The drive out to the building was long, winding, and mostly along long-deserted semi-rural streets. Out in the wilds of western Pennsylvania, she had absolutely nothing except her job, and a couple of friends she ate chicken wings and played Pub Quiz with every Thursday. Her parents were on the other side of the state, along with all her friends, and the two boyfriends she’d ever had.
As she clicked her blinker to signal a left turn, her headlights pierced the veil of thick blackness in front of her. Above, through the open moon roof on her CRV, she could see a billion stars, all placidly twinkling in the distance. If she had it all to do over again, Claire thought she maybe would go into astronomy instead.
But, she didn’t. The time for regrets – whatever they were about – was a luxury Claire didn’t have. There was too much nothing to do, too much idle sitting and wondering.
As she turned into the mostly-empty employee parking lot that stretched for what seemed like eternity, and checked in with Simon at the front door, Claire started to think about other things. Her mind wandered a lot, with so little to captivate it. She wondered what Simon’s life was like, she wondered what Eckert’s was like outside of work, or if he even had one. In a lot of ways, the rotund, crotchety old scientist brought back memories of professors who went through three marriages before they finally admitted to themselves that the only thing in the world they loved was work.
She didn’t want to be that person. She wanted other things – love, a family, and... for the damn birthmark to quit tingling.
Down the main hall, Claire plodded along with her feet clicking on the mirror-finish gray tile. So sterile, so clean and unassuming.
There it was again.
Sterile.
She passed the elevator leading down to the underground labs – B3 for one – and as she did, the place on the front of her left shoulder thrummed with heat. For a second, she thought she was going crazy, and pulled down the collar of her shirt. “No way,” she said, slightly breathless.
It looked like, impossibly, the dark purple discoloration was... changing colors? Shimmering? “I gotta stop drinking before I come in here,” Claire said to disarm her fear. “When you start to see birthmarks changing color, it’s time to take a long, hard look at some of your life choices.”
With a sigh, and a decision to stop paying attention to her weird birthmark, even though it had started making her feel strange in places she hadn’t felt stirs since the last time she watched a Matthew McConaughey movie. That, in turn, made her giggle nervously.
“Either quit drinking, or get a boyfriend. Either one would solve this problem, I think,” she smiled, buzzing herself into the elevator that would take her up to level forty-two, where her office – of course, spotlessly clean, hopelessly sterile – waited for her to warm a chair and play Sudoku and waste her life copying bullshit off clipboards.
The only thing less likely than Claire not having her nightly Malbec was Claire finding someone. It wasn’t that she was an incurable sourpuss or anything like that. It was just the time, the effort, and mostly the energy.
“What I need,” she said to her empty office, “is some big, rugged, bear to just fall into my lap.” She took a breath, not entirely sure why she said ‘bear’, and exhaled slowly. “Yeah, right. Well, either way, a girl can always dream. No harm in that, huh?”
With one click of a button, her three-monitor array hummed to life, and with a series of six very practiced clicks on her mouse, she opened Netflix, opened her email account, and resumed her half-finished Sudoku from the night before.
“Yeah,” she said again. “A girl sure can dream.”
-2-
“I wasn’t really trying to embarrass him. Okay, all right, fine, maybe just a little.”
-Claire
“You have no idea how much I needed this,” Claire said, groaning as she finished her first beer of the night. “I’m so glad Eckert let me have the night off.”
The waiter interrupted her reverie – a slight guy with a mop of red hair, a bunch of freckles and a nametag that said “Shirley” on it. She eyed him askance when he came up to the table, and immediately he picked up on her confusion.
“Hazing,” he said. “I worked in the back for a few months, just got moved to the front of the house. So now I have to wear a nametag with a girl’s name on it for a week.”
“That’s pretty boring, as far as initiations go,” Andy, the single one of Claire’s non-GlasCorp acquaintances, said over the din of AC/DC and the clatter of plates, mugs and chicken bones. They’d met at a conference three years before, and happened to end up in the same town after graduating through some stroke of luck. “Although I guess it’d be sorta weird if you had to get jumped in to be a waiter.”