These little fires smoulder through the weekend, many of them coming to a head at a spectacularly disastrous dinner party (I’m an absolute sucker for a charged dinner scene, and this is one of the best I’ve read in a while). Meanwhile at the lab, the pressure and competition are getting to Wallace and his colleagues, particularly Dana. Wallace’s relationship with the brooding Miller starts tenderly, but something darker emerges: Miller also has bad things in his past.
Cole and his boyfriend Vincent are talking about opening their relationship, Emma’s fiancé Thom doesn’t like her friends, the straight Yngve is probably in love with his gay housemate Lukas. Wallace has horror in his past in Alabama, but we are only drip fed the details as he goes to the lab, plays tennis, dines and brunches. Over the course of the weekend he will reveal things about himself he wouldn’t have dreamed of doing, grapple with his place in the world, and reconsider whether he really wants to continue working with worms. That night he takes the heretofore straight Miller home with him. What drives him to do so he cannot begin to comprehend, perhaps driven by a need he cannot put words to. On a Friday night he does something out of character: agrees to meet them for drinks by the lake on the pier. There’s Cole, Yngve, Emma, Miller and their various partners, “his particular group of white people” that he’s met through his research.
He didn’t go to the funeral and hasn’t told his friends. He’s black and gay and his father died several weeks earlier. Wallace is a fourth-year bioscience grad student at a Midwest institution, studying something that involves carefully breeding microscopic nematode worms.
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