None

The girls had lead Sarah to a large gymnasium adjoining the locker room then. She realized now why the building had appeared so large from the outside... its interior contained a standard 400-meter track, layered with that sort of black rubber that she'd heard was made of recycled tires. A tier of mostly empty black bleachers ran parallel to the track on each of its long sides. They took Sarah to the front row in a roped-off section marked "VIP."

"Will you be okay here, Sarah?" Laurie asked. "The only people allowed on the field are contestants and officials.

Sarah chuckled at that. "Inflation Olympics, huh?" Laurie smiled happily.

When I signed up to study ecology, I had visions of visiting exotic biomes. I daydreamed of swimming through Caribbean reefs and discovering a new species of pufferfish or finding a violet poison dart frog in Amazonia. The reality is that you have to go where the money will take you. So there I was, knee-deep in the effluent from Grimesworth Dye Works in a freezing polluted stream, sifting out the red water mites to take them back to the lab and test them for mutated bacteria. This dominated my life, regardless of the season. I was paying my dues for my PhD.

Having been a smoker since the age of sixteen, Marti made many attempts to break the habit. She first went cold turkey at nineteen when she couldn’t afford to buy cigarettes, but found herself bumming smokes at every opportunity.

At twenty-two, her boyfriend introduced her to nicotine gum. It tasted unsavory and did little for her cravings, so she dumped both the gum and the boyfriend.

At the age of twenty-five, she tried the patch. After making herself sick from applying too many at once, she found smoking to be safer after all.