Free So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman Page A

conduct clinical trials because all of a sudden you don’t like the lifestyle? Seriously?”
    “It’s not forever, man. I didn’t get a free ride everywhere I went to school. If you had the loan payments I have, you would find that salary reasonable for a couple of fucking years, too.”
    That was it. Gene felt his heart rate increase. His neck felt hot, and his hands began to sweat. The term “free ride” always did it to him. There was nothing free about institutionalizing his intellect for eight years.
    “I’m sorry,” he told Con sarcastically, meticulously. “Did you not start this conversation with the phrase ‘repurpose the botulism toxin’? Am I wrong? It sounded like you were asking me to work for a cosmetic company to repurpose botulism. You came up here, where I am working on growing our food, and . . . and . . . and you said that I should take a job working on human clinical trials repurposing a deadly substance for nonmedical use in humans. Wait! No, wait. And the reason you gave is becauseI am about to have a child.” Gene roughly shook the dirt off his hands as he spoke. “Does that make any fucking sense to you? Does it?”
    Con nodded. “Yeah. It does. You are broke, you have a medical degree that you are not using right now, you won’t be going on assignment with the baby coming, and this isn’t that big a deal. There is a price at which you could make this decision.”
    “That ‘price’?—that ‘everybody has a price’ price, Con?—that’s fucking bullshit, man. That price doesn’t represent the value you assign to yourself. It’s what you assign to everyone else involved. Three hundred K isn’t how much you’re worth. It’s how much humanity is worth to you. Introducing some completely unnecessary, possibly dangerous procedure into the world, you’d give up a bunch of people you never met for three hundred K?”
    “Dude. Spare me your grandstanding, all right? And your Dr. Moreau fantasies. Stop talking to me like I’m fucking stupid, okay? I’m trying to help you and Claire. I don’t know how we’re going to live with a baby in this neighborhood.”
    Gene was furious and knew it wasn’t just because of Con’s suggestion. It was because Con was talking down to him, echoing his professors and colleagues. Hinting that his current behavior really signified a “mental-health issue,” not ideology. He would not let their vision of him replace what he knew to be true. He was not going to screw people for money. Fuck them. He was twenty-nine years old and had graduated before all of them. He knew what it was like doing that kind of research, and it was for the morally retarded. The fact that Constant now thought it was okay to do “just for a while” disturbed Gene beyond words. What the fuck was he talking about? Con was the one who had turned him on to gardening in the first place, describing the logic of it, telling him how his mother’s vegetables had saved them growing up in Beirut when there were blackouts and food shortages. Gene resented being treated as though he were somehow aromantic for doing one of the most practical and essential things humans do.
    Constant stared at him. “Why did you go to fucking Harvard, dude? Why did you even fucking bother? Put your ideology in check and do the right thing. This is asinine.”
    Gene turned away and raised his eyebrows, shook his head. Wiped his hands on his sweater, leaned against the raised bed of dirt, and lit a cigarette.
    Why had he gone to Harvard? Because he got in. Because you don’t know anything when you’re a teenager and labeled “gifted.” Nothing, not even why you’re good at things or whether you like doing the things you’re good at. Being good at things did not obligate you to do them. It was a mistake to think so. And he had made many mistakes, been told too many times that he was just the person for some special job or project or social movement. He’d picked medicine because it was fun at the