MIGHT BE A bit late in the game to pull my mad-scientist origin story out of its holster, but I’m sitting in the dark, staring at a less-than-flattering reflection of my splotchy face in the balcony doors, the purple of my hair nearly brown—a trick of the light. Someone just ransacked my pockets and stole my most important belongings, and that someone is me. I’m feeling very Dr. Marie SkłodowskaCurie, circa 1911, and I guess it’s self-disclosure o’clock.
Originally, I wanted to be a poet. Like my mom. I’d write little sonnets about all sorts of stuff: the rain, pretty birds, the mess Reike made in the kitchen when she tried to bake a cherry pie, kittens playing with yarn—the works. Then we turned ten, and we moved for the fourth time in five years, this time to a mid-sized French town at the border with Germany, where my father’s eldest brother had a construction business. He was kind. His wife was kind, if strict. His kids, in their late teens, were kind. The town was kind.
My sister’s best friend, Ines, was kind. There was lots of kindness going around.
A couple of weeks after moving, I wrote my first poem about loneliness.
Frankly, it was embarrassingly bad. Ten-year-old Bee was an emo princess of darkness. I’d quote the most dramatic verses here, but then I’d have to kill myself and everyone who read them. Still, at the time I fancied myself the next Emily Dickinson, and I showed the poem to one of my teachers (full-body cringe intensifies). She zeroed in on the first line, which would roughly translate from French to “Sometimes, when I’m alone, I feel my brain shrink,” and told me, “That’s what really happens. Did you know that?” I hadn’t. But in the early 2000s the internet was already a thing, and by the end of the day, when Reike came home from an afternoon at Ines’s place, I knew a lot about The Lonely Brain.
It doesn’t shrink, but it withers a little. Loneliness is not abstract and intangible—metaphors about desert islands and mismatched shoes, Edward Hopper’s characters staring at windows, Fiona Apple’s entire discography.
Loneliness is here. It molds our souls, but also our bodies. Right inferior temporal gyri, posterior cingulates, temporoparietal junctions, retrosplenial cortices, dorsal raphe. Lonely people’s brains are shaped differently. And I just want mine to . . . not be. I want a healthy, plump, symmetrical cerebrum.
I want it to work diligently, impeccably, like the extraordinary machine it’s supposed to be. I want it to do as it’s told.
Spoiler alert: my stupid brain doesn’t. It never did. Not when I was ten.
Not when I was twenty. Not eight years later, even though I’ve tried my best to train it not to expect anything of me. If alone’s the baseline, it shouldn’t
wither. If a cat never gets any treats, he won’t miss them. Right? I don’t know. Looking at my reflection in the window, I’m not so sure anymore. My brain might be dumber than a cat’s. It might be one of Reike’s blobfish, swimming aimlessly in the bowl of my skull. I have no idea.
It’s June. Almost summer. Sunset doesn’t come early anymore—if it’s dark outside, Levi must have left hours ago. I stand gingerly from the couch, feeling heavy and weightless. An old woman and a newborn calf. Wretched little me, still containing multitudes. But as much as I’d rather wallow in self-pity, this situation is a grave of my own digging. There are things I need to do. People I need to take care of.
First, Rocío. She’s not in her apartment and doesn’t pick up when I call—
because she’s with Kaylee trying to forget today’s fustercluck, because she hates me, because she’s a Gen Z. Could be all three, but what I have to tell her is important, and I’ve already hurt her chances to get into the Ph.D.
program of her dreams enough, so I email her.
Whatever happens with BLINK, get in touch with Trevor ASAP and ask him to let you stay on the project as the RA (I’d do it, but it’s best if it doesn’t come from me). Levi will support this. What happened today is my
responsibility only and won’t re ect on you.
Okay. One down. I swallow, take a deep breath, and tap on the Twitter app. Shmac’s next: he needs to know what’s going on with STC. That if he continues to associate with Marie, things could go south very quickly. I still don’t know what the hell happened, but publicly disavowing me might be best for him.
I DM him to ask if he has a minute, but he doesn’t immediately reply.
Probably with the girl, I tell myself. After my disastrous conversation with Levi, the idea of someone brave enough to seize that kind of love, intense
and eviscerating and gutting and joyful, fills me with an envy so overwhelming I have to push back against it with my entire self.
I click on Shmac’s profile, wondering when’s the last time he was online.
He
hasn’t
tweeted
much
in
the
past
week—mostly
#FairGraduateAdmissions stuff, comments on the peer-review system, a joke about how he’d love to be writing, but with his cat sitting on his laptop he really can’t
—
Wait.
What?
I click on the picture attached to the tweet. A black cat is snoozing on top of the keyboard. It’s short-haired and green-eyed and . . .
Not Schrödinger. It can’t be. All black cats look the same, after all. And this picture—I can barely make out the cat’s face. There’s no way to tell who—
The background, though. The background . . . I know that backsplash.
The dark-blue tiles are just like the ones in Levi’s kitchen, the ones I stared at for half an hour last week after he bent me over the counter, and even without them I can see the edge of a carton of soy milk in the picture, which Levi finds “gross, Bee, just gross” but started buying when I told him it was my favorite, and . . .
No. No, no, no. Impossible. Shmac is . . . a five-eight nerd with a beer belly and male-pattern baldness. Not the most perfect Cute Sexy Handsome Guy™ in the world. “No,” I say. As if it’ll somehow make everything go away— the last few disastrous days, Shmac’s tweet, the possibility of . . . of this. But the picture is still there, with the tiles, the soy milk, and the—
“Shmac,” I whisper. Hands shaking, out of breath, I scroll back up our message history. The girl. The girl. We started talking about the girl when I—when did we first talk about her? I check the dates, vision blurry once again. The day I moved to Houston was the first time he mentioned her to me. Someone from his past. But, no—he told me she was married. He said her husband had lied to her. And I’m not, so—
