“Are they likely to ask?”
He considered it. “If they don’t, could you casually bring it up?”
It turned out not to be that bad, so I asked Cece if she wanted to try it, too. I swear I don’t secretly hate her. It was just the only thing I could think of upon realizing that we’d both made the stupidest of career choices (i.e., academia). We’re overeducated and too poor to survive—as evidenced by our crappy apartment, full of exposed wiring and scary spiders that look like the love children of murder hornets and coconut crabs. If we had a sitcom-like group of friends, we’d hold an asbestos-removal party. Sadly, it’s just us. And the barely avoided scurvy.
“So.” She steals my tea mug and hops on the counter. I let her: no need for caffeine after the sheer agony of a thousand needles. “They sent me to this guy.”
“What’s his deal?” Meaning: What deep-seated, soul-scorching trauma dragged this poor sap out of the primordial swamp and made him shell out wads of cash to pretend he’s not alone?
“He’s one of yours.”
“Of mine?”
“A scientist.”
Cece is a linguist, finishing up her Ph.D. at Harvard. We first met when her former roommate moved out: apparently, Hedgie had chewed her way through his boxer briefs. Also apparently: blasting “Immigrant Song” while making poached eggs on Saturday mornings is not something normal people put up with. Cece was desperate for someone to help with rent. I felt as if I’d just been skinned alive, and was desperate not to be living with J.J. Two desperate souls, who found each other in desperate times and desperately bonded—over the fact that I could scrape together seven hundred dollars a month, was not attached to my underwear, and owned a set of noise-canceling headphones.
Frankly, I lucked out. Roommate feuds are a pain, what with the passive-aggressive notes and the aggressive-aggressive Windex poisoning. I was ready to bend, twist, and carve my personality a million different ways to get along with Cece. As it turns out, the Elsie that Cece wants is conveniently close to the Elsie I am: someone who’ll companionably pig out on cheese while she complains about academia; who, like her, chooses to use children’s Tylenol because it tastes like grape. I do have to fake an appreciation for avant-garde cinema, but it’s still a surprisingly relaxing friendship.
“What kind of scientist is he?”
“Is there more than one kind?”
I smile.
“Chemist. Or engineer? He was . . . handsome. Funny. He made a joke about mulch. My first mulch joke. Popped my mulch cherry.” Her tone is vaguely dreamy. “He just . . . seems like someone you’d want to date, you know?”
“I’d want to date?”
“Well”—she waves her hand—“not you you. You’d rather walk into the sea with stones in your pockets than date—though that’s because of your basic misconception that human romantic relationships can only succeed if you hide and shape yourself into what you think others want you to be—”
“Not a misconception.”
“—but other people would not ban Kirk from their chambers.”
“Kirk, huh?”
I initially feared that Cece would abysmally fail at fake-girlfriending. For one, she’s way too beautiful. Her wide-apart eyes, pointy chin, and Cupid’s-bowy lips might be unconventional, but she looks like the sexiest, most stunning bug in the universe. Secondly: she’s the opposite of a blank slate. A thing of nature who pees with the door open and eats Chex Mix as cereal, full of lurid anecdotes about dead linguists’ sex lives doled out with a charming lisp. I barely let any of my personality come through, but she bombards people.
And it did turn out to be a problem: clients like her way too much.
“What do you tell them when they ask you to date for real?” she asked me one night. We were splitting a bag of Babybels while watching a Russian silent movie in eight parts.
“Not sure.” I wondered if the guy who offered me seventy bucks to have sex in his nearby parked car qualified. Probably not. “It’s never happened.”
“Wait—really?”
“Nope.” I shrugged. “No one ever asks me out, really.”
“No way.”
I let the cheese melt in my mouth. On-screen, someone had been sobbing for twenty-five minutes. “I don’t think people see me as dating material.”
“They’re intimidated. Because you’re a genius. And pretty. And nice. Hedgie loves you, and she’s the best judge of character. Also, you know lots about the Tadpole Galaxy.”
Fact-check: none of this is true—except for the last bit. Sadly, listing random facts about star clusters four hundred million light-years away is not considered love interest material.
“Kirk the Scientist asked if he could hire me again,” Cece says now. “Next week. I said yes.”
I try to sound casual. “Faux has a one-date policy.”
“I know. But you broke it, too, for Greg.” She shrugs, trying to look casual. Lots of casual going on. Hmm. “Of course, I might cancel, since by next week you’ll have your fancy MIT job, and I shall retire from the fake-dating scene to become your kept BFF.”
I sit back in my chair and—I want it bad, so bad, I moan. My way out of fake-girlfriending. Above all, my way out of the crappiest, lamest circle of academia: the one of adjunct professors.
I know that I sound dramatic. I know that the title conjures lofty images. Professor? Has prestige, nurtures minds, wears tweed jackets. Adjunct? Pretty word, starts with the first letter of the alphabet, reminds one faintly of a sneeze. When I tell people that I’m an adjunct professor of physics at several Boston universities, they think that I made it in life. That I’m adulting. And I let them. Take my mom: she has lots to worry about, between my idiot brother and my other idiot brother. It’s good for her to believe that her daughter is a fully operational human being with access to basic healthcare.
Not good for her? To know that I teach nine courses and commute between three different universities, translating into some five hundred students sending me pics of the weird rash on their crotch to get their absence excused. That I make so little money, it’s almost no money. That I have no long-term contract or benefits.
Cue mournful violin sonata.
It’s not that I don’t like teaching. It’s just that . . . I really dislike teaching. Really, really, really. I’m constantly drowning in the ever-swallowing quicksand of student emails, and I’m way too screwed up to shape young minds into anything that’s not aberrant. My dreams of physics academia always entailed me as a full-time researcher, a blackboard, and long hours spent pondering the theories on the equatorial sections of Schwarzschild wormholes.
And yet here I am. Adjuncting and fake-girlfriending on the side. Teaching load: 100 percent. Despair load: incalculable.
But things might be turning around. Adjuncts are cheap labor, the gig workers of academia, but tenure-track positions . . . oh, tenure tracks. I shiver just thinking about them. If adjuncts float like buoys in the open sea, tenure tracks are oil rigs cemented into the ocean floor. If adjuncts open Nickelback concerts, tenure tracks headline Coachella. If adjuncts are Laughing Cow wedges, tenure tracks are pule cheese, lovingly made from the milk of Serbian Balkan donkeys.
Point is, I’ve been academia’s disposable fake girlfriend for a while now, and I’m exhausted. I’m all done. I’m ready to graduate to a real relationship, ideally something lasting with MIT—who’ll put a 401(k) and a ring on it.
Unless they choose the other physicist they’re interviewing. Oh God. What if they choose the other physicist they’re interviewing?
“Elsie? Are you thinking about whether they’ll hire the other candidate?”
“Don’t read my mind, please.”
Cece laughs. “Listen—they won’t. You’re the shit. All those years in grad school spent thinking about multiverses and binomial equations and . . . protons?” I lift my eyebrow. “Fine, I have no idea what you do. But you forsook a social life—and oftentimes personal hygiene—to elevate yourself above the sea of mediocre white men that is theoretical physics. And now—one job opening this year, one, and out of hundreds of applicants, you’re in the final round—”
“Two job openings. I didn’t get an interview for Duke—”
“Because Duke’s a nepotistic swamp and the position was already earmarked for the chair’s cousin’s son’s girlfriend’s llama, or whatever.” She hops off the counter and sits across from me, reaching out to cup my hand. “You’re going to get the job. I know it. Just be yourself during the interview.” She bites her lip. “Unless you can be Stephen Hawking. Is there any way you could—”
“No.”