You know that feeling when you're sitting in your room and the only light is from your phone and outside its just like, totally black because there aren't any streetlights out here, just the wind hitting the side of the trailer? It makes you feel so small. Like you're just this tiny speck in the middle of all these cornfields and nothing you do actually matters but then at the same time everything matters TOO MUCH. Sometimes you just wish you could go back to when you were ten and the biggest problem was if the creek was too high to catch crawfish, because now I'm seventeen and everyone in this town thinks I'm some kind of genius who "made it out" or whatever. They keep talking about the paper in the big science journal like it's a golden ticket, and my mom even pinned the printout on the fridge right next to a coupon for the Piggly Wiggly which is just... it's so embarrassing I want to die. But the thing is, you ever have a secret that feels like it's literally eating a hole through your stomach? Like a physical weight right under your ribs? Because that paper, the one about the soil microbes and the carbon whatever—I stayed up for three days straight doing those charts back in the summer when I was supposed to be helping my uncle at the shop. I was so tired my eyes were vibrating, you know? And I remember typing in the numbers from the spectrometer and the screen was blurry and I just... I think I shifted a whole column. Or maybe I didn't. That's the worst part, I don't even know if I did it on purpose because I wanted the results to look like what Dr. Aris said they should look like, or if I'm just stupid. And now it’s OUT there. It's in the actual journal that people in like, London and New York read. I was looking at it again tonight, the PDF on my phone, and I saw this one figure—Figure 3—and my heart just stopped. It was like the world went quiet. If you look at the baseline, it doesn't match the raw data in my notebook from that Tuesday in July. It’s off by like a factor of ten. Ten! That's not just a little mistake, that's like, a "you're a fraud and your whole career is over before it started" kind of mistake. And you know how it goes, people are going to start trying to do the same experiment because it was a "breakthrough" and some guy at a real university is going to sit down at his desk and realize I'm a liar. Or a moron. I don't know which one is worse, honestly. Sometimes you just feel like you're wearing a mask and everyone is clapping for the mask but underneath your face is just... melting. My chemistry teacher, Mr. Henderson, he stopped me in the hall yesterday and said he was so proud that a kid from our county got published in something so PRESTIGIOUS. He used that word, prestigious. And I just stood there and nodded like a little doll, but inside I was thinking about how much of a joke I am. Like, if he knew that the "future of environmental science" can't even copy numbers into an Excel sheet right, he’d probably just walk away. Everyone thinks I'm the one who's gonna get the scholarships and never come back to this town, but what if I'm just stuck here forever because I ruined everything before I even left? I tried to tell my mom once, well not tell her, but I said like, "Hey, what if the science stuff is wrong?" and she just laughed and said I was being too hard on myself and that I always was a "perfectionist." She doesn't get it. Nobody here gets it. They think science is just like, facts you find in a book, they don't realize it's all just numbers that people like ME type into computers at 3am when they can't even see straight. You ever feel like you're a ticking bomb? Like you're just waiting for that one email to pop up in your inbox from some professor who's like "Actually, we noticed a fundamental flaw in your methodology..." and then the whole house of cards just blows away in the wind. I went out to the porch a few minutes ago just to breathe because the air in my room felt like it was getting used up. The stars are so bright out here and it’s so quiet it hurts your ears. I was thinking about Dr. Aris, who’s the lead author, and how he’s this big deal who trusted me to do the grunt work. He’s going to hate me. He’s going to lose his funding and it’ll be because some teenager in a town with one stoplight messed up a decimal point. My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped my phone off the porch. You ever just want to scream into the woods until your throat is raw but you don't because you don't want your stepdad to wake up and ask what's wrong? It’s just... you spend your whole life trying to be the smart one so you can get away from the smell of the chicken plant and the feeling that nothing ever changes, and then you finally get a chance and you BUNGLE it. You bungle it so bad it might actually be illegal or something. I don't know. Is it illegal to be bad at math? I keep thinking maybe I should just delete the file and pretend I never saw the mistake, but then I remember that other people are reading it. Right now. Some guy in a lab somewhere is probably looking at Figure 3 and frowning and reaching for his calculator. I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept for real in like a week. Every time I close my eyes I see that spreadsheet. I see the little green cells and the numbers and I’m trying to move them back but they won't move. You know that dream where you’re running but your feet are like lead? It’s like that but with data. I’m just... I’m so scared. I’m so incredibly scared that I’m gonna be found out and everyone will see that I’m just a dumb kid from the middle of nowhere who got lucky and then messed it up because she wasn't good enough to be there in the first place. And the worst part is I have to wake up in four hours and go to school and act like I’m the girl who’s going places. I hate it. I hate everything so much.