Total pages in book: 117
Estimated words: 113051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
I’d like to say my findings were boring and benign, but they weren’t. Oh, I wasn’t pulling the legs off butterflies or frying ants under the microscope accompanied by a villainous laugh, just for the hell of it. My efforts were methodical and calculated. I sliced up the fungi that grew along rotted tree stumps, burning their edges with a match to see if they contracted or showed any signs of pain (they didn’t, obviously, but I was curious). When my grandmother needed to defend her garden, I did the job of sprinkling salt on slugs, but really just to see how they would die. I didn’t go into trying to torture things; everything was entirely in the name of curiosity and science.
And the pure fucking boredom of poverty.
But I also knew better than to tell my grandmother this when she asked me how my science experiments were going. As much as I coveted the term “mad scientist,” I knew that telling her what I actually did would get me into trouble. Sure, a little boy can be excused for callous cruelty, but a girl doing the same thing, even in the name of research, would get me into deeper trouble.
See, boys are allowed to be mad scientists. But when women do it? We’re simply labeled crazy. And even at eight years old, I knew there was a difference.
Which is probably why the idea of mandatory psych sessions grates on me, because of how many times I’ve been told I need to “go see a shrink.” Not because I’m a woman, per se (though I’ve noticed they never tell the men to get their head checked), but because I dealt with undiagnosed ADHD for so long. I hated how short my temper was, how the slightest criticism or rejection would feel like the world was ending, how some days, especially around my period, the smallest thing would set me off in a downward spiral. I’d been labeled “mad” and “crazy” and “fucking psycho” by more than a few ex-boyfriends (and one ex-girlfriend, who should have known better) just because I lacked emotional regulation.
When I was finally diagnosed, it was like a switch went off in my head. An explanation as to why I am the way I am. But even though more and more people are getting diagnosed as neurodiverse in some capacity, the stigma hasn’t gone away. Many neurotypicals think most of us are faking it; they don’t understand how we’re not actually lazy but that there are brick walls that slide down, preventing us from doing things, even things we want to do. When they tell us not to worry about something or not to take something personally, they don’t realize we often can’t. And in the end, they shun us and side-eye us and make pithy comments about how “mentally unstable” we are, especially if we happen to present as feminine.
I don’t want Everly to think I’m mentally unstable. I don’t want Professor/Dr. Kincaid to think that either. And yet, if they find out the truth, that’s exactly what they’re going to think. If I’m below Stanford’s moral standards, I sure as hell won’t measure up here.
Thankfully, at no point has David appeared, demanding I be sent back on the next seaplane. Everly continued the tour, leading me to a short cliff overlooking the inlet with a cedar-shingled gazebo at the end, a place to hide from the rain and hunker down at the picnic table that had been scratched with hundreds of initials and doodles, and Madrona Beach, a strand of light sand so aptly named because of the lone madrona tree growing near the edge.
“We call them arbutus trees here,” Everly said as she ran her hands over the papery and peeling red bark. “But my father thought the American name, madrona, had a better ring to it. The foundation was called the Johnstone Institute before he bought up the fishing lodge, and this tree sparked the change. Normally these trees aren’t found this far north on Vancouver Island—they are concentrated more around Victoria and the Gulf Islands, where it’s drier—but my father said there was something special about this tree, therefore something special about this place. And he was right.”
One thing I’ve done on the tour is manage to keep a million questions to myself. I want to ask her about their fungus, the one that’s only found here, the component that really makes this place special. The foundation is so secretive about it that I don’t even know what the fungus looks like. I might have already walked past it and not known (I doubt it, though I did spot some rainbow chanterelle under a Sitka spruce).
After Everly takes me past the Panabode cabins, built for temporary researchers, and the north dorm, where the administrative offices are and miscellaneous visitors stay, we stop outside two buildings with a path connecting them.