She hadn’t wanted to go to the party at all, especially not with them, but Dr. Athyn, who went every year, insisted. A farewell celebration for the visiting scientists who’d spent their summer at the fancy research institute twenty minutes from their own lab: Who would miss that?

Into his Chevy Nova she’d gone, sitting behind Lev, the research associate who’d set up her equipment, and next to Jiazhen, her fellow postdoc. Dr. Athyn drove too fast through the steaming Philadelphia streets and then into outskirts that were leafier but not cooler, shouting facts from a new paper she hadn’t read. Still talking, he parked down the street from a tall hedge with a rank smell and then popped them through the gate. Around the bland façade of the house, past the azaleas and tired begonias (I knew those azaleas well, but by then had stopped noticing them): and there was the pool, and the cloth-draped table, the paired grills, the disordered lawn chairs separating various groups. Lev and Jiazhen peeled away but Dr. Athyn taxonomized the crowd for Deirdre: Indian biochemists here, Argentinian structural biologists there. Japanese crystallographers, Finnish membrane biologists, French enzymologists by the zebra grass. Farther away, near the pergola and the fountain—

“But there,” Deirdre said, interrupting herself, “was Constance.”

She was talking about my advisor: Constance Humboldt, no longer living, but on that day unabashedly scratching her bosom while listening intently to a good-looking young man.

“How intimidated was I?” Deirdre said.

All the scientists sprouting from the smooth green lawn were Constance’s colleagues and students: I knew them by then, I took them for granted. And Dr. Athyn claimed Constance as his old friend, as well as his greatest rival, someone Deirdre would have to reckon with if she stayed in this field. Tall, heavy, with a low-cut caftan stretched over her large chest and larger waist before stopping abruptly above her shapely knees and calves, she’d looked to Deirdre like Gertrude Stein but for the long hair wound in a knot and stabbed with two lacquered sticks.

Caught in Constance’s orbit, surrounded by Constance’s clever friends, Deirdre, she said, had felt entirely average. (Never, I thought. Never.) Averagely tall, averagely built, with unremarkable dirty blond hair above hazel eyes and heavy eyebrows; in a photo she would, she’d thought (but she’d be wrong about this: the eyebrows were gone and she was now quite slight but still utterly recognizable), be the one who, twenty years later, no one could name. She’d done excellent but not brilliant work in graduate school, where her thesis supervisor had ignored her flair for seeing unexpected patterns and had written such bland recommendations that she’d ended up at her third-choice lab for her postdoctoral fellowship.