She and science had never agreed. In chemistry, the stink was off-putting. Biology had pig fetuses in jars. You couldn’t look at them, yet you were supposed to cut them apart. As for astronomy, the transit of Mercury was spectacular, then they had to go and ruin it with a bunch of formulas and calculations. But when she needed it, she enlisted the help of science. The window to the chem lab was unlocked. Bunch of absent-minded nerds, just like you’d think. She looked up the precise dose for a person her weight— better make that twice her weight. Finding the bottle was no problem; everything was labelled very neatly. It would have been nice in a four-poster bed, or on a windowseat, but she made do wrapped in a white coat in a corner of the lab floor. It was the first day of Christmas break.