Lab Girl by Hope Jahren Page A

wouldn’t have even stolen that shit,” Bill hollered at him over his shoulder, and I smiled, knowing that the joke was ours alone.
    The little group of students leaned in toward one another and said something private, and then began to titter in our direction. Bill and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. It might have been the first time, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last, that the people around us would misinterpret the nature of our connection.
    During the next week we toured a working citrus orchard and were dumbfounded to learn how many different ways there were to mechanically shake the produce from a tree. We also toured the packing facility and saw rows of women standing along a conveyor belt pulling out large or oddly shaped spheres from a river of forest-green fruit that flowed down the line at a rate of ten per second. I am sure that we looked confused when our guide announced solemnly that these women were sorting lemons; it would have been easier to believe that the spheres were billiard balls, given the extremely hard knocking noise they made while bouncing down the conveyor belt.
    Our guide loudly narrated our visit, gushing about how this factory was a great place to work, complete with on-site housing, and I thought about the weird little town that would result from such an arrangement. He ushered us into the plus-five-degree “ripening room,” which was like a windowless train car packed floor-to-ceiling with the hard green fruit. The door would be sealed tonight, he told us, and the room would be flooded with ethylene gas, forcing these lemons to get off their asses and ripen in ten hours. Sure enough, the room next to us contained thousands of identically sized fruits, each sporting a peel so perfectly yellow that it could have been made of plastic.
    After the tour was over, we milled about in the parking lot. “Good grief, talk about mind-numbing. I’ll never complain about school again.” Bill was referring to the lemon-sorting and was also jumping up and down in order to warm himself up after leaving the chilled rooms.
    “Assembly lines depress the shit out of me. The town where I grew up had miles of them,” I said, rubbing my hands and shuddering at the secondhand memory of my brother’s gory third-grade field trip through the slaughterhouse. “Actually, they were more like disassembly lines.”
    “Did you ever work in the factory?” Bill asked.
    “I was lucky, I went to college instead. I moved out of my parents’ house when I turned seventeen.” I spoke cautiously, modulating my urge to trust him.
    “I moved out of my parents’ house when I was twelve,” Bill replied. “But not far, just into the yard.”
    I nodded, as if this was the most perfectly normal thing in the world. “Was that when you lived in a hole?”
    “It was more of an underground fort. I put carpet and electricity in it and everything.” He spoke offhandedly, but not without shy pride.
    “Sounds cool,” I said, “but I don’t think I could sleep in a fort like that.”
    Bill shrugged. “I’m Armenian,” he said. “We’re most comfortable underground.”
    I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was making a dark joke about his father, who as a child had been hidden in a well during the massacre that had killed the rest of his family. Later, I came to know that Bill lived pursued by the ghosts of his macabre ancestors, and it was they who continuously pressed him to build, plan, hoard, and—above all—survive.
    “Where is Armenia? I don’t even know,” I asked.
    “Most of it isn’t anywhere,” he answered. “That’s kind of the problem.”
    I nodded, sensing the gravity of his words while not really understanding them.
    Near the end of the trip, I approached my advisor as he readied the equipment for the next day’s work. “Listen, we have to hire that Bill guy in the lab,” I told him.
    “You mean the weird dude who’s always off by himself?” he asked.
    “Yes. He’s