1969. It was the year of Manson's helter-skelter, the year we put a man on the moon, and the year two strangers watched the world end in a mushroom cloud of nuclear war.
1966. This was a much better year. Well, for everyone except twenty-two-year-ol...
Three years into a bachelors in biochemistry and even I couldn't figure out what lunch-lady Joe had put in the meatloaf.
The jiggly concoction of onions, ketchup, and "meat" sat menacingly between my buttered peas and a jagged piece of cornbread, daring me to make the first move. And while it seemed harmless, I watched carefully as the gravy spread out across my tray and crept ever closer to my frontline of peas.
"Stop staring at your food," Kimmy grumbled as she flipped a page of her impossibly thick textbook. As always, she was hunched over reading, trying to block out the world around her and not wasting time on eye contact.
"I swear it moved," I mumbled back as I laid my chin on the tabletop, watching the shadows of the palm trees sway as the California sun soaked through the cafeteria skylight and warmed the back of my neck.
Kim only shook her head, eyes unflinching as they scanned over the lines of her textbook in a robotic fashion. I squinted, studying her movements, looking for loose wires and mulling over the possibility that Kimberly Lam could actually be a machine of some sort. Sent from the future to study us and then destroy us.
She definitely has the personality to match, I said to myself, narrowing my eyes further.
At lunch her mathematically straight hair was always tied up—somehow being held together by a single pencil—as her pale skin reflected light like unscuffed plastic and, while most of her body was as still as a statue, her left leg bounced as she focused.
Must be a problem with her hydraulics, I smirked, searching for an antenna in her dark hair as my stomach gurgled angrily.
As nice as the hospital cafeteria was, the food could kill you. And while there were no proven cases, I wasn't willing to take that chance.
So as my stomach threw a tantrum, I shut my eyes and inhaled the oh-so-familiar smell of disinfectant and still air. It wasn't as busy as it usually was. The lunch rush had just passed and so the nurses, lab techs and hospital staff dominated the oval room. Shadows of swaying plant life from the nearby courtyard moved past my closed eyes as the light that reflected off the art déco columns struck my cheek.
