Eleanor didn't want to go blind.

She backed away from the fume hood, letting memory guide her toward the sink and the adjacent emergency station, arms outstretched to feel for the counter's edge, the sink's metal lip. Her eyes watered and burned, pain searing into her skull. Half-formed thoughts wrestled with each other for her attention, pushed back by the all-consuming fire in her eyes, and the panic that had flooded her body when everything went so wrong.

She stumbled forward, foot catching on a trash can with a hollow, plastic clatter. She had to be close, hands raking the air for another landmark.

Her hand caught on the emergency shower handle as she fumbled through the blur before her, and water poured from above, soaking into her clothes and hair. Eleanor tilted her head up for a second, forced her raw eyes open and let the water hit them, let it rinse the spots on her skin where the liquid had splashed her.

She clicked the emergency shower off, got her bearings, and lunged straight ahead for the eyewash station. She hunched over it, flipping the protective yellow cap off the nozzles and starting the water with a forceful push on the paddle by her right hand. Warm saline solution mixed with tears and acid, coated her eyelashes, and brought a brief relief from the burn that had bored from her eyes into her skull. She kept her eyes open wide, pulling at her eyelids, hoping she had been fast enough.

Every movement had felt so calculated and so slow, like she was rehearsing for a crisis rather than living through one.

In case of emergency, she thought, remembering the safety training a few months earlier, the eyewash station must be located within ten seconds of the fume hood. It couldn't have taken her more than a few seconds to get to the eyewash station after patting herself down and ensuring the acid hadn't hit any other exposed skin. It had been torture to try and focus as the pain in her eyes grew more urgent.

She had walked by the metal and plastic contraption, with its yellow cap and green pipes, more times than she could count. She hadn't bothered looking at the emergency station twice. It was as mundane as a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. Something she saw so often she forgot about it, something she couldn't have described, or told anyone where to find.

Working in the lab had become second nature over the last year. She got to the graduate offices in the morning before anyone else did, to sit at her desk in the near darkness and sip on her coffee, read through an article or two and, when the coffee was either tepid or gone, start working on her analyses. She would plug her earphones in and let herself into the lab, taking a minute each time to admire the state-of-the-art, expensive machines, the clean counters and organized glassware, the cabinets marked with different colored stickers based on the danger level of their contents.

She was a gear in the clockwork of the lab, synching up with every other person, every other piece, understanding how to keep things neat, and organized, and safe. Eleanor knew she looked absurd, but she wore her purple latex gloves, and kept her safety glasses on at all times, even though they slipped down the bridge of her nose. She wore a lab coat, and looked the picture of a scientist, never breaking protocol.

Until today.

Today she had missed a step. The clockwork lab, dependent on her, ground to a halt.

She pictured the red warning label she'd memorized, the dire warnings on most of the chemicals she worked with. The instructions she'd internalized but ignored, the kind of thing she expected she would wake up and remember in the middle of the night when she was long retired, the words playing in her mind like a ghost prayer.

In case of contact with eyes, flush liberally for fifteen minutes. Seek immediate medical attention.

In the early morning quiet, Eleanor remained folded over the eyewash station, turning her head in a figure-eight over the saline stream. She hunched in place, dread spreading like a cryogenic cold through her veins. She couldn't tell if the burning was subsiding, being replaced by irritation from the saline; she couldn't tell if she could really see, vision blurred and limited to the glassy cloud of the saline solution and the cold metal sink below. Her back ached, and her eyelids fluttered in protest as she kept them propped open, counting the seconds away.

She had fourteen minutes. Fourteen minutes left to rinse away the acid, and hope it wasn't tearing into her still. Hope that when it was over, she would be able to see.

**

Luka couldn't sleep. His neighbors had a new baby, and new babies were like wailing alarm clocks that malfunctioned at all hours of the night. He had spent most of the previous evening at the library, heading home at three in the morning, when he thought the infant might have succumbed to sleep from sheer exhaustion. He'd unlocked his apartment door and been greeted by familiar, wall-piercing howling. After a frustrating time readjusting on his bed, hoping to lie in the precise place that would help him sleep through the din, he sank into a light, hallucinatory sleep. A few hours later, he awoke to the crashing vacuum of silence. He'd resigned himself to greet the day as a ghost, and went to work on a Saturday morning, where infants weren't allowed.

He keyed his passcode for the lab into the door, and turned to push his way in without dropping his coffee mug, coat, and notebook. He walked in and the door clicked shut behind him as the hydraulic door closer sealed him in with a hiss. The sound of flowing water startled him, and he dropped his belongings on the nearest counter.

Luka realized the lights were on.

He shook his head to clear his thoughts, and walked deeper into the lab, toward the sound. The sinks were designed so that the faucet handles reverted to the off position as soon as they were let go. If running water were accidentally left flowing, it could do hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. His pulse quickened as he turned into the main body of the lab, dreading the sight of water pooled on the floor like a mirror.

Luka stepped on broken glass in front of the fume hood. Larger shards were still in the fume hood, where a puddle of acid was starting to discolor the countertop. A pair of latex gloves lay discarded on the floor.

He needed to figure out what had been spilled and neutralize it, and started toward a cabinet for protective gear, when he noticed the girl at the eyewash station.

Her hair draped across her face in a dark, sodden mess, and her wet lab coat clung to her skin. Her back was curved into a deep C-shape, hands up at her face. He could hear her ragged breathing faint under the sound of the water.

"Can you call for help?" she asked, her voice thick and raw.

Luka nodded, then realized it was futile.

"Yes." He ran back to the main door and poked his head out, flagging the first person he saw, another graduate student in his year, the only people who could be found in the building this early on a weekend.

"There's been a lab accident, you need to call an ambulance and tell them to prepare for a patient exposed to acid."

"Shit. Burns?" The student recoiled even as he pulled a phone out of his back pocket.

"It's her eyes," Luka replied. "Send them in when they get here," he added, and ran back into the room.

Mouse needed him.

Luka knew most women would hate the nickname Mouse. But he didn't think it would ever bother her, since he would never tell anyone. He would never tell her. He would just notice her, every so often, walking down the hallway with her head down, or grabbing coffee in the break room, most often working in the lab. Without fail she would be plugged in to her headphones, watching her experiments closely, taking notes in fine, small print. He would never ask her name, because her blue eyes would never meet his, and she created a moving world around her that looked impenetrable-shielded by a wall of silence.

He called her Mouse because she was unassuming, not plain. She shrouded herself in her dark brown hair, which sprung from her head in unruly curls that had approached bird's nest levels of madness during finals. He'd almost spoken to her then, when she had spilled her coffee in the break room and he found her wiping it up with what looked like notes for Dr. Ballard's first-year seminar. But she had sopped it up, dumped her notes in the bin, and been out of the room before he could open his mouth. She had glanced at him, and looked away. Another object to catalogue and dismiss. He didn't begrudge her any lack of interest, as it seemed universal, not personal. Mouse wanted to understand how the world worked-everyone in their program did, on some level-she just didn't seem to take notice of the people in it.

"They're on their way," Luka called out, striding through the lab back to Mouse.

It didn't look like she'd moved at all, although he thought he could hear her sniffling. Her shoulders gave a small shudder and then stopped at the sound of his voice.

He stepped to one side of the girl, unable to see her face through the curtain of her hair.

"I'm Luka," he said, leaning against the sink and wondering what he should do next.

"Eleanor," came the curt reply, her tongue still sounding thick in her mouth.

Luka savored the name for a moment, his joy overshadowing his anxiety over the fate of the girl he used to call Mouse. Eleanor.

He ducked his head down to her level, peeking around her hair.

"Eleanor, I want to help you. The EMTs will take a while. How long have you been flushing?"

"Four minutes," she said, turning her head toward him. Her hair stuck to her hands, which she still held close to her eyes.

She turned back to the saline stream, moving to shake her hair away.

Luka checked the clock on the wall, noting the time. If it had been four minutes, she had to stay in the eyewash station for another eleven minutes, until 8:37.

"Can you tie my hair up?" she asked. She held her wrist out and shook the wet sleeve of her lab coat back, revealing a black hair band.

Luka pulled the band off and wrapped it around his own wrist. He started to pull her hair back, beginning with the strands plastered to her face. It was hard to maneuver, as Eleanor had pulled her right hand back and was once again holding her eyelids apart.

"How do you know it's been four minutes?" he asked. He didn't want her to cheat the time.

"I've been singing Her Majesty," she said, her voice clearer with her hair now pulled back to the nape of her neck.

"The Beatles song?"

"Yeah. It's 23 seconds long. I went through it twelve times while I waited. Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl, but she doesn't have a lot to say. Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl, but she changes from day to day," she sang.

Luka watched the clock as she finished the song, the second hand ticking in time.

"Looks about right," he said.

"It's exactly right." Eleanor's demeanor shattered at the words, and she punctuated the sentence with a sob. Her shoulders shuddered again-she had been crying when he left the room. Luka felt pressure build in his own chest, behind his eyes, as he struggled not to step forward and envelop her in a hug.

"I'm sorry," she said, through her sobs. She sniffled, a sound absurd against the enormity of the situation.

"It's going to be ok," Luka said, his tone like cardboard. He didn't know if it was true.

"You have to look," she said.

"It's going to be ok," Luka repeated.

"Look."

Eleanor tipped her head up for a second, and looked him straight in the eye.

The skin below her eyes looked angry, raw and blistered. Her irises were a shocking, pure blue against the red web of the rest of her eyes, irritated veins laced like a delicate filigree. A bruised looking cloud in her right eye spread into one iris. Her dark, wet lashes clumped together, framing her injuries.

Her expression showed nothing-no recognition, no fear, no expectation. He didn't think she could see him clearly, her eyes lacking focus. She ducked her head back down after that brief glance, then sobbed again, shaking over the eyewash station.

"What did you see?"

Luka's nostrils flared, and he bit down on his tongue, hard.

"It's just irritation," he said, looking at the clock. "You have another nine minutes."

**

Eleanor recognized him. She recognized everyone, cursed with the kind of memory that let go of nothing.

Luka Brankovic, the fourth-year PhD student who had the most publications of any student in the department, the student who got funded by the National Science Foundation twice in three years. Dr. Ballard's rising star, the TA who got the chili pepper on the professor rating website.

She never was good talking to people, and the vice that tightened around her throat when people were around seemed to compress harder when she saw Luka. She avoided making eye contact with him, steering clear of him and his long, dark hair, messy in way that looked like he'd always just rolled out of bed. She hated the scruff on his jawline, indicating he did know how to shave, just not in a consistent manner. She hated his blue eyes, icier than hers, catching the light whenever he talked to people. Caught in a constant state of laughter. And when she had looked at him just now: pity.

Eleanor hadn't worked so hard her whole life just to be distracted by men like Luka Brankovic.

She choked on a laugh that sounded like a sob, still folded over the eyewash station. It all seemed pointless now. She started singing Her Majesty to herself again, humming it as a meditation. Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl, but she doesn't have a lot to say.

The song's calming effect had lessened after a dozen rounds, and Eleanor dropped her hands to the sides of the metal sink, blinking into the stream of water still burbling into her eyes. Her hands gripped the cold metal, her body sagging.

"I can't do this," she said, her hands anchoring her to the station even as her knees begged her to give out.

"You can," Luka encouraged. "You've got eight minutes left. Only twenty-four more rounds of Her Majesty."

"It's pointless," Eleanor said, feeling sobs building up again. She liked to think she was level-headed. She liked to think she was careful, too, but look what she'd done. She was going to go blind. What good was a scientist who couldn't observe her own experiments?

"It isn't pointless," Luka snapped. "Flushing is your best chance, and you're going to do it, and then you'll go to the hospital and get some eye drops or something else inane and you'll be fine."

She almost admired his anger. It was preferable to his pity. She wished she could see Luka angry, rather than perpetually pleasant. Thick, dark brows knit over cold eyes.

"Thank you," she said. She took her hands off the sink and brought them back up to her eyelids, spreading them again to make sure the water hit every angle of her eye. The sound of the water was starting to drive her crazy.

"Say something else," she added.

"What happened?" he asked.

Not the best way to keep her mind off things, but on the off chance the acid ate into her brain, people needed to know for posterity. They could make an instructional video about lab safety and base it on her story.

"Contents may be under pressure," she recited, her voice wet and garbled through the sound of the water. "I got sprayed when I unscrewed the cap to the acid solution, and dropped the container. Shattered the beaker I was going to pour it into."

Eleanor didn't know what else to say. I was an idiot, she didn't say. I didn't pull the sash window down, she didn't say. My goggles slipped, she didn't say.

A simple sequence of events that she would replay in her mind the rest of her life.

"When this is over, I'm taking you for a beer and telling you about the time I thought I got hydrofluoric acid on my arm," Luka said.

She heard him shift over by the sink, the sound of cloth against the laminate paneling of the cabinets. He sighed and she risked a quick glance his direction. He'd sat down at the foot of the sink, cross-legged, and was looking up at her. She ducked back into the water stream.

"You had an accident with HF?" she asked, incredulous.

"I told you, it's a story to share over a beer," Luka said, "but yes. So don't go thinking you're a badass for getting some acid in your-"

He stopped the sentence short, as if noticing what he said only after hearing it.

Eleanor took in a sharp breath, and then started laughing.

**

Eleanor's laughter broke through their conversation as unexpected as a cell phone at a funeral. Luka thought she'd cry, or kick him out of the room for being insensitive. He was insensitive. He was an ass.

What kind of thing was that to say? And yet, it seemed like the right thing, as Eleanor's peals of laughter rang out.

He'd only heard her laugh once before; honestly, he'd only heard her have a long conversation once, and it was over the phone, so he felt like a creep listening in. He had come to the graduate offices while it was still dark on a Sunday morning, trying to catch up on grading for one of his classes. The students' half-written equations and poor grasp of his subject, combined with the sun's slow rise, put him to sleep. He had rested his head on his arms, and gone to sleep in his cubicle, out of sight.

When he woke, it had been to Eleanor's laughter. He had peered over the divider to his cubicle, and seen her sitting on the windowsill, legs stretched out in front of her, illuminated by the sun. She had a phone to her ear and was glancing outside, one hand writing something on the glass. He hid back in his cubicle and debated what to do. Should he make a noise, and let her know he was there? How long had she been in the room-would she think he'd been listening the whole time?

The girl he saw in the window that day had been happy. Over the next few months in the program, he hadn't seen her smile again, or heard her laugh. He had begun to think it was a chance occurrence, or something she didn't think anyone at the school deserved. Maybe they didn't. Her laugh was something else, clear and musical.

"Hey," she said, interrupting his thoughts. "I need you to keep talking. Tell me the time."

He glanced at the clock again from his place on the floor. It was selfish to sit when she had to stand hunched over like that.

"You have six minutes."

Eleanor nodded into the sink.

"How does it feel?" Luka asked.

"Like acid is burning my eyes," Eleanor said, sharp and cutting. "So make me think of something else."

Luka sighed. He used to think he was good at talking to women. He looked around the lab, hoping for inspiration. This was the wrong place. This was not what she wanted to think about.

He told her about the crying baby. The sleepless nights, and the few nights he'd napped in his cubicle rather than go home.

"Do you ever wake up to the custodian here?" she asked.

"Yeah. I'm thinking of setting aside a section of my next grant proposal to get the university vacuum cleaners that weren't made in the eighties."

Eleanor laughed again.

"You would succeed," she said.

With a thrill Luka realized she knew about him. He buried the feeling at once, embarrassed by his own ego. He wanted to ask her about herself. He wanted to know where she grew up, and what she was researching, what music she listened to all day long. Who she had been on the phone with last year, the day that she laughed. What else made her laugh. He worried all of it would lead back to this morning, the accident.

He talked about the hikes he liked to take on the weekends, instead. The New England fall colors, red, yellow and orange brushstrokes across the landscape. The constant chitter of the black capped chickadee.

"I think my favorite part is the bite of the wind once you get into October. It's like the shadow of snow on your skin."

He realized she hadn't said anything that whole time. He checked her shoulders, listened for her breathing.

"I want to see that." Her voice was quiet, almost masked by the running water.

"Keep talking."

Luka didn't know what else to say. He wanted her to see it, too. He wanted to take her out for that beer. He wanted to tell her that she would be ok and know he wasn't lying.

The rest of her song came to mind, unbidden. Maybe she listened to the Beatles all day, every day.

He realized he was humming Her Majesty when she joined in again, her voice wavering and thin. He sang the last lines out loud with her.

"I want to tell her that I love her a lot, but I gotta get a bellyful of wine. Her Majesty's a pretty nice girl, someday I'm going to make her mine."

"Someday I'm gonna make her mine," he finished alone.

He couldn't take his eyes of Eleanor. He said nothing. She needed him to speak, and he could say nothing.

"I'm scared," she said, breaking the silence. She looked over the side of the sink at him. Her eyes were still so red. So blue. Like a bird taking flight, a flash of color as it spread its wings, then disappearing as Eleanor looked away, and went back to flushing her eyes.

He scooted closer to her, away from the sink, until he was below the eyewash station. Maybe a stupid thing to do. He needed to be there for her.

Eleanor let her right hand drop next to Luka. She grazed his hair, and pulled her arm closer to her body, shying from the gesture. He reached out and grabbed her hand. It was wet, and cold. She squeezed his hand hard, crushing his knuckles, her own hand turning white in his grasp.

Luka looked at the clock.

"Three more minutes," he said. "I'll be here. I'm not going anywhere."