Chapter Twelve
HYPOTHESIS: If I am bad at doing activity A, my chances of being asked to engage in activity A will rise exponentially.
Campus felt strangely empty with Adam gone, even on days in which she likely wouldn’t have met him anyway. It didn’t make much sense: Stanford was most definitely not empty, but teeming with loud, annoying undergrads on their way to and from class. Olive’s life, too, was full: her mice were old enough for the behavioral assays to be run, she’d finally gotten revisions for a paper she’d submitted months earlier, and she had to start making concrete plans for her move to Boston next year; the class she was TA’ing had a test coming up, and undergrads magically began to pop by during office hours, looking panicky and asking questions that were invariably answered in the first three lines of the syllabus.
Malcolm spent a couple of days trying to convince Olive to tell Adam the truth, and then became—thankfully—too discouraged by her stubbornness and too busy trying to meditate away his own dating drama to insist. He did bake several batches of butterscotch cookies, though, patently lying that he was “not rewarding your self-destructive behaviors, Olive, but just perfecting my recipe.” Olive ate them all, and hugged him from behind while he sprinkled sea salt on top of the last batch.
On Saturday, Anh came over for beer and s’mores, and she and Olive daydreamed about leaving academia and finding industry jobs that paid a proper salary and acknowledged the existence of free time.
“We could, like, sleep in on Sunday mornings. Instead of having to check on our mice at six a.m.”
“Yeah.” Anh sighed wistfully. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was running in the background, but neither of them was paying attention. “We could buy real ketchup instead of stealing packets from Burger King. And order that wireless vacuum cleaner I saw on TV.”
Olive giggled drunkenly and turned to her side, making the bed squeak.
“Seriously? A vacuum cleaner?”
“A wireless one. It’s the shit, Ol.”
“That is . . .”
“What?”
“Just . . .” Olive giggled some more. “It’s the most random thing.”
“Shut up.” Anh smiled but didn’t open her eyes. “I have severe dust allergies. You know what, though?”
“Are you going to hit me with a Trivial Pursuit vacuum cleaner fact?”
The corners of Anh’s eyes crinkled. “Nah,” she said, “I don’t have any.
Wait—I think that maybe the first female corporate CEO worked for a vacuum cleaner company.”
“No way. That is actually cool.”
“But maybe I’m making it up.” Anh shrugged. “Anyway, what I meant to say is . . . I think I still want it?”
“The vacuum cleaner?” Olive yawned without bothering to cover her mouth.
“No. An academic job. And everything that comes with it. The lab, the grad students, the outrageous teaching load, the race for the NIH grants, the disproportionately low salary. The whole shebang. Jeremy says that Malcolm has it right. That industry jobs are where it’s at. But I think I want to stay and become a professor. It’ll be miserable, for sure, but it’s the only way to create a good environment for women like us, Ol. Give some competition to all these entitled white men.” She grinned, beautiful and fierce. “Jeremy can go into industry and make a ton of blood money that I’ll invest in wireless vacuum cleaners.”
Olive drunkenly studied the drunken determination on Anh’s drunken face, thinking that there was something reassuring in knowing that her closest friend was starting to figure out what she wanted her life to be like. Who she wanted to live it with. It did send a pang deep in Olive’s stomach, in that spot that seemed to feel Adam’s absence most acutely, but she pushed it down, trying not to think about it too hard. Instead she reached for her friend’s hand, squeezed it once, and inhaled the sweet scent of apple from her hair.
“You’ll be so good at it, Anh. I can’t wait to see you change the world.”
—
ALL IN ALL, Olive’s life continued as it always had—except that for the first time, there was something else she’d rather be doing. Someone else she’d rather be with.
So, this is liking someone, she mused. Feeling like the biology building was not worth going to because if Adam was out of town, even the most remote chance of running into him had been taken away from her; constantly spinning around after catching a glimpse of jet-black hair, or when hearing a deep voice that sounded as rich as Adam’s but really wasn’t; thinking of him because her friend Jess mentioned planning a trip to the Netherlands, or when on Jeopardy! the correct answer to “Aichmophobia” turned out to be “What is fear of needles?”; feeling stuck in an odd limbo, waiting, just waiting, waiting . . . for nothing. Adam was going to come back in a few days, and Olive’s lie that she was in love with someone else was still going to be there.
September twenty-ninth would arrive all too soon, and anyway, the assumption that Adam could ever see Olive in any romantic light was preposterous. All considered, she was lucky he liked her enough to want to be her friend.
On Sunday, her phone pinged while she was running at the gym. When Adam’s name popped up at the top of the screen, she immediately jumped to read it. Except that there wasn’t much to read: just the image of a huge drink in a plastic cup, topped with what looked like a muffin. The bottom of the image proudly stated “Pumpkin Pie Frappuccino,” and below that, Adam’s text:
Adam: Think I can smuggle this on the plane?
She didn’t need to be told that she was grinning at her phone like an idiot.
Olive: Well, TSA is notoriously incompetent.
Olive: Though maybe not that incompetent?
Adam: Too bad.
Adam: Wish you were here, then.
Olive’s smile stayed in place for a long time. And then, when she remembered the mess she was in, it faded into a heavy sigh. —
SHE WAS CARRYING a tray of tissue samples to the electron microscope lab when someone patted her on the shoulder, startling her. Olive nearly tripped and destroyed several thousand dollars’ worth of federal grant funding. When she turned, Dr. Rodrigues was staring at her with his usual boyish grin—like they were best buddies about to go for a beer and a jolly good time, instead of a Ph.D. student and a former member of her advisory committee who’d never quite gotten around to reading any of the paperwork she’d turned in.
“Dr. Rodrigues.”
His brow wrinkled. “I thought we’d settled on Holden?”
Had they? “Right. Holden.”
