Emily's Seams

I don’t remember the drive home. I don’t even remember passing the border. Mr. Puggums must have been asleep when we did. Probably would have remembered being detained for trying to bring an animal across the border. I don’t remember pulling up to my building and falling into my apartment. I don’t remember any of it.

I just remember the questions that ran through my head. What was Angus? Had he been alive? Was I insane?

My phone was blinking when I got in. There was only one message and it had been sent the day after Angus and I had left. It was the boss.

Look, Emily. I know you don’t think much of me as a boss. But I think a lot of you as a lab assistant. You’re very valuable to us here. Even if you came back to train a new assistant, I would be very grateful. Take care.

“Well how do you like that?” I said to my empty apartment.

Mr. Puggums was kind enough not to leave me hanging and gave a right good screech in reply.

After a long shower I called my boss back and got his voicemail.

“Hey, this is Emily. I didn’t call you back sooner because I was away for a funeral. I’m sure it’s been long enough that you’ve figured it out but if you need any more help I’m happy to come by. And thanks…for your message. It was nice to get.”

I got a call the next morning. The boss, who I was to now call Larry, asked me to come in as soon as possible.

Larry escorted me around the lab like a proud papa. He introduced me to people I’d worked with for the last three years as if it were Day One.

He had hired a new lab assistant. His name was Eric and he was a complete tool.

Larry left for a conference call and I sat with Eric and Lynn. I was trying hard to be kind but he was grating on me. Not because he had my old job. I just really didn’t like him.

He was the kind of person that was told at a very impressionable age that he was smart. This is a bad thing because if said to a certain kind of person, they will feel no pressure to follow through with actually being smart. I’ve always believed that nine tenths of being smart was hard work. Eric had been smart enough to float through an undergraduate program, but too lazy to pull off the marks or work experience to go any further. He was all talk and this annoyed the shit out of me.

“Kirsing’s methodology was elementary at best.” Eric was turning his nose up at a recent publication from the lab situated one floor above us. I had read the Kirsing paper before I’d left. The methods were simple and absolutely brilliant.

“A child could have thought up that design,” he continued.

I couldn’t help myself. “And yet Kirsing was the first one to come up with it.”

“Everyone’s fawning over it like it’s a stroke of genius!” he countered.

“Because it’s simple doesn’t make it stupid.”

He shrugged. It was an arrogant shrug.

“Why don’t you go eat your sour grapes somewhere else? Or better yet, why don’t you get to work on that genius methodology you think so highly of. Wait, I know, I know! You can’t because you are too busy shitting on the hard work and good ideas of people that actually contribute something worthwhile.”

His nose twitched. He stood up and left.

As I went down in the elevator, I realized that I felt okay. Not elated, or even happy. But okay. I was going to be okay. Even if the boss didn’t end up keeping me on any longer than he needed to have Eric trained, it was going to be okay.

Eric. I was almost out the front doors of the building when I noticed him sitting alone in the first floor coffee shop. He looked really sad and kind of pathetic.

“Eric?”

He sat up straighter and tried to put on his best face but it was too late. I had already seen him looking like he was drinking steamed shit and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

“May I sit with you?”

He just shrugged.

I took a deep breath and sat down. “Look, I’m sorry if I embarrassed you earlier. I just have a lot of respect for Kirsing’s work and I guess you caught me on a bad day.” Lie. It was a good day. I just didn’t like him.

He was looking off to the side when his nose crinkled up and his eyes started to fill with tears. Oh fuck, I’d made him cry.

“You’re right though. I’m just jealous. I just...I went to school with Kirsing. Three years later I’m still bouncing around as a lab assistant and he’s a lab’s star student. It’s like I just miss everything.”

“Eric, he worked really hard to get where he is. Kirsing stays late, comes in early. There’s a reason he’s doing so well.”

Eric nodded. “I know, I just...feel like I’m never going to get anywhere. I applied for grad school too, got it but just hated it!” He smiled but it wasn’t a happy smile. “When I left my Master’s project, I told my family it was because the lab head was a moron and wasn’t challenging me enough. Truth was I had no idea what I was doing. It was painful going to the lab every day.”

He may have been annoying but I still felt sorry for him. Nobody likes to have no idea what they’re doing, especially when it seems like everyone else has it down. “Look, I don’t know you but the first thing I got from you was that you think you’re smart and you want everyone to know it.”

He laughed weakly. “Don’t hold back.”

“I’m serious. Enough of an ego to have the confidence to try is one thing, but yours is a little much. And the sad thing is it isn’t enough. Don’t be worried to say I don’t have a fucking clue. I bet if you had said that a few times during your Masters, someone would have helped you. You don’t need to know everything or always one up everyone to make it.”

“It’s probably too late for me.”

“Oh my God, you’re not seventy. Talk to Larry, see if there are any projects he wants a student on. He’s got a lot of grants coming in for work he can’t do himself.”

“Hence the grad students?”

I nodded. “You’re learning from his experience, making some of it up as you go along and somewhere along the way you start to get some original thoughts. Then you write a paper like the Kirsing one.”

He nodded. “Thanks Emily.”

“Sure, see you tomorrow.” I stood up to leave.

“Hey, Emily? Why aren’t you a grad student?” He hadn’t thrown it back in my face. It looked like he really wanted to know.

I smiled and shrugged. “Somebody’s gotta keep the idiot grad students in line.” That was all I could give him.

He laughed a little. “Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.”