“You’re working it today, girl,” Shelley said, as she did most mornings when Ruth stepped off the elevator. But all Ruth was really working was the customary uniform of any laboratory scientist from the research and development team: long pants and long sleeves under a lab coat, closed-toe shoes, safety goggles, and purple gloves.

It was nearly impossible to be cute in this getup, but Ruth recognized what Shelley meant without either woman having to verbalize it. Their conspiratorial looks said Ruth had made it and so had Shelley, by proxy. Just her mere presence as a chemical engineer made a statement: a road map for the handful of Blacks in the company and an unwritten, unspoken exclamation point for anyone who doubted they could dominate in the sciences.

The lab’s fluorescent ceiling lights illuminated the brown liver spots at the top of her boss Clayton’s head, the open terrain that his sparse mud-brown hairs failed to cover. Side by side, they poured surfactant into beakers.

She cleared her throat and said, “I see Max’s getting his name on lots of patents lately.”

Had her tone sounded casual, as she’d intended? Or had her insecurity bled through her practiced nonchalance? Holding the beaker eye level and swirling the liquid inside, Clayton said, “Mmm. I’d say our entire group is innovating.”

Defending her statement would seem just that, defensive, so she kept quiet. Max had joined their team as a scientist just two years ago, and after she trained him, he was quickly assigned to core brands and then new innovations. In Langham lingo, they were the high-market-value, high-market-share products.

No one in the workplace was indispensable, yet when senior leaders said they wanted a detergent with ten times more cleaning power than that of their main competitor, Ruth busted her ass to make those claims true. In the early days, Clayton often referred to her enviable talent.

Three years into her tenure with the company, Ruth began working on core brands, but recently, Clayton asked her to only make small tweaks to formulas. Nothing more challenging than that. Now was not the time, despite Xavier’s eagerness, to get pregnant and have Clayton question her commitment to Langham. In spite of Clayton’s early praise of her work, she feared her own position would always remain tenuous. A bull she would ride for as long as she could hold on without it bucking and knocking her to the ground.

She had met Clayton at a National Society of Black Engineers recruiting event on Yale’s campus a few months before graduation. Her knees trembled beneath her somber gray interview suit when she faced him as he scouted new talent at the networking reception.

Her grandmother’s voice rang in her head that night. Stand up straight. Don’t slouch. Look them straight in those blue or green eyes, because they’re no better than you. Let them see how smart you are.

It didn’t take long for Ruth and Clayton to bond over being born and raised in the Midwest—the Indiana auto factory town for her and a dairy farm in Wisconsin for him. Even though she was Black, and he was white and older, they had similar roots. The same values. Corn-fed folks. Sturdy. Good, decent people at the core.

They laughed at their mutual preference for no-frills cuisine with names that were easy to pronounce. But it was their banter over biochemical interactions and thermodynamics that lit her up, and before they knew it an hour had passed. Their conversation was so all-consuming that Ruth forgot her fear and left behind the shamed teen mother from Ganton who had been intimidated by the Ivy League freshman year. By this time, she had become a butterfly shedding her cocoon, finding her legs and then her wings.

Now, Max stood on the other side of Clayton, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his corduroys.

“Which mission are you on?” Max asked their boss. Splotches of red dotted the skin of his neck just above the collar of his lab coat.

For weeks now, the two of them had been talking endlessly about Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron. Clayton said, “I’m on Korriban. We got Han Solo unfrozen from that carbonite. Now we’re attacking Emperor Palpatine.”

Max said, “Okay, you’re on the ninth mission then. Just wait till he gets trapped and you have to help him get into the shield generator base. Pretty gnarly.”

At night, Ruth found herself googling the adventures of Han Solo so that she could add something to these conversations. But it was as if Clayton and Max were speaking another language that she didn’t have the patience to learn.

Trying to ignore their voices, Ruth turned on the propeller mixer and watched the cloudy haze of blue color mix with a cleaning agent. It always reminded her of a smoothie in a blender.

She felt someone’s eyes on her and looked up to see Nigel, a scientist from Ghana, glance at her quickly before returning to his acid-level test. The sting from his furtive gaze burned her cheeks. She wished she hadn’t confided in him her fears about Max cozying up to Clayton and leapfrogging over her in the company.

“You just have to work harder is all,” Nigel had said dismissively, before launching into a diatribe about what he called the abysmal work ethic of American Blacks.

When he joined the team, Ruth had rejoiced at having another person of color in R&D. Without exaggeration, Nigel’s skin could be described as blue black, that you-can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face level of darkness. Yet his snobbery reminded her of Victor. As Zora Neale Hurston once said, All my skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.

Christmas ads, Christmas music, and Christmas decorations seemed to sprout everywhere like overgrown weeds she wanted to trample with only a week to go before the holiday. The brightness of window displays that had delighted her days before blinded her now, and she blanched at their lack of subtlety. All this festivity shoved Ruth into the arms of cheer she didn’t really feel and actively resisted.