Growing a part

Sammie was staring intensely through her microscope at the petri dish before her. Her dreams of being a princess long behind her, she had swapped ballgowns for scrubs, tiaras for a facemask, satin gloves for latex ones, and a castle for a lab. The tissue cells she was studying had multiplied appropriately since her last observation, and a smile escaped the confines of her mask, spreading up to her grey-blue eyes. It had worked.

With a stream of thoughts flooding through her mind, she pulled off her disposable apron and threw it in the hazard bin alongside her latex gloves and face mask. Having washed her hands thoroughly, she left the lab, pulling out her tight ponytail as she went. She ran her fingertips through her hair, letting the straightened strands settle on her shoulders. As she approached the large meeting room, she didn’t know whether she wanted to run or drag her feet.

She raised her hand to knock as the door swung inwards. The company’s CEO, Dr Jonathon Howard, welcomed her with an ever expressionless face. She nodded politely as she stepped through the doorway.

“Mr Tomioka couldn’t be with us today,” he stated. “So we have been joined by his personal secretary –“

“Alena?” Sammie interrupted, shocked, as she caught sight of the businesswoman sat at the far end of the oval table. “Is that you?”

“Alena Karenski, I would like to introduce you to –“

“Sammie.” Her tone was quiet, incredulous, as their eyes locked.

“You two know each other?” Dr Howard asked, surveying them both in turn.

“Sorry,” Sammie murmured to him, unable to take her eyes away from Alena’s. “We were at school together.” In fact, they had once been the spitting image of one another: their hair plaited the same way, their nails painted the same colour, their dresses of the same design, and their free time spent in the company of the other.

Alena stood and made her way round the table. Although it went against every protocol that had been drilled into her, she wrapped Sammie in a hug, who squeezed her back just as tightly. They pulled apart and Sammie held out her hand. Alena clapped it, before performing the elaborate handshake routine they had created in the first year of primary school.

“You remember?” Sammie asked as they finished with a high-five.

“Of course.” Alena’s hazel eyes were warm as she maintained her gaze with Sammie’s. She would have stayed travelling down memory lane if it weren’t for Dr Howard’s throat-clearing cough dragging her back to reality.

The two girls followed him out of the room as he led them to the labs Sammie had come from just a moment before. She barely heard a word that Dr Howard was saying, her mind filled with the sound of songs they had created to perform for their parents in pretty dresses. She could still remember the words. She couldn’t help stealing glances at Alena, and could sense that she was doing the same.

“So,” Dr Howard said, turning to face them as they approached the laboratory door. “That’s all from me for now. Over to you.” He gave a small nod in Sammie’s direction, who registered what he was saying, and stepped forward to push open the door.

“What we do here - well, what I do here..." Sammie was desperately trying, but failing, to remind herself that she was talking to an investor and not her childhood best friend. "That is, the royal ‘we’.” Alena hid a small smirk at the reference to an inside joke from twenty years ago. She couldn’t recall now why they had found the phrase ‘royal we’ so amusing, but she knew that they had. Probably toilet humour, come to think of it.

Sammie took a breath to compose herself. “What we are doing here," she tried again, "is growing a part. My work consists of synthetically re-creating a section of the windpipe.” She walked towards her desk where the microscope was still set up. “If you look through here," Sammie directed Alena to peer through the eyepiece as she continued. “You can see the donor stem cells have now multiplied as needed and formed around the scaffolding.” She had no idea whether Alena would actually be following this or if, like her, her mind was elsewhere.

“Our scaffolding, unlike previous trials, uses 3D printed technology to create a trachea that is tailor-made for the patient. We need the funding to be able to perform our study outside of the lab, with real patients. Because a windpipe in a petri dish isn’t helping anyone to breathe easy.” The side-eye her boss was giving her made her regret her choice of words in that last sentence. And from the small bite of her lower lip, it seemed that Alena had noticed it too.

“I’ll take it from here,” Dr Howard intercepted, an I’ll-talk-to-you-later conveyed in his tone. He walked Alena back through the corridors. Sammie followed them, seating herself outside the meeting room like a student waiting for the headmaster to come out of his office. There were several other stern-faced business men in there with them now, who Sammie concluded must have arrived whilst they were in the lab. None of them could have been younger than sixty-five, nor did they look particularly pleased to be there.

When Dr Howard and Alena eventually re-emerged from their deliberations, Sammie, who had resorted to counting ceiling tiles, practically leapt out of her seat to hear the verdict. “Well?”

“I’m sorry, but your request for funding is not something that Tomioka and Sons Corporation would be prepared to invest in at this time.” Alena’s tone was sincere. It was impossible to detect any trace of their previous inside jokes and reminiscences.

Sammie nodded, and, with a formal “thank you for your consideration,” she excused herself. She turned back towards the corridors, her footsteps thunderous on the wooden floor, but stopped in the doorway, turning abruptly on her heels.

The floorboard beneath her squealed.

"You know what," she exclaimed, her voice loud and piercing as her eyes fell back on Alena, and everyone else's landed on her "I'm disappointed in you 'Lena. When I saw you here today, I thought you were gonna swoop in and help me out like an eff'ing fairy godmother, but you're just like all the rest of these money-grabbing businessmen." She held her hand up to stop Alena who had opened her mouth to speak. "No," she continued. "No. I don't want to hear your sorry excuses. I'm done."

She turned, ignoring the call of her name, and walked briskly through the corridors, past her lab and all the others like it, past a row of identical offices, and to the grand glass-ceilinged foyer. She swiped her card, letting herself out of the building, and breathed deeply, inhaling the cool calm of the autumnal air. Tears stung her eyes, threatening to fall, as betrayal sunk to the pit of her stomach. She began to walk, going somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t here. Her phone buzzed in her pocket but she continued walking. Walking. She passed building after building, crossed road after road, until her weakened legs ached beneath her. She flopped down on a bench, pulled her windswept hair back from her face in a half-hearted ponytail, and wondered how the day she had been working towards for months - no, years - had turned out like this.

She allowed herself a moment just to sit, before pulling out her still vibrating phone. There were multiple missed calls from her boss, even more texts, and a single email from Tomioka and Sons. That was the notification she clicked. Below a standardised ‘we regret to inform you’ message, a note had been added by Alena. Sammie scanned its contents, finding an insincere apology, an imaginative excuse, an intention to shift the blame to her boss, all topped off with an offer of drinks next Saturday.

Having read through the message a second time, she returned the phone to her pocket without replying and buried her head in her hands. She couldn't bring herself to accept an invite to share fancy cocktails with someone who had just cost her the culmination of her career’s progression - even if they had played princesses together, once upon a time.

Instead, Sammie had to accept a fact her five-year-old self never would have allowed: that not all stories end with 'happily ever after'.