Hold Me

  “I mean it. What would have happened if it had taken you four and a half years to finish your PhD instead of three and a half? What will happen if you don’t make full professor by thirty-five?”

  I take a bite of pizza so I have an excuse not to answer. For some reason, my conversation with Em a month ago comes back. Is there anything that must urgently be done? And then: You are enough. I shake my head to dispel the idea.

  Maria persists. “What are you going to miss out on?”

  “I suppose I can ask the opposite question. What’s the point of doing anything if you’re not all in? I mean, let’s take...you, for instance.”

  She raises her eyebrows.

  I continue.

  “Actuarial math? Seriously? What are you going to do, make risk tables for insurance companies for the rest of your life? Let me guess. You’re a dabbler. You like a little bit of everything. You don’t go deep.”

  “Well, you know how it is.” She doesn’t flinch. “Endless repetition without variation does tend to chafe.” Her eyes meet mine. “Or, wait—maybe you don’t know that? It would explain why you work all the time and rely on stimulated emission.”

  I smile despite myself.

  She shrugs. “But it’s okay. It takes all types.”

  “Now there’s a true but useless platitude. ‘It takes all types.’ The ocean needs both plankton and whales to be a functioning ecosystem, but nobody wants to be plankton. It’s better farther up the food chain.”

  She meets my eyes levelly. “Well, that’s a shitty analogy.” She shifts forward. “It’s more like the difference between omnivores and carnivores. Some of us are grizzlies. We eat anything. Salmon. Blueberries.”

  “Bicycle chains,” I put in.

  She tilts her head at me.

  “I read it in National Geographic. There was a grizzly once who was bothering everyone, and they pumped its stomach...” I trail off. “But go ahead. Make the case for indiscriminate consumption. I’m waiting.”

  “Some of us,” she continues, ignoring this, “are pandas. We’re screwed without our bamboo. We only eat the same damned thing over and over.”

  I look at her. “I’m the panda, I take it? That’s a crappy insult. You’re saying I’m sweet, majestic, and lovable.”

  “I’m saying you’re completely dysfunctional outside your ecosystem.”

  “Sure.” I nod. “I’ll grant you that. But I’m a panda with a laser. You’re a grizzly with an actuarial statistics table. Who do you think is going to win?”

  Rachel speaks up. “Oh, now this is a fun game. It’s like Rock/Paper/Scissors, but with Actuarial Table/Laser...” She frowns, considering. “Okay, what’s the third thing?”

  “Grant proposal,” Gabe puts in. “Laser shreds actuarial table. Actuarial table defeats grant proposal. Grant proposal defeats laser.”

  Maria is watching me throughout all of this with a half smile on her face.

  “Long story short,” I say, “I still win.”

  “Fine,” she says. “But we’re going best two out of three.”

  I make a show of glancing at my watch. “Raincheck on the next two rounds. We have a shitload of bamboo here, and it’s not eating itself. And you...” I look over at her. “You have, what? A bachelor’s degree to work on?”

  She just shakes her head.

  I sit back in my seat. For a moment, I feel self-satisfied. I made my point.

  It doesn’t last long. First, I can tell that Rachel is uncomfortable. Some people don’t like conflict, and…well, apparently, she’s one of them. It occurs to me that she’s been trying to keep us from tearing each other’s throats out every time we spoke, and failing. Shit.

  Second, Maria sits back in her chair and takes a bite of her pizza. Her eyes meet mine.

  Here’s the thing: Maria is fucking hot, and she knows it. She knows it so well that she probably knows to the electron-volt how much expectant energy zings through me when she licks her thumb clean of an errant bit of pizza sauce. She knows that my eyes linger on her mouth.

  Fuck me. I don’t want anything to do with anyone who knows how to be as hot as she does.

  Third occurs to me like a punch to the gut. I made some assumptions about Maria when we first met. She was hot. She knew it. She talked about concerts and…dammit, dammit, dammit.

  For all that she taunted me about being average before, it’s obvious that she’s not. Maria is smart—almost as smart as she is hot—and she knows it.

  “Is something wrong, Three Sigma?” she asks pointedly.

  I manage to look away. But Maria is like the sun—even after I stop staring at her, I can almost see her imprinted on my eyelids.

  “Guys.” Rachel shakes her head. “Guys, bad news. We totally failed.”

  Maria turns to her. “Failed how?”

  “We were going to not talk about science over dinner. But...lasers, ecosystems, grant proposals.” She shakes her head sadly. “The score stands at us, three. Conversation, zero.”

  “Oh.” Maria glances at me sidelong and smiles once more. “Are we all on the same team? I didn’t notice.”

  * * *

  MARIA

  * * *

  After dinner, Rachel excuses herself. Jay and I both stay, going through my brother’s slides. I listen to Jay talk strategy. I am an omnivore, whether he respects it or not, and every detail of academic life is something I might be able to slide into a future post at some point.

  But my brother still has work to do, and when they finish their discussion and the clock strikes nine-thirty, Gabe asks Jay if he can take me down.

  LBL is a government-run lab; I’m technically only here as Gabe’s visitor, and I’m not allowed to go running around on my own. Jay and I exchange dubious glances.

  “Fine,” he says shortly.

  I have no excuse. We’re stuck together.

  He doesn’t look at me as we walk down the hallway. He opens the first fire door for me, but it’s an automatic response, not any form of chivalry, and he doesn’t say anything when I open the outside door for him.

  I don’t like him, but he’s friends with my brother, and he’s giving Gabe valuable advice. I can tolerate him for that.

  I open my umbrella. It’s not raining as hard as it was earlier, but it’s still drizzling.

  He doesn’t touch his umbrella. One of those kinds of people, I guess.

  We go down the building stairs together. “I drove,” he says curtly. “Want me to take you back to campus?”

  I don’t really have a choice. “Sure.”

  I get in his car. The car reminds me of him. It’s a practical compact hybrid. There are no errant papers on the front seat, no extra Starbucks cups left in the cup holder. It smells like some generic flavor of sweet air freshener.

  Campus is mostly dark below us, lit by little globes of lights. Eucalyptus trees block the view intermittently as he makes his way down the wet asphalt.

  The entire situation is weird. For one, Jay is a professor. It doesn’t feel like it to me, because I met him through Gabe instead of in a class. But he is most definitely a professor. He’s also only five years older than I am.

  He probably has students who are twice his age.

  He doesn’t say anything as he drives to campus. He doesn’t offer to drive me home. He just parks in the north lot and unlocks the doors.

  I get out. “Thanks for the ride. Us plankton have a hard time getting around.”

  He doesn’t say anything immediately. Instead, he pulls the parking brake and gets out. The yellow globe of the streetlight paints his face with dark shadows. He folds his arms and looks at me.

  “Fine.” He speaks as if the words have been reluctantly drawn from him. “I owe you an apology.”

  The dim light of the overhead lamp shouldn’t be flattering to anyone. It is to him, giving his face mysterious planes, deepening the color of his skin. His eyes are enigmatic. He looks fierce and forbidding, not apologetic.

  “What for?”


  He frowns. “You were right. I made a lot of assumptions about you.”

  “Did you?” I stare flatly at him. “I am a girly-girl. I love heels. I do my hair. I watch makeup tutorials on YouTube, and I do a better smoky eye than you could dream of.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t realize…” He makes a frustrated sound.

  “That I also knew math?” I tilt my head in his direction. “That my brother wrote his dissertation on second-order nonlinear optical processes, and in the course of talking to him every week on Skype, I somehow learned the basics of how a laser worked?”

  He gives me a single nod.

  All my latent annoyance boils over. “You’re apologizing for the wrong thing.”

  “Am I?”

  “You’re a goddamned professor. If you assume your female students who care about their appearance don’t know math, you’re doing them an incredible disservice.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “That’s sexist and gross, and I have friends in STEM and—” And I’m not going on that rant. I can hear myself breathing heavily, even though I’ve done nothing more strenuous than sit in his car. I inhale long and slow, willing my heart rate to come down.

  He folds his arms. The drizzle is collecting on him, beading on his skin. “Are you done?”

  “No,” I say. “Because it shouldn’t matter. Saying, ‘I didn’t know you knew math, so I’m sorry I treated you like a nonperson’ is also fucked up. People who don’t know math also deserve respect.”

  He looks at me for a long time. “Of course,” he says coldly.

  Laser-like doesn’t begin to describe him. I feel like he’s laying me bare. Like he knows everything about me.

  He folds his arms. “My apology stands as given. I don’t take back anything else I said last time. I think you’re distracting your brother.”

  “Thanks,” I manage.

  “I’m serious,” Jay says. “Your brother needs to focus. Let him fucking digest his bamboo.”

  “Criticism noted. My answer still applies.”

  “That being said,” Jay continues, “I should...” He hesitates, and then looks down. “Fine, whatever. You’re right about two things. I…have some thinking to do about…stuff.” He frowns as he says this. “Second, that plankton shit today was uncalled for. I play to win, but that was unfair on my part.”

  “You mean I’m slightly more developed than protozoa?” I look over at him.

  His eyes dip down, briefly. Momentarily. My throat tightens.

  “Yes,” he says. “You are. It doesn’t mean I like you.”

  Our eyes meet briefly. I know he doesn’t like me. I know it the way I know he can’t look away. I know it the way I can see his lip curl when his gaze dips down to my shoes—sensible flats with a filmy bow, my late-night get-work-done shoes.

  “Fuck you,” I say calmly. “Fuck your apology. And fuck your holier-than-thou fake British accent.”

  He shakes his head.

  “I’m not the one you need to apologize to, anyway,” I tell him. “You know who you really messed with back there? Rachel.”

  His eyes narrow. “Bullshit.”

  “Because you just sent her a really clear message, Three Sigma. She’s going to wonder if you’ll turn on her if she shows up to lab looking nice because she has a date. She spent an hour and a half listening to you make fun of another Latina, and she was so upset that she left halfway through. She has to work with you. How is she ever supposed to trust you again?”

  His expression doesn’t change. He stares at me as if he were carved from a block of ice, before finally he shakes his head. “I’m out of here. I have research to go over. Grant proposals to write.”

  “Be careful. Actuarial tables defeat grant proposals.”

  His eyes don’t move, but I still have the impression that he’s taking me in. All of me, from head to toe. I have the distinct feeling that if he let himself, he’d take a step toward me.

  Maybe he thinks the same thing, because he rolls his eyes. “No shit. You’re not just distracting your brother.”

  With that, he gets in his car and pulls away.

  Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but part of me wants him to be distracted by me. Not because I’m attracted to him in anything other than an abstract, physical sense.

  No, my desire is much crueler. I want him to want me because I want him to not have me. I want him to know that I’m completely, utterly out of his league. That there’s nothing he can do that will ever make things better.

  I want to distract him from science by existing without him.

  I want him to regret being a jerk to me. I want him to beg me for forgiveness for misjudging me.

  And when he does, I want to squash him like the cockroach that he is and walk out of his life.

  I swipe the rain out of my eyes and head home. On foot.

  8

  JAY

  I park my car in the driveway, my thoughts boiling. I don’t like what just happened with Maria. I don’t like it at all. Right now, I just want to talk to someone who will tell me that I’m okay. That I haven’t fucked up.

  Em comes to mind. You’re enough just as you are, she told me. And I still haven’t forgotten.

  I get out my phone in front of my house and type. How does this soup thing work? I think I need soup.

  The neighborhood seems silent and still.

  I don’t know if Em’s around right now. She goes out, after all. But a half-minute later, three little dots appear.

  Are you okay? she asks.

  I’m fine. I just fucked up, is all, and I hate fucking up.

  She doesn’t ask for details, and I don’t provide them. I don’t really want to have to explain to Em that someone I didn’t want to respect just pointed out that I was a dick. I hate even more that Maria was right.

  I have always considered myself… I don’t know, one of the good guys. My first grad student was female. My study groups always had women in them. My perpetual coauthor had to cancel our last in-person work session because her daughter got pneumonia, and that’s just the way things are. My mom has a master’s in computer science, and I’ve seen all the bullshit she went through to get to the top of her field. I believe in birth control and expanding the STEM pipeline, and dammit, I think of myself as a feminist.

  Except apparently, I’m not as good as I thought I was. I knew that Rachel was upset, but until Maria said those words, I didn’t realize how upset.

  I feel like shit.

  Sorry, I type. Just a case of wanting cookies I don’t deserve.

  She sends back one character: ?

  You know. I feel even worse explaining this to her. Cookies. The praise people expect for being a basically decent human being. Except apparently I’ve been awarding myself cookies and doing it wrong.

  I know what cookies are. I just didn’t think you did.

  I frown, and type. Why?

  Not to stereotype, but cookies are usually transparent to men. Men think they always deserve them.

  I’m frustrated. Unhappy. My sentences come out choppy. Yeah. Probably. I fucked up.

  I don’t realize how much I was hoping for Em to forgive me until she doesn’t.

  I’m not really in a mood to offer soup or cookies to men who fuck up right now, she writes. I know I should be a good friend or something and tell you that it’s okay, but you know what? Maybe it isn’t okay, and maybe it’s your fault, and maybe I’m not going to be your magical female scientist friend right now. If you fucked up, don’t whine to me about it. Do better next time.

  Now I feel shittier than ever, because that is exactly what I wanted her to do—make me feel better.

  I grimace. You know what? You’re right. I’m just going to shut up.

  I should…read papers or something before I go to sleep, but I can’t. When I got out my phone, I had this image of texting Em. Of her offering support. Telling me that I’m not that bad, that one little mistake doesn’t make me a bad person.
r />   And it doesn’t. But the truth is, this is not a little mistake. I keep thinking of the look on Rachel’s face when she left. I keep hearing Maria’s voice. How is she ever supposed to trust you again? I can still see the curl in Maria’s lip. People who don’t know math also deserve respect.

  I hate that Maria is right. I hate it. I hate that I’m not as good as I believed myself to be, and I hate that I let Rachel down. I hate that it’s going to take me months to build up trust again. I fucked up, and I hate it.

  * * *

  MARIA

  * * *

  It’s almost eleven, and I’m home and in bed and warm, before I get out my phone again. The guilt hasn’t gone away, which means…dammit. I text an apology.

  Hey. I’m sorry about earlier. I snapped at you because I was upset about something else.

  I’m sitting on my bed. I have an eight AM class. Still, I haven’t been able to wind down for the night yet. I don’t know if Actual Physicist is awake still, but…

  Heh. His response is almost immediate. I was just about to apologize to you. You implied you were upset earlier. I ignored it because I was mad about discovering I was imperfect.

  I don’t say anything for a little while. I don’t like fighting with him, not like this. It’s stupid to care what a pseudonymous physicist hidden somewhere in the world thinks of me, but I do.

  I was a dick, he says. You basically told me someone was a jerk to you, and I kept going on about me. Are you okay?

  There are so many things I can say to that. I start typing, and delete, and start again three times.

  I keep waiting to discover the conditions on our friendship, I type. I don’t hit send.

  I delete a fourth time and try again. There aren’t many people who know me well, I type instead. I usually don’t let myself get too angry with people I care about.

  I don’t realize what I’ve said until the words are contained in a little green bubble, with no way to call them back.

  The words are meaningless enough. “I care about you” doesn’t specify how much. It doesn’t tell him that his texts make me smile. That I’ve been worrying about him snapping at me or not writing back or…