Keeley helped Aiden bring it upstairs and set it on a table in his second bedroom that housed a ridiculous amount of technological equipment she didn't even recognize.
"Do you really want to keep a hamster tank in here with all this…stuff?"
He nodded. "Yeah, I spend most of my time in here. It'd be cool to have the company."
"What do you do in here?" she asked curiously.
"Video games, mostly. I also do some IT stuff from home…and my girlfriend lives in Sweden so we video chat a lot as we game and stuff. We met in game."
She never would have guessed this goofy guy had a foreign girlfriend. The things you learn about people.
"Interesting. Well, good luck with your hamsters. What made you want to get them anyway?"
"All of my friends have pets now so I wanted one too. Out of nowhere, one of them wanted to get a cat and I was a bit jealous," he explained.
"Huh, I was actually just out helping somebody pick out a cat this morning. She's a real cutie! Super sweet too. She actually purred for him and he's an ice block that nobody likes."
Aiden nearly choked holding back laughter but Keeley didn't notice because she was looking at the hamster palace again. "An ice block that nobody likes, huh?"
"Yeah, super annoying. He's always making me do things I don't want to do. I wish he'd get off my case," she sighed. "You ever meet anybody super clingy and weird like that?"
"I'm quite familiar with someone exactly like that," he said in a tone dripping with irony. "He doesn't mean any harm though; he's just…not so good with regular human beings."
Not so good with regular human beings was too generous a statement for someone like Aaron. Sometimes she even wondered if he was a human being himself.
"This guy definitely means harm. He couldn't take a hint in high school, or my freshman year of college, and then he suddenly dropped off the face of the earth until a couple weeks ago. Now he's at it again. I'm pretty sure he's only doing it to spite me."
"Why would he be spiting you?" Aiden asked curiously.
"He was kind of a big shot at my school and I offended him the first time we met. I'm pretty sure he's only been messing with me all this time because he's trying to get me to bend to his will."
He raised an eyebrow. "Sounds like this guy has his work cut out for him."
"Huh?"
"I mean he sounds like a real piece of work," Aiden corrected. "Anyway, thanks for helping me bring this up. You probably have things to do."
"Unfortunately I do," she sighed. "I have to start thinking of topics to research for my doctoral thesis. Wish me luck!"
"Good luck!"
Keeley crossed the hall to her apartment, greeted Valentina as she lay on the couch watching a telenovela, and headed straight for her room. It was still early but after the day she'd had she deserved to be back in her pajamas so she changed into them.
She sat down at her desk chair and stretched before opening up the scholarly article search engine she had access to as an NYU student. There had to be something that hadn't been done yet but still had enough similar research that she could find a starting point to reference somewhere.
Cystic fibrosis was definitely the topic she wanted to research the most but what could she do that hadn't already been done? Talking about Kaleb earlier strengthened her resolve to write her thesis on the disease.
Since going to school and actually following her dream to make things up to her little brother, it was a lot easier to think and talk about him (and her mother) without getting upset. Keeley was healing by accomplishing what she couldn't before.
Kaleb would have loved going to the buffet chain/arcade today. It was probably his second favorite place to go after Yankee Stadium.
He couldn't ride most rides because he could get out of breath too easily but the Twister was gentle enough that he could handle it so he loved riding it.
Sweet Kaleb. If he were still here, he'd be twenty-one. She couldn't believe he had been gone so long. It might be time to bust out the old family albums again the next time she visited her dad.
She knew she most likely wouldn't find a significant breakthrough as a student but she still wanted to get started researching what she was passionate about.
'Someday, Kal. I'll find a way to help other kids like you,' she thought as she continued looking for a base point for her research.
Hours later she was still at it. She was considering trying to do gene therapy with the mutated CTFR gene in order to see if it was possible to fix the cells individually and cure the disease at a genetic level rather than simply treat the symptoms.
Gene therapy had worked for other diseases. Why not cystic fibrosis? There was plenty of base research on gene therapy. She could totally do this if she got the go ahead from her faculty mentor.
Keeley decided to bring it up on Monday. For now, she wanted to relax. There were only a few hours left in her Saturday after all.
Making her way out into the living room, she plopped down next to Valentina and decided to join her on her telenovela binge.
"What did I miss?"
"Jorge and Ana Maria are eloping but Ana Maria is pregnant with Felipe's baby. Jorge thinks it's his," Valentina replied without looking up from the screen.
"Juicy. I wonder how he's going to take it."
"Not well, most likely. He really loves her," she sighed.
Keeley wanted to laugh. Her friend really got into these things. She mostly watched because she thought they were hilarious rather than having a real emotional attachment. The acting and storylines were just so over-the-top.
"I have an idea for a telenovela," Keeley said suddenly, wanting some advice about her current situation without actually revealing it.
"Oh? Tell me."
"A girl falls in love with the heir to a huge conglomerate and they date in secret for years because the heir is ashamed of showing her to his high society friends. Eventually they go against his parents' wishes and get married but his childhood sweetheart of sorts schemes against her, eventually killing her father.
"Then she seduces the heir and gets pregnant with his baby after the wife finds out she can't have kids. He asks for a divorce but the childhood sweetheart has the wife killed anyway. Then the wife wakes up as a teenager right before she meets the heir and wants nothing to do with him but suddenly, instead of being ice cold, he's interested in her and refuses to leave her alone even after many years have passed."
"And?" Valentina asked eagerly. She was invested already.
"And nothing, that's all I've got," Keeley said lamely.
It was how far things had gotten in her actual life. She couldn't predict the future outside of big events that happened outside of her little world.
For example, she knew who was going to win the next two presidential elections and when certain natural disasters would happen because those were out of her control, but she couldn't tell what was going to happen in her own life since the timeline became so skewed.
In her first run-through of 2012, Keeley had been married to Aaron for nearly two years. It was around this time that her ectopic pregnancy occurred and all her dreams of motherhood died with it. Obviously she wasn't married or pregnant right now.