“Monica will love to hear about your secret librarian identity—”
“No!” I barely keep my voice down. “Please, just call Greg before you talk to Monica. He’ll explain.”
“Convenient, given that I can’t get in touch with him while he’s on his retreat, and he won’t be back until your interview is over.”
Shit. I’d forgotten about Woodacre. “There must be a way to reach him. Can you tell him it’s an emergency? That, um, he left his porch light on? You need his alarm code to go turn it off. Save the environment.”
“No.”
“Please. At least—”
“No.”
“You’re being absolutely unreasonable. All I ask is that you—”
“—do you think about the girl? Hannaway, right?” one of the urinal voices asks. We both instantly tune in.
A mistake, clearly.
“CV’s real good. Her two-dimensional liquid crystals theories . . . good stuff.”
“I remember reading her paper last year. I was very impressed. Had no idea she was that junior.”
“Right? Makes you wonder how much of it is her mentor’s.” A vague hum of agreement that has my hands tightening around the balls of Jack’s shoulders. None, I want to scream. It was my model. “She’s young and beautiful. Which means that she’ll get pregnant in a couple of years, and we’ll have to teach her courses.”
It’s like a punch in the sternum, to the point that I almost slip butt-first into the toilet. Jack stops me with a hand between my shoulder blades, arm contracting around my waist. He’s frowning like he’s as disgusted as I am. Though he’s not. He can’t be, because Pereira, or maybe Crowley, adds:
“Doesn’t matter. I’m voting for Jack’s candidate. He’s got influence, and he hates theorists.”
“He does? Oh, yeah. Can’t believe I forgot that article he wrote.”
“It was brutal, man. And hilarious. Wouldn’t want to be on his bad side.”
A hand dryer goes off, muffling the rest. Jack’s still holding me, eyes on mine, foreheads near touching. My nails dig into his chest—made of some granite-Kevlar blend, engineered by a task force of experimentalists to exude heat. He’s a sentient weighted blanket, and I—
I hate him.
I’ve never hated anybody: not J.J. Not the Film Appreciation 101 professor who nearly failed me for saying that Twilight is an unrecognized masterpiece. Not even my brother Lucas, who had me convinced that I was adopted for over six months. I’m mild mannered, adaptable, unobtrusive. I get along with people: I give them what they want, and all I ask in return is that they not actively dislike me.
But Jack Smith. Jonathan Fucking Smith Fucking Turner. He’s been hostile and unpleasant and suspicious since the day we met. He has shat upon my field and destroyed my mentor, and now stands between me and my dreams. For that, he lost the privilege that I afford every human being: to deal with the Elsie he wants.
The Elsie he’s going to get is the one I care to give him. And she’s pissed.
“I want this job, Jack,” I hiss over the hand dryer. I actually need this job, but—semantics.
“I know you do, Elsie.” His voice is low pitched and rumbly. “But I want someone else to get it.”
“I know. Jack.”
“Then it seems like we’re at an impasse. Elsie.” He articulates my name slowly, carefully. I’m going to lean forward and bite his stupid lips bloody.
No, I won’t, because I’m better than that.
Or am I?
“You do not want to come at me,” I hiss.
“Oh, Elsie.” His hands on me are incongruously gentle, and yet we’re on the verge of the academic equivalent of nuclear warfare. “I think it’s exactly what I want.”
The dryer turns off into silence and saves me from committing aggravated assault. “They left,” I say. “Let me go.”
His mouth twitches, but he deposits me on the floor in some ludicrous reverse–Dirty Dancing move. His hands on my waist linger, but as soon as they leave me I’m scampering out of the stall, heels clicking on the tiles. I nearly lose my balance. With Jack’s scent out of my nose, the stench of the place hits me anew.
“Talk to Monica if you want to,” I bluff, turning back to him. “You’ll see the good it does you.”
“Oh, I will.” He’s clearly about to smile, like the angrier I get, the more amused he becomes. A never-ending vicious cycle that can end only in me holding his head in the toilet bowl.
“It’s my word against the word of the guy with a decade-long agenda against theorists, after all.”
He shrugs. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s a physicist’s word against a librarian’s.”
I scoff and stalk to the entrance, suddenly confident in my stilt shoes, determined not to be in his presence a second longer. But when I reach the door, something ticks inside me. I whip my head back to Jack, who’s standing there like K2, studying me with an interested frown, like I’m an exotic caterpillar about to pupate.
God, I hope he has itchy, purulent ass acne for the rest of his natural life. “I know you have despised me since the very first moment we met,” I spit out.
He bites the inside of his cheek. “You do?”
“Yes. And you know what? It doesn’t matter if you hated me at first sight, because I’ve hated you long before we ever met. I hated you the first time I heard your name. I hated you when I was twelve and read what you’d done in Scientific American. I’ve hated you harder, I’ve hated you longer, and I’ve hated you for better reasons.”
Jack doesn’t look so amused anymore. This is new to me—talking to others like the me I really am. It’s new and different and weird, and I freaking love it.
“I’m really good at hating you, Jack, so here’s what I’m going to do: not only am I going to get this job, but when we’re colleagues at MIT, I’m going to make sure that you have to look at me every day and wish that I were George. I’m going to make you regret every single little jab. And I’m going to single-handedly make your life so hard that you’ll regret taking on me, and Monica, and theoretical physics, until you cry in your office every morning and finally apologize to the scientific community for what you did.”
He is really not amused now. “Is that so?” he asks. Cold. Cutting.
This time I’m the one to smile. “You bet, Jonathan.”
I open the door. Leave the restroom.
And I don’t glance at him for the rest of the evening.
4
ENTROPY
So. Just to get this straight. You, Elsie ‘I’m allergic to peanuts but I still ate Mrs. Tuttle’s homemade brittle because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, have you seen my EpiPen?’ Hannaway—you told Jack Smith . . . all that?”
I’ve kicked off the red dress, and I’m neurotically pacing in the glory of my thigh highs, striped cotton underwear, and insulin pod. I should be cold, but my anger burns toasty from within, like the plasma core of the sun. “It’s a minor allergy, Mrs. Tuttle is very elderly and our landlady, and yes, I did—because Jack deserved it.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Cece lies back on the couch, watching like my meltdown is the apotheosis of entertainment. Hedgie lounges in her lap with a schadenfreudey, demonic gleam, clearly getting a serotonin boost from my impending demise. “That article he wrote was such a huge deal, every academic field still talks about it. Even linguistics. How did you not know what he looked like?”
I rub my eyes. My fingers come back soot black. “I was engaging in an academic boycott.”
“Maybe not your most fortunate idea.”
“If someone wrote a hoax paper saying that adjectives suck, you’d boycott them, too.”
“I’d straight up murder them. And I’m proud of you for finally yelling at someone—a most pleasing moment in your career. But my question is, how are you going to do”—she waves her hand inchoately—“all that?”
“Do what?”
“Hatch out of the yolky egg of adjuncthood. Get the job. Make Jack rue the day he was born. What’s the plan here?”
“Right. Yeah.” I stop pacing. Massage my temples. “I have none.”
“I see no flaws in that.”
The only response I can think of involves kicking the top part of the credenza. I do just that, then proceed to limp around with a swollen pinky toe.
“I’ve never seen you like this, Elsie.”
“I’ve never felt like this.” I’m a Large Hadron Collider: atomic particles smash angrily about my body, building up the energy to burn Jack to a crisp. Or at least cook him well done. I can’t remember the last time I experienced so many negative emotions. “I should have known. I always had a bad feeling about him, and last night—that’s why he’s so good at Go. He was a physicist all along, that—that piece of Uranus—”
“Science insult. Nice.”
“I bet he thinks in Fahrenheit—”
“Ooh, sick burn.”
“—and spends his free time flying to Westminster Abbey to dance on Stephen Hawking’s grave—”
“Hawking’s dead?”
“—and won’t even bother calling Greg to ask for an explanation, because he’s a sadistic, egotistical, ignorant black hole of sh—”
“Elsie, babe, do you need us here for this, or should we go to our room to mourn Stephen?”