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She completes her first experiment when she is four-years-old.
At the time she did not know that was what she was doing, but in retrospect, it absolutely was. After her tenth viewing of Peter Pan, she decided to see if it was truly possible to fly. Mistaking some glitter she found in her mother’s art studio for fairy dust, Cosima shook it all over herself, giving her tiny body a blue sheen, managed to reach the roof of the garage after climbing the ladder her father left leaning against it while replacing some of the tiles, conjured up a happy thought, and leapt.
Her father heard her screams from inside the downstairs bathroom. He scooped her up and rushed her to the emergency room, where the doctors sedate her and reset the compound fracture to her right humerus. Her mother insisted the cast be orange, Cosima’s favorite color that week, and when Cosima finally emerged from the anesthesia, her father asked, “What were you thinking?”
She shrugged. “I just wanted to see what would happen.”
Needless to say, her experiment to see if she could fly was a literal crashing disaster.
She completes her second experiment when she is seven-years-old after everyone goes home following her birthday party.
Both of her parents were teachers though they both somewhat pretentiously referred to that as their “day jobs.” Her mother taught junior high school math but considered her true passion to be gigantic canvases covered in paint, glitter, and “found objects,” which Cosima learned early on to never refer to as “garbage.” Her father taught high school chemistry but frequently locked himself away in the garage to play the saxophone. Neither of them particularly liked their jobs from what Cosima understood, but they took school very seriously.
Which was why when Cosima received a “N” on her report card that term, telling her parents that her science grade needed improvement, her parents decided to buy her a kit to make a volcano.
She wanted a New Kids on the Block sleeping bag.
“C’mon, Cos, let’s do this,” her father cajoled, wrapping an arm around her shoulders while her mother cleaned up, and Cosima followed him to the slab of cement that passed for their back porch.
She liked the precision of it, of the exact measurements and the steps to follow. In all she did, Cosima tried to be organized, and this catered to it. When the baking soda and vinegar combined to overflow, Cosima laughed in surprise and excitement, wanting to replicate it again and again.
Her second experiment was more successful, but it left an unquenchable thirst inside her for more.
Her third experiment at age eleven is of an entirely different sort.
Lisa Ng was her locker partner. Her parents owned a Laundromat a few blocks from their school, and sometimes after school Cosima would go there with Lisa to do their homework. Like Cosima, Lisa wore glasses and had a mouth full of braces; they also both attended the gifted program in the afternoons while their peers took gym and art. Lisa’s best subject was math whereas Cosima’s was science; they both hated history and were bored with English.
“I can’t wait to go to college,” Lisa always sighed dramatically after her mother would yell at her in Cantonese, blowing her bangs out of her eyes.
Lisa wanted to go to Harvard; though Cosima hadn’t really given any thought to it yet, she decided then she wanted to go to Harvard too.
It took months to convince Lisa’s parents to let her sleepover at Cosima’s house, and when the day finally came, Cosima felt like she would burst into a million pieces in excitement. Sometime after gorging themselves on popcorn and licorice and watching the TGIF block of sitcoms, Cosima noticed how shiny Lisa’s hair was, how warm her brown eyes were.
Cosima moved forward, pressing her lips to Lisa’s. Lisa started, crab walking backwards with wide eyes, and Cosima knew she did something wrong.
Lisa never slept over again, and Cosima stopped going to the Laundromat after school.
Cosima would not kiss another girl until her sophomore year of high school, having learned sometimes the consequences of an experiment were too much to bear.
Her fourth experiment changes her life.
She took biology in eighth grade rather than ninth, part of her advanced curriculum. Cosima was fascinated by the sight of her cells beneath a microscope, couldn’t get enough of the different theories. When they reached the unit on genetics, Cosima’s fascination only increased.
Her teacher gave them a worksheet that listed genetic traits. Their assignment was to go home, study their family members, and determine which were present on which side of the family. Then they were to complete Punnett Squares to show if the traits they inherited were dominant or recessive.
When she sat down to dinner with her parents, Cosima suddenly realized for the first time in her life how little she looked like her parents. Her mother’s hair was red and her eyes, green; her father’s sparse hair was blond and his eyes, blue. Cosima did not have dimples in her cheeks when she smiled like her mother or a dimple in her chin like her father. She was the only one in the family who wore glasses and the only one with an allergy to peanuts.
“Am I adopted?” she asked over quinoa, and both of her parents laughed.
But the science didn’t lie, Cosima decided as she filled in the squares, and she shared none of her parents’ traits or exhibited the ones she should. And so she tiptoed down the hallway to her parents’ bedroom, knocked, and, when called inside, repeated her question about adoption.
“Cosima, you’ve seen pictures of me when I was pregnant with you.”
“But it doesn’t make sense unless I was switched at birth,” she insisted, brandishing her science notebook as proof.
And so her parents explained to her their fertility problems, specifically her father’s immotile sperm, and while Cosima could have gone her entire life without thinking of her father’s sperm count, at least it explained why she looked nothing like her parents.
But her experiment revealed there was a whole other person responsible for half of her genetic material, and it became a new obsession.
Her fifth experiment requires she become someone else entirely, and it is the first experiment Cosima completes that she is completely uncertain about attempting.
The cryobank was on the other side of the city, and Cosima felt like she spent the entire morning using every sort of public transportation to get there. She wore one of the suits her roommate wore to interview with venture capitalists, and inside her borrowed purse was the fake ID she’d spent three months’ work study money to purchase.
“You have to be confident,” April advised as she painstakingly straightened Cosima’s hair, pinning it into a tight knot at the base of her skull, “and you have to act like you belong there.”
“Do you really think I look twenty-eight?” Cosima asked as she gnawed her lip, taking in her decidedly eighteen-year-old looking reflection in the mirror.
“You will when I get done with you.”
Cosima seldom wore more makeup than eyeliner, but April painstakingly applied enough layers that Cosima thought her face might crack if she moved it too much. By the time Cosima managed to make it to the cryobank, she was sweaty, paranoid, and convinced this was the worst idea in the world.
But the only way to collect the data was to do the legwork, and so Cosima took a deep breath, said a prayer to a god she didn’t know if she believed in, and sauntered into the cryobank to collect information on Donor 35C21.
“Let me see if he agreed to a release of information,” the perky receptionist said after Cosima showed her the driver’s license identifying her as Hanna Neihaus, recipient of Donor 35C21’s sperm in 1984.
Ten minutes later a severe looking woman came out of the back office and snapped, “We do not release donor information.”
“You don’t understand, I’d like more of the – the donation to give my daughter a sibling and – “
The woman snatched up Cosima’s fake ID and sneered, “Well, Mrs. Neihaus, why don’t I contact the police and we can discuss this more?”
She wanted to cry the entire way back to Berkeley but didn’t. When Cosima returned to her dorm, she put on a brave face for April and said it was a wash.
The problem with experiments, Cosima learned that day, was outside forces could ruin them and not even care at all.
Cosima’s seventh experiment is the most devastating.
She came home for Winter Break with a heaping bag of laundry and about a backpack full of scholarly papers she planned to cite in her honors project. When she sat down for dinner with her parents, all she was thinking about was if her father was going to want to play fight like they always did on who got to light the first candle on the menorah and if she’d be able to hook up with her old high school girlfriend during break. Facebook told her that she was back from Smith, and Cosima definitely needed to blow off steam. So caught up in the filthy memories of their last time together, she missed her mother saying her name three times.
“Cosima!”
“What?!” she snapped, irritated to have been caught daydreaming.
“Your father has leukemia,” her mother said, blunt as ever, and Cosima listened as her parents catalogued the symptoms Cosima hadn’t seen, the tests she didn’t even know were happening. When the topic of bone marrow transplants and testing for matches came up, Cosima didn’t hesitate to say she’d get tested.
They never ended up lighting the menorah that year. It was funny the things she remembered about that time.
Cosima sat in the phlebotomist’s chair, watched the bright red blood be sucked out of her veins and into the vial, and she hoped she somehow had enough unseen things in common with her father hidden inside of her to keep her alive, to heal her.
She didn’t. Her father died suddenly three months later, an infection wreaking havoc on his compromised system and killing her while Cosima sat for a final. Three months after that, Cosima packed up her belongings and left for Minnesota, leaving California, her mother, and her mother’s new boyfriend.
The stakes of some experiments were just too high.
Her eighth experiment is the one that ends up giving her life a purpose.
She lived in the lab, throwing herself wholly into her work. Most of the time she didn’t care that she had no social life, that Minnesota was nothing like San Francisco, but loneliness began to creep up on her.
“Online dating,” April suggested via Skype one night. “You’re a hot, smart lesbian. There has to be someone who digs that even if you do live in the North Pole.”
“Thanks,” Cosmia laughed, taking a hit from her bong.
While high as hell, Cosima navigated to a free dating site and created a profile. She picked a decent picture of her, filled out the sections, and expected no response. After several guys who wanted to date her despite her sexuality and a surprising amount of couples looking for a threesome, an intern at the local hospital sent her a message and asked if she’d like to go to a movie.
Cosima said yes before she could talk herself out of it, picking a date and time. She left the lab early that day, threw together an outfit that she hoped said she wasn’t expecting anything but was open to it, and smoked up to relax. By the time someone knocked at the door, Cosima thought she was almost ready for this.
And then she opened the door to reveal a woman who looked exactly like herself.
“You’re not Ashley,” she blurted out, startled by the appearance of her possible twin.
The woman shook her head. “My name’s Beth Childs. We need to talk.”
Sometimes the outcome of an experiment is the last thing you hypothesize.