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"Thanks, but I like washing my hair. I like showering. It's relaxing." "You need hobbies, Zoey. Knitting, karaoke, kite flying, taiko drumming.

All you do is work, or stuff around work."

It was an old argument. "I did promise myself I wouldn't toil away all weekend. I didn't go back to Toronto for the holidays, and I've been in the lab every weekend for the last four months. I'm going to take naps. I'm going to clean my room. I'm going to go stand in line at that restaurant Phnom Penh so I can eat an entire plate of Cambodian chicken wings by myself. I'm going to read a...a fiction book."

"They're called novels."

"Right. Whatever. You know, one of those books that people who know how to relax read. I'm going to—"

"Zoey."

"Yeah?"

"School sounds like a drag."

Zoey tried to deny it. She liked being a grad student. Didn't she? So why couldn't she offer a retort to her roommate.

"You don't have to do this program, you know. I mean, you're clearly miserable. You'd do just fine being a goddamn doctor."

Zoey swallowed. "I'd still have to do my clerkship and residency. And I can't give up The Plan."

"Right. To become a medical researcher. Find a cure for bone cancer." "At least put us on the right path."

"But is it the right path for 'you'? Because it's not going so well." "Plans are always a bit difficult when you're in the middle of them."

"But they're supposed to have rewards eventually. You're close to burning out."

"I feel very rewarded."

Although she had to admit, she was maybe a little exhausted from trying to please Smerek and never succeeding. Luckily—or unluckily—there was no time for Zoey's roommate to call her on the lie. Li-leng had started sniffing the air. "Oh no, the clafoutis!"

She hopped toward the oven. "The what?"

"There were all these cherries on sale!"

Smoke wasn't quite pouring out but there was a definite smell of burning.

Luckily the window was still wide open, and the detector batteries were sitting on the kitchen counter—although maybe if either of them had remembered to put them back in they'd have had a little warning. As it was, Li-leng, forgetting an oven mitt in her hurry, tried to take the dessert out of the oven and promptly dropped a pan and two ramekins full of berry and cake at her feet.

In Zoey's expert opinion as a med student, Li-leng had to go to the ER. They spent the rest of the night at the hospital taking in some of that good ole Canadian health care. Luckily Li-leng only sustained minor burns to one hand, and after a long evening in the waiting room at Vancouver General, Zoey was able to bring Li-leng back home in a cab, cherry-batter-splattered and bandaged. Zoey sent her roommate off to bed, she scraped up the dessert from the floor and put away the leftovers, went upstairs to shower dessert and dinner and hospital-people smell off of her, and dropped into bed.

Not the beginning to the weekend that she'd been hoping for, she thought as she was falling asleep, but at least her roommate would be all right.

It wasn't until the middle of the night that Zoey sat up bolt upright in bed and remembered.

The slide with the bone sample. What had she done with it? He'd taken it and forgotten to give it back to her.

The Handsome had taken the slide.