Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 96178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Around her, students happily opened their kits, read the directions, and laughed as they watched each other spit into the vials.
“Should I?” she said quietly. She knew what her parents would say: an unequivocal no. No meals out, no leaving campus, no boys, no alcohol, no makeup, no internet. But Ren had been away from home long enough to have softened some of those fearful boundaries. She’d walked with a professor to get a cup of tea at the café across the street from Davis Hall, and it had felt just as safe as sitting in the dining hall. She’d let Miriam put a small amount of blush on her cheeks for an outdoor concert on campus, and Ren hadn’t felt the need to start wearing makeup all the time. She’d had a study session with a group of students at a TA’s apartment a block off campus, and none of the males in attendance had tried anything untoward. It was fine. The profile in the student portal was perhaps the best example: Her name wasn’t searchable anywhere in there. Sure, everyone on campus knew it was about her, but no Google search could bring up her name. There were times when you simply had to trust people to do what they said they would do, and if Dr. Audran said he would protect their anonymity, then he would.
Right?
Ren groaned, scrubbing her hands over her face. Was this a test of her conviction? If so, she worried she would fail; her curiosity raged. “Ugh. I don’t know what to do.”
Dazed, Fitz turned. “About what?”
“Whether I should do this DNA thing.”
“It’s optional,” he said. “It’s all anonymous anyway.” He gave her one of those brief sarcastic smirks that she liked despite her better instincts, and said, “You know, just like that anonymous fluff piece in the portal.”
“Fluff piece?”
“The article about you.” He rubbed a finger over his flirty eyebrow.
“You read it?”
He nodded. “It was glowing.”
“I’m sure you’ve had one, too.”
“I have.”
“And yours wasn’t glowing?” she asked, ducking to smile at him. “That seems improbable.”
“Mine was basically about how I’m smart and my dad is rich,” he said with a humorless laugh, and then looked back at his own DNA kit. He gazed at it as if making a wish, before unceremoniously opening it and carrying out the directions. Ren watched while he peeled one label from the instructions and carefully lined it up over his vial. The other he stuck to the inside of his folder and pointed to the sample ID there. “You only link it to your name online if you want to. Otherwise, you’re just a number.”
Just a number, she repeated in her thoughts. Not even linked to my name.
She swallowed down a tiny, nervous flutter in her throat. “I want to do everything while I’m here.”
Fitz replied with a disinterested hum and turned to talk to the other students at the table.
“It could be anyone’s data,” she whispered to herself while Fitz and the other students discussed their plans for spring break in over a week: an Alaskan cruise with parents, road trip to Nashville, flying to Cancún.
Quickly—but carefully—Ren carried out the instructions, then pressed one sticker with her sample ID inside her classroom notebook and the other on the vial. Before she could think better of it, she dropped her package in with the others to be mailed off that day.
The rest of the class flew past in a blur of lecturing, discussion, questions, and exercises. Too soon, Ren was packing up and heading to her international political economy course, and then to introductory Mandarin, and then holing up in the library carrel reading and completing the day’s coursework. The next day was the same, but with different courses—vocal performance, chemical engineering, and advanced expository writing—but for these classes came study groups and peers and a whole giant group of students inviting her to sit with them at a big round table in the dining hall, sharing stories of college life with her. College was already everything she’d dreamed of, and by the time Friday rolled around, Ren had all but forgotten about the commercial DNA assay.
So in the end, it was wild how fast it all felt. On Monday, she was spitting into a vial, telling herself that it was a harmless experiment and a good opportunity to learn, and on Friday she was sitting at her table for immunology as Dr. Audran said he had some preliminary results for them.
“We’ll do a deep dive after spring break,” the professor said as he walked around, passing each student a sheet with a sample of their data. “This is just a taste to whet your appetite. I want you to spend the last ten minutes of class getting familiar with how this data looks and comparing your sequences for these alleles I’ve pulled. There’s nothing intense here, nothing dire—no one is finding out today that they have a rare genetic disease.” The class laughed, eyes flickering nervously around. “But for these five sequences, see if you can identify among yourselves which have homology across most humans, and which have the most variance.” He handed Ren her sheet and kept walking. “Oh! And a number of you have relatives who’ve done this kit already. You can see how your data compares on these five genes to your relatives. Those will be at the bottom of your page.”