“You could do both.”

“I don’t date.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“No, actually.” Reike’s tone takes on its usual stubborn quality. “Listen, I know that the last time you dated—”

“I was engaged.”

“Same difference. Maybe things didn’t go well”—I lift one eyebrow at the most euphemistic euphemism I’ve ever heard—“and you want to feel safe and practice maintenance of your emotional boundaries, but that can’t prevent you from ever dating again. You can’t put all your eggs into the science basket. There are other, better baskets. Like the sex basket, and the making-out basket, and the letting-a-boy-pay-for-your-expensive-vegan-dinner basket, and—” Finneas chooses this very moment to meow loudly.

Bless his little feline timing. “Bee! Did you get that kitten you’ve been talking about?”

“It’s the neighbor’s.” I lean over to nuzzle him, a silent thank-you for distracting my sister mid-sermon.

“If you don’t want to date nose-tongue guy, at least get a damn cat. You already have that stupid name picked out.”

“Meowrie Curie is a great name—and no.”

“It’s your childhood dream! Remember when we were in Austria? How we’d play Harry Potter and your Patronus was always a kitten?”

“And yours was a blobfish.” I smile. We read the books together in German, just a few weeks before moving to our maternal cousin’s in the UK,

who wasn’t exactly thrilled to have us stay in her minuscule spare room.

Ugh, I hate moving. I’m sad to leave my objectively-crappy-but-dearlybeloved Bethesda apartment. “Anyway, Harry Potter is tainted forever, and I’m not getting a cat.”

“Why?”

“Because it will die in thirteen to seventeen years, based on recent statistical data, and shatter my heart in thirteen to seventeen pieces.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“I’ll settle for loving other people’s cats and never knowing when they pass away.”

I hear a thud, probably Reike throwing herself back into bed. “You know what your condition is? It’s called—”

“Not a condition, we’ve been over—”

“—avoidant attachment. You’re pathologically independent and don’t let others come close out of fear that they’ll eventually leave you. You have erected a fence around you—the Bee-fence—and are terrified of anything resembling emotional—” Reike’s voice fades into a jawbreaking yawn, and I feel a wave of affection for her. Even though her favorite pastime is entering my personality traits into WebMD and diagnosing me with imaginary disorders.

“Go to bed, Reike. I’ll call you soon.”

“Yeah, okay.” Another small yawn. “But I’m right, Beetch. And you’re wrong.”

“Of course. Good night, babe.”

I hang up and spend a few more minutes petting

Finneas. When he slips out to the fresh breeze of the earlyspring night, I begin to pack. As I fold my skinny jeans and colorful tops, I come across something I haven’t seen in a while: a dress with yellow polka dots over blue cotton—the same blue of Dr. Curie’s wedding gown. Target, spring collection, circa five million years ago. Twelve dollars, give or take. It’s the one I was wearing when Levi decided that I am but a sentient bunion, the most repugnant of nature’s creatures.

I shrug, and stuff it into my suitcase.

2

VAGUS NERVE: BLACKOUT

“BY THE WAY, you can get leprosy from armadillos.”

I peel my nose away from the airplane window and glance at Rocío, my research assistant. “Really?”

“Yep. They got it from humans millennia ago, and now they’re giving it back to us.” She shrugs. “Revenge and cold dishes and all that.”

I scrutinize her beautiful face for hints that she’s lying. Her large dark eyes, heavily rimmed with eyeliner, are inscrutable. Her hair is so Vantablack, it absorbs 99 percent of visible light. Her mouth is full, curved downward in its typical pout.

Nope. I got nothing. “Is this for real?”

“Would I ever lie to you?”

“Last week you swore to me that Stephen King was writing a Winnie-the-Pooh spin-off.” And I believed her. Like I believed that Lady Gaga is a known satanist, or that badminton racquets are made from human bones and intestines. Chaotic goth misanthropy and creepy deadpan sarcasm are her brand, and I should know better than to take her seriously. Problem is, every once in a while she’ll throw in a crazy-sounding story that upon further inspection (i.e., a Google search) is revealed to be true. For instance, did you know that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was inspired by a true story?

Before Rocío, I didn’t. And I slept significantly better.

“Don’t believe me, then.” She shrugs, going back to her grad school admission prep book. “Go pet the leper armadillos and die.”

She’s such a weirdo. I adore her.

“Hey, you sure you’re going to be fine, away from Alex for the next few months?” I feel a little guilty for taking her away from her boyfriend. When I was twenty-two, if someone had asked me to be apart from Tim for months, I’d have walked into the sea. Then again, hindsight has proven beyond doubt that I was a complete idiot, and Rocío seems pretty enthused over the opportunity. She plans to apply to Johns Hopkins’s neuro program in the fall, and the NASA line on her CV won’t hurt. She even hugged me when I offered her the chance to come along—a moment of weakness I’m sure she deeply regrets.

“Fine? Are you kidding?” She looks at me like I’m insane. “Three months in Texas, do you know how many times I’ll get to see La Llorona?”

“La . . . what?”

She rolls her eyes and pops in her AirPods. “You really know nothing about famed feminist ghosts.”

I bite back a smile and turn back to the window. In 1905, Dr. Curie decided to invest her Nobel Prize money into hiring her first research assistant. I wonder if she, too, ended up working with a mildly terrifying, Cthulhuworshipping emo girl. I stare at the clouds until I’m bored, and then I take my phone out of my pocket and connect to the complimentary in-flight Wi-Fi. I glance at Rocío, making sure that she’s not paying attention to me, and angle my screen away.

I’m not a very secretive person, mostly out of laziness: I refuse to take on the cognitive labor of tracking lies and omissions. I do, however, have one secret. One single piece of information that I’ve never shared with anyone—

not even my sister. Don’t get me wrong, I trust Reike with my life, but I also know her well enough to picture the scene: she is wearing a flowy sundress, flirting with a Scottish shepherd she met in a trattoria on the Amalfi Coast.

They decide to do the shrooms they just purchased from a Belarusian farmer, and mid-trip she accidentally blurts out the one thing she’s been expressly forbidden to repeat: her twin sister, Bee, runs one of the most popular and controversial accounts on Academic Twitter. The Scottish

shepherd’s cousin is a closeted men’s rights activist who sends me a dead possum in the mail, rats me out to his insane friends, and I get fired.