Page 15 of The Invisible Roommate

NEARLY TWO YEARS EARLIER

When Emory Griffin was on the verge of a scientific breakthrough, every single one of his senses leveled up, so even though his nemesis was still halfway down the hall of the austere physiology and pharmacology building at the University College of Medicine & Health Sciences, Emory huffed out, “Leave me alone, Marvel,” before the heavy door even opened.

“How did you know it was me?” Marvel asked in his usual deep Southern drawl when he entered.

The squeak of your new sneakers on the buffed floors. The overwhelming aroma of your coconut-scented shampoo that I can practically taste. The noxious clicking of the fancy pen you never let leave your fist.

“Lucky guess,” Emory said instead of outing his superpowers. No use making people think he was more of a freak than they already did based on his shockingly light blond hair, mysterious background, and hatred of socializing. “Go away. I’m busy.”

“Dr. Kemp wants to see you,” Marvel said, disregarding the fact that Emory hadn’t even looked up from his work. “She says you’ve been ignoring her emails.”

“I don’t check my email.” It was astounding how he responded and continued to scribble in his lab book, like he had two brains hiding inside that large skull of his, beneath that mop of greasy hair that skimmed his scrawny shoulders. One brain was dedicated entirely to science. The other was mostly dedicated to science, with a small center somewhere in the back for maintaining the illusion of decorum. He didn’t kid himself. He had no real decorum, despite the countless lessons the ham-fisted overlords he lived with tried to impart on him when he was young so they got their checks from the government.

“She said she tried to call, too,” Marvel added.

“My phone was turned off.” His campus job barely kept him fed—when he remembered to eat, that was. Paying bills was not a top priority for him when he was knee-deep in imminent, world-shaking experimentation, so the phone had been shut off, and since everyone he corresponded with lived on campus, he figured it was fine.

Marvel remained, a nuisance in overly bright Nikes. “Hence her sending me to get you.”

“Hence me telling you, once again, to go away.” Emory fiddled with a measuring instrument. Over his many years of study, his professors claimed science was like baking, ruled entirely by exacts. Emory approached it more like cooking, on instinct. History had proven his methods unorthodox but fruitful.

“You think you’d be a little nicer to the guy whose name is on your scholarship,” Marvel said, standing over Emory’s shoulder like a squawking parrot.

“Your granddad made the name. You just inherited it,” Emory said, unschooled in snark so it came out sounding flat.

Unflappable Marcus Marvel was impenetrable to insults, shielded by too much money and too much unearned encouragement from an ivory-tower family, so he didn’t even flinch.

When Emory got assigned to this lab with his roommate, he nearly requested a transfer, so as not to have to choke on the rancid fumes of nepotism day and night.

But if the foster system gave him anything, it was the will to continue to work through whatever and whomever life threw at him. So instead of finding a new room or switching labs or leaving notes on sauce-crusted dishes, he simply continued to do what he needed to do, while blocking out the noise.

That’s what he’d always done. Through shouting matches and tragedies and plentiful moves, he worked away. Nothing had ever stopped him except—

“Emory Griffin, please put down the pipette.” Dr. Kemp could’ve stopped a firing squad with a single clearing of her throat. Authority radiated off her in palpable waves, and with Emory’s senses heightened, it felt like he was being repeatedly pummeled by cinder block boxing gloves.

Research supervisors were hit-or-miss. Dr. Claude—Emory’s original research advisor, an eighty-five-year-old who wore wool suits under his lab coat and always smelled vaguely of canned tuna—was a hit, mostly because he left Emory to his own devices. Then, last semester, he got sick and finally retired, leaving Emory in a lurch. That lurch being the much-younger, five-foot-six, brown-skinned woman standing in the doorway with a scowl cast in his direction.

Word around the University College of Medicine & Health Sciences was that Dr. Kemp got all the difficult students in her caseload. For some, this was worrying, but Emory spun it as a point of pride. Nobody ever made it into a history book by being easy to get along with.

Emory blew out a breath and freed his hands, trying not to project supreme impatience at the interruption.

“Thank you, Mr. Marvel, for trying your best. You may go.”

“Actually, I’ve got some data to—”

“I said”—Dr. Kemp dropped and slowed down her voice—“you may go.”

“Yes, Doctor,” Marvel squeaked and clicked all the way back from whence he came. Probably to dirty more dishes for Emory to clean up later when he finally scraped himself off the lab table around 2 AM.

Dr. Kemp walked the front length of the room in silence. Her glossy dark hair had not a fleck of gray in it despite her being in her fifties, and her posture was so good you’d have thought she’d gone through military training. She looked out the second-story window onto the quad as she said, “I do not appreciate having to chase down students, Mr. Griffin.”

“Okay,” he said, because apologies were useless with Dr. Kemp, and he never learned how to make his own sound sincere. So many times in his tumultuous childhood he was strong-armed into saying he was sorry when he wasn’t. He banished the cursed word from his vocabulary as soon as he turned eighteen, left the system, and forged his own path.

Still looking out the window, she folded her arms across her chest. “Yet, here I am, and here you are. I shouldn’t be surprised. From the reports I have been getting from your professors, it seems you are rarely where you are supposed to be these days.”

True, he had missed a class or two. He mostly made up the work, read the chapters, and took the notes, but wasn’t getting his PhD more about his contribution to continuing research anyway? From the time he was twelve, he read scientific textbooks well above his grade level to escape his circumstances, knowing that knowledge was the key to a better life; he was ahead of the curve.

“My research has been taking priority,” Emory said. From sunup until well after sundown, he worked tirelessly to achieve something nobody dared to dream possible. Attending the University College of Medicine & Health Sciences was more about access to resources than getting a degree for him, though he would never have confessed that in an admissions interview.