Edited by: Chloe Costa Baker | Illustrated by: Amy Park
October 16, 2025
Things they don’t tell you
about science:
$110. They give you $110 for an MRI study. Or they do tell you, but only after you’ve read the newsletter and clicked the buttons and sent the emails, curious because you never had an MRI before. Then they tell you the magic number you will sell a few hours of your time for, to satiate your curiosity.
You write about yourself in the email: 18 year old female, normal and corrected to vision, meets all requirements for the study, no issues, you are nothing less than perfect.
Sidney E Frank Hall, opened in 2006, is a beautifully modern glass building that should be put on the front page of a brochure for Brown. The MRI Research Facility is in the basement of SFH, beneath the crushing weight of the five-story, 169,000-square-foot structure. You can touch the ceiling if you stand on your tippy toes.
They will put you in an EEG cap and spend two hours gelling you up. They will press the metal nodes against your skull and it will teeter between pressure and pain. The gel gets inserted with a plastic syringe and forms an uncomfortable cool wetness between your hair and the cap. You may fall asleep between the methodical workings of two strangers.
It is okay if you have a thin metal wire behind the rows of your teeth, permanently bonded to keep your teeth straight after two years of orthodontic treatment. It is okay if you forgot to mention it the first time they go over the screening questions because you will remember it the second time and your orthodontist will send them an email. The researcher says it is okay and your orthodontist says it is okay. You will still worry that the MRI machine will rip it out of your mouth with its magnetic force, and then your teeth will no longer be straight.
The MRI machine is beautiful. She is sleek, white, and powerful, illuminated by a halo of soft yellow light. She thrums beneath your feet because she is alive, sending quiet reverberations running down your spine. The facade is ruined by a gray line of fraying duct tape running down the inner seam of the scanner.
MRI immobilizers made of foam and gel slot you into place on the patient table. You feel like a mounted animal, ready to be stuffed and posed—the immobilized yellow perch screwed to driftwood, the paralyzed bluegill flush against his plaque.
The patient table is thin and flimsy plastic quaking beneath you as you are mechanically moved into the all-encasing white of the scanner. They cover your body with a white sheet to keep you warm. You are a draped cadaver being slid into the mortuary cabinet.
The. MRI. Tube. Is. Smaller. Than. It. Looks.
They can taste your discomfort. They are kind. One offers to play a video of fish as they set up. You will watch the video of fish. The fish will swim when you cannot.
You ask if you can be taken out between the assignments (no), if they can talk to you during the assignments (no), if you can wiggle your head a little (no). Once you are done with your silly questions, the machine will rumble to life. The song of the scanner swoops between pitches, high to low, beeping to booping. Between each bar the scanner shakes. You are lulled by the machine.
Guilt. You aren’t supposed to be dozing off, but you are. Trapped between the sterile white walls of the scanner, your mind is the only thing that can spin, so you sleep to escape. You try to summon the comfort you found in small spaces as a child, squeezing into cabinets and sliding under the bed, but it doesn’t come to you. Don’t let the nausea overpower you. Click your button instead. Click. Click. Click.
They will pull you out. You won’t be in there forever. You peel the EEG cap from your head. The gel will have begun to dry and crust on your scalp. You will be annoyed at having to wash it out later. In the moment you will only be able to feel the crashing waves of relief.
It surprises you that what surprises you is they pay you in cash. You were expecting something digital, or at least a check. When was the last time you held so many crisp tens in your hand?
You will take a nap afterward.
about growing up:
There exists a hexagonal wooden model a little less than 30 inches in all dimensions and of a deep walnut hue. You are young, so you are only two cabinets tall.
The cabinet has a pair of inset wooden doors, each decorated with an ornate curved brass handle. The doors were engineered in such a manner that you can only open one from the outside and have to push the other open from the inside. It takes a tug—the cabinet resists.
Online quotes of similar prototypes go up to $1,000, but knowing your parents and the timeline of cabinet acquisition, it was rescued off the side of the road or from a neighbor’s driveway yard sale.
It is fun to play pretend. You meticulously move the vintage holiday mugs full of cables, discarded cardboard children’s books, and other miscellaneous items out of the cabinet. The cabinet is your den and you are a mother fox, the cabinet is a mountaintop cave and you are a dragonet, the cabinet is safe and crushing comfort.
Slowly, the cabinet will shrink and the space between your skin and its walls will grow smaller. One day, you realize you cannot fit in the cabinet at all. You are hit with a feeling of loss but you do not know what you are missing.
about dorms:
Some triples are 537 square feet. Some triples are 259 square feet. Some triples have the floor’s electrical closet jutting into the room, making the narrowest part of the room 38 inches wide. Just enough to slot a twin XL mattress.
Some triples are too small for three people.
Once you move into your dorm, it will be even smaller than before. Your things seem to inch forward, taking up more room until you periodically push them back into place. They are crowding for more space, your space, so you will have to fight for it, shoving clothes into wooden dressers and memorabilia into plastic gallon bins.
When you lie on your 38 by 80 inch twin XL at night, you imagine you can feel the walls of the room move to the breaths of your roommates. Your bed is pushed flush against the wall and the wall pushes back—no matter the season, the painted cinder block is strangely chalky and clammy to the touch. You imagine the wall is sweating.
Your third roommate moves out. Somehow, the room feels larger and smaller than before. Her part of the room is crossed off with an imaginary line and when you step over, you can feel the oxygen atoms that long exited her lungs rattle around yours. There is nothing left but bare matress and uncovered tabletop.
She had the narrowest part of the room. Maybe that’s why she left. The ceiling is stooped so that if you sit on the bed and stretch your spine, you can brush the roof with your fingertips. Neither the overhead fluorescent lighting nor the narrow windows can reach into the dark corner.
about all of the above:
Forget. Spend the $110, move the cabinet to the garage, pack your things and relocate. Forget the jarring roar of the scanner, the feeling of wood grain against your skin, the sweaty cinder block walls.
Fact: you will continue to be forced into spaces too small for comfort. You will never stop growing out of your safe spaces. Every refuge is temporary.
Grit your teeth, claw your way out, turn the four alien walls into your home. When trapped, learn to recognize when you should muster courage to stomach the discomfort and when to force the space to fit you. Understand when to move on, and you will burst out of the wooden cabinet that can no longer contain yourself.
Sole Magazine