Kendra stalked out of the women’s room, and climbed the stairs two at a time, quite a feat for her five-foot, one-inch, slim but sedentary frame. Her heart still pounded when she reached the door to her lab. It made her remember the first day that she’d approached it. Imagine, Kendra Tanagawa, daughter of a restaurateur in Wichita, Kansas, had her own lab--even if it was a glorified broom closet--at Stamford University. She pushed into her lab, ready to crunch data. If she’d finally gotten through to the Little Bitch, then she should be able to apply her equation more broadly—big if.
Momentarily lost in the contemplation of her own early teenaged psyche, she had halfway seated herself behind 20 terabytes of accumulated data before she noticed the bare, hairy ankles that protruded from a huge pair of narrow topsiders resting, as usual, on top of her ancient digital oscilloscope. Fortunately it had a thick heavy case, but Kendra was mad. She had asked Neil dozens of times not to rest any part of his body on her equipment. In fact, she’d insisted that her fellow PhD candidate not sneak into her lab at all. Labs were supposed to be sacrosanct.
“Get off!” She smacked the feet sideways at the same time as she chopped up against the extended knee of Neil’s lower leg. The effect was satisfying.
“Ow!” he yowled as the weight of his legs hurtling toward the floor pulled him upright in her spare chair. The chair was old and had a the broken spring that dumped any occupant who dared to move too fast. He landed in an awkward squat, one hand grasping the edge of her lab bench to keep himself from sprawling on the floor. “What’d you do that for?” he asked incredulously as he stood.
“I’m tired of you coming in here to spy on me, Neil,” Kendra replied, and bit off the tirade that knocked against her clenched teeth so great was its yearning to follow.
“I’m not spying--”
“Remind whoever sent you that I’m the outcast. You’re not supposed to be interested in me.”
“But Professor Healy just--”
Kendra inhaled, determined not to lose control. She might say too much. Instead, she summoned the positive image of herself: a physics rock star. Elegant in a white silk suit, she gleamed in the spotlight of a darkened auditorium as she wowed an adoring audience at a huge TED conference.
“I’m not concerned about the director’s opinion of my work.” Calm once again, she met Neil’s eager, nosey gaze. “So why should you be?” She stared at him until he had no choice but to leave.
He deliberately left her door open, another rude gesture in the competitive and compulsively private little world of doctoral candidates in physics. Kendra waited until he’d slammed the door of his own lab before she got up. A quick look down the hall of closed doors showed her that her older colleagues had gone back to work. She closed her own door softly, her mind already turned to work.
She searched through the heap of books and papers around her computer until she found her wireless keyboard. She logged in, and opened the equation that had consumed her mind, awake or asleep, for three years. Kendra peered at the troublesome second page of it. No, she still didn’t see what limited her travel, but something did.
She pushed her chair away from the lab bench, and sighed. Really, it had been a waste of time to look at the equation. If she continued to occupy the smallest, crummiest lab in the department, then nothing had changed. She would have to face the Little Bitch again, and the sooner the better. “But I don’t want to,” she whined softly, then had to laugh. She sounded just like LB.
“I am tired.” She glanced at the old analog clock that was part of her Rube Goldberg alarm, the mechanical part of her triple system of reminders, each reduplicated in her apartment. She’d missed a meeting in her first week at Stamford. As a result, she was not at the swanky dinner that the university hosted to introduce tomorrow’s innovators to today’s industry giants. The giants agreed to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars that evening. Most of the funding for PhD research really happened there, so, though Kendra had filed more grant applications than any of her colleagues, all of her conventional research went unfunded. The only good thing to come out of it was that she abandoned her unfunded conventional research to begin her real life’s work, the project that no one knew anything about.
She realized that she’d been staring at the old alarm clock, and blinked. It was only five-thirty, still evening. She was tired enough that it felt like midnight, but of course it wasn’t. As the department chairman, Professor Healy would never stay late just to chastise a student. Her stomach rumbled. Kendra couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten, but she didn’t care. She wasn’t weak or shaking, so it couldn’t have been too long.
“Okay, once more into the fray.” She locked the door to her lab, then surveyed the blinking devices around her. She reset a digital countdown on each of two machines, adjusted a dial, and stood on a black circle no bigger than a dime that she’d painted on the floor of the lab. A horizontal beam of light scanned her. When it finished, she pressed a button on what appeared to be a small key fob, and disappeared. 
