“Love George, great guy. I often play b-ball with him.”

“I’m Lesley Wong,” the woman said, shaking Pia’s hand in turn.

For a moment there was an awkward silence. Pia briefly eyed the two students, realizing they had to be the students Rothman had briefly mentioned the day before and then never brought up again. He had said something about tasking her to come up with something for them to do, as if she wasn’t going to be busy enough. One way or another it was going to be a burden of sorts.

Lesley and Will eyed Pia back. For their part, they weren’t terribly excited about meeting her either. For them, finding out they had been assigned to Rothman’s lab was the equivalent to being sent someplace in Dante’s inferno. Rothman had the reputation of destroying every student’s sense of self-confidence by making them feel stupid, which they invariably were in comparison to Rothman’s encyclopedic knowledge. And they had heard about Pia as well. She too was known as being over-the-top smart and also strangely detached and had taken an early interest in research in addition to the regular curriculum. For most people being a medical student was demanding enough. Except for being tight with George Wilson, who was one of the more popular students in the class, a mark in her favor, Pia never had had the time or inclination to be particularly friendly with many of her classmates. And all that was on top of the gossip that she and Rothman had something going since she was the only person in the entire medical center that he got along with except for Dr. Yamamoto.

Lesley looked over at Will, but he was staring at Pia. When they’d received their assignment, Lesley had told Will that she’d sat next to Pia in a lab every day for a month the first year but she was sure Pia wouldn’t remember. Lesley hadn’t made up her mind if Pia was extremely focused on her work or just plain rude, although she thought it was the former. As for Will, he was excited to be finally matched with Pia—he’d wanted to be for three and a half years. He’d been sure to introduce himself to every woman in the student body he deemed attractive, but this was the closest he’d come to her.

“Okay. Introductions done,” Yamamoto said. It hadn’t been quite as awkward as he feared, and he was relieved. He could get down to business.

“If it’s okay, we can go to my office. I’d like you to come as well, Pia. There are a couple of things we need to talk over and then we can all go take a look at the organ baths with Dr. Rothman.”

Yamamoto beamed a smile and walked away, the two new students padding closely after him. Pia brought up the rear, reluctant to be leaving her reading but excited at the same time. Even though she had been working there for years, she had never seen the organ baths. Although she had spent more actual time with Dr. Yamamoto than she had with Rothman, she didn’t feel she knew him as well. In her mind he was more complicated than Rothman. She thought of him as a kindly man but knew that in his own way, he was just as demanding as the chief. He suffered fools no more gladly, but his reprimands and corrections were delivered more politely and at lower volume. Pia had gathered from experience that the quieter Yamamoto spoke, the more important it was to listen.