Praise for THE LOVE HYPOTHESIS “Contemporary romance’s unicorn: the elusive marriage of deeply brainy and delightfully escapist. . . . The Love Hypothesis has wild commercial appeal, but the quieter secret is that there is a specific audience, made up of all of the Olives in the world, who have deeply, ardently waited for this exact book.” —New York Times bestselling author Christina Lauren “Funny, sexy, and smart. Ali Hazelwood did a terrific job with The Love Hypothesis.” —New York Times bestselling author Mariana Zapata “This tackles one of my favorite tropes—Grumpy meets Sunshine—in a fun and utterly endearing way.... I loved the nods toward fandom and romance novels, and I couldn’t put it down. Highly recommended!” —New York Times bestselling author Jessica Clare “A beautifully written romantic comedy with a heroine you will instantly fall in love with, The Love Hypothesis is destined to earn a place on your keeper shelf.” —Elizabeth Everett, author of A Lady’s Formula for Love “Smart, witty dialogue and a diverse cast of likable secondary characters.... A realistic, amusing novel that readers won’t be able to put down.” —Library Journal (starred review) “With whip-smart and endearing characters, snappy prose, and a quirky take on a favorite trope, Hazelwood convincingly navigates the fraught
shoals of academia. . . . This smart, sexy contemporary should delight a wide swath of romance lovers.” —Publishers Weekly
TITLES BY ALI HAZELWOOD ••• The Love Hypothesis Love on the Brain LOATHE TO LOVE YOU Under One Roof Stuck with You Below Zero
A JOVE BOOK Published by Berkley An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2022 by Ali Hazelwood Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. A JOVE BOOK, BERKLEY, and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hazelwood, Ali, author. Title: Love on the brain / Ali Hazelwood. Description: First Edition. | New York: Jove, 2022. Identifiers: LCCN 2021053843 | ISBN 9780593336847 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593336854 (ebook) Subjects: GSAFD: Love stories. Classification: LCC PS3608.A98845 L69 2022 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053843 First Edition: August 2022 Cover illustration by lilithsaur Title page art: space icons © kosmofish / Shutterstock Book design by Alison Cnockaert, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. pid_prh_6.0_140667116_c0_r0
CONTENTS Cover Praise For: The Love Hypothesis Titles by Ali Hazelwood Title Page Copyright Dedication Chapter 1: The Habenula: Disappointment Chapter 2: Vagus Nerve: Blackout Chapter 3: Angular Gyrus: Pay Attention Chapter 4: Parahippocampal Gyrus: Suspicion Chapter 5: Amygdala: Anger Chapter 6: Heschl’s Gyrus: Hear, Hear Chapter 7: Orbitofrontal Cortex: Hope Chapter 8: Precentral Gyrus: Movement Chapter 9: Medial Frontal Cortex: Maybe I Was Wrong? Chapter 10: Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex: Untruths Chapter 11: Nucleus Accumbens: Gambling Chapter 12: Ventral Striatum: Yearning Chapter 13: Superior Colliculi: Will You Look at That? Chapter 14: Periaqueductal Gray & The Hippocampus: Painful Memories Chapter 15: Fusiform Area: Familiar Faces
Chapter 16: Subthalamic Nucleus: Interruptions Chapter 17: Pulvinar: Reaching & Grasping Chapter 18: Raphe Nuclei: Happiness Chapter 19: Basolateral Amygdala: Arachnophobia Chapter 20: Ventral Tegmental Area: Romantic Love Chapter 21: Right Inferior Frontal Gyrus: Superstition Chapter 22: Anterior Cingulate Cortex: Oh, sh*t Chapter 23: Amygdala, Again: Fear Chapter 24: Right Temporal Lobe: Aha! Chapter 25: Oriens-Lacunosum Moleculare Interneurons: Courage Epilogue Author’s Note Acknowledgments About the Author
To my Grems. [Insert DolphinBoob.gif]
1 THE HABENULA: DISAPPOINTMENT HERE’S MY FAVORITE piece of trivia in the whole world: Dr. Marie Skłodowska-Curie showed up to her wedding ceremony wearing her lab gown. It’s actually a pretty cool story: a scientist friend hooked her up with Pierre Curie. They awkwardly admitted to having read each other’s papers and flirted over beakers full of liquid uranium, and he proposed within the year. But Marie was only meant to be in France to get her degree, and reluctantly rejected him to return to Poland. Womp womp. Enter the University of Krakow, villain and unintentional cupid of this story, which denied Marie a faculty position because she was a woman (very classy, U of K). Dick move, I know, but it had the fortunate side effect of pushing Marie right back into Pierre’s loving, not-yet-radioactive arms. Those two beautiful nerds married in 1895, and Marie, who wasn’t exactly making bank at the time, bought herself a wedding dress that was comfortable enough to use in the lab every day. My girl was nothing if not pragmatic. Of course, this story becomes significantly less cool if you fast forward ten years or so, to when Pierre got himself run over by a carriage and left
Marie and their two daughters alone in the world. Zoom into 1906, and that’s where you’ll find the real moral of this tale: trusting people to stick around is a bad idea. One way or another they’ll end up gone. Maybe they’ll slip on the Rue Dauphine on a rainy morning and get their skull crushed by a horse-drawn cart. Maybe they’ll be kidnapped by aliens and vanish into the vastness of space. Or maybe they’ll have sex with your best friend six months before you’re due to get married, forcing you to call off the wedding and lose tons of cash in security deposits. The sky’s the limit, really. One might say, then, that U of K is only a minor villain. Don’t get me wrong: I love picturing Dr. Curie waltzing back to Krakow Pretty Woman– style, wearing her wedding-slash-lab gown, brandishing her two Nobel Prize medals, and yelling, “Big Mistake. Big. Huge.” But the real villain, the one that had Marie crying and staring at the ceiling in the late hours of the night, is loss. Grief. The intrinsic transience of human relationships. The real villain is love: an unstable isotope, constantly undergoing spontaneous nuclear decay. And it will forever go unpunished. Do you know what’s reliable instead? What never, ever abandoned Dr. Curie in all her years? Her curiosity. Her discoveries. Her accomplishments. Science. Science is where it’s at. Which is why when NASA notifies me—Me! Bee Königswasser!—that I’ve been chosen as lead investigator of BLINK, one of their most prestigious neuroengineering research projects, I screech. I screech loudly and joyously in my minuscule, windowless office on the Bethesda campus of the National Institutes of Health. I screech about the amazing performance-enhancing technology I’m going to get to build for none other than NASA astronauts, and then I remember that the walls are toilet-paper thin and that my left neighbor once filed a formal complaint against me for listening to nineties female alt-rock without headphones. So I press the back of my hand to my mouth, bite into it, and jump up and down as silently as possible while elation explodes inside me.
I feel just like I imagine Dr. Curie must have felt when she was finally allowed to enroll at the University of Paris in late 1891: as though a world of (preferably nonradioactive) scientific discoveries is finally within grasping distance. It is, by far, the most momentous day of my life, and kicks off a phenomenal weekend of celebrations. Highlights are: I tell the news to my three favorite colleagues, and we go out to our usual bar, guzzle several rounds of lemon drops, and take turns doing hilarious impressions of that time Trevor, our ugly middleaged boss, asked us not to fall in love with him. (Academic men tend to harbor many delusions—except for Pierre Curie, of course. Pierre would never.) I change my hair from pink to purple. (I have to do it at home, because junior academics can’t afford salons; my shower ends up looking like a mix between a cotton candy machine and a unicorn slaughterhouse, but after the raccoon incident—which, believe me, you don’t want to know about—I wasn’t going to get my security deposit back anyway.) I take myself to Victoria’s Secret and buy a set of pretty green lingerie, not allowing myself to feel guilty at the expense (even though it’s been many years since someone has seen me without clothes, and if I have my way no one will for many, many more). I download the Couch-to-Marathon plan I’ve been meaning to start and do my first run. (Then I limp back home cursing my overambition and promptly downgrade to a Couch-to-5K program. I can’t believe that some people work out every day.) I bake treats for Finneas, my elderly neighbor’s equally elderly cat, who often visits my apartment for second dinner. (He shreds my
favorite pair of Converse in gratitude. Dr. Curie, in her infinite wisdom, was probably a dog person.) In short, I have an absolute blast. I’m not even sad when Monday comes. It’s same old, same old—experiments, lab meetings, eating Lean Cuisine and shotgunning store-brand LaCroix at my desk while crunching data—but with the prospect of BLINK, even the old feels new and exciting. I’ll be honest: I’ve been worried sick. After having four grant applications rejected in less than six months, I was sure that my career was stalling—maybe even over. Whenever Trevor called me into his office, I’d get palpitations and sweaty palms, sure that he’d tell me that my yearly contract wasn’t going to be renewed. The last couple of years since graduating with my Ph.D. haven’t been a whole lot of fun. But that’s over with. Contracting for NASA is a career-making opportunity. After all, I’ve been chosen after a ruthless selection process over golden boys like Josh Martin, Hank Malik, even Jan Vanderberg, that horrid guy who trash-talks my research like it’s an Olympic sport. I’ve had my setbacks, plenty of them, but after nearly two decades of being obsessed with the brain, here I am: lead neuroscientist of BLINK. I’ll design gears for astronauts, gears they’ll use in space. This is how I get out of Trevor’s clammy, sexist clutches. This is what buys me a long-term contract and my own lab with my own line of research. This is the turning point in my professional life—which, truthfully, is the only kind of life I care to have. For several days I’m ecstatic. I’m exhilarated. I’m ecstatically exhilarated. Then, on Monday at 4:33 p.m., my email pings with a message from NASA. I read the name of the person who will be co-leading BLINK with me, and all of a sudden I’m none of those things anymore. ••• “DO YOU REMEMBER Levi Ward?”
“Brennt da etwas—uh?” Over the phone, Mareike’s voice is thick and sleep-laden, muffled by poor reception and long distance. “Bee? Is that you? What time is it?” “Eight fifteen in Maryland and . . .” I rapidly calculate the time difference. A few weeks ago Reike was in Tajikistan, but now she’s in... Portugal, maybe? “Two a.m. your time.” Reike grunts, groans, moans, and makes a whole host of other sounds I’m all too familiar with from sharing a room with her for the first two decades of our lives. I sit back on my couch and wait it out until she asks, “Who died?” “No one died. Well, I’m sure someone died, but no one we know. Were you really sleeping? Are you sick? Should I fly out?” I’m genuinely concerned that my sister isn’t out clubbing, or skinny-dipping in the Mediterranean Sea, or frolicking with a coven of warlocks based in the forests of the Iberian Peninsula. Sleeping at night is very out of character. “Nah. I ran out of money again.” She yawns. “Been giving private lessons to rich, spoiled Portuguese boys during the day until I make enough to fly to Norway.” I know better than to ask “Why Norway?” since Reike’s answer would just be “Why not?” Instead I go with, “Do you need me to send you some money?” I’m not exactly flush with cash, especially after my days of (premature, as it turns out) celebrations, but I could spare a few dollars if I’m careful. And don’t eat. For a couple of days. “Nah, the brats’ parents pay well. Ugh, Bee, a twelve-year-old tried to touch my boob yesterday.” “Gross. What did you do?” “I told him I’d cut off his fingers, of course. Anyway—to what do I owe the pleasure of being brutally awakened?” “I’m sorry.” “Nah, you’re not.” I smile. “Nah, I’m not.” What’s the point of sharing 100 percent of your DNA with a person if you can’t wake them up for an emergency chat? “Remember that research project I mentioned? BLINK?”
“The one you’re leading? NASA? Where you use your fancy brain science to build those fancy helmets to make fancy astronauts better in space?” “Yes. Sort of. As it turns out, I’m not leading as much as co-leading. The funds come from NIH and NASA. They got into a pissing contest over which agency should be in charge, and ultimately decided to have two leaders.” In the corner of my eye I notice a flash of orange—Finneas, lounging on the sill of my kitchen window. I let him in with a few scratches on the head. He meows lovingly and licks my hand. “Do you remember Levi Ward?” “Is he some guy I dated who’s trying to reach me because he has gonorrhea?” “Huh? No. He’s someone I met in grad school.” I open the cupboard where I keep the Whiskas. “He was getting a Ph.D. in engineering in my lab, and was in his fifth year when I started—” “The Wardass!” “Yep, him!” “I remember! Wasn’t he like... hot? Tall? Built?” I bite back a smile, pouring food in Finneas’s bowl. “I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that the only thing you remember about my grad school nemesis is that he was six four.” Dr. Marie Curie’s sisters, renowned physician Bronisława Dłuska and educational activist Helena Szalayowa, would never. Unless they were thirsty wenches like Reike—in which case they absolutely would. “And built. You should just be proud of my elephantine memory.” “And I am. Anyway, I was told who the NASA co-lead for my project will be, and—” “No way.” Reike must have sat up. Her voice is suddenly crystal clear. “No way.” “Yes way.” I listen to my sister’s maniacal, gleeful cackling while I toss the empty pouch. “You know, you could at least pretend not to enjoy this so much.” “Oh, I could. But will I?”
“Clearly not.” “Did you cry when you found out?” “No.” “Did you head-desk?” “No.” “Don’t lie to me. Do you have a bump on your forehead?” “...Maybe a small one.” “Oh, Bee. Bee, thank you for waking me up to share this outstanding piece of news. Isn’t The Wardass the guy who said that you were fugly?” He never did, at least not in those terms, but I laugh so loud, Finneas gives me a startled glance. “I can’t believe you remember that.” “Hey, I resented it a lot. You’re hot AF.” “You only say so because I look exactly like you.” “Why, I hadn’t even noticed.” It’s not completely true, anyway. Yes, Reike and I are both short and slight. We have the same symmetrical features and blue eyes, the same straight dark hair. Still, we’ve long outgrown our Parent Trap stage, and at twenty-eight no one would struggle to tell us apart. Not when my hair has been different shades of pastel colors for the past decade, or with my love for piercings and the occasional tattoo. Reike, with her wanderlust and artistic inclinations, is the true free spirit of the family, but she can never be bothered to make free-spirit fashion statements. That’s where I, the supposedly boring scientist, come in to pick up the slack. “So, was he? The one who insulted me by proxy?” “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 strongarmed into pretending that he found me attractive. Or . . . well, notrepulsive. 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 kick-start,” 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. Specifically me.
Yes, he was a taciturn, somber, brooding mountain of a man. He was private, an introvert. His temperament was reserved and aloof. I couldn’t demand that he like me, and had no intention of doing so. Still, if he could be civil, polite, even friendly with everyone else, he could have made an effort with me, too. But no—Levi Ward clearly despised me, and in the face of such hatred... Well. I had no choice but to hate him back. “You there?” Reike asks. “Yeah,” I mumble, “just ruminating about Levi.” “He’s at NASA, then? Dare I hope he’ll be sent to Mars to retrieve Curiosity?” “Sadly, not before he’s done co-leading my project.” In the past few years, while my career gasped for air like a hippo with sleep apnea, Levi’s thrived—obnoxiously so. He published interesting studies, got a huge Department of Defense grant, and, according to an email Sam sent around, even made Forbes’s 10 Under 40 list, the science edition. The only reason I’ve been able to stand his successes without falling on my sword is that his research has been gravitating away from neuroimaging. This made us notquite-competitors and allowed me to just . . . never think about him. An excellent life hack, which worked superbly—until today. Honestly, f*ck today. “I’m still enjoying this immensely, but I’ll make an effort to be sisterly and sympathetic. How concerned are you to be working with him, on a scale from one to heavily breathing into a paper bag?” I tip what’s left of Finneas’s water into a pot of daisies. “I think having to work with someone who thinks I’m a sh*t scientist warrants at least two inhalers.” “You’re amazing. You’re the best scientist.” “Aw, thank you.” I choose to believe that Reike filing astrology and cristallotherapy under the label “science” only slightly detracts from the compliment. “It’s going to be horrible. The worst. If he’s anything like he used to be, I’m going to... Reike, are you peeing?”
A beat, filled by the noise of running water. “...Maybe. Hey, you’re the one who woke me and my bladder up. Please, carry on.” I smile and shake my head. “If he’s anything like he was at Pitt, he’s going to be a nightmare to work with. Plus I’ll be on his turf.” “Right, ’cause you’re moving to Houston.” “For three months. My research assistant and I are leaving next week.” “I’m jealous. I’m going to be stuck here in Portugal for who knows how long, groped by knockoff Joffrey Baratheons who refuse to learn what a subjunctive is. I’m rotting, Bee.” It will never cease to befuddle me how differently Reike and I reacted to being thrown around like rubber balls during childhood, both before and after our parents’ death. We were bounced from one extended family member to another, lived in a dozen countries, and all Reike wants is... to live in even more countries. Travel, see new places, experience new things. It’s like yearning for change is hardwired in her brain. She packed up the day we graduated high school and has been making her way through the continents for the past decade, complaining about being bored after a handful of weeks in one place. I’m the opposite. I want to put down roots. Security. Stability. I thought I’d get it with Tim, but like I said, relying on others is risky business. Permanence and love are clearly incompatible, so now I’m focusing on my career. I want a long-term position as an NIH scientist, and landing BLINK is the perfect stepping-stone. “You know what just occurred to me?” “You forgot to flush?” “Can’t flush at night—noisy European pipes. If I do, my neighbor leaves passive-aggressive notes. But hear me out: three years ago, when I spent that summer harvesting watermelons in Australia, I met this guy from Houston. He was a riot. Cute, too. Bet I can find his email and ask him if he’s single—” “Nope.” “He had really pretty eyes and could touch the tip of his nose with his tongue—that’s, like, ten percent of the population.”
I make a mental note to look up whether that’s true. “I’m going there to work, not to date nose-tongue guy.” “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-vegandinner 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-butdearly-beloved 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 f*ck’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 jaw-breaking 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 early-spring 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 Winniethe-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, Cthulhu-worshipping 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. No, thank you. I love my job (and possums) too much for this. I created @WhatWouldMarieDo during my first semester of grad school. I was teaching a neuroanatomy class, and decided to give my students an anonymous mid-semester survey to ask for honest feedback on how to improve the course. What I got was... not that. I was told that my lectures would be more interesting if I delivered them naked. That I should gain some weight, get a boob job, stop dying my hair “unnatural colors,” get rid of my piercings. I was even given a phone number to call if I was “ever in the mood for a ten-inch dick.” (Yeah, right.) The messages were pretty appalling, but what sent me sobbing in a bathroom stall was the reactions of the other students in my cohort—Tim included. They laughed the comments off as harmless pranks and dissuaded me from reporting them to the department chair, telling me that I’d be making a stink about nothing. They were, of course, all men. (Seriously: why are men?) That night I fell asleep crying. The following day I got up, wondered how many other women in STEM felt as alone as I did, and impulsively downloaded Twitter and made @WhatWouldMarieDo. I slapped on a poorly photoshopped pic of Dr. Curie wearing sunglasses and a one-line bio: Making the periodic table girlier since 1889 (she/her). I just wanted to scream into the void. I honestly didn’t think that anyone would even see my first tweet. But I was wrong. @WhatWouldMarieDo What would Dr. Curie, rst female professor at La Sorbonne, do if one of her students asked her to deliver her lectures naked?
@198888 She would shorten his half-life. @annahhhh RAT HIM OUT TO PIERRE!!! @emily89 Put some polonium in his pants and watch his dick shrivel. @bioworm55 Nuke him NUKE HIM @lucyinthesea Has this happened to you? God I’m so sorry. Once a student said something about my ass and it was so gross and no one believed me. Over half a decade later, after a handful of Chronicle of Higher Education nods, a New York Times article, and about a million followers, WWMD is my happy place. What’s best is, I think the same is true for many others. The account has evolved into a therapeutic community of sorts, used by women in STEM to tell their stories, exchange advice, and... bitch. Oh, we bitch. We bitch a lot, and it’s glorious. @BiologySarah Hey, @WhatWouldMarieDo if she weren’t given authorship on a project that was originally her idea and that she worked on for over one year? All other authors are men, because *of course* they are. “Yikes.” I scrunch my face and quote-tweet Sarah.
Marie would slip some radium in their coffee. Also, she would consider reporting this to her institution’s Office of Research Integrity, making sure to document every step of the process I hit send, drum my fingers on the armrest, and wait. My answers are not the main attraction of the account, not in the least. The real reason people reach out to WWMD is... Yep. This. I feel my grin widen as the replies start coming in. @DrAllixx This happened to me, too. I was the only woman and only POC in the author lineup and my name suddenly disappeared during revisions. DM if u want to chat, Sarah. @AmyBernard I am a member of the Women in Science association, and we have advice for situations like this on our website (they’re sadly common)! @TheGeologician Going through the same situation rn @BiologySarah. I did report it to ORI and it’s still unfolding but I’m happy to talk if you need to vent. @SteveHarrison Dude, breaking news: you’re lying to yourself. Your contributions aren’t VALUABLE enough to warrant authorship. Your team did you a favor letting you tag along for a while but if you’re not smart enough, you’re OUT. Not everything is about being a woman, sometimes you’re just A LOSER
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a community of women trying to mind their own business must be in want of a random man’s opinion. I’ve long learned that engaging with basem*nt-dwelling stemlords who come online looking for a fight is never a good idea—the last thing I want is to provide free entertainment for their fragile egos. If they want to blow off some steam, they can buy a gym membership or play third-personshooter video games. Like normal people. I make to hide @SteveHarrison’s delightful contribution, but notice that someone has replied to him. @Shmacademics Yeah, Marie, sometimes you’re just a loser. Steve would know. I chuckle. @WhatWouldMarieDo Aw, Steve. Don’t be too hard on yourself. @Shmacademics He is just a boy, standing in front of a girl, asking her to do twice as much work as he ever did in order to prove that she’s worthy of becoming a scientist. @WhatWouldMarieDo Steve, you old romantic. @SteveHarrison f*ck you. This ridiculous push for women in STEM is ruining STEM. People should get jobs because they’re good NOT BECAUSE THEY HAVE vagin*S. But now people feel like they have to hire women and they get jobs over men who are MORE
QUALIFIED. This is the end of STEM AND IT’S WRONG. @WhatWouldMarieDo I can see you’re upset about this, Steve. @Shmacademics There, there. Steve blocks both of us, and I chuckle again, drawing a curious glance from Rocío. @Shmacademics is another hugely popular account on Academic Twitter, and by far my favorite. He mostly tweets about how he should be writing, makes fun of elitism and ivory-tower academics, and points out bad or biased science. I was initially a bit distrustful of him—his bio says “he/him,” and we all know how men on the internet can be. But he and I ended up forming an alliance of sorts. When the stemlords take offense at the sheer idea of women in STEM and start pitchforking in my mentions, he helps me ridicule them a little. I’m not sure when we started direct messaging, when I stopped being afraid that he was secretly a retired Gamergater out to doxx me, or when I began considering him a friend. But a handful of years later, here we are, chatting about half a dozen different things a couple of times a week, without having even exchanged real names. Is it weird, knowing that Shmac had lice three times in second grade but not which time zone he lives in? A bit. But it’s also liberating. Plus, having opinions online can be very dangerous. The internet is a sea full of creepy, cybercriminal fish, and if Mark Zuckerberg can cover his laptop webcam with a piece of tape, I reserve the right to keep things painfully anonymous. The flight attendant offers me a glass of water from a tray. I shake my head, smile, and DM Shmac.
MARIE: I think Steve doesn’t want to play with us anymore. SHMAC: I think Steve wasn’t held enough as a tadpole. MARIE: Lol! SHMAC: How’s life? MARIE: Good! Cool new project starting next week. My ticket away from my gross boss. SHMAC: Can’t believe dude’s still around. MARIE: The power of connections. And inertia. What about you? SHMAC: Work’s interesting. MARIE: Good interesting? SHMAC: Politicky interesting. So, no. MARIE: I’m afraid to ask. How’s the rest? SHMAC: Weird. MARIE: Did your cat poop in your shoe again? SHMAC: No, but I did nd a tomato in my boot the other day. MARIE: Send pics next time! What’s going on? SHMAC: Nothing, really. MARIE: Oh, come on!
SHMAC: How do you even know something’s going on? MARIE: Your lack of exclamation points! SHMAC: !!!!!!!11!!1!!!!! MARIE: Shmac. SHMAC: FYI, I’m sighing deeply. MARIE: I bet. Tell me! SHMAC: It’s a girl. MARIE: Ooooh! Tell me EVERYTHING!!!!!!!11!!1!!!!! SHMAC: There isn’t much to tell. MARIE: Did you just meet her? SHMAC: No. She’s someone I’ve known for a long time, and now she’s back. SHMAC: And she is married. MARIE: To you? SHMAC: Depressingly, no. SHMAC: Sorry—we’re restructuring the lab. Gotta go before someone destroys a 5 mil piece of equipment. Talk later. MARIE: Sure, but I’ll want to know everything about your affair with a married woman. SHMAC: I wish.
It’s nice to know that Shmac is always a click away, especially now that I’m flying into The Wardass’s frosty, unwelcoming lap. I switch to my email app to check if Levi has finally answered the email I sent three days ago. It was just a couple of lines—Hey, long time no see, I look forward to working together again, would you like to meet to discuss BLINK this weekend?—but he must have been too busy to reply. Or too full of contempt. Or both. Ugh. I lean back against the headrest and close my eyes, wondering how Dr. Curie would deal with Levi Ward. She’d probably hide some radioactive isotopes in his pockets, grab popcorn, and watch nuclear decay work its magic. Yep, sounds about right. After a few minutes, I fall asleep. I dream that Levi is part armadillo: his skin glows a faint, sallow green, and he’s digging a tomato out of his boot with an expensive piece of equipment. Even with all of that, the weirdest thing about him is that he’s finally being nice to me. ••• WE’RE PUT UP in small furnished apartments in a lodging facility just outside the Johnson Space Center, only a couple of minutes from the Sullivan Discovery Building, where we’ll be working. I can’t believe how short my commute is going to be. “Bet you’ll still manage to be late all the time,” Rocío tells me, and I glare at her while unlocking my door. It’s not my fault if I’ve spent a sizable chunk of my formative years in Italy, where time is but a polite suggestion. The place is considerably nicer than the apartment I rent—maybe because of the raccoon incident, probably because I buy 90 percent of my furniture from the as-is bargain corner at IKEA. It has a balcony, a dishwasher, and—huge improvement in my quality of life—a toilet that flushes 100 percent of the times I push the lever. Truly paradigm shifting. I excitedly open and close every single cupboard (they’re all empty; I’m not
sure what I expected), take pictures to send Reike and my coworkers, stick my favorite Marie Curie magnet to the fridge (a picture of her holding a beaker that says “I’m pretty rad”), hang my hummingbird feeder on the balcony, and then... It’s still only two thirty p.m. Ugh. Not that I’m one of those people who hates having free time. I could easily spend five solid hours napping, rewatching an entire season of The Office while eating Twizzlers, or moving to Step 2 of the Couch-to-5K plan I’m still very... okay, sort of committed to. But I am here! In Houston! Near the Space Center! About to start the coolest project of my life! It’s Friday, and I’m not due to check in until Monday, but I’m brimming with nervous energy. So I text Rocío to ask whether she wants to check out the Space Center with me (No.) or grab dinner together (I only eat animal carcasses.). She’s so mean. I love her. My first impression of Houston is: big. Closely followed by: humid, and then by: humidly big. In Maryland, remnants of snow still cling to the ground, but the Space Center is already lush and green, a mix of open spaces and large buildings and old NASA aircraft on display. There are families visiting, which makes it seem a little like an amusem*nt park. I can’t believe I’m going to be seeing rockets on my way to work for the next three months. It sure beats the perv crossing guard who works on the NIH campus. The Discovery Building is on the outskirts of the center. It’s wide, futuristic, and three-storied, with glass walls and a complicated-looking stair system I can’t quite figure out. I step inside the marble hall, wondering if my new office will have a window. I’m not used to natural light; the sudden intake of vitamin D might kill me. “I’m Bee Königswasser.” I smile at the receptionist. “I’m starting work here on Monday, and I was wondering if I could take a look around?” He gives me an apologetic smile. “I can’t let you in if you don’t have an ID badge. The engineering labs are upstairs—high-security areas.”
Right. Yes. The engineering labs. Levi’s labs. He’s probably up there, hard at work. Engineering. Labbing. Not answering my emails. “No problem, that’s understandable. I’ll just—” “Dr. Königswasser? Bee?” I turn around. There is a blond young man behind me. He’s nonthreateningly handsome, medium height, smiling at me like we’re old friends even though he doesn’t look familiar. “...Hi?” “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I caught your name and... I’m Guy. Guy Kowalsky?” The name clicks immediately. I break into a grin. “Guy! It’s so nice to meet you in person.” When I was first notified of BLINK, Guy was my point of contact for logistics questions, and he and I emailed back and forth a few times. He’s an astronaut—an actual astronaut!—working on BLINK while he’s grounded. He seemed so familiar with the project, I initially assumed he’d be my co-lead. He shakes my hand warmly. “I love your work! I’ve read all your articles—you’ll be such an asset to the project.” “Likewise. I can’t wait to collaborate.” If I weren’t dehydrated from the flight, I’d probably tear up. I cannot believe that this man, this nice, pleasant man who has given me more positive interactions in one minute than Dr. Wardass did in one year, could have been my co-lead. I must have pissed off some god. Zeus? Eros? Must be Poseidon. Shouldn’t have peed in the Baltic Sea during my misspent youth. “Why don’t I show you around? You can come in as my guest.” He nods to the receptionist and gestures at me to follow him. “I wouldn’t want to take you away from... astronauting?” “I’m between missions. Giving you a tour beats debugging any day.” He shrugs, something boyishly charming about him. We’ll get along great, I already know it. “Have you lived in Houston long?” I ask as we step into the elevator. “About eight years. Came to NASA right out of grad school. Applied for the Astronaut Corps, did the training, then a mission.” I do some math in
my head. It would put him in his mid-thirties, older than I initially thought. “The past two or so, I worked on BLINK’s precursor. Engineering the structure of the helmet, figuring out the wireless system. But we got to a point where we needed a neurostimulation expert on board.” He gives me a warm smile. “I cannot wait to see what we cook up together.” I also cannot wait to find out why Levi was given the lead of this project over someone who has been on it for years. It just seems unfair. To Guy and to me. The elevator doors open, and he points to a quaint-looking café in the corner. “That place over there—amazing sandwiches, worst coffee in the world. You hungry?” “No, thanks.” “You sure? It’s on me. The egg sandwiches are almost as good as the coffee is bad.” “I don’t really eat eggs.” “Let me guess, a vegan?” I nod. I try hard to break the stereotypes that plague my people and not use the word “vegan” in my first three meetings with a new acquaintance, but if they’re the ones to mention it, all bets are off. “I should introduce you to my daughter. She recently announced that she won’t eat animal products anymore.” He sighs. “Last weekend I poured regular milk in her cereal figuring she wouldn’t know the difference. She told me that her legal team will be in touch.” “How old is she?” “Just turned six.” I laugh. “Good luck with that.” I stopped having meat at seven, when I realized that the delicious pollo nuggets my Sicilian grandmother served nearly every day and the cute galline grazing about the farm were more... connected than I’d originally suspected. Stunning plot twist, I know. Reike wasn’t nearly as distraught: when I frantically explained that “pigs have families, too—a mom and a dad and siblings that will miss them,” she just nodded thoughtfully and said, “What you’re saying is, we should eat the whole family?” I went fully
vegan a couple of years later. Meanwhile, my sister has made it her life’s goal to eat enough animal products for two. Together we emit one normal person’s carbon footprint. “The engineering labs are down this hallway,” Guy says. The space is an interesting mix of glass and wood, and I can see inside some of the rooms. “A bit cluttered, and most people are off today—we’re shuffling around equipment and reorganizing the space. We’ve got lots of ongoing projects, but BLINK’s everyone’s favorite child. The other astronauts pop by every once in a while just to ask how much longer it will be until their fancy swag is ready.” I grin. “For real?” “Yep.” Making fancy swag for astronauts is my literal job description. I can add it to my LinkedIn profile. Not that anyone uses LinkedIn. “The neuroscience labs—your labs—will be on the right. This way there are—” His phone rings. “Sorry—mind if I take it?” “Not at all.” I smile at his beaver phone case (nature’s engineer) and look away. I wonder whether Guy would think I’m lame if I snapped a few pictures of the building for my friends. I decide that I can live with that, but when I take out my phone I hear a noise from down the hallway. It’s soft and chirpy, and sounds a lot like a... “Meow.” I glance back at Guy. He’s busy explaining how to put on Moana to someone very young, so I decide to investigate. Most of the rooms are deserted, labs full of large, abstruse equipment that looks like it belongs to... well. NASA. I hear male voices somewhere in the building, but no sign of the— “Meow.” I turn around. A few feet away, staring at me with a curious expression, is a beautiful young calico. “And who might you be?” I slowly hold out my hand. The kitten comes closer, delicately sniffs my fingers, and gives me a welcoming headbutt.
I laugh. “You’re such a sweet girl.” I squat down to scratch her under her chin. She nips my finger, a playful love bite. “Aren’t you the most purrfect little baby? I feel so fur-tunate to have met you.” She gives me a disdainful look and turns away. I think she understands puns. “Come on, I was just kitten.” Another outraged glare. Then she jumps on a nearby cart, piled ceiling-high with boxes and heavy, precarious-looking equipment. “Where are you going?” I squint, trying to figure out where she disappeared to, and that’s when I realize it. The equipment? The precarious-looking equipment? It actually is precarious. And the cat poked it just enough to dislodge it. And it’s falling on my head. Right. About. Now. I have less than three seconds to move away. Which is too bad, because my entire body is suddenly made of stone, unresponsive to my brain’s commands. I stand there, terrified, paralyzed, and close my eyes as a jumbled chaos of thoughts twists through my head. Is the cat okay? Am I going to die? Oh God, I am going to die. Squashed by a tungsten anvil like Wile E. Coyote. I am a twenty-first-century Pierre Curie, about to get my skull crushed by a horse-drawn cart. Except that I have no chair in the physics department of the University of Paris to leave to my lovely spouse, Marie. Except that I have barely done a tenth of all the science I meant to do. Except that I wanted so many things and I never oh my God any second now— Something slams into my body, shoving me aside and into the wall. Everything is pain. For a couple of seconds. Then the pain is over, and everything is noise: metal clanking as it plunges to the floor, horrified screaming, a shrill “Meow” somewhere in the distance, and closer to my ear... someone is panting. Less than an inch from me. I open my eyes, gasping for breath, and...
Green. All I can see is green. Not dark, like the grass outside; not dull, like the pistachios I had on the plane. This green is light, piercing, intense. Familiar, but hard to place, not unlike— Eyes. I’m looking up into the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen. Eyes that I’ve seen before. Eyes surrounded by wavy black hair and a face that’s angles and sharp edges and full lips, a face that’s offensively, imperfectly handsome. A face attached to a large, solid body—a body that is pinning me to the wall, a body made of a broad chest and two thighs that could moonlight as redwoods. Easily. One is slotted between my legs and it’s holding me up. Unyielding. This man even smells like a forest—and that mouth. That mouth is still breathing heavily on top of me, probably from the effort of whisking me out from under seven hundred pounds of mechanical engineering tools, and— I know that mouth. Levi. Levi. I haven’t seen Levi Ward in six years. Six blessed, blissful years. And now here he is, pushing me into a wall in the middle of NASA’s Space Center, and he looks... he looks... “Levi!” someone yells. The clanking goes silent. What was meant to fall has settled on the floor. “Are you okay?” Levi doesn’t move, nor does he look away. His mouth works, and so does his throat. His lips part to say something, but no sound comes out. Instead, a hand, at once rushed and gentle, reaches up to cup my face. It’s so large, I feel perfectly cradled. Engulfed in green, cozy warmth. I whimper when it leaves my skin, a plaintive, involuntary sound from deep in my throat, but I stop when I realize that it’s only shifting to the back of my skull. To the hollow of my collarbone. To my brow, pushing back my hair. It’s a cautious touch. Pressing but delicate. Lingering but urgent. As though he is studying me. Trying to make sure that I’m all in one piece. Memorizing me.
I lift my eyes, and for the first time I notice the deep, unmasked concern in Levi’s eyes. His lips move, and I think that maybe—is he mouthing my name? Once, and then again? Like it’s some kind of prayer? “Levi? Levi, is she—” My eyelids fall closed, and everything goes dark.
3 ANGULAR GYRUS: PAY ATTENTION ON WEEKDAYS, I usually set my alarm for seven a.m.—and then find myself snoozing it anywhere from three (“Raving success”) to eight times (“I hope a swarm of rabid locusts attacks me on my way to work, thus allowing me to find solace in the cold embrace of death”). On Monday, however, the unprecedented happens: I’m up at five forty-five, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I spit out my night retainer, run into the bathroom, and don’t even wait for the water to warm up to step under the shower. I am that eager. As I pour almond milk on my oatmeal, I give rad Dr. Curie the finger guns. “BLINK’s starting today,” I tell the magnet. “Send good vibes. Hold the radiations.” I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this excited. Probably because I’ve never been part of anything this exciting. I stand in front of my closet to pick out an outfit and focus on that—the sheer excitement—to avoid thinking about what happened on Friday. To be fair, there isn’t much to think about. I only remember up until the moment I fainted. Yes, I swooned in His Wardness’s manly arms like a twentieth-century hysteric with penis envy.
It’s nothing new, really. I faint all the time: when I haven’t eaten in a while; when I see pictures of large, hairy spiders; when I stand up too quickly from a sitting position. My body’s puzzling inability to maintain minimal blood pressure in the face of normal everyday events makes me, as Reike likes to say, a syncope aficionado. Doctors are puzzled but ultimately unconcerned. I’ve long learned to dust myself off as soon as I regain consciousness and go about my business. Friday, though, was different. I came to in a few moments—cat nowhere in sight—but my neurons must have still been misfiring because I hallucinated something that could never happen: Levi Ward bridal-carrying me to the lobby and gently laying me on one of the couches. Then I must have hallucinated some more: Levi Ward viciously tearing a new one into the engineer who’d left the cart unattended. That had to have been a fever dream, for several reasons. First of all, Levi is terrifying, but not that terrifying. His brand is more kill-’em-with-icy-cold-indifference-and-silent-contempt than angry outbursts. Unless in our time apart he’s embraced a whole new level of terrifying, in which case... lovely. Second, it’s difficult, and by “difficult” I mean impossible, to imagine him siding against a non-me party in any me-involved accident. Yes, he did save my life, but there’s a good chance he had no idea who I even was when he shoved me against the wall. This is Dr. Wardass, after all. The man who once stood for a two-hour meeting rather than take the last empty seat because it was next to me. The man who exited a game of poker he was winning because someone dealt me in. The man who hugged everyone in the lab on his last day at Pitt, and promptly switched to handshakes when it was my turn. If he caught someone stabbing me, he’d probably blame me for walking into the knife—and then take out his whetstone. Clearly, my brain wasn’t at her best on Friday. And I could stand here, stare at my closet, and agonize over the fact that my grad school nemesis saved my life. Or I could bask in my excitement and pick an outfit. I opt for black skinny jeans and a polka-dotted red top. I pull up my hair in braids that would make a Dutch milkmaid proud, put on red lipstick, and
keep the jewelry to a relative minimum—the usual earrings, my favorite septum piercing, and my maternal grandmother’s ring on my left hand. It’s a bit weird to wear someone else’s wedding ring, but it’s the only memento I have of my nonna, and I like to put it on when I need some good luck. Reike and I moved to Messina to be with her right after our parents died. We ended up having to move again just three years later when she passed, but out of all the short-lived homes, out of all the extended relatives, Nonna is the one who loved us the most. So Reike wears her engagement ring, and I wear her wedding band. Even-steven. I shoot a quick, uplifting tweet from my WWMD account (Happy Monday! KEEP CALM AND CURIE ON, FRIENDS ) and head out. “You excited?” I ask Rocío when I pick her up. She stares at me darkly and says, “In France, the guillotine was used as recently as 1977.” I take it as an invitation to shut up, and I do, smiling like an idiot. I’m still smiling when we get our NASA ID pictures taken and when we later meet up with Guy for a formal tour. It’s a smile fueled by positive energy and hope. A smile that says, “I’m going to rock this project” and “Watch me stimulate your brain” and “I’m going to make neuroscience my bitch.” A smile that falters when Guy swipes his badge to unlock yet another empty room. “And here’s where the transcranial magnetic stimulation device will be,” he says—just another variation of the same sentence I’ve heard over. And over. And over. “Here is where the electroencephalography lab will be.” “Here you’ll do participant intake once the Review Board approves the project.” “Here will be the testing room you asked for.” Just a lot of rooms that will be, but aren’t yet. Even though communications between NASA and NIH indicated that everything needed to carry out the study would be here when I started. I try to keep on smiling. It’s hopefully just a delay. Besides, when Dr. Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1903, she didn’t even have a proper
lab, and did all of her research out of a converted shed. Science, I tell myself in my inner Jeff Goldblum voice, finds a way. Then Guy opens the last room and says, “And here’s the office you two will share. Your computer should arrive soon.” That is when my smile turns into a frown. It’s nice, the office. Large and bright, with refreshingly not-rustedthrough desks and chairs that will provide just the right amount of lumbar support. And yet. First of all, it’s as distant from the engineering labs as possible. I’m not kidding: if someone grabbed a protractor and solved for x (i.e., the point that’s farthest from Levi’s office), they’d find that x = my desk. So much for interdisciplinary workspaces and collaborative layouts. But that’s almost secondary, because... “Did you say computer? Singular?” Rocío looks horrified. “Like . . . one?” Guy nods. “The one you put on your list.” “We need, like, ten computers for the type of data processing we do,” she points out. “We’re talking multivariate statistics. Independent component analysis. Multidimensional scaling and recursive partitioning. Six sigma—” “So you need more?” “At the very least, buy us an abacus.” Guy blinks, confused. “...A what?” “We put five computers on our list,” I interject with a side look at Rocío. “We will need all of them.” “Okay.” He nods, taking out his phone. “I’ll make a note to tell Levi. We’re heading to meet him right now. Follow me.” My heartbeat accelerates—probably because the last time I saw Levi my brain confabulated that he was carrying me An Officer and a Gentleman– style, and the previous came on the tail of a year of him treating me like I’m a tax auditor. I’m nervously playing with my grandmother’s ring and wondering what disaster of galactic proportions this next meeting has in store for me, when something catches my eye through the glass wall.
Guy notices. “Want a sneak peek at the helmet prototype?” he asks. My eyes widen. “Is that what’s in there?” He nods and smiles. “Just the shell for now, but I can show you.” “That would be amazing,” I gasp. Embarrassing, how breathless I sound when I get excited. I need to follow through with my Couch-to-5K plans. The lab is much larger than I expected—dozens of benches, machines I’ve never seen before pressed against the wall, and several researchers at various stations. I feel a frisson of resentment—how come Levi’s lab, unlike mine, is fully stocked?—but it quiets down the instant I see it. It. BLINK is a complex, delicate, high-stakes project, but its mission is straightforward enough: to use what is known about magnetic stimulation of the brain (my jam) to engineer special helmets (Levi’s expertise) that will reduce the “attentional blinks” of astronauts—those little lapses in awareness that are unavoidable when many things happen at once. It’s the culmination of decades of gathering knowledge, of engineers perfecting wireless stimulation technology on one side and neuroscientists mapping the brain on the other. Now, here we are. Neuroscience and engineering, sitting in a very expensive tree called BLINK, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. It’s hard to communicate how groundbreaking this is—two separate slices of abstract research bridging the gap between academia and the real world. For any scientist, the prospect would be exhilarating. For me, after the mild sh*tshow my career has put up in the past couple of years, it’s a dream come true. All the more now that I’m standing in front of tangible proof of said dream’s existence. “That’s the...?” “Yep.” Rocío murmurs, “Wow,” and for once doesn’t even sound like a sullen Lovecraftian teenager. I’d tease her about it, but I can’t focus on anything but the helmet prototype. Guy is saying something about design and stage of development, but I tune him out and step closer. I knew that it’d be made
from a combination of Kevlar and carbon fiber cloth, that the visor would carry thermal and eye-tracking capabilities, that the structure would be streamlined to host new functionalities. What I did not know was how stunning it would look. A breathtaking piece of hardware, designed to house the software I’ve been hired to create. It’s beautiful. It’s sleek. It’s... Wrong. It’s all wrong. I frown, peering closer at the pattern of holes in the inner shell. “Are these for the neurostimulation output?” The engineer working at the helmet station gives me a confused look. “This is Dr. Königswasser, Lamar,” Guy explains. “The neuroscientist from NIH.” “The one who fainted?” I knew this would haunt me, because it always does. My nickname in high school was Smelling Salts Bee. Damn my useless autonomic nervous system. “The one and only.” I smile. “Is this the final placement for the output holes?” “Should be. Why?” I lean closer. “It won’t work.” A brief silence follows, and I study the rest of the grid. “Why do you say that?” Guy asks. “They’re too close—the holes, I mean. It looks like you used the International 10–20 system, which is great to record brain data, but for neurostimulation...” I bite into my lip. “Here, for instance. This area will stimulate the angular gyrus, right?” “Maybe? Let me just check....” Lamar scrambles to look at a chart, but I don’t need confirmation. The brain is the one place where I never get lost. “Upper part—stimulation at the right frequency will get you increased awareness. Which is exactly what we want, right? But stimulation of the lower part can cause hallucinations. People experiencing a shadow following them, feeling as though they’re in two places at the same time, stuff like that. Think of the consequences if someone was in space while
that happened.” I tap the inner shell with my fingernail. “The outputs will need to be farther apart.” “But . . .” Lamar sounds severely distressed. “This is Dr. Ward’s design.” “Yeah, I’m pretty sure Dr. Ward knows nothing about the angular gyrus,” I murmur distractedly. The ensuing silence should probably tip me off. At least, I should notice the sudden shift in the atmosphere of the lab. But I don’t and keep staring at the helmet, writing possible modifications and workarounds in my head, until a throat clears somewhere in the back of the room. That’s when I lift my eyes and see him. Levi. Standing in the entrance. Staring at me. Just staring at me. A tall, stern, snow-tipped mountain. With his expression—the one from years ago, silent and unsmiling. A veritable Mount Fuji of disdain. sh*t. My cheeks burn. Of course. But of course, he just caught me trashtalking his neuroanatomy skills in front of his team like a total asshole. This is my life, after all: a flaming ball of scorching, untimely awkwardness. “Boris and I are in the conference room. You ready to meet?” he asks, his voice a deep, severe baritone. My heart thuds. I rack my brain for something to say in response. Then Guy speaks and I realize that Levi isn’t even addressing me. He is, in fact, completely ignoring me and what I just said. “Yep. We were just about to head there. Got sidetracked.” Levi nods once and turns around, a silent but clear order to follow him that everyone seems eager to obey. He was like that in grad school, too. Natural leader. Commanding presence. Someone whose bad side you wouldn’t want to be on. Enter me. A proud resident of his bad side for several years, who just renewed her housing permit with a few simple words.
“Is that Dr. Ward?” Rocío whispers as we enter the conference room. “Yup.” “Welp. That was excellent timing, boss.” I wince. “What are the chances that he didn’t hear me?” “I don’t know. What are the chances that his personal hygiene is very poor and he has huge wax balls in his ear canal?” The room is already crowded. I sigh and take the first empty seat I can find, only to realize that it’s across from Levi. Awkwardness level: nuclear. I’m making better and better choices today. Cheering erupts when someone deposits two large boxes of donuts in the center of the table—NASA employees are clearly as enthused by free food as regular academics. People start calling dibs and elbowing each other, and Guy yells over the chaos, “The one in the corner, with the blue frosting, is vegan.” I shoot him a grateful smile and he winks at me. He’s such a nice guy, my almost-coleader. As I wait for the crowd to disperse, I take stock of the room. Levi’s team appears to be WurstFest™ material. The well-known Meatwave. A Dicksplosion in the Testosteroven. The good old Brodeo. Aside from Rocío and I, there’s one single woman, a young blonde currently looking at her phone. My gaze is mesmerized by her perfect beach waves and the pink glitter of her nails. I have to force myself to look away. Eh. WurstFest™ is bad, but it’s at least a small step up from co*ckcluster™, which is what Annie and I called academic meetings with only one woman in the room. I’ve been in co*ckcluster™ situations countless times in grad school, and they range from unpleasantly isolating to wildly terrifying. Annie and I used to coordinate to attend meetings together—not that hard, since we were symbiotic anyway. Sadly, none of my male cohort ever got how awful WurstFest™ and co*ckcluster™ are for women. “Grad school’s stressful for everyone,” Tim would say when I complained about my entirely male advisory committee. “You keep going on about Marie Curie—she was the only woman in all of science at the time, and she got two Nobel Prizes.”
Of course, Dr. Curie was not the only female scientist at the time. Dr. Lise Meitner, Dr. Emmy Noether, Alice Ball, Dr. Nettie Stevens, Henrietta Leavitt, and countless others were active, doing better science with the tip of their little fingers than Tim will ever manage with his sorry ass. But Tim didn’t know that. Because, as I now know, Tim was dumb. “We’re ready to start.” The balding redheaded man at the head of the table claps his hands, and people scurry to their seats. I lean forward to grab my vegan donut, but my hand freezes in midair. It’s not there anymore. I inspect the box several times, but there’s only cinnamon left. Then I lift my eyes and I see it: blue frosting disappearing behind Levi’s teeth as he takes a bite. A bite of my damn donut. There are dozens of alternatives, but behold: The Wardass chose the one I could eat. What kind of careless, inconsiderate boob steals the single available option from a starving, needy vegan? “I am Dr. Boris Covington,” the redhead starts. He looks like an exhausted, disheveled ginger hard-boiled egg. Like he ran here for this meeting, but there are five stacks of paperwork on his desk waiting for him. “I’m in charge of overseeing all research projects here in the Discovery Institute—which makes me your boss.” Everyone laughs, with a few goodnatured boos. The engineering team seems to be a rowdy bunch. “You guys already know that—with the notable exception of Dr. Königswasser and Ms. Cortoreal, who are here to make sure we don’t fail at one of our most ambitious projects yet. Levi’s going to be their point of contact, but, everyone, please make them feel welcome.” Everyone claps—except for Levi, who is busy finishing his (my) donut. What an absolute dingus. “Now let’s pretend that I gave an impressive speech and move on to everyone’s favorite activity: icebreakers.” Almost everyone groans, but I think I’m a fan of Boris. He seems much better than my NIH boss. For instance, he’s been speaking for one whole minute and hasn’t said anything overtly offensive. “I want your name, job, and... let’s do favorite movie.” More groans. “Hush, children. Levi, you start.” Everyone in the room turns to him, but he takes his sweet time swallowing my donut. I stare at his throat, and an odd mix of phantom
sensations hits me. His thigh pushing between mine. Being pressed into the wall. The woodsy smell at the base of his— Wait. What? “Levi Ward, head engineer. And...” He licks some sugar off his bottom lip. “The Empire Strikes Back.” Oh—are you kidding me? First he steals my donut, and now my favorite movie? “Kaylee Jackson,” the blonde picks up. “I’m project manager for BLINK, and Legally Blonde.” She talks a bit like she could be one of Elle Woods’s sorority sisters, which makes me like her instinctively. But Rocío tenses beside me. When I glance at her, her brows are furrowed. Weird. There are at least thirty people in the room, and the icebreakers get old very soon. I try to pay attention, but Lamar Evans and Mark Costello start fighting over whether Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is better than Vol. 1, and I feel a weird prickle in the center of my forehead. When I turn, Levi’s staring hard at me, his eyes full of that something that I seem to awaken in him. I’m a bit resentful about the donut, not to mention that he still hasn’t answered my email, but I remind myself of what Boris just said: he’s my main collaborator. So I play nice and give him a cautious, slow-to-unfurl smile that I hope communicates Sorry about the angular gyrus jab, and I hope we’ll work well together, and Hey, thank you for saving my life! He breaks eye contact without smiling back and takes a sip of his coffee. God, I hate him so— “Bee.” Rocío elbows me. “It’s your turn.” “Oh, um, right. Sorry. Bee Königswasser, head of neuroscience. And...” I hesitate. “Empire Strikes Back.” With the corner of my eye I see Levi’s fist clench on the table. Crap. I should have just said Avatar. Once the meeting is over, Kaylee comes to speak to Rocío. “Ms. Cortoreal. May I call you Rocío? I need your signature on this document.” She smiles sweetly and holds out a pen, which Rocío doesn’t accept.
