As I half-ran to class, my head was half-spinning faster than I'd watched Fredward spin that bottle cap. So few questions had been answered in comparison to how many new questions had been raised. At least the rain had stopped questioning my soul.
I was lucky; Mr. Banner wasn't in the room yet when I arrived. I settled quickly into my seat, aware that both Mike and Angela were staring at me. Mike looked resentful; Angela looked like a lesbian.
Mr. Banner came into the room then, calling the class to order. He was juggling a few small cardboard boxes in his arms. He put them down on Mike's table, telling him to start passing them around the class.
"Okay, guys, I want you all to take one piece from each box," he said as he produced a pair of rubber gloves from the pocket of his lab jacket and put them on. The sharp slap of latex gloves snapping against his wrists seemed ominous to me. "The first should be an indicator card," he went on, grabbing a white indicator card with four squares marked on it and displaying it. "The second is a fur-pronged applicator —" he held up something that looked like a nearly hairless toothpick. "—and the third is a sterile micro-lancer." He held up a small piece of blue plastic and split it open. The barb was invisible from this distance, but my stomach flipped like a greasy cheeseburger nonetheless.
"I'll be coming around with a dropper of water to prepare your cards, so please don't start until I get to you." He began at Mike's table again, carefully putting one drop of
130. A reference to Natalie Imbruglia's 1995 hit, "Torn." A sampling of lyrics: "Nothing's right, I'm torn / I'm all out of faith / this is how I feel."