cared if Mr. European Perfume Ad saw me looking like this.
We’d probably never encounter each other again.
Squaring my shoulders, I adjusted my bag and told myself not to get distracted. I had things to do, data to analyze, coffee to drink. I was making for the door, eyes fixed on my phone screen as I pulled up my email, when he stepped directly into my path.
I glanced up. He looked at me. I took a step back. He kept looking at me.
So, the stepping in my path wasn’t an accident. It was calculated. He’d measured the trajectory and plotted an intercept.
My heart, which had coasted along inertly for the better part of a year, spiked a little.
“Pardon me,” he said.
Nice voice. Very nice. Low and smooth, with a faint European inflection that I couldn’t pin down but absolutely believed got him laid on a regular basis.
I blinked at him, then did the New Yorker thing where you make yourself so unimpressed that it comes back around to seeming interested.
“Yes?”
“You’re Samantha, yes?” He cocked his head, his green eyes sweeping over my face. The man’s tone broadcasted interest, but his gaze seemed somehow both bored and intense.
I took another step back, scrutinizing him, and considered pretending I wasn’t Samantha, but the way he’d pronounced my name, dragging the a out ever so slightly, made me want to engage rather than lie outright. “Depends. Who’s asking?”
He smiled, and it was a micro-expressive thing, barely more than a twitch at the corners of his mouth. “Andreas Kristiansen. You got my note, yes?”
It took my tired brain a full second to realize that this wasn’t just some random European thirst trap.
This was *that* Andreas, the youngest Kristiansen, the boy—no, the man—who’d sent me a wedding invite and put himself as the groom.
And when it did, my heart tripped all over itself and I stood paralyzed for several long seconds, chasing my breath.
I had no idea if he noticed or was bothered by my sleep-deprived gaping. Andreas simply stood there and returned my stare, giving me time to collect myself, as though he’d foreseen this reaction to his sudden appearance after fifteen years.
By the time I’d collected myself enough to respond, I was breathing hard and my heart had taken off at a gallop. I cycled through every available response and landed on the most mature by far. “I’m busy.”
He didn’t seem offended. Good for him.
“You remember me,” he said, sounding certain and pleased, though his expression didn’t change.
I didn’t respond. I owed him nothing. Also, I didn’t know what to say or why my body had suddenly divorced itself from my mind.
After studying me for another long moment, he gathered a deep breath and glanced over my shoulder. “It’s urgent that we meet.”
I spoke without thinking. “So, you show up at my job?”
His attention cut back to mine and he gave me another of his micro smiles. “Despite the risk, I suspected waiting for you here would be more efficient than waiting for you to answer an email. Or a letter. Or a courier.”
I laughed, once, because it was either that or throw my empty coffee cup at him. “I was hoping the next step would be a singing telegram. Or a skywriter.” Again, I’d spoken on instinct, the sarcasm emerging without thought. His sudden presence had sent me into a panic and I didn’t understand why.
Andreas’s face flickered with what might have been amusement, hard to tell. “If there’d been time, I would’ve done that next.”
I glared at him while also suddenly very aware of his proximity. He didn’t smell like cologne, but there was a faint, unfamiliar trace of something herbal and clean. Like rosemary and ozone, like the air after a thunderstorm, if that’s even possible.
Clinging to sarcasm like a shield, I made no attempt to hide the largeness or loudness of my sigh and took yet another step away, outside of the radius of his seductive olfactory assault. “What do you want?”
His gaze darted past me, scanning, then fixed on my face. “May I buy you a coffee? Or is that redundant?”
The fact that his voice was so incredibly alluring irritated me. I looked at my cup of coffee, which I’d just finished, then back at Andreas, intending to turn him down.
Thus, no one was more surprised than me when what came out was, “Fine.”
“Thank you,” he said, sounding sincerely grateful, gaze moving over my face like he was hungry for the sight of it. My eyes narrowed.
What are you doing, Samantha? This feels dangerous. Don’t do it!
Clearing my throat, I added testily, “If you promise to leave me alone after, then fine. I shall go get a cup of coffee and listen to whatever you have to say.”
If my glare bothered him, he didn’t make any outward sign of it, instead saying, “There is a café just there. I believe they opened at six.” He lifted his hand toward the corner across the street. “We can talk for a bit, and?—”
“No.” I turned and began marching toward the café he’d indicated, not waiting to see if he’d follow. “You said in your note a half hour would suffice. I’ll give you a half hour. And that’s it.”