Jon rushed into his lab class, gasping and panting. “Sorry,” he offered in exchange for his embarrassing entrance. “I got sorta turned around in those halls. I’m not usually on this side of campus.”
“You’re the transfer, right?” said the dark haired man far too young to be a professor, but then again nothing would surprise him with this school. Him being an instructor actually seemed more likely than the campus budget supporting TAs “Jon, am I correct. Well, we’re glad to have you since now we have an even class size and Chemistry is always better with a partner. You’ll have two labs to make up due to your late add, but you can discuss that with me after we finish. Now take a seat so we can get on to business. So class, today’s lab should be an easy one and we can hopefully all get out here early.”
Relieved that the instructor seemed pretty lax about him showing up late, actually a big bright spot of Community College was just how lax it all was, and tried to make as little a scene as possible as he trudged over to the one empty lab stool at the one unmatched lab table.
There was a girl there waiting for him. A redheaded, frizzy, out of control haired girl with Pokemon earrings, thick glasses, and far too many bracelets around her wrist. She was obviously dorky but in a way that immediately registered with him as undeniably cute. Because of course he did, Jon realizing he had an undeniable thing for redheads. Even ones that could probably use one of those conditioners he’d seen ads for recently that would help her with all those split ends and damaged locks.
Jon was far too engrossed in his own random thoughts, and being generally being awkward and smitten, to realize she was finding his messy brown hair and concert tour shirt ‘cute’ as well. They were evenly matched in social ineptitude, lost in their own headspaces, but somewhere Jon found enough manners to break the ice.
“Jon,” he offered his hand.
“Rayleigh,” she demurely offered hers.
Not knowing what to say and she not doing much better, Jon found some courage to continue thawing the tundra. “I, uh, like your nails… And how you do each one a different color.”
“Oh, um thanks,” she blushed. “I actually paint one, every day, since I never have the patience to do them all and figured it keeps them all looking varying degrees of sorta fresh. I also have this bad habit of buying a new polish way too often and this way, I might actually be able to use all of them before the heat death of the universe.”
“Smart,” Jon admired through a playful smile. “Which one did you do today?”
“This one,” she pointed with one glittery index finger to a lime green middle finger with some black shading on the right side of the cuticle. “My morning playlist ended up being a lot of stuff off BRAT so I figured it was a sign. Guess painting my nails is kinda like my own little self check-in.” Rayleigh was crimson red, her own inner voice berating her for oversharing.
But Jon cured her of her rosy cheeks, earnestly replying “That’s actually really cool. So what happened with that one and those spirals? Bad day there?”
“Well you see-” and as she went on, Jon realized that maybe this wouldn’t be so terrible. Maybe he had grown up a little since high school and the prom incident. Maybe he didn’t have to be a complete buffoon around girls all the time. Even if it was just 85% of the time, that was a huge improvement.
“So now that I’ve explained the science behind our experiment today-” the TA announced, interrupting their little flirt session, and sending a flustered Rayleigh and disorganized Jon scrambling to jot down what was written on the board before it was erased.
“-You have written instructions at each of your lab stations. By the hour mark your crucibles should be coming out of the oven so you’ll have enough time to stir the reactant into the solution. Please remember to take your tare weights. And due to budget restrictions, we are short on lab coats and gloves so let your partner or someone else with the right PPE complete certain steps. You’ll be working with chemicals generously donated by Snyx Cosmetics and Copi Polish Manufacturing, so these are industrial level chemicals so be very careful. Safety always comes first people! Alright, are we good? Then let’s get to it!”
Which they did. At his core, Jon was a good student, or at least one who always put his best effort into doing the work. Rayleigh was as well, her folders and notebooks being immaculately organized with different colored sticky notes hanging out of most of the pages having a different color pen and note card ready for almost every situation.
Between these two try-hards, this lab should have been an easy A, but there was a different type of chemistry they didn’t account for. Instead of keeping a regimented, step by step operation, they got distracted and lost track of time. A lot. Needing to redo procedures and re-mix reactants more than once.
Because they talked. And talked. And talked and talked and talked. About everything. From their love of puzzles- Jon finally found someone who loved hashi puzzles as much as he did- to their favorite books and authors and the vortex of theories they had about the next book in the series, the next season of a show, and anything. They were dreamers, loved imagining what came next, and they had seemingly found someone just as lost in the clouds as they were.
Rayleigh was definitely more optimistic though. She seemed to have a gut feeling that a good ending was waiting around the corner for all her favorite characters. Jon found it adorable. That, and her sense of humor, and the way she’d laugh at his jokes, and her eyes…
“Uh-oh,” interrupted the TA.
He had a habit of doing that, Jon thought before realizing what spurred the phrase. “Uh-oh,” Jon agreed, snapping from his puppy dog trance, when he saw pink foam beginning to bubble over and spew from their gigantic 1000mL volumetric Erlenmeyer flask. “What do we do?” he panicked as the foam began to propel itself a few inches higher than before.
“Cap it!” shouted a classmate from the peanut gallery.
“No!” fired off the TA immediately. “Take it to the fume hood!”
So with his almost 90 minutes of practical lab training, Jon did the first thing that came to mind and stuck his bare hands over the mouth of the flask to stop the flow and cut it off from oxygen and then began to run the volcano over to the protected hood. Unfortunately, this had the same effect as putting your thumb over a garden hose, making the spewing chemical spray and cover even more of Jon.
It felt longer than it took, but Jon was able to relocate his pink volcano to the hood, getting blanketed in the process, with the TA pulling the guard down and running the fans to stop the reaction.
“And that’s why I put in bold letters to stir continuously,” said the TA through a sigh of relief. “Seems like we’ll need to revisit lab safety practice and ideal gas law next week, Thomas. You alright Jon? Foam is 99% air so as long as you didn’t swallow any or get any in your eyes you should be… oh.”
“Oh?” Jon didn’t notice it himself at first either, but as he began to brush his clothes clean of the foam, he saw it too. His nails pink, bright pink, and… longer? Actually, his hands generally seemed different, softer, hairless, and if they hadn’t felt like the same hands he always had, he would have sworn smaller.
He went to the sink, followed by the curious TA, to wash them off, but the paint job wasn’t going anywhere. With the excitement of the situation wearing off, he could confirm that yes, indeed, his nails were a bit longer, his hands were a lot softer, and the hairs down his forearms had seemingly disappeared too.
None of this concerned the TA though, breathing his own sigh of relief, offering, “At least your arms didn’t turn pink.”
Back at his lab table, a concerned Rayleigh was waiting for him. “That was pretty heroic Jon. Definitely something I could see Qvothe doing.”
“Yeah, but at what cost?” Jon flexed his fingers, trying his best to present the polish job in a manly way.
“I don’t know. I think guys with polish are kinda hot.”
Oh, Jon gulped. Maybe this wasn’t humiliating.
“Probably has to do with the confidence,” Rayleigh continued. “But I don’t think that pink is your color. Maybe, if you’re free, you could come over tomorrow night and I could pick out a color I think suits you better?”
Maybe this was definitely worth it. Jon’s tongue grew three figurative sizes in his throat as he stumbled for words. “Um, oh, uh-huh, yeah, definitely that’s something we should do.”
“I always keep a bit of polish remover in my purse, why don’t you work on de-pinkifying yourself and I could put my number in your phone? I just want to make sure you get my name right, it drives me crazy when I see it spelled Riley like Miley instead of Rayleigh.”
“Yeah, no, definitely,” Jon offered back, still working with a very limited vocabulary, as he unlocked his phone, still cringing at his embarrassing manicure. “That’s not my usual case.”
He went to work with a cotton ball, through the acrid fumes of acetone, but the color on his cuticles wasn’t budging a bit. He didn’t notice that Rayleigh wasn’t typing anything on his phone and instead scrolling away. It was only as she began quickly and hurriedly throwing her books and binders into her bag did Jon notice anything was wrong.
“Actually Jon, on second thought, I realized I’m busy tomorrow,” she said, jamming her notes carelessly into what seemed to usually be an immaculately kept bookbag. “Sorry, gotta go. And don’t worry about the lab report, I’ll take care of it. Bye-eee.”
Jon was so confused as she exited so quickly it basically left a cartoonish dust outline of where she used to be. Things were going so well and he didn’t even have the chance to say anything to screw it up so why did she-
Oh no, Jon’s face paled as he realized what had her turning tail. His phone. His feed. His screwed up, stupid feed.
He was sitting on the bus, scrolling through his feed, wondering what exactly scared her off so badly. It didn’t really matter, every brush of the thumb was loaded with land mines of red flags. She probably thought he was some sort of sick fetishist with all the breast feeding shit coming up scroll after scroll.
Jon was about two seconds from launching his phone across the bus, exhaling deeply as the only means to vent his frustration. Why? Why now? She was cool and we were hitting it off… but this?! Why does it always have to be something?
Instead of flinging his device, he instead began flagging and reporting every ad and post that wasn’t meant for him. It wasn’t even that much of a catharsis because each flag came with a barrage of dialogue boxes asking 20 questions about why the ad wasn’t right. ’Why didn’t this appeal to you? Why did you find this out of place? What would make this ad better?’
Almost every answer required some minimum character explanation to be typed out before moving forward. And having to do so with his new, rosy clickity-clackity, tippity-tappity nails just had him boiling.
On the fifth pop-up box while trying to remove an ad for pH wipes, Jon finally snapped when prompted for the second time ’How is this not for you?’
“What part of ‘I do not have a fucking vagina’ do you not understand?!” His rage disappeared pretty quickly when he realized he had just became the crazy person on the bus. Luckily, there was less than a half dozen night riders, but their disbelieving stares were plenty sobering.
Jon’s phone vibrated in his palm, no, actually, it was more violent than that. It felt like it shook, not from magnets, but fury, a bit longer than its normal little pulse, stopped completely, then chimed happily about removing the post. If he wasn’t trying to curl up and die in his bus seat, maybe Jon would have noticed or found it odd that it took a vocal cue from him when that feature should have been turned off.
But Jon was never one for paying too close of attention to details like that and began silently searching for industrial strength nail polish remover. He realized that his shopping was probably undoing all the work he previously did to fix his algorithm.
Hopefully it’d arrive soon so he could destroy all evidence of this terrible day. The only thing worse would be having to recount it to Zoe and Karyn.
