Page 116 of Saint Céline
We worked for almost an hour. She argued more than she listened at first, which was inefficient but still ended up becoming useful. Her questions were not elegant. They were not Katherine’s questions. Katherine’s mind had moved cleanly through systems, cutting away ornament until only structure remained. Céline’s mind moved through resistance. She approached understanding like someone testing every door for traps before admitting one might open. But she learned faster when angry.
I had suspected that. Now I knew for sure.
“No,” I said, turning her laptop toward her. “You’re confusing stress response with adaptation again.”
Her jaw tightened. “Because the paper uses both.”
“The paper distinguishes them.”
“The paper assumes the reader has a personality disorder and enjoys suffering.”
“Most competent research does.”
“I hate molecular biology.” She rubbed at her forehead.
“You chose bioscience.”
“I chose survival. Bioscience just happened to be standing nearby with respectable employment prospects.”
I looked at her in surprise because this was the first honest response I got from her. She seemed to realize what she had said a second later and glanced away, fingers tightening around the edge of the laptop. There she was again. The artist in hiding.
I closed the paper in front of me.
“Why didn’t you study art?”
Her face changed immediately with embarrassment, perhaps, or grief.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You draw.”
Her eyes snapped back to mine. “Who told you that?”
“No one.”
“Then how would you know?”
“Your hands.”
She stared at me. I reached for her left hand before she could pull it away. She stiffened at the contact but did not retreat. Her fingers were cold from the rain, nails neatly shaped, skin soft except for the faint callus near the middle finger where a pencil or brush would rest after long use. I turned her hand slightly, observing the mark.
“You hold instruments competently,” I said. “But not naturally. Your hands look more at ease when you write in the margins than when you handle a pipette.”
Her mouth had parted slightly. “You’re insane,” she whispered.
“Frequently.”
“You can’t know things like that from a callus.”
“Not alone.”
“Then what else?”
“You look at diagrams longer than text. You redraw methods when you don’t understand them. You sketched Miss Astoria in the corner of your notes three times today.”
Colour rose in her face. “That was private.”
“It was in the shared folder.”
