I’m instantly swimming in guilt. Dr. L. pulled strings. He called up old colleagues—reached out to people who turned their backs to him after the Smith-Turner censure. Swallowed his pride for me. “No! The commute between different campuses is time consuming, but . . .” I start biting into my cuticles, then remember that I stopped three years ago. With the help of Cece and a spray bottle. “But nice. The variety.” I smile.
He smiles back, pleased, and I feel a heady sense of relief and affection. Dr. L. is my one ally in the Red Riding Hood forest of academia. If it weren’t for him, I’d never have gotten into grad school to begin with. My heart squeezes as I remember senior year of college. My low grades. My mediocre GRE scores blinking on the screen, and the knowledge that I couldn’t afford to retake it. J.J.’s careless “Hey, what’s up?” whenever we crossed paths.
I remember the sense of dread I felt compiling my applications and sending them to fourteen—fourteen—schools, and then, over the following weeks, the weight sinking in my stomach, centimeter after centimeter. Other students were being flown out for on-campus interviews, and my email pinged with nothing but spam and Mom’s requests that I take care of my brothers.
It was the shortest winter of my life, and yet it crawled at a snail’s pace till the end of February, when I finally knew that it just wouldn’t happen. Becoming a physicist was the only thing I ever wanted, and it would never come true because of a stupid mistake.
Until Christophe Laurendeau contacted me.
“I was going through some . . . personal issues,” I told him during our first meeting, hoping to explain the dip in my grades. “Just relationship stuff.”
“I see.” He assessed me, inscrutable. “I trust that everything is resolved.”
“It is. For good.” No more relationships, I hoped he would read between the lines, and when he nodded with a pleased smile, I thought maybe he had.
“Theoretical physics, if pursued seriously, is hardly compatible with . . . personal issues.”
It sounded good to me. Ever since learning that the universe is subject to rules that can be described and understood, I’d had one dream. One constant, throughout the iterations of Elsies I carefully constructed for others. If it weren’t for Dr. L., I’d be left without it, and that’s why I’ll forever trust him.
But paying for insulin out of pocket for one more year . . .
“Elise, it is my responsibility to look out for you,” he’s saying, voice full of worry. “You deserve better than to work with Jonathan Smith-Turner—”
“He’s not in the Physics Department,” I blurt out. It is, technically, the truth.
Dr. L. squints. “What do you mean?”
“Ja—he’s the head of the Physics Institute. He’s . . . barely part of the search. I might never meet him again.” I wrap a hand around a green armrest. Okay, this one’s a lie. But small. A lielet.
“I see.” He nods silently, fingers stroking his chin. “In that case . . .”
I’ll forever trust Laurendeau with my career, but his salary is six figures. He hasn’t taken a bus since the late eighties, and I bet the credenzas in his house are all neatly assembled.
“Do not withdraw, then. But be careful. You know what that man did,” he admonishes. The Smith-Turner Affair is, surprisingly, not a taboo topic. Laurendeau is nothing but open about his contempt. “If I hadn’t been tenured, I would have lost my faculty position. And he nearly destroyed my reputation. If it hadn’t been for him, I would have been awarded grants in the past sixteen years. I would have had the funds to keep you here, working with me.”
One more reason to hate Jack. My jaw sets. “I know.”
“Very well, Elise,” Laurendeau says, holding my eyes a little too intensely. “Now that I think about it, you winning the position over his handpicked candidate might be an opportunity in disguise.”
“An opportunity?”
He slowly breaks into a smile. “For revenge.”
6
ANODE AND CATHODE
From: [email protected]
Subject: thermo paper
omg I forgot to write it can I turn it in late? im sorry i was at wedding last weekend and got soooo high i’ve been out of it for the whole week.
From: [email protected]
Subject: No fair!
A B-on my Vibrations paper? Offensive. I’m emailing the Dean about this.
No rest for the adjunct.
As in, contractually: adjuncts cannot take time off. Since I’ll be busy interviewing, I prerecorded lessons and scrambled to find instructors to cover my classes. But I need to reply to students’ messages—while fantasizing about “accidentally” misspelling my email in next year’s syllabus. When I arrive on the MIT campus, I’m still answering the odd May I have an extension email. The one thing adjuncting has done for me is hone my teaching skills, so I’m not too nervous about today’s demonstration.
That is, till Monica meets me at the entrance of the physics building and tells me darkly, “You’ll be evaluated by me, Volkov, and Smith-Turner.”
Instant. Stomach. Knot.
“I see.” Maybe it’s like figure skating at the Winter Olympics, where the highest and lowest scores get automatically tossed out?
“But don’t worry.” She darts up the stairs, and I struggle to keep up in my pencil skirt. (The thigh highs are proving surprisingly comfortable, if . . . drafty.) “I’ve seen your student evals—you’re an excellent lecturer.” She takes a right and guides me through a series of doors. “You’ll be teaching a graduate class, and the Ph.D. students will be asked to weigh in and give their impressions of you. Keep that in mind and do the thing where you make them feel important. Stupid questions don’t exist, yada yada.” She stops outside a closed door and bites her lip. “There’s something else.”
“What is it?” I’m a little winded.
She clears her throat. “I really tried to get your demonstration to be for another group of students.”
Oh? “Why?”
“Because the faculty member who teaches this one—”
“Dr. Hannaway!” We both turn. Volkov is waddling toward us, grinning like we go way back and he used to babysit me. “Do you know the one about the radio that only works in the morning?”
I force myself to smile. God, I’m tired. “The AM radio?”
He laughs, delighted. Monica discreetly rolls her eyes, opens the door, and gestures me inside, our coaching session cut short.
The first thing I notice is Jack—which is unsurprising. He’s a giant mountain of muscles, after all, and there’s probably a physics equation that explains his annoying habit of becoming the center of mass of every room he burdens with his presence. He’s standing behind the podium, tinkering with the computer, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, as though the world outside is not relapsing into an ice age. The lines of his tattoo curl around a biceps that frankly no one, no one who doesn’t work out for a living should have. I still can’t tell what the ink’s supposed to form.
In theory, it’s a scene I know well. The few minutes leading up to the start of class: students enjoying the last few seconds with their phones, the instructor scrambling to pull up the PowerPoint against all IT odds (missing cables, incompatibility issues, never-ending Windows 10 updates). In practice, there are about twenty pairs of eyes in the room, and they’re all fixed on Jack with a mix of admiration, respect, and awe, like he’s the dominant turkey of the mating season.
Okay.
So the MIT grad body fanboys over Jack.
Fantastic.
“—whether it’s true or not,” a young man with faded green hair is saying, “that Christopher Nolan uses you as a consultant on all his movies?”
Jack shakes his head, and I see the muscles cording his neck. Breaking news: necks have muscles. “I will not be blamed for Tenet, Cole,” he replies, and everyone laughs.
I hate him. Though that’s not news. What is news is how he looks in my direction and politely says, as though last night I didn’t threaten to feed his rotting corpse to the earthworms, “Welcome, Dr. Hannaway. I started the monitor for you.” He’s smiling, but there’s an edge to it. A challenge. Like he’s asking me to jump into a puddle that’s actually twenty feet deep.
“Thank you.” Our arms brush together on my way to the podium. I remember his hands, warm, unwavering around my waist, a hushed settle down murmured against my temple, and I suppress a shiver.
Have I mentioned that I hate him?
“Good morning, and thank you for having me,” I say once my PowerPoint is loaded. The class is (predictably) 90 percent male and (predictably) made of students who are around my age.
It’s complicated, being a woman in STEM. Even more so when you’re young and unproven. And even more so when you have a semi-pathological need to get along with others. As the only female grad in my department, I’ve had ample opportunity to contemplate the tightrope that those who are not white cishet men tread in academic spaces.