Chapter 1: Gluing Herself to Infamy
The smell of vinegar and burnt rubber always meant progress. Alex Dunphy wiped a sweaty strand of hair from her forehead with the back of her wrist, leaving a faint gray smudge. Her bedroom was less a sleeping quarters and more a tertiary laboratory. Beakers and petri dishes shared dresser space with socks. A poster of Marie Curie watched, stern and encouraging, over a desk littered with scorched hot plates and dozens of tiny tubes filled with viscous, murky fluids.
“Okay, batch seventeen,” she muttered to an empty Gatorade bottle wearing google eyes. “Resistance to organic solvents, check. Heat tolerance up to two-fifty degrees Fahrenheit, check. Drying time under thirty seconds… regrettably also check.”
She held up a glass slide where two strips of aluminum were fused together by a clear, rubbery substance. She tried to pry them apart with a flathead screwdriver. The metal groaned, but the bond held. A slow, triumphant smile spread across her face. This was it. The permanent, flexible, waterproof adhesive she’d been chasing for nine months. She’d just need to run a few more toxicity screens, file the patent, and finally move out of her parents’ house. The thought was a quiet electric buzz in her chest.
The door flew open without a knock.
“You look like a homeless chemist,” Haley announced, perched in the doorway. She was holding two mugs. “Mom made tea. I told her you’d probably prefer a beaker of hydrochloric acid, but she insisted.”
Alex didn’t look up from her microscope. “Set it on the bookshelf. Not the one with the cyanobacteria cultures.”
Haley rolled her eyes and navigated the cluttered floor, placing the mug precariously on a stack of old Scientific American journals. Her gaze swept the room, lingering on the open toolbox, the soldering iron, and the small, discreet black case on Alex’s nightstand. A smirk played on her lips.
“Big plans tonight? Big… scientific breakthrough?” Haley asked, her tone dripping with faux innocence.
“The breakthrough is in the chemical composition, not my personal life,” Alex said flatly, finally turning. “Why are you really here?”
“Can’t a sister check in? You’ve been up here for forty-eight hours straight. You smell like a new car and despair.” Haley picked up a spare plastic stopper and twirled it in her fingers. “You should get out. Live a little. Use some of that… equipment.”
Alex felt her cheeks grow warm. “Haley, please. I’m working.”
“All work and no play makes Alex a very glued-together girl.” Haley’s smirk widened. She glanced again at the nightstand. “Just saying. A little stress relief might help the genius process. Don’t you have, like, a special oil for moving parts?”
“It’s water-based. And it’s none of your business.” Alex turned her back, a clear dismissal. She heard Haley sigh dramatically.
“Fine. Be a hermit. Drink your tea before it gets cold.”
The door clicked shut. Alex let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. The buzz of triumph was now mixed with the familiar static of social irritation. She loved her family, but they existed on a different, much louder wavelength.
A few hours later, the buzz was pure, undiluted victory. The final test was perfect. She stretched, her spine popping in protest. The mundane, physical needs she’d ignored came rushing back: hunger, thirst, and a deep, muscular tension coiled in her lower back. Stress relief. Haley’s annoying comment echoed. Maybe she had a point.
She walked to the nightstand and opened the black case. The bottle inside felt lighter than she remembered. She shook it. Still plenty. She set it on the bed and went to her desk, grabbing a small, sleek device from its charging dock.
The routine was mechanical, a process to switch her brain off. She applied the clear gel from the bottle where needed. It felt cool, slightly thicker than usual, but she was too tired to note it as anything but a product of her fatigued senses. She engaged the device, letting the familiar vibration drown out the whirl of her own thoughts.
Thirty seconds in, she noticed the first problem. A strange warmth, not unpleasant but distinctive, began to spread where the gel had been applied. Then a slight tightening sensation.
Her scientist’s brain, usually so compartmentalized, fired a warning shot across the bow of her personal moment.
Heat reaction. Unusual for a water-based lubricant. Thickening. Rapid polymerization?
She jerked the device away. Or tried to.
It didn’t move.
A cold, sharp terror, entirely different from any laboratory accident, lanced through her gut. She pulled again, gently at first, then with more force. Nothing. It was stuck. Firmly. The warming sensation was becoming a distinct, unyielding bond.
“No,” she whispered to the empty room.
She tugged, her breath coming in short pants. The device held fast, the proprietary polymer of its casing now seemingly fused to her own skin by the substance between them. She twisted, trying to find an angle. A searing bolt of pain made her cry out. It was bonded. Everywhere.
Panic, cold and absolute, flooded her system. She scrambled off the bed, hunched in an awkward, horrifying stance. She limped to her desk, her mind racing through chemical profiles. Permanent. Flexible. Waterproof. Resistant to organic solvents. The list she’d been so proud of moments ago was now a checklist of utter horror.
Batch seventeen.
The bottle on her bed. It wasn’t her bottle.
She snatched it up, her hands trembling so violently she could barely read the label she’d printed herself that morning. In neat, small type it read: Adhesive Trial #17 - PERMANENT BOND. CAUTION.
The mug of tea, now cold, sat on the stack of journals. Haley’s smirk. “Don’t you have, like, a special oil for moving parts?”
A sob, raw and choked, burst from her throat. This wasn’t an experiment. This wasn’t a slide she could clean. This was her body. Her privacy. A catastrophic, intimate failure of her own genius, orchestrated by her sister’s asinine idea of a joke.
She stared at the wall, at Marie Curie’s grim expression. The vibration of the still-whirring device against her leg felt like a cruel taunt. The momentum of her triumph had not just halted; it had reversed into a silent, screaming freefall. She was literally glued to her mistake.
The door downstairs slammed. Haley’s laugh, bright and carefree, floated up the stairs.
Alex stood frozen in the middle of her cluttered sanctuary, utterly, permanently attached to the physical evidence of her own isolation. The next move was impossible to calculate.
The next move was impossible to calculate. Alex’s frantic, trembling fingers clawed at the unyielding junction between her body and the device, her sobs of panic muffled by the sheer, stupid horror of it all, until the bedroom door swung open again.
Haley walked in, trailing steam and the scent of coconut body wash, a towel wrapped around her hair and another around her torso. “Okay, I feel kinda bad about the tea thing—” she began, then her eyes widened, taking in the scene: Alex, naked, bent over, hideously attached to the still-vibrating device. A snort of laughter escaped her. “Oh my god, Alex, what the hell are you doing?”
“You switched them!” Alex shrieked, hysterical, straightening up as much as the tether would allow and gesturing wildly with the adhesive bottle. “You stupid bitch, you switched my lube with the permanent glue!”
Haley’s laughter died, replaced by dawning, slack-jawed understanding. “That was the glue? I thought it was, like, fancy silicone stuff!” She took a step closer, gaping. “How do we get it off?”
“We don’t! It’s permanent! You glued a fucking dildo inside me!” Alex wailed, the clinical term absurd in her own ears.
In her shock, Haley didn’t notice the discarded underwear on the floor. Her foot caught in the fabric and she pitched forward with a yelp, her hands flying out to break her fall. She landed hard, knees on the carpet, her torso falling between Alex’s legs. The other end of the sleek, curved device, now slick with the same experimental adhesive from its initial application, pressed flush against Haley’s naked body as she fell.
There was a sickening, warm squelch, a mutual gasp of shock, and then a seamless, unbreakable seal.
For a second, there was only the humid sound of their shared breath and the relentless, intimate buzz of the motor. Haley froze, her eyes wide with a terror that now mirrored Alex’s. She tried to push herself back, to scramble away, but the bond was instantaneous and complete. They were locked together, skin to skin, by a six-inch polymer shaft, a grotesque, naked sculpture of sisterly hubris and bad luck.
“Oh, no,” Haley whispered, the color draining from her face. “No, no, no.”
Alex could feel every faint tremor from Haley’s body transmitted through the rigid connection. “Get off! Get off me!” she screamed, pushing at Haley’s shoulder, but any movement tugged brutally at the sealed tissues inside them both, a sharp, nauseating pain that made them cry out in unison.
They were stuck.