I hated her for saying that. It made me feel guilty for being born with the option to fail when I wanted.
So I helped her with bioscience because I did not know how to stop. Because if she failed, then the whole structure we had built together would fail with her. Because if Céline Martin collapsed, people might finally look underneath and see Selena, and somehow, despite everything, I still did not want that.
I wanted her exposed.
I wanted her punished.
I wanted hermine.
The contradictions lived inside me so long they it messed up my head.
Professor Moreau’s lab was supposed to bemine.
I had decided that before applications even opened. Vincent Moreau was young enough to be mythologized and brilliant enough to deserve it. The molecular biology department spoke about him with a particular kind of reverence, as if even the older professors resented needing his approval. His research group was nearly impossible to enter. He selected students like he was choosing organs for transplant, coldly, carefully, with no interest in anyone’s feelings.
I liked that.
I liked him before I knew him because he seemed like someone who would value the right things.
Precision. Discipline. A mind that did not need to be made palatable. He didn’t need the charm I would borrow from Céline in social situations.
For months, I worked on the proposal.
Not just for the credit, though I did. Not just because I wanted another line on my academic record, though I wanted that too. I worked on it because the idea became mine in a way few things had ever felt mine.
Adaptive cellular response under chronic environmental stress.
The phrase sounded clinical enough to be safe, but beneath it was something I could not stop thinking about.
Cells did not merely endure harm. Under enough repeated pressure, they reorganized around it. Survival became structure. Damage became instruction. I told myself it was science.
Mostly it was.
Sometimes, late at night in my room with Miss Astoria asleep in the chair and the house too quiet around me, I wondered whether I was writing about Céline. Then I dismissed the thought because sentimentality made bad research, and I was not ready to accept my obsession with Céline.
Céline saw the proposal before anyone else did.
She came to the estate one evening in a pink sweater that had once been mine, with her hair pinned back and Thad’s bracelet glittering on her wrist. She looked tired but expensive, which was her favourite kind of fragility. I was at my desk with articles spread everywhere, notes arranged by theme, draft sections marked in different colours.
She hovered behind me longer than necessary.
“What is that?”
“My proposal for Moreau.”
Her gaze sharpened.
“Can I read?”
“No.”
Her mouth curved. “Why not?”
“Because you’ll say you understand it when you don’t.”
“That’s rude.”
“Come on Selena, we both know this is beyond your scope of abilities.”
