Today, 3:11 p.m.
FROM: Aysegul-Aslan@stanford.edu
TO: Olive-Smith@stanford.edu
SUBJECT: Reaching out to researchers for pancreatic cancer project Olive,
I’d be happy to introduce you and ask scholars about opportunities for you in their labs. I agree that they might be more welcoming if the email comes from me. Send me your list, please.
BTW, you still haven’t sent the recording of your talk. I cannot wait to listen to it!
Warmly,
Aysegul Aslan, Ph.D.
Olive did some mental calculations to determine whether it was polite to send the list and not the recording (probably not), sighed, and started AirDropping the file to her laptop. When she realized that it was several hours long, because she’d forgotten to stop her phone after her talk, her sigh morphed into a groan. “This’ll take a while, guys. I have to send Dr. Aslan an audio file, and I’ll need to edit it beforehand.”
“Fine,” Anh huffed. “Malcolm, would you like to entertain us with tales of your date with Holden?”
“Okay, first, he wore the cutest baby-blue button-down.”
“Baby-blue?”
“Shut your mouth with that skeptical tone. Then he got me one flower.”
“Where did he get the flower?”
“Not sure.”
Olive poked around the MP3, trying to figure out where to cut the file.
The ending was just minute after minute of silence, from when she’d left her phone in the hotel room. “Maybe he stole it from the buffet?” she said absentmindedly. “I think I saw pink carnations downstairs.”
“Was it a pink carnation?”
“Maybe.”
Anh cackled. “And they say romance is dead.”
“Shut up. Then, toward the beginning of the date, something happened.
Something catastrophic that could only ever happen to me, given that my entire damn family is obsessed with science and, therefore, attends all the conferences. All of them. ”
“No. Tell me you didn’t—”
“Yes. When we got to the restaurant, we found my mother, father, uncle, and grandfather. Who insisted on us joining them. Which means that my first date with Holden was a freaking Thanksgiving dinner.”
Olive looked up from her laptop and shared an appalled look with Anh.
“How bad was it?”
“Funny that you ask, because it is with the utmost disconcert that I must say: it was fucking spectacular. They loved him—because he’s a badass scientist and because he is smoother than an organic smoothie—and in the
span of two hours he somehow managed to help me convince my parents that my plan of being an industry scientist is bomb. I’m not kidding—this morning my mother called and was all about how I have grown as a person and am finally in control of my future and how my dating choices reflect that.
She said that Dad agrees. Can you believe it? Anyway. After dinner we got ice cream and then we went back to Holden’s hotel room and sixtynined like the world was about to end—”
“A girl like you. Who figured out so early in her academic career thatfucking well-known, successful scholars is how to get ahead. You fuckedAdam, didn’t you? We both know you’re going to fuck me for the same reas
—”
Olive slammed the spacebar, immediately stopping the replay of the recording. Her heart was pounding in her chest—first from confusion, then from the realization of what she’d inadvertently recorded, and finally from anger at hearing the words again. She brought a trembling hand to her lips, trying to purge Tom’s voice from her head. She had spent two days trying to recover, and now—
“The hell was that?” Malcolm asked.
“Ol?” Anh’s tentative voice reminded her that she was not alone in the room. She looked up and found that her friends had sat up. They were staring at her, wide-eyed with concern and shock.
Olive shook her head. She didn’t want to—no, she didn’t have the strength to explain. “Nothing. Just . . .”
“I recognize it,” Anh said, coming to sit next to her. “I recognize the voice.
From that talk we went to.” She paused, searching Olive’s eyes.
“That was Tom Benton, wasn’t it?”
“What the—” Malcolm stood. There was real alarm blooming in his voice.
Anger, too. “Ol, why do you have a recording of Tom Benton saying shit like that? What happened?”
