“Yep. Levi Ward. The one and only.”
I pour water into a bowl for Finneas. It didn’t go quite that way. Levi never explicitly insulted me. Implicitly, though . . .
I gave my first academic talk in my second semester of grad school, and I took it very seriously. I memorized the entire speech, redid the PowerPoint six times, even agonized over the perfect outfit. I ended up dressing nicer than usual, and Annie, my grad school best friend, had the well-meaning but unfortunate idea to rope Levi in to complimenting me.
“Doesn’t Bee look extra pretty today?”
It was probably the only topic of conversation she could think of. After all, Annie was always going on about how mysteriously handsome he was,
with the dark hair and the broad shoulders and that interesting, unusual face of his; how she wished he’d stop being so reserved and ask her out.
Except that Levi didn’t seem interested in conversation. He studied me intensely, with those piercing green eyes of his. He stared at me from head to toe for several moments. And then he said . . .
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
He just made what Tim, my ex-fiancé, later referred to as an “aghast expression,” and walked out of the lab with a wooden nod and zero compliments—not even a stilted, fake one. After that, grad school—the ultimate cesspool of gossip—did its thing, and the story took on a life of its own. Students said that he’d puked all over my dress; that he’d begged me on his knees to put a paper bag over my head; that he’d been so horrified, he’d tried to cleanse his brain by drinking bleach and suffered irreparable neurological damage as a consequence. I try not to take myself too seriously, and being part of a meme of sorts was amusing, but the rumors were so wild, I started to wonder if I really was revolting.
Still, I never blamed Levi. I never resented him for refusing to be strong-armed into pretending that he found me attractive. Or . . . well, not-repulsive. He always seemed like such a man’s man, after all. Different from the boys that surrounded me. Serious, disciplined, a little broody. Intense and gifted. Alpha, whatever that even means. A girl with a septum piercing and a blue ombré wouldn’t conform to his ideals of what pretty ladies should look like, and that’s fine.
What I do resent Levi for are his other behaviors during the year we overlapped. Like the fact that he never bothered to meet my eyes when I talked to him, or that he always found excuses not to come to journal club when it was my turn to present. I reserve the right to be angry for how he’d slip out of a group conversation the moment I joined, for considering me so beneath his notice that he never even said hi when I walked into the lab, for the way I caught him staring at me with an intense, displeased expression, as though I were some eldritch abomination. I reserve the right to feel bitter
that after Tim and I got engaged, Levi pulled him aside and told him that he could do much better than me. Come on, who does that?
Most of all, I reserve the right to detest him for making it clear that he believed me to be a mediocre scientist. The rest I could have overlooked easily enough, but the lack of respect for my work . . . I’ll forever grind my axe for that.
That is, until I wedge it in his groin.
Levi became my sworn archenemy on a Tuesday in April, in my Ph.D.
advisor’s office. Samantha Lee was—and still is —the bomb when it comes to neuroimaging. If there’s a way to study a living human’s brains without cracking their skull open, Sam either came up with it or mastered it. Her research is brilliant, well-funded, and highly interdisciplinary—hence the variety of Ph.D. students she mentored: cognitive neuroscientists like me, interested in studying the neural bases of behavior, but also computer scientists, biologists, psychologists. Engineers.
Even in the crowded chaos of Sam’s lab, Levi stood out. He had a knack for the type of problem-solving Sam liked— the one that elevates neuroimaging to an art. In his first year, he figured out a way to build a portable infrared spectroscopy machine that had been puzzling postdocs for a decade. By his third, he’d revolutionized the lab’s data analysis pipeline. In his fourth he got a Science publication. And in his fifth, when I joined the lab, Sam called us together into her office.
“There is this amazing project I’ve been wanting to kickstart,” she said with her usual enthusiasm. “If we manage to make it work, it’s going to change the entire landscape of the field. And that’s why I need my best neuroscientist and my best engineer to collaborate on it.”
It was a breezy, early spring afternoon. I remember it well, because that morning had been unforgettable: Tim on one knee, in the middle of the lab, proposing. A bit theatrical, not really my thing, but I wasn’t going to complain, not when it meant someone wanted to stand by me for good. So I looked him in the eyes, choked back the tears, and said yes.
A few hours later, I felt the engagement ring bite painfully into my clenched fist. “I don’t have time for a collaboration, Sam,” Levi said. He was standing as far away from me as he could, and yet he still managed to fill the small office and become its center of gravity. He didn’t bother to glance at me. He never did.
Sam frowned. “The other day you said you’d be on board.”
“I
misspoke.”
His
expression
was
unreadable.
Uncompromising. “Sorry, Sam. I’m just too busy.”
I cleared my throat and took a few steps toward him. “I know I’m just a first-year student,” I started, appeasingly, “but I can do my part, I promise.
And—”
“That’s not it,” he said. His eyes briefly caught mine, green and black and stormy cold, and for a brief moment he seemed stuck, as though he couldn’t look away. My heart stumbled. “Like I said, I don’t have time right now to take on new projects.”
I don’t remember why I walked out of the office alone, nor why I decided to linger right outside. I told myself that it was fine. Levi was just busy.
Everyone was busy. Academia was nothing but a bunch of busy people running around busily. I myself was super busy, because Sam was right: I was one of the best neuroscientists in the lab. I had plenty of my own work going on.
Until I overheard Sam’s concerned question: “Why did you change your mind? You said that the project was going to be a slam dunk.”
“I know. But I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“Can’t what?”
“Work with Bee.”
Sam asked him why, but I didn’t stop to listen. Pursuing any kind of graduate education requires a healthy dose of masochism, but I drew the line at sticking around while someone trash-talked me to my boss. I stormed off, and by the following week, when I heard Annie chattering happily about the fact that Levi had agreed to help her on her thesis project, I’d long stopped lying to myself.
Levi Ward, His Wardness, Dr. Wardass, despised me.
Me.
