Ouro Preto

the summer before my senior year of college, I spent far too many of my waking hours in the basement of the state natural-science museum, rarely leaving, even for meals. During my lunch break, I sat eating red licorice under the yellow orb of a desk lamp, turning pale and flaccid as a mushroom.

“You need something with some damn nutrition to it,” my boss, Bill, would say, jabbing a thick finger at me as I chewed plasticky chunks. But he had a MoonPie with Sun Drop for lunch himself, so my eating habits felt like an act of solidarity.

Bill was a geologist whose Twitter handle was @DrRocks and who played in a prog rock band on the weekends. I was his summer research assistant, having taken the job with little idea as to what it would actually entail but knowing it was the least popular option each year on the university’s summer work board. Mostly, I’d taken it as a sort of punishment. I wasn’t a geology major; I’d taken one class as a freshman to fulfill a science requirement: “Rocks for Jocks,” people called it. As summer drew near, though, I’d allowed myself to imagine some possibility of adventure: the geologist and myself, hiking over hillsides together, delving into hidden seams of mineral deposits, plundering the earth, the jumble of ruby and kyanite and hiddenite in my hands like cool, disinterested eyes. By the end of such a summer, I’d find myself strong-legged and sun-browned from the fieldwork, restored.

Of course, it turned out to be nothing like that. Bill, or DrRocks, had gotten a new mass spectrometer. He patted it lovingly from time to time, as if it were a trusty basset hound, cajoling it sweetly before each use. We were going through the current specimen collection, reorganizing it.

“Respect the drudgery, Annie,” Bill would say, and then, with both thumbs pointing at himself, “Respect the drudge.”

He was working on a project involving carbon dating; I’d stopped paying attention the moment I’d understood we weren’t going to be swashbuckling our way to gemstones together. Really, I had very little understanding of Bill’s methods or aim.

It didn’t matter. He mostly seemed to want company, a captive audience, and I could provide that. I’d broken up with my boyfriend, Nick, and my best friend, Beau, right around the same time. It felt appropriately punitive to be stuck in a grungy basement all summer, listening to Bill. Most of the specimens were not even beautiful. I felt a little cheated, having imagined that we’d at least be rummaging through boxes of sparkling, candy-colored stones. Instead I sorted hunks of humdrum gray or black or olive green. Plain old gravel. Penance.

“If they’d give a little more funding to us instead of those damn dino duds,” Bill would say, three or eleven or fifty-eight times a day. His perennial plaint was the inequity in funding and attention between the geology department and paleontology. By his contention, paleontology, the damn dino duds, got everything—the money, the glory, the cartoon T-rex T-shirts in the gift shop. All of Bill’s rocks, lovingly labeled and identified—fewer than half of them had ever even made it out for display.

“Damn dino duds,” I echoed. Even as hollowed out as I felt, I could be loyal. What I didn’t point out to Bill was that dinosaurs were pretty darn interesting, and that’s why little kids loved them, and so maybe this was just the natural order of things, an unequal dispensation of gifts—like how some people seem to possess an intrinsic luminosity while others bumble around, dull and uncertain.

Like the difference between Nick and me. My boyfriend, Nick, had broken up with me. I’d met him in one of my English classes, where he’d stood out with his blonde dreadlocks, weaponized smile, and effortless, unearned confidence. He’d responded to the professor the very first day of class, September sunlight dappling his shoulders like a mantle...