Monday morning, just barely after class. Rose was among the first twenty in line for lunch, so she reserved the gang’s table and dragged over enough chairs to accommodate the whole crowd. She set her tray down, and lifted her plate, utensils, and soda glasses off, and set the empty tray on a nearby table. She opened up her book, took a bite of her hamburger, and sat down to wait.
Regan, Rachael, and Alex arrived at approximately the same time. Regan sat down exactly one chair away from Rose; Rachael sat next to Regan. Alex sat in the chair next to Rose, on the side away from Regan. Rose looked up from her book and glared; Alex showed his teeth in a guilty grin and scooted away to the seat as exactly opposite the girls as the table would manage. Scotty and Jeff arrived next, and filled a good portion of the table with their trays. Regan gave them a stern look; Jeff nudged Scotty and they both moved their dishes off their trays and set their trays on the table next door. Gwen, [Winnie, Wendy, and Victoria] gathered themselves around the table, trays correctly out of the way. Everybody else arrived, but no Dave.
“Hey, Scotty, Dave’s not here. What gives?” Rose asked.
Scotty looked blank and shrugged. Jeff was caught with his mouth full of orange juice; he grabbed a napkin and held it to his face just barely in time to prevent major spewage. “You don’t want to know,” he said.
Rose sighed and set her Mountain Dew glass down with a bang, slopping soda over the edge onto her plate. “Yes I do,” she said.
“No you don’t,” Jeff said.
“Come on.”
Dave banged in just then. “Oh, wow, guys,” he said, “I have just had a morning that you would so not believe. Oh my God.” He attacked his Sloppy Joe with more vigor than class, dripping meat bits, bread crumbs, and sauce all over his plate, Rose’s, and Regan’s.
“So what wouldn’t we believe?” Regan asked.
“It was the fruit flies,” Dave said around another mouthful of Sloppy Joe. “We work with fruit flies in Genetics, you know? We play with them because they’re cheap, plentiful, and PETA doesn’t get all worked up if we should happen to mistreat a few of them.”
“And they mutate easily,” Scotty added.
“They’ve got a really short life cycle,” Jeff said.
“Yeah, and that,” Dave said. “We keep them in jars. They live in these jars. They breed in these jars. They grow in these jars. They die in these jars. We’ve got the blue oatmeal mush in the bottoms for them to eat. So I had my jar out on my desk, counting the number of normal fruit flies, the number of abnormal fruit flies, and the number of three-eyed, blue-eyed, flying stripy fruit flies, which is what I’m studying.”
“He was kinda perched on his stool leaning over,” Scotty contributed.
“Anyway, the jar fell over,” Dave said.
“He knocked it over when he stood up on his stool and started singing about the flying purple people eaters,” Jeff said.
“And it shattered on the floor. There were shards of glass all over the floor. There was blue oatmeal all—”
“Why is the oatmeal blue?” Rachael asked.
“So you can see the fruitfly larvae in the oatmeal,” Dave answered. “There was blue oatmeal all over the floor. There were little teeny baby fruitflies all over the floor.”
“And there were hundreds of fruit flies flying all over the room,” Jeff continued.
“And I needed to catch all of them,” Dave said.
“Actually, the instructor has about a billion sheets of fly paper dangling from the ceiling, so it looks like a first grade classroom who’s just done the unit on wind chimes,” Jeff said. “So the fly catching was kind of superfluous.”
Rose was forming a mental image, and not liking what she saw. It was horrible, humiliating. She bowed her head, pressed her hands to her lips, and suppressed a sputter of laughter.
“I needed them for my data,” Dave explained. “If I had to try and duplicate what I was doing, I’d lose a week. So I hunted down each and every one of those flies.”
“He pursued the flies high,” Scotty said, “leaping from bench to bench.”
“He pursued the flies low,” Jeff said, “crawling under each and every lab stool in dauntless pursuit of his elusive prey.”
“He pursued flies in the middle air, knocking over slides and scattering papers,” Scotty said.
“Everyone kept getting in my way and bitching at me,” Dave said. “I could have done it in five minutes if everyone had just cleared out of the room. But they didn’t.”
“And then he caught all but about three of them,” Scott said. “He had them all inventoried. Inventoried! And he was missing three. So he climbs back up on the stools and lab benches and pulls down all the fly paper looking for his flies. He finds three flies on the fiftieth sheet of fly paper he pulls down.”
“Actually, it was the fifty-second,” Dave said.
“Whatever. So he’s heaving a big sigh of relief, and recording his data, and then here comes this last uncaptured fly. So he chases it around. He waves his notebook at it.”
“It was Carol’s notebook.”
Jeff took up the story. “He yells, things that you are really not supposed to yell in an academic situation, at it. It circles his head. He runs up and down the room, seeking more than just lab results this time. He is angry. He wants vengeance. And then—”
“So I inhaled it,” Dave said. “Big deal. Doesn’t everybody inhale a bug once or twice in their life?”
“Oh my God,” Regan said, “a kamikaze fruit fly.”
Dave shook his head in despair. “No one understands! Anyway, I was cleaning up the genetics lab. It got a little messy.”
“Shards of glass,” Scotty said, “all over the floor.”
“And blue oatmeal,” Jeff said. “You can’t forget the blue oatmeal.”
“Ugh,” said Rose. “Do you guys mind? I’m trying to eat here.”
“Mmm, chocolate covered ants,” Regan said, popping a raisin in her mouth and chewing with great relish.
“You people disgust me,” Dave said, and polished off the remains of his Sloppy Joe.
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evealone is pissy about my having had a glass of chocolate milk with addative. 
