Mrs. Marshall burns a gram of hash in the palm of her hand, catching the smoke in an inverted drinking glass. This is where I realize she’s an android, because she doesn’t wince.

She takes her hand out from underneath the ventilation hood and offers me a hit. I raise the glass a little and suck down the sweet, milky smoke and manage not to cough. My lips don’t brush her skin, but they come close. The hairs on her arm are pale and twinkle under the fluorescent lights. She puts her hands back under the hood. Neither of us speaks — I hold my breath and she watches the smoke refill the glass. I look from her to the wall filled with wooden drawers filled with tempered-glass items: beakers and petri dishes. The air is sweet and nauseating with chemicals and gas from the bunsen burners. The fan makes a lot of noise. I lean over and exhale into the ventilation hood and am surprised at how little comes out, for the large breath I had taken.

I was the only kid to sign up for a science project for extra credit. Everyone else is doing a sports workshop or community service or something with band.

Mrs. Marshall lets the hash go out and takes a final hit. Mrs. Marshall is old, about thirty-five, but a very hot thirty-five. She has blond hair and bangs and glasses. “That’s enough of that,” she says.

Mrs. Marshall pours me a glass of lemonade. We’re at her house. The idea is, she has data on her computer at home, and the file is too large to fit onto a diskette and bring to school. I sit in her living room waiting for her to bring me the glass of lemonade from her kitchen. She hums, but it’s a normal musical humming, nothing machine-like. She gives me the glass and kicks off her shoes. She’s wearing pumps and they fly into the corner of her room beneath the aquarium, one after the other. She sits down beside me on the sofa and massages her left foot with her right foot. I ask her what that thing is hanging on the wall that looks like a giant scrotum.

“That’s my regeneration sac,” she tells me. “That’s what I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

“What’s it do?”

“Transfers energy. It’s how I recharge.”

“I thought that was, you know…”

She squeezes my thigh. Her hands are strong, yet sensitive. A thrill runs through my body. “No, the sex was just for fun. This is business.”

“Business.”

“You’re special, Justin. I knew you’d be able to understand the situation. Someone older couldn’t, and the other kids at school — come on. Why do you think you’re romping with your chemistry teacher while they pull weeds at the old-folks’ home for extra credit? They wouldn’t get it either. Listen: Time is bi-directional for me, but it comes at a cost. I’m asking you for a year of your life.”

“Which year?”

“This one, from now.”

“My sixteenth year? Won’t I miss it?”

She shakes her head. “You can make up the school you miss afterwards. It’s not like you do a lot in school this year, anyway. I’ll give you full credit for Chemistry, and extra points for the project. And what else are you going to do this year? I can tell you now: nothing special. The parties don’t really start until you’re eighteen. You’ll miss a few movies with friends. You won’t have a girlfriend until you’re nineteen, nothing steady anyway.”

“Nineteen.” It makes sense. “How do you know this?”

“I don’t know it. I just calculate the probability. These things I’m telling you, the probability is practically 100%. But I’m not seeing into your future or anything like that. I can’t do that. And I wouldn’t even if I could — that’s totally addictive.”

“So this is just probably what will happen.”

“Yeah, but 100% probable.” She switches feet and massages her right foot with her left one. When you’re sixteen, it doesn’t take a lot to drive you crazy. And Mrs. Marshall has been doing this for a hundred years at least.

We get into the sac and she turns it on. When I wake up, I’m somewhere else and my mom is going crazy with tears of joy in her eyes and I feel weak. The room is bright and I fall back to sleep and later a guy is taking my picture for the newspaper.

I was in a coma for a year, she tells me. It doesn’t feel like it. When I go back to school Mrs. Marshall isn’t there anymore and the girls think I’m somehow more interesting because I was in a mitochondrial coma for so long and some students from the university want to study me. “It’s rare that all mitochondrial activity ceases for an entire year and the subject survives.” They tell me there’s been an increase of late in this rare condition. They show me a map with red dots.

As Mrs. Marshall had promised, I don’t miss the year much. And I turn out to be a writer, just as she’d said. Genre, just as she’d said. I start writing the Lo and Beholden series in college and for some reason everyone loves my detectives Tommy Lo, the ex-Hong Kong action star with a gambling addiction who knows a little kung fu but whose fighting philosophy is “avoid trouble, run away if you can and only fight if they catch you,” and Gretchen Beholden, the six-foot-two ex-Marine weapons expert about whom Tommy once remarks, “she eats bad guys for breakfast and trust-fund divas for dessert.”

Readers can’t wait for my next book. Lo and Beholden don’t do anything other detectives don’t do. They find the runaway before the killers do — killers hired by her relatives, who know what she doesn’t: that she’s supposed to inherit a drugstore fortune from the father she never knew. They solve the thing with the religious sect, and they solve the government thing with the cover-up. Gretchen gets Tommy out of jams with the Tong over gambling debts, and Tommy nurses Gretchen back to health once or twice and they help each other through heartbreak.

Anyway, they sell and I sign books and do readings and college radio interviews me now and then. And I watch the coeds and remember Mrs. Marshall telling me another thing, that the highpoint of my love life would be sitting in a chair with a girl on my lap one summer, and kissing all night and not wanting anything else. She was right about that too. That’s what I try to catch in my writing, every book: the feeling of that night.

In my office I have a big map of the world with pins everywhere I find a case of mitochondrial coma. In this way I follow Mrs. Marshall around the globe. She does two a year. Somewhere in the world, she’s about twenty right now, serving some kid a glass of lemonade and kicking off her shoes.