Some Side Effects May Occur

3. Lab Rat

3. Lab Rat

I don’t have to ask Sophie to stay in the car when she takes me to the first consultation at Corinthian Labs. In theaters and studios, she’s more at ease than anyone has a right to be, but medical labs and offices make her edgy.

I don’t mind them. They remind me of the first time I was brave enough to go in, so nervous about what would happen if they insisted on seeing my ID, so excited at the prospect of earning a real payment with no one’s help, more than a few crumpled fives from the parent of some kid I’d watched TV with for an evening.

So I sit alone in the waiting room, watching the few other applicants, mostly late college age women and a few men, disappearing into the office one by one.

None of them are anything close to attractive -- we don’t need to be for this -- but I mentally rank them while we wait anyway. It’s a hard habit to break.

Especially when, for once, I’m probably number one.

There’s one woman with a purple sequined purse I’ve been on a couple other trials with before. I think her name is Lisa, or maybe Elise. She waves brightly at me when she’s called in.

Finally, it’s my turn.

“Rachel!” a slender doctor in excellent shape for her early forties greets me the moment I walk in, as if we’re old friends, springing up from behind her desk and shaking my hand with both of hers.

She pays attention to her signup sheets.

“Have a seat. Are you thirsty?”

I shake my head and sink onto the wooden chair on the near side of the desk. She barely releases my hand to take the leather one on the other side.

Against the wall behind her, a reading screen towers too impressively high to make studying it comfortable. It’s studded with more memory chips than this lab could possibly have filled.

The other three walls display rotating, soothing images of forests, meadows, and oceans. Faint, meandering woodwinds play in the background.

“Thanks for coming in, Rachel.”

The doctor stares at my forehead while she repeats my name, as if trying to etch it into my skin with her mind.

Mrs. Cornwall taught us all the same memory trick for networking.

“I’m Dr. Rowland,” she introduces herself, and I apply the same technique, mentally scrawling the letters of the name across her subtle, expertly applied makeup, the delicate yet chiseled lines of her nose and cheekbones, which look custom made to balance attractiveness with respectability, all the way to her curtain of blow-dried hair bleached to half a shade lighter than mine.

“First of all, I’d like to give you a little background on the study we’re doing.”

She pauses as if she needs permission for this, or to make sure she hasn’t lost me yet, so I nod her on.

“Corinthian is the new face of beauty.”

No wonder she’s the face of Corinthian.

“We believe that beauty and attraction are one of the natural goals that every human body works toward, whether our minds are aware of it or not. It’s part of the basic reproductive instinct, after all.”

I swallow what I know about my body’s natural tendencies when left to its own devices and nod.

“We believe that each body can reach its fully realized state of beauty naturally, given the right encouragement and tools. Our goal is to provide an alternative to traditional cosmetic surgery that’s safer, less invasive, and more affordable, while providing the same ‘wow factor.’”

“Sounds like something every aesthetics loan organization in the world would order in bulk,” I say.

This is Sophisticated Rachel speaking, sharply discussing ice cold matters of business with professionals twice my age, as if those matters of business don’t hold almighty power over the hopes and dreams of Scared Rachel’s desperate young heart.

Sophisticated Rachel has no heart, only a brain and a thirst for respect.

“You’re a smart girl.” Dr. Rowland nods. “Yes, our primary target market will be the Public Aesthetics Endowment and private talent agencies, but we also expect significant sales to end users, on a much wider scale than traditional surgical options. Ultimately, our discovery might even mark the end of the beauty arms race.”

Sophisticated Rachel acknowledges the gravity of what Dr. Rowland is proposing with a somber nod, rather than by jumping out of her seat with a million questions at once.

I do well enough in every subject -- you have to if you want to stay in extracurriculars, and no one will let a female bit player slide just for the good of the drama club, not even at Roberts High -- but I know my History of Theater and Film in particular backwards and forwards.

The Public Aesthetics Endowment was founded back in the 2030s, when there was this huge rash of actresses and singers who died from botched surgery or organ failure from starving too hard.

It wasn’t a new problem at the time, but there were three really beloved, award-sweeping stars who bit it within less than two years of each other, and the most famous one now, an eighteen-year-old movie star named Carlie Greene, happened to be a senator’s mistress, so it became this big hot button issue.

That’s when the term “beauty arms race” was coined.

A whole lot of measures were proposed to regulate images of medically underweight and surgically or digitally altered human bodies in visual media, in the interests of truth in advertising and worker safety.

People argued that filmmakers already weren’t allowed to use footage of things like actors actually dying, and that encouraging actresses to die like Carlie Greene in pursuit of unrealistic physical requirements and profiting off the footage of them on their way there was pretty much the same thing.

None of those measures actually became law, of course. How could anyone make movies or TV shows or commercials without beautiful people?

After a ton of amending, a compromise bill was passed, adding the Image Distortion Advisory requirement to the fine print of ads that use altered images of their products or results, and establishing the Public Aesthetics Endowment, a federal loan program designed to provide up-and-coming performing arts professionals with startup money for safe, professional, aesthetic support, to deter them from resorting to dangerous, unlicensed or do-it-yourself options.

Following the success of the endowment, private talent agencies started remodeling their business practices after it.

So now everyone knows when ads are lying, as long you happen to know what the IDA number in the corner of the screen means and have really good eyes, and young actresses don’t have to starve or go to back alley surgeons to get their breakouts, as long as the Endowment or one of the private agencies picks us out as up-and-coming stars.

Yay.

What Dr. Rowland’s talking about, a surgery substitute that people wouldn’t need loans to afford, would change the way everything works.

“It almost sounds like you could make the Endowment obsolete,” I say.

Dr. Rowland smiles modestly.

“One step at a time.”

I know the part about discovering a treatment to end the beauty arms race is bullshit. That’s not how arms races work. If whatever Corinthian is developing becomes standard across the industry, and maybe across the general population, filmmakers are going to start looking for some kind of extra beauty “wow factor” on top of that.

Pretty soon, Cadence’s violet eyes and extra vertebrae might not even qualify someone to play the dorky best friend.

But all I’m hearing at this moment is that someone might be offering to make me beautiful now, for free, in time to make a name for myself before that can happen.

Oh yes, I’m in.

Once I’ve made it big, maybe I can help make things better. I’ll buy my own damn production company and hire a bunch of ugly but amazing actors and actresses and show everyone what they can do. I might even gain a couple pounds (compared with how I’ll look then, of course, not now) and prove that I can still own the spotlight.

Maybe I can force everyone to get so used to seeing people who look like I do now onscreen that when they see one on the street, they’ll think, “pretty,” the way people used to think about those fat models in renaissance paintings, before TV, when someone could live a whole lifetime without seeing enough examples to have any idea what pretty can really be.

Yeah. Right.

Then maybe I’ll figure out world peace.

The point is, when I’ve made it, I may be able to do a lot of things. Not everything I want to, but a lot of things.

And if I walk out of this room right now, another girl will take this seat in fifteen seconds, and nothing at all will be different, except that I’ll have lost out on two grand and the free chance to know if whatever Dr. Rowland’s developing actually works.

“Sounds good,” I tell her.

“It gets better. When we say less invasive, we mean it. Can you imagine a world where all our little aesthetic problems could be completely cured with something as easy as taking your morning vitamin C?”

My heart sinks.

I can’t. No pill could do everything my body needs done to it.

Which leads me toward the theory that this doctor is full of more s**t than most.

I should’ve known it couldn’t be this easy.

But Sophisticated Rachel doesn’t slam her head against the desk in furious disappointment. She only raises a skeptical eyebrow.

“That would be incredible,” I say, not at all expecting a trial doctor (and probably a hack) to catch my double meaning.

The doctors who do the real labwork, the ones who work on the research itself, are usually pretty cool when I get the chance to talk to them, which isn’t often. They’re as smart as you’d imagine, following a passion for discovering and creating stuff that helps people.

It’s not my calling, but I get it.

Then there’s that one doctor in charge of every trial, the one you can occasionally hear yelling at the others about schedule and budget in some other wing of a facility. The one with the painfully fake stage presence that someone somewhere for some reason thinks will set people at ease. These are the doctors we guinea pigs usually get the overview from.

Dr. Rowland stands and beckons me toward her office’s second door, away from the waiting room. “Maybe this will help a little with your credulity.”

Okay, so this one paid attention in her English classes.

She leads me into the lab proper, past steel tables cluttered with equipment and cages with rodents and rhesus monkeys inside. The room is cramped and made uncomfortably white under its fluorescents, but it’s clean.

On the table where she stops, there’s a smaller cage with a single, sleek black rat.

“This is Belle,” she introduces it. “Beautiful, isn’t she?”

“Sure,” I agree. “For a rat.”

Dr. Rowland laughs good-naturedly. “Well, you have to consider how she looked before.”

With a gesture, she awakens one of the screens along the wall, and the sudden appearance of a mangy, crooked-nosed sewer rat blown up to about twenty times life size nearly makes me jump.

“That’s the same rat?” I ask, trying to sound open to this similarly incredible idea.

“You can’t see it in the eyebrows?”

I look again, and the two rats do both have the same unusual streak of white over the right eye. When I don’t answer, Dr. Rowland carries on her demonstration.

“You don’t have to take my word for what a beauty she is now. For that, we can go to an expert.”

She opens the top of the cage, reaches in to lift Belle up by the tail, and clasps her in her hands, leading the way back over to the wall of cages.

“Let’s ask a male rat.”

She opens one of the cages on the wall and drops Belle in between the two white rats inside.

I had a couple hamsters when I was little, and I’ve watched other rodents in pet stores, so I expect them to ignore each other, or maybe spend a while sniffing and circling before deciding that they’re all nonthreatening enough to share a water bottle.

Instead, one of the white rats perks up, takes one sniff, and, before I can prepare myself not to blush, flings himself on top of Belle and f***s her like his little ratty life depends on it.

Belle nibbles on a nearby food pellet and hardly seems to notice.

Dr. Rowland watches my face and almost suppresses her smirk.

“That third wheel you see there,” she tells me, pointing to the other white rat, “is a female, by the way. The two white rats have mated a few times, as any healthy, mature male and female will when left together long enough. But I don’t think I need to tell you that the male has never shown this level of interest.”

Okay, count me curious.

“So what’s the secret?” I ask.

“We call it Swan,” says Dr. Rowland proudly. “An all-natural blend, primarily plant extracts, some enzymes already present in the human brain, all balanced to target and enhance natural mating signals and instinctively favored qualities, with other benefits as well. Increased energy, and resilience against infection and injury.”

I try not to hope too much while I fill out the waivers, the same way I used to try not to be too afraid the first few times I skimmed through long questionnaires and ingredient disclosure lists like these.

Are you a vegetarian? No.

Do you have any personal, ethical, or religious convictions that might prevent you from completing a full course of treatment? No.

Really, what kind of people who can afford “convictions” rent themselves out as petri dishes?

Have you ever travelled outside The United States and Canada? No.

Have you had s****l relations with more than one partner in the last five years? You overestimate me No.

Sure, the rat demonstration has me intrigued.

And yes, these questionnaires and words like “ophiocordyceps” and “trichophyton” and “toxoplasma” on the disclosure form are scary, but so are the things in my toothpaste tube and growing in my gym locker if I give them too much thought.

I might have let my imagination run away from me for a moment in the office. Who wouldn’t at the promise of an aesthetic panacea? But Corinthian Labs isn’t the first company to make those kinds of promises with no way of backing them up.

These trials are probably just a formality to prove that their snake oil formula is safe enough to con the open market with.

I’ve learned not to expect too much from these experiments, one way or the other, except for the money. Money is tangible, possible to guarantee.

It’s for the money that I give myself an extra year under “date of birth,” then grit my teeth and will my body not to manifest any complications when Dr. Rowland administers the preliminary allergy test, a series of small injections along the inside of my left arm.

I failed this part in my last lab gig and had to walk away with only two hundred dollars for showing up and a rash like a second degree sunburn.

“I’ll need to do another assessment next week,” she tells me, “and then, if I can approve you to move forward, biweekly examinations.”

“Only biweekly?”

I thought I’d have to miss school for a Monday or two and miss everything else for a few weekend days and nights.

Most labs, the ones that pay worth a damn, want to keep you under pretty close observation. I’ve done the math, and if you count every hour in the lab, most trials pay barely more than minimum wage. They’re still a way better value for me than flipping burgers, but only because those lab hours include a lot of downtime that can double for homework and line running time, and I don’t have to worry about bending to a week-by-week schedule indefinitely.

You’d think the going rate for selling your body for dangerous and painful experiments would be higher.

Then again, I do it for whatever I can get, so why should it be? The one thing I’ve learned from both acting and guinea pigging is that whatever you have, whatever you are, talented, energetic, healthy, desperate, open to all manner of inconvenience and humiliation, there are always a million more just like you.

“We’ll provide you with the software necessary for remote monitoring in the interim,” says Dr. Rowland, as if that’s a perfect explanation for this trial’s laxness.

I’m not complaining about this temporary per-hour pay raise, though, so I nod and pull my jacket on in spite of the unseasonably warm weather, covering the injection sites where I know the usual, normal boils will soon appear.

When she offers me the chance to ask questions, I decline.

This trial might make me irresistible. It might make my brain start leaking out of my ears. Or I might step outside, get hit on the head by a meteorite, and never find out what it would have done at all.

Freak accidents are rare, freak miracles even more so. Every move I make, I’m rolling the dice a little, just like everyone else on earth, but in all likelihood, nothing is going to happen to me, or for me.

Nothing but what I make happen.