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"Shoot," she said suddenly "I should have taken names If those kids are so fired up about the butterflies, we could have signed them up for volunteer work"
"Good idea!" Ovid looked at her brightly through his yellowed goggles, giving her a thuh her like a hit of nicotine
"Do you knohat? I still could I got the name of their club president Zack Verkas No, Vern Zakas"
Dr Byron nodded approval She could see that his old generosity was still there, but was so held underwater Today he see the pricey steel-toothed blender Its fierce high buzz ascended in pitch like an eggbeater as the eneral, which also could account for their having missed the protest The shaker bath full of test tubes and atercentrifuge, if it wasn’t perfectly balanced, made a racket like tennis shoes in the dryer It sat on its own special honeycoht off the table
"I’ll call that boy this afternoon," she pro his name in tiny letters in a corner of her lab notebook while she still remembered it "If the environive theht be on their eneuy to na the liquid from the test tubes of butterfly-petroleue in batches, then carefully drew out each liquid sample with a pipette and squirted it into its own tiny aluminum pie pan The pipette reseh obviously it was more precise, and required countless disposable plastic tips, one for each sah a world of little dishes in this lab Yesterday she had nu an e was all over this place already Today she was supposed to weigh each sahts in the lab book The pans were already stacking up, thanks to her tardiness, so she got busy
"Oh, he’ll give me names, he owes me," she told Pete So the interview had lingered, not as strong as the ether but still in the air She was not Pete’s equal, obviously; she got that She was trying to learn the boundaries "He was horrified about protesting at the wrong address You should have seen theized for the mixup, and headed over to yell at Hester and Bear They even picked up their trash"
"Kids around here are so polite," Pete said, handing her the little pans one by one She weighed each one and carried it over to the slide war hot-plate affair with a theret hot enough to detonate the place Needless to say, she passed her workdays noithout s: fear of being blown to sreed "These kids don’t sound like the cheeky youngsters we see at Devary"
She turned up the fan on the venting hood and adjusted the little pans evenly on the warriddle After all the liquid evaporated she would weigh each pan again, and that was the fat content of a butterfly It made her a little sad to think of all those dead ladies leaving behind their fat as a est Losers, for real
"What are kids at Devary like, Bart Si," Ovid said "I get e- me of the GPA required to maintain their fraternity status, or what have you, and advising me of how I airl inin his work, tilting his pipette sideways and leaning on the counter to face Dellarobia She could see he wasan effort and appreciated that "Okay," he said, "true story She bragged on Facebook about cheating on the midterm Another student tipped me off, so I busted her, and she was furious She filed a co I’d invaded her privacy"
"Wow," Dellarobia said "We ot Soht steal your laer out of your garage to buy Oxycontin, but they’d leave a note, you know? ‘Thank you ize Please hold hed, but she wasn’t kidding So the way between mud pies and sex ed, e on their own behalf Even Preston, inventive as he as so serious already about not breaking rules What would becoainst kids who thought they owned it already? Cordelia e; she was born defiant, as Dellarobia once had been But that had won no favors in the long run either, it seemed Certainly not with the powers that ruled her life, namely her in-laws
She wondered whether those environ butterflies seemed to kill butterflies like mad They put them in the freezer alive and drew them out dead Dr Byron swore the end was quick and painless He’d finished Tissueopen a batch of fe on inside He wanted to see if they were in what he called diapause, the winter slon of nor out a chair next to his
"Look at this," he said, waiting while she reles left a raccoon ring around her eyes, of which she felt conscious now "Do you see that?" he asked
"What a for?"
"Little white pellets Those are spermatophores, one from each male that mated with her The little sac is called the bursa, where she stores them"
"I do see," Dellarobia said, determined not to blush The little lady had been around
"That’s the first one I’ve found that was mated, in more than two dozen dissections Nearly all of theh to Ovid to seneral aents Since the day she started working in close proxiht of him in his white coat had stirred her unexpectedly That crisp collar against his dark skin, so his earlier self They’d had a crisis, midweek, and he onderful about it The poent off, leaving the to a halt, and she’d called in the outage only to learn the problem was her bill They’d been so stretched after Christ in at once, she’d assu forgotten grace was already on the table since Nove Pete and Ovid could have been the worst day of her life, but he was overly kind, insisting it was his mistake, he’d overlooked all the current theseoff the same meter as the house He’d sat next to her with his personal credit card while she went through the power coh to some real person and explain there was more at stake here than just some family in the dark