“Yeah. And you could take out a permanent marker and scribble something on my forehead.”
His head tilts. “What would I scribble?”
I shrug. “?‘Do not hire’? ‘Albert Einstein sux’? ‘I hate theorists’?”
He steeples his hands. “Is this what you think? That I hate theorists?” He finds me amusing. Or boring. Or pitiful. Or a mix. I wish I could tell, but I shall die in ignorance.
“Your students sure seem to.”
“And you think I’m the reason?” He sounds genuinely puzzled by that. The audacity.
“Who else?”
He shrugs. “You’re discounting a simpler explanation: students interested in experimental physics are both more likely to have preconceived notions about theory and more likely to choose to take a class taught by me. Correlation does not equal causation.”
“Of course.” I smile politely. I’m calm. Still calm. “I’m sure the fact that someone they look up to—you—notoriously hates theorists has no impact on their view of the discipline.”
“Do I?” His head tilts. “Notoriously hate theorists? I regularly collaborate with them. Respect their work. Admire several.”
“Name one.”
“You.” He pins me with his stupid, hyper-seeing look. “You are very impressive, Elsie.”
My stomach flips, even though I know he’s lying. I just . . . didn’t expect this specific lie. “I doubt you know anything about my work.”
“I’ve read every word you’ve written.” He looks serious, but he must be mocking me.
What do I do? Mock back. “Did you enjoy my middle school diary?”
A hint of a crinkle appears at the corners of his eyes. “It was a little Justin Bieber heavy.”
“You broke into the wrong childhood bedroom—I was all about Bill Nye.”
His mouth twitches. “One of the popular kids, were you?”
“Not to brag, but I also played the tuba in the marching band.”
“Lots of competition, I bet.” He has a dimple. Only one. Ugh.
“Tons. But I had an in. Through the D&D Club.”
His laugh is soft. Relaxed. Lopsided. Different from the unyielding expression I’ve come to expect from him. Even more breaking news: I’m smiling, too. Yikes.
“I bet you weren’t half as cool,” I say, pressing my lips together, assessing him. The broad shoulders. The strange, striking eyes. The casual confidence of someone who was never picked anything but first during PE. Jack was no marching tuba. “You held the heads of people like me in the toilet bowl. Occupied the janitor’s closet with the cheerleaders.”
“We mathletes often do,” he murmurs, a little cryptic. “Your models are elegant and grounded. It’s clear that you have a very intuitive grasp of particle kinetics, and your theories on the transitions to spherulitic structures are fascinating. Your 2021 paper in the Annals, in particular.”
My eyebrow lifts. I don’t believe for a second that anything he’s saying is true. “I’m surprised you read the Annals.”
He laughs once, silent. “Because it’s too advanced for me?”
“Because of what you’ve done to Christophe Laurendeau.”
The detached nothingness of his expression slips. Morphs into something harsh. “Christophe Laurendeau.”
“Not a familiar name? He was the editor of the Annals when you pulled your stunt. And, more recently, my mentor.” Jack’s eyes widen into something that looks beautifully, unexpectedly like shock. Splendid. I exploit my advantage by leaning forward in the seat, resist the temptation to adjust the hem of my skirt, and say, “No theorist has forgotten about the article. It might have been fifteen years ago, but—”
Wait. Something doesn’t add up.
Jack’s three years older than Greg, which makes him about five years older than me. Thirty-two or thirty-three. Except that . . .
I study him narrowly. “The hoax article came out when I was in middle school. You must have been . . .”
“Seventeen.”
I shrink back in the chair. Was he some sort of wunderkind? “Were you already doing your Ph.D.?”
“I was in high school.”
“Then why—how does one submit a paper to a higher education journal at seventeen?”
He shrugs, and whatever emotion he was showing a minute ago has been reabsorbed into the customary blank wall. “I didn’t know there were age limits.”
“No, but most seventeen-year-olds were too busy begging for hall passes or rereading Twilight—”
“Twilight and Bill Nye, huh?”
“—to focus on cloak-and-dagger ploys that involved writing offensive, unethical parody articles whose only purpose is to deceive hardworking scholars and slander an entire discipline.” I end the sentence practically yelling, nails clawing the armrests.
Okay. Maybe I’m not super calm. Maybe I could use some deep breaths. De-escalate. How does one de-escalate? I don’t know. I’m usually already de-escalated. Unless Jack’s around, that is. Jack, who’s sitting there, relaxed, all-knowing. Punchable.
I close my eyes and think of my happy place. A warm beach somewhere. No one is fair haired and massive. Cheese is heavily featured.
“You know what puzzles me?” Jack asks.
“The entire gamut of human emotions?”
“That, too.” I look at him. Take in his self-deprecating smile when there isn’t a single self-deprecating bone in his body. “But here’s the thing: whenever the article comes up, what everyone asks is how I could do such a horrible thing. Why did I write it? Why did I submit? Why did I set out to humiliate theoretical physics?”
“As opposed to? What chianti vintage you celebrated your evil triumph with? The breed of the mandatory supervillain white cat you were stroking? The decibels at which you cackled?”
“As opposed to why it got accepted.”
I know exactly where he’s going with this. “It was a fluke.”
“Maybe,” he concedes. “But here’s the thing: if a theoretical geologist wrote a bullshit article saying that the inner core of the earth is made of nougat, and the foremost authority in the discipline, say, the New England Journal of Rocks, decided to publish and endorse the article, I wouldn’t be so quick to chalk it off as a fluke. Instead I’d investigate whether there is a systemic problem in the way theoretical geology papers are assessed. Whether the editor made a mistake.”
I swallow. It goes down like broken glass. “I am willing to acknowledge that the system is fallible, if you stop pretending that you acted out of concern for the injustice of the peer-review system and admit that you maliciously exploited its loopholes because you wanted to . . . You still haven’t answered, actually. Why did you do it?”
“Not for any reason you think, Elsie.”
I bite my lip to not bark at him to stop using my name. “Not to pull an epic prank and become famous among the lab bros?”
“No.” I wish he sounded defensive or offended or—anything at all. He’s just matter-of-fact, like he’s saying a simple truth.
“And not the same reason you want to hire an experimentalist over me?”
He draws back, looking surprised. Disturbed, even. “You think I don’t want to hire you because you’re a theorist?”
I almost snort and say, Yes, of course, but then I remember my first meeting with him, back in the summer. The way he looked at me a little too hard, hesitated a little too long before shaking my hand. “Well,” I concede with a small shrug, “I suppose you do come by your dislike of me honestly.”
He huffs out a laugh and shakes his head. “Again, with this supposed dislike.”
“I heard you talking to Greg about me.” I ignore the way his eyes widen, almost alarmed. “Asking him how quickly he planned to get rid of me.” I pull on the hem of my skirt again, and his eyes dart to my knees, lingering for a moment before ricocheting away. I should probably stop doing that. I need a new nervous habit. Nail biting. Fidget spinners. I’ve heard great things about crystal meth.
“I’ve never said—”
“Oh, it’s fine.” I wave my hand. “You have every right to your opinion of me. You think I’m not good enough for him. I don’t care.” Much.
He bites the inside of his mouth. His paw-like hand reaches out to play with something on his desk—a 3D-printed model of the Large Hadron Collider. “You make lots of assumptions about my thoughts,” he says, setting it down. “Negative assumptions.”
“Your thoughts are clearly negative.”
“It might be connected to the fact that you’ve been insincere with my brother for months.”
I sigh. “We can navel-gaze about how abominable a girlfriend I am till Betelgeuse explodes, but there are a few things you don’t know about me and Greg, and until—”
“There are many things I don’t know.” He drums his fingers on his desk, slow, methodical. I cannot look away. “I spent hours last night trying to home in on this, and I’m not any closer to sorting you out. For instance, why would you lie about your job? You’re an adjunct, not Jeff Bezos’s accountant. And the fact that not only are you a physicist, but you’re interviewing here . . . My first instinct would be to assume that it has something to do with me.”