Expelled by Emmy Laybourne

 
    There she was. Sitting at her desk, one skinny leg crossed over the other, expensive jeans tucked into scuffed knee-high boots. A ratty Indian tunic, supposed to make her seem earthy somehow. Texting some boy on her phone. Li Jing could catch the side of her face and see her mouth was twisted in a clever smile. They all took such pains to be clever, the English majors.
    Li Jing SLAMMED the door and Penny jumped, her feet coming down square.
    â€œJesus, what’s your problem?”
    â€œYou told!”
    There was a brief hitch in her roommate’s expression of remote distain—a second of fluster. Penny noticed the loaded file box in Li Jing’s arms. Her research.
    â€œWhy did you tell?!” Li Jing yelled. She stomped into the room and set the box down by the window.
    â€œI didn’t!” Penny answered. Then a pause, as she set down her phone, “And anyway, if I had, that was my right. Carolann showing up here all the time. In the middle of the night? It was creepy!”
    â€œThey expelled me!”
    Li Jing should never, never have told Penny about her research.
    It was in a moment of stupid pride, back in the second month of the school year when they were both trying to make the best of their mandatory freshmen roommate assignment.
    Penny had won an award in poetry and was boasting about it. An award in poetry!
    Li Jing must have rolled her eyes, because Penny had said, “You know, Li Jing, poetry does just as much for people as medicine.”
    Li Jing couldn’t help herself. “The compound I am working on,” she had boasted, “will change millions and millions of lives.”
    And when Penny had snorted in disbelief, Li Jing had told Penny everything. About the natural sweetness of the compound. About the obese mice that were losing weight with no organ damage, no loss of appetite, and no brain damage or dehydration or muscle loss or any other negative symptoms usually associated with rapid weight loss. About the fact that her thesis advisor, the pinched-face Professor Hewitt, who never got excited about anything, had told her to keep her project very, very secret. Penny had flounced out of the room, saying that Li Jing just didn’t get it.
    That was the end of the friendly time. Li Jing spent most of her time in the lab, anyway. She didn’t need to have friends over. She didn’t need a place to sit and daydream and make doodles of flowers and cubes while “waiting for the words to come”. Li Jing returned to the room only to sleep—and Penny often slept elsewhere with one boyfriend or another.
    It had been an uneasy truce, but they had almost made it to the end of the year. Then Carolann had started showing up at the door. Li Jing’s test subject, Carolann.
    â€œWell, I’m sorry, Li Jing.” Penny always over-pronounced the J and G, making it sound like the first syllable of the word “jingle.” “But I don’t care how genius your research is, you can’t test some drug you are making up on an actual human being!”
    â€œShe was desperate for it. She was happy to have it.”
    â€œPeople are desperate for crack cocaine, but we don’t go selling it to them!” Penny had returned to her texting. Li Jing wanted to smack the phone out of her hands.
    â€œShe has lost sixty pounds in just over six weeks! With no side effects.”
    Penny stopped, her mouth open.
    â€œYou’ve been giving her that stuff for six weeks?! How … how big was she before?”
    Carolann was a morbidly obese, middle-aged manicurist from the strip mall a few blocks off campus. Li Jing had been stocking up on ramen at the convenience store when she had seen Carolann for the first time. Carolann had bought an Arizona iced tea and a pack of strawberry Zingers. She had thinning hair, wore too much makeup, and was obviously a townie. Li Jing’s first thought was that she’d make a perfect test