When We Write the Stars

Chapter 5: Cassie

"Well, that's what we do, we fight. You tell me when I'm being an arrogant son of a bitch and I tell you when you're a pain in the ass. Which you are, 99% of the time." – The Notebook

     After I finished my classes, the remainder of my day was spent in the lab. We had a deadline approaching fast, and of course, were way behind schedule because that's how it always went. Additionally, since it was the start of the school year new people were joining our research team to replace those who'd graduated. I tried not to think too hard about the fact that I'd be replaced by someone next fall.

     Right now, I was training the latest addition to our team, Reva. She was a junior and this was her first quarter officially in the astrophysics major. It was exciting to have another girl on the team, there were only a handful of girls in the major, and our research team was made up of eight people. Two professors that were the lead researchers, then six of us undergrads got to help out. The only other girl on the team had graduated last spring, so I was thankful to have Reva now. We seriously could use some more women in the department. 

    I always tried to look on the bright side of things though. At least when it came to astrophysics, the gender gap wasn't as bad as it was with computer science. It still wasn't ideal, but it could be worse. I liked that I knew almost every girl in the department though, that was in some ways comforting. The department was small enough though that I also knew most of the guys at this point.

      "So the biggest part of our job is really going through and analyzing data and going through and finding useful related literature. It's definitely not as exciting as it sounds, but it looks great on a resume, and the teams pretty chill about when you come in as long as you get enough work done," I tell Reva as I finish showing her around our lab.

     The lab itself was pretty small, it was in the same building as all the big telescopes we had, but those were in a different room. The room we worked in was made up primarily of computers and other various workstations, and there were whiteboards covering almost every wall because sometimes it was nice to just grind out an equation on the board.

     "Okay, cool got it," Reva said grinning from ear to ear. She reminded me a lot of myself when I first joined the research team. I'd joined my sophomore year when I was still in the pre-major because Steven had been on the team and talked me up to Professor Johnson. Reva still had a gleam in her eye that only went away after too many hours spent in the lab or working on assignments.

     "And if you ever need anything, just let me know. It can be really overwhelming at first, and it's better to ask me or one of the other undergrads for help than one of the leads."

     "I'll definitely do that, so should we start now," she asked grinning as I sat down by my usual lab computer and motioned for her to sit next to me. I was going to spend the next few hours showing her the general process of how we did things.

     By the time I left the lab, it was almost 9:30, and I was exhausted, but I'd gotten some important work done, and now that Reva was trained, hopefully, I'd have a slightly lighter lab workload. We'd had a whole team meeting over dinner as kind of a welcome back, so the second I got back to my apartment I went into my room to relax.

     It was a Thursday night, and the only class I had on Friday was kickboxing so instead of doing homework like usual I threw an episode of the office on, and grabbed my current crochet project.

     I liked crocheting, I'd picked it up a few years ago, but had quickly learned that anything I tried that was more complex than a blanket ended up looking like absolute garbage, so I'd made a lot of blankets. At this point, everyone in my family, plus all of my roommates had blankets I'd made for them, so now I'd make them and then donate them to shelters. I liked having something to do with my hands when I listened to music or watched tv.