The air in Lecture Hall 3B smelled like stale coffee and anxiety. It was the distinct scent of two hundred nursing and pre-med students realizing that midterms were three weeks away and they didn't understand half of what was on the projector screen. The room was a cavernous, windowless amphitheater where the hum of the ventilation system battled against the frantic scratching of pens and the clacking of laptop keys. Under the harsh fluorescent lights, everyone looked a little pale, a little washed out, and entirely desperate.
Cathay Williams sat in the very last row, hunched over her notebook. She wore an oversized grey hoodie, the sleeves pulled down over her hands, trying to take up as little space as possible. She hated this room. It was too big, too loud, and too full of people who seemed more confident than she would ever be. She kept her head down, her handwriting small and cramped as she frantically took notes. She couldn't afford to miss a single word. If she lost her GPA, she lost her scholarship. If she lost her scholarship, she didn't know what she would do.
"The cellular membrane," a voice cut through the room, sharp and cold as a scalpel. "Is not a wall. It is a negotiation."
Down in the "pit," which was the sunken stage at the front of the auditorium, Dr. Whitmore paced.
She was a striking woman, though "approachable" was not a word anyone would use to describe her. She wore a charcoal blazer that looked more expensive than Cathay's entire tuition, her dark hair pulled back into a severe, perfect knot. She didn't use notes. She didn't use a microphone. She didn't need to. When Whitmore spoke, the room went silent out of pure, instinctual fear. Even the air seemed to grow colder when she walked by.
Cathay peeked up from her notes, then quickly looked back down, terrified of making accidental eye contact. She found Dr. Whitmore intimidating in a way that made her stomach turn. The woman was brilliant, the youngest head of the Microbiology department in the university's history, but she looked at the students as if they were beneath her notice. She looked at them as if they were bacteria in a petri dish that she was considering bleaching. Cathay felt invisible in her presence, and truthfully, she preferred it that way. Being seen meant being questioned, and being questioned meant the possibility of being wrong.
"Most people view the immune system as a standing army," the Professor said, stopping at the edge of her desk. She leaned back, crossing her arms. Her eyes scanned the crowd, but they looked glassy, distant. It was as if she were looking through the back wall of the lecture hall and seeing something terrible on the horizon. "But an army is useless if the enemy is wearing a friendly uniform. That is the danger of the synthetic pathogen. It doesn't break the door down. It knocks. And the cell... the cell opens the door."
Cathay frowned, her pen hovering over the paper. Synthetic pathogen? She checked the syllabus tucked in her binder, running her finger down the dates. They were supposed to be covering the history of influenza today. She reread the entry for October 12th just to be sure. It clearly said Spanish Flu and Cytokine Storms. She wanted to raise her hand and ask, but the thought of two hundred heads turning to look at her made her throat close up. She stayed quiet, deciding to just write it all down and figure it out later.
"Dr. Whitmore?" a confident student in the front row asked. Cathay envied him. He was one of those students who always sat in the front, wearing a pressed shirt, his hand shooting up before the question was even fully formed. "Is this going to be on the midterm?"
Whitmore looked at the student. For a second, her mask of icy professionalism slipped. She looked tired. Not tired like Cathay, who was physically exhausted from double shifts at the diner and late-night study sessions, but soul-tired. Old. The skin around her eyes seemed to sag, carrying the weight of a lifetime in a single moment.
