Dana Schwartz - Choose Your Own Disaster

1. Are you a left-brain thinker or a right-brain thinker?

A. Left brain

B. Right brain

2. What was your favorite subject in school?

A. English

B. Biology

3. Would you rather be fulfilled or rich?

A. Fulfilled

B. Rich

4. In sixth grade, you read The Call of the Wild and your English teacher has you create a project to represent the book. You would prefer to:

A. Draw a wolf with charcoal and place a poem you wrote and printed onto clear paper over the drawing for an effect that you truly think belongs in an art museum.

B. Build a small model sled out of wood.

5. On a winter day in the sixth grade, your same English teachera woman with a poodle poof of white hair, who wears floor-length skirts and a brooch at her neck like shes onboard the Titaniccomes outside to shepherd you back in from recess when she slips on the ice. But not just slip the way most people use the word slip. She slips like a cartoon character, tiny-heeled boots flung straight out in front of her so shes fully horizontal above the ground before she falls. Im okay! she croaks from the pavement. Do you laugh? Please note here that she is actually completely uninjured. Promise.

A. Of course you laugh. Youre not proud of it, but what do you want me to say here?

B. No. I mean, yes, but youre going to say no because even though it said she wasnt hurt, this might turn out to be a trick question or something.

Congratulations! Your rom-com lady career is vaguely arts related, probably at a television studio or womens magazine. If the former, youll be wearing a headset microphone and carrying a clipboard, flitting around a control room in a pencil skirt and high heels. If the latter, youll be carrying a half dozen coffees that are spilling all over your cardigan, flitting around New York City in a pencil skirt and high heels. Being clumsy is your primaryand adorablecharacter trait. Your apartment is inexplicably massive and your wardrobe is all designer blazers and statement jackets in bright colors, and even though they should all be covered in coffee all the time, on account of all the coffee you spill, they always look perfect. You will never get persnickety emails from your bank account, heavy with electronic red exclamation points, about overdraft fees and you will never, ever be sitting barefoot on your couch and feel a slight tickle and look down to see a cockroach the size of a baseball, all legs and hair-thin quivering antennae, crawling across your foot and disappearing beneath the oven before you have a chance to kill it, so you just have to know, forever, that that giant cockroach is living somewhere in your house, waiting to emerge, and its already gotten a taste for crawling across human flesh. No. Your apartment is always spotless, and your hair is always professionally blown out.

You should be the love interest in an action movie. Think Bond girlyoure incredibly smart in the one specific area that just so happens to help the protagonist in this one very specific instant of the plot. Give me that, youll say, snatching the hieroglyph from the heros hand. I have two PhDs in cryptozoological translation. Youll shove the hero aside from the beeping machine. Im NASAs top-ranking expert in nuclear disarmament techniques. Does it make sense? No, but who cares? You are very, very pretty. And smart, definitely smart because even though you look like a supermodel and wear very sexy clothing and a full face of makeup, you are also wearing glasses. Sure, twenty-four looks a little young to have three PhDs but theyre pretty sure making you smart in whatever will move the plot forward means this movie is feminist. You will either end up running away with the hero, or you will die. Apologies.

Here is how you cut off a mouses tail:

Step 1: Get an internship at the laboratory in the biology building at the center of campus. The animal labs are all several floors down, below the concrete and perfectly manicured grass squares. Your first time walking through the industrial hallways, youll pass doors guarding pigs and mice (youve heard that there are also primates somewhere in the underground labyrinth of hallways, but their locationand existencewas classified after a legion of animal rights activists in the 1970s engineered a plot to set them free).

Step 2: Get dressed. Youll never quite be sure whether the protective gear you have to wear when you enter the room with the cages is for your protection or that of the mice, with their delicate, scientifically coordinated immune systems. It will take you five full minutes to pull on the covers for your shoes, the gloves, the hair net, and the thin plastic apron while your new supervisor watches, teaching you how to make sure the elastic is all the way around your shoes and making you promise you will never touch a doorknob with a gloved hand. (Is it to keep whatever bacteria youre playing with off the doorknob or to make sure you dont contaminate your experiment?)

Today, were going to be snipping their tails for PCR samples, your supervisor says, swiping her access card to get you into the mouse room. Shes about forty-five years old, with shoulder-length hair like Kathy Bates in Misery. Shes just a technician, not the scientist in charge of the lab. Among the many things shes told you that you dont quite understand, you dont entirely know what PCR stands for. Eventually youll be doing this on your own, but it takes some getting used to, she continues.

The mouse room is about the size of a prison cell, lined on all sides with stacked plastic cages, each filled with its own generation of mice, their unique genetic and pharmaceutical history carefully marked on an identifying card. The smell is exactly how youd imagine it, and just a little worse.