Chapter Text
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an overworked PhD student did not have time for frivolous pursuits such as romance and Beth Bennet was no exception. There were samples to prep, code to fight, and papers to write, so Beth was too busy for dating, thank you very much. But, Frances Bennet, mother and match-maker extraordinaire, did not accept this.
‘If only you would try dear, there are good men and women out there! And you can be rather pretty sometimes, when you put some effort in. Have you tried the dating apps? That is how at least half my client meet.’ Frances, putting her obsession with all things relationship to work, had been Meryton’s foremost wedding planner for several years. ‘I just don’t want you to die alone, never having known love. Goodness knows that I have enough to worry about with Mary.’ her mother explained as if Beth was accomplishing nothing in her life. Being single did not mean she was unfulfilled, she had her work, friends, and 15 plants to keep her busy. But try explaining this to her mother.
Beth rolled her eyes, her mother meant well, but her obsession with relationships was tiring. Just once it would be nice to be asked about her work, for her mother to acknowledge how hard Beth was working or congratulate her on her recent paper, but apparently nothing but marriage counted in the eyes of the Bennet matriarch. ‘I am not going to die alone, Charlotte wouldn’t let that happen.’ Charlotte had been Beth’s best friend since forever and they both roomed together and worked in the same lab.
‘Don’t be smart with me Beth, you know what I mean.’ Not for the first time, Beth wished she had thought of applying to another university, one across the country from her hometown or perhaps on another continent altogether, they need environmental scientists in Australia, right? But alas, here she was, 25 and less than an hour away from where she had grown up. There were benefits to staying close, moving to her apartment was as easy as moving could be, not having to find new doctors was helpful, and her siblings were all nearby, but some days she questioned whether it was worth it.
‘Have you spoken to James recently?’ Turning the topic to her favored older brother, her mother’s golden boy. Not that Beth resented James, it was impossible to resent him with his kind demeanor. Growing up with four siblings, Beth often felt overlooked by her parents, but James had always made time for her and the two were close.
‘Yes, he said he can’t come to family dinner this Sunday because he has to work a double shift, isn’t that simply criminal!’ Frances Bennet was a very family oriented individual and she instituted a Sunday family dinner as her children were growing up. As James, then Beth, then Mary had left home it had become harder for them to make it every Sunday, but they still tried to all be there at least once a month.
Beth took a sip of her tea and glanced at the clock, wondering if she should tell her mother that she too would be missing Sunday dinner due to the department poster session/mixer
because nothing says welcome to a new semester like being made to condense all your research onto a poster) that Dr. Gardiner, her PI, had suggested (insisted) she and her lab mates all attend. Since reminding her mother would only lead to more complaints about Beth’s life choices and constant busyness, she decided to tell her mother later, perhaps over text.
‘James said the flu has been going around and the hospital has been packed.’ James had also canceled his and Beth’s weekly lunch at the hospital cafeteria, telling Beth to stay away until the plague passed.
‘Well, I hope he doesn’t get it, James has such a delicate disposition.’ Beth choked on her drink. Her brother, 6 ft 2 in, was anything but delicate. He was gentle and shy, but not delicate and had what had to be the world’s best immune system. Each year as Beth, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia all succumbed to whatever pestilence was circulating their small town, James remained untouched. Secretly, Beth thought this was what made James such a good nurse. ‘You are not getting ill now are you dear?’ her mother looked at Beth, who was still coughing, with concern.
‘No’ Beth wheezed, ‘just swallowed wrong, sorry.’ One of the many joys of dysautonomia was choking frequently, so Beth was rather too accustomed to this.
‘You must be careful dear, do you need some water?’ Beth nodded, more water would be nice and would also take her mother away from the table for a moment so Beth wouldn’t have to receive the concerned parent look.
One glass of water later, Beth was feeling much better and she and her mother discussed the family summer vacation her mother was trying to talk her father into while finishing their tea and then headed their separate ways.
—
Beth dropped into her desk chair, sighing.
‘How was tea?’ Charlotte asked, not looking up from the multitude of graphs displayed across her screen.
‘Fine. My mother seems to think that being single is a crime.’
‘Hmmm… At least she cares.’ Charlotte was no stranger to Frances Bennet’s lectures and had been on the receiving end of a few, a benefit of being Beth’s close friend. ‘Can you look at these graphs for me? I know there is something wrong, but I just can’t put my finger on it.’
Beth rolled over and stared over her bestie’s shoulder. The graphs looked wrong. Charlotte had been getting pretty good data recently, her removal method for organophosphates (Charlotte’s current pesticide of choice) had been working, but this latest batch of data just looked messy. ‘Can I see your code?’ Charlotte pulled up the code and Beth flicked through it. ‘Ah! One second,’ Beth fiddled with the code and brought up the raw data. ‘Yep, right here, the column names got misassigned, so you weren’t plotting what you thought you were.’ Beth dropped in a line of code. ‘Try it again.’ Charlotte ran the code again and the plots popped back up, but this time showing that Charlotte’s remediation technique was in fact still working, she grinned.
‘Thanks Beth, I had been staring at that for the last half hour.’ Charlotte hit save and snapped her laptop shut.
‘No problem, you know I live to code.’ Beth rolled back to her desk. ‘Do you have instrument time today?’
‘No, but I need to get some samples prepared for tomorrow.’ Charlotte pulled back her dark hair, twisting it up into a messy bun. ‘You need anything from the stock room?’
‘No, you getting even more HPLC vials?’ Beth teased. Charlotte used more HPLC vials than the rest of the lab combined, perhaps more than the rest of the department combined, but for good reason, Charlotte was a sample processing machine, running batch experiments and churning out hundreds of samples a day. Beth preferred to focus more on the analysis side. She collected and processed samples, of course (she was an environmental chemist), but rather than focus on remediating one compound at a time like Charlotte, she liked to look at the big picture, detecting as many compounds as she could at once, then trying to decipher trends and interactions.
‘Hey! Be nice or I won’t help you with your sample prep next time!’ Charlotte threatened, backing towards the door.
‘I take it back, oh lab goddess, take mercy on me.’ Beth grinned, ‘though I could threaten to bug your code.’
‘Nah, you love me too much,’ Charlotte left and Beth wiggled her mouse to reawaken her screen. Rapid lines of text ran across the terminal, her analysis was still running. It had been 16 hours already, but this is what Beth got for running so much data through her unedited code, she really needed to get in there and work on parallelizing some of the analysis. But that was a problem for future Beth, right now she had a poster to finish for the department mixer. She figured she could just update her latest conference poster, but needed to update the charts.
Selecting which data to present was daunting. If she talked only about pesticides she had detected in groundwater she was leaving out her most exciting data about low level industrial pollutants, but the analysis of these pollutants wasn’t complete, and then there was the plastics data, so many interesting things. It was like being asked to select a favorite book, she loved all her data. Finally, she decided to shrink her figures just a bit and squeeze information about all the classes of pollutants she was interested in on the poster. Sending the completed poster to the printer, Beth leaned back in her chair. She should be working on a paper about the pesticide data, but writing was Beth’s least favorite task. Instead, she pulled up her newest code and quickly fell down the rabbit hole of building a neural network to identify degradation products of pesticides. What felt like 15 minutes later, Beth looked up hearing her name.
‘Beth, what are you working on?’ Dr. Lauren Gardiner was leaning against the door frame, looking the picture of a woman in science in her lab coat.
‘Just trying to identify the degradation products we talked about. I am building a neural net, it’s not working too well, maybe I need more training data.’
‘Hmm… well I won’t pretend to know more about neural nets than you, but I would talk to Caroline about training data, she looked into degradation products a year or two ago.’ Beth smiled tightly. She loved Lauren, she was a great mentor, a brilliant scientist, and a true environmental advocate, but just sometimes she wished that she knew a bit more about coding. Who Beth did not love was Caroline. Supposedly, Caroline, two years ahead of Beth in the PhD program, was her mentor, but she had a way of speaking to Beth as if she was lesser, as if Beth had bumbled her way through college and fell into the chemistry PhD program. It hadn’t helped that Beth’s first week in the lab she had dropped a box of glass pipettes, shattering them everywhere. Caroline seemed to think that Beth had dropped the pipettes because she was disabled, because, obviously, people who used canes wouldn’t be able to carry boxes of pipettes, or do lab work, or do science.
‘I’ll do that, thanks’ Beth lied, she could find her own data.
Dr. Gardiner nodded and seemed about to leave, then turned to ask ‘Have you finished your poster for the mixer?’
‘Yes’ Beth said with far more enthusiasm than she felt. If she had been asked, there were about a thousand and eighty two things she would rather do with a Sunday evening than explain her science to prospective grad students and polite, but bored, professors.
‘Good, you should make sure to talk to Darcy Fitzwilliams, she is doing a sabbatical in the Netherfield lab this semester and I think her research would interest you. Lots of computational work. I know she is in the bio-chem arena, but I thought that maybe you could get some ideas.’
Beth nodded, while her work was pretty far from bio-chem, it would be nice to have someone to ask about machine learning, someone other than her best friend google (sorry Charlotte). ‘Will do, thanks.’
Dr. Gardiner’s phone chimed, probably reminding her to pick up her kids from daycare, and Beth’s PI headed out. Beth sent a quick text to Charlotte:
Beth: Ready to go?
Beth: Also, dinner?
She began to pack up for the evening, and turned off her monitor to conserve energy, but allow her analysis to continue, 20 hours and going strong, she really needed to edit that code. Her phone chimed.
Charlotte: 10 mins?
Charlotte: pasta?
Beth leaned back in her chair and pulled up a book on her kindle to read while she waited. Charlotte rushed in 20 minutes later, Charlotte was the type of person who would be late to her own funeral.
‘Sorry, sorry, the instrument’ she made a wild gesture with her hands, that Beth accepted to mean the instrument was messing with her friend again. As much as Beth loved Dr. Gardiner and being at a smaller university, it would be nice to get some new equipment. She knew Charlotte would murder for a new mass spectrometer and what wouldn’t Beth give for a computer with a couple more cores. ‘Let’s go’ Charlotte grabbed her backpack and was ready to go.
The pair headed over to the student parking lot where Charlotte’s rusty car waited for them. Their commute was short, they often walked it, but it had been oppressively hot this week. Back at their apartment, Charlotte fed Carson, her very fat orange cat, while Beth put water on to boil and pulled out the pasta sauce and vegan cheese.
‘Are you going in tomorrow?’ Charlotte asked from her place sprawled on the couch.
‘Yeah, I need to edit some code. You?’ She also needed to start writing her paper, but it would be just wrong to spend a Saturday writing a paper, if you had to work on the weekend, it should be fun work.
‘Yeah, I got samples to finish prepping’ Charlotte grinned at Beth ‘and, if I get them done this weekend I think I can skip Caroline in line for the mass spec.’ Charlotte had joined Beth in her dislike of Caroline, a true best friend.
‘Want to stop for doughnuts on the way?’
‘Of course!’ Sometime during their first year in the PhD program, when they had been even more overworked than now, TAing classes, taking classes, and trying to squeeze in research Beth and Charlotte had developed a tradition of buying doughnuts on Saturdays on the way to lab, to reward themselves for their devotion.
The water started to boil and Beth added the pasta.
‘Do you ever wonder what it would be like to have a life?’ Charlotte had moved so her feet were over the head of the couch and her head was hanging of the seat, her hair brushing the floor.
‘You mean like, what if we had weekends?’ Beth laughed stirring the pasta.
‘Yeah. I would have more time to knit and maybe sleep and cook.’
‘You would cook?’ Beth raised her eyebrows disbelievingly at her bestie. Boiling water and working the microwave was about all the cooking either of them ever did. Occasionally Beth baked a cake, but neither of them could be considered talented in the culinary division, much to Frances Bennet’s chagrin.
‘Well, maybe not cook, but I used to have hobbies. I used to play soccer.’
‘We can do that after we get our PhDs.’
‘I guess, but it would be nice to have a weekend’ Charlotte turned her attention to Carson who had finished his dinner and was begging for more. And Beth finished up cooking wondering what she would do with free time. She couldn’t remember what she used to do before environmental chemistry had become her life. Maybe she would join the community garden. It didn't signify, she loved environmental chemistry and it was perfectly fine that it was her life.