I’m going to say something terribly selfish, he says in response.
My heart gives a wild thump.
I was upset earlier. Because you were right and I was afraid you’d think badly of me, and also, if I told you the whole story, you would absolutely think badly of me. It took me an hour to realize that instead of worrying about how to tell a story so I looked like I wasn’t a prick, I should just stop doing things that would make you think badly of me.
It’s stupid. Sometimes—more than sometimes—I wonder what he looks like. I’ve kind of imagined him as a rail-thin guy with glasses and messy hair, sarcastic and funny and just a little self-deprecating.
We’ve flirted before. Not seriously. It’s all been friendly flirting. But there’s been just that edge.
This, though? This isn’t casual internet flirtation. Not for the first time, I think about asking him something stupid. Something like, where do you live?
I’m glad I don’t know you, he types, because if this were real, I’d be so embarrassed I’d never be able to talk to you again.
If this were real. I exhale. Shut my eyes.
Fine. That’s fine. I tell him I care about him and he reminds me that I’m not real. Message received loud and clear, Actual Physicist.
Yeah, well. My sarcasm comes out a little. I’ll take my fake self off to fake bed.
Sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.
I shake my head, tired all over again. It’s okay. I know what you meant.
And I do. He knows I’m real. He just doesn’t want me to be real to him.
9
MARIA
Late November
“Blake.”
I’m sitting in our kitchen at a barstool on the kitchen island, frowning at my computer. Tina’s ten feet away at the table, two monitors hooked up to her one Cyclone laptop. Blake sits across from her. He’s reading something—I suspect not schoolwork, because Blake never seems to do schoolwork—on a tablet. “Hey, Blake.”
He looks up the second time she speaks. “Hmm?”
“Can you play cybersecurity specialist for a sec?”
He gestures to his monitors. “I’m playing cybersecurity specialist right now, genius.”
“I mean for me.”
He gives her a look. It’s a long, steady, heated look. His voice drops a few notes. “You mean in the bedroom?”
TMI. I bite my lip and look away. When I first agreed to live with them, Blake and Tina were still traversing new territory, and it felt like solidarity to be here for Tina if—when—they broke up.
But that when doesn’t seem to be materializing any time soon. And I feel more and more like an interloper in what should be my space, too.
“No. It’s not that. Let me show you this.” She unplugs her laptop and pushes it across the table to him. “Does this mean someone’s trying to hack into my account?” She points to the screen.
He frowns.
“Unless you mistyped your password ten times and don’t remember doing it? I’d say yes.”
“Crap. Should I do something?”
Blake bites his lip. “Do you really want to hear this?”
“Of course I do.”
He sighs. “Okay. So. Your password is sc3nturion, spelled with an s, 3 swapped for the e.”
I can see the blood draining from her face. I can’t pretend I’m not paying attention any longer. Slowly, we both turn to face him.
She exhales heavily. “How exactly do you know that?”
He shrugs. “Because I’ve seen you typing it in. You don’t bother to hide your fingers when you put in your password. I figured it out like five months ago. I wasn’t going to say anything. Most people have insecure passwords. If I told everyone every time I figured out their password, I’d always be explaining myself.”
“Um.” Tina’s hand goes to her hip.
Maybe he can sense us both watching him incredulously, because he looks around slowly. “What?” He seems honestly surprised. “It’s not like I used it or anything.”
It takes me a moment to figure out what to think. Truth is, it’s incredibly easy to forget that Blake is anything other than a regular college student who barely cares about his grades. He’s disarmingly nice. He doesn’t flaunt his wealth. He doesn’t remind everyone that his father used to run one of the most powerful companies in the world. When he agreed to share a house with Tina and me, he took to a chore rotation and a dinner list without complaint, even though I doubt he’s cleaned a bathroom in his life.
He blinked when we told him it made no sense to throw out empty plastic tubs of cream cheese, but he accepted the idea of reusing them as makeshift Tupperware with relative ease.
Still, every once in a while, he does something so baffling that I’m reminded he is not normal.
“Do you typically figure people’s passwords out?” Tina asks.
He has the grace to finally look chagrined. “Well. So. Maybe? Sort of?”
“Maybe?” Tina’s foot starts tapping. “Sort of?”
“Okay, all the time,” he admits. “When I was a kid, and we were at Cyclone late at night, we used to play these games.”
“Oh god.” Tina winces. “How did I know this was going to turn into a fucked-up Cyclone nightcare story?”
“I swear to god, this isn’t one of the fucked up stories,” Blake says. “These were just red team/blue team games. You know.”
I don’t know. “Red team/blue team?” I ask. “Like, team sports?”
“Exactly. It’s basically capture the flag, except we played it on Cyclone servers. First team to hack into the other team’s enclave won. You got glory if you won. And if you found an actual Cyclone vulnerability and told the security team, you’d get a share of Cyclone stock. So, um. Old habits die hard.”
Tina and I both look at him. He returns our stares with an innocent, unblinking gaze.
“That’s weird,” I finally say.
Tina shakes her head. “Let me see if I understand this. Your dad used child labor to find bugs?”
“No,” Blake says smoothly. “Not my dad. He wasn’t the computer security expert. The internal bug-bounty program was run by Cyclone’s CFO.”
“That’s so much better.”
It’s like he can’t even hear my sarcasm. He goes on. “A good password is like a secret. You don’t think about it. You don’t remember it. You put it in muscle memory—a series of keystrokes that only your fingers know. I don’t even know my own passwords.”
Tina and I exchange glances. Brief glances. Here’s the thing—she doesn’t tell me a lot about her boyfriend, but we are on the same dinner rotation. He told me—in that same this messed-up thing is incredibly normal tone—that he had issues in the past with not eating. And also running too much. Given what I know about him, you put your secrets in muscle memory is kind of a screwed-up thing for him to say.
But hey. At least he has good password security and Cyclone stock.
“Or,” Tina says, “you could use a password aggregator and generator.”
“Well, but that means—” He cuts himself off, looking at us. “Right. Yeah. Do that.”
Tina goes over to sit next to him. She takes his hand, and I look away. I don’t want to hear their conversation. Trying not to overhear two people talking from four feet away is almost impossible.
“It’s not that weird,” Blake says to her. “Is it?”
“It’s a little weird,” she says. “But weird is not bad.”
“I know. I just forget that normal people can have passwords based on real words. Hackers try to break into my account all the time.”
I almost feel sorry for him.
“And this,” Tina says, “is why no thank you, I don’t want anything to do with Cyclone, or Cyclone subsidiaries, or non-Cyclone non-subsidiaries that are owned by Cyclone people. It’s bad enough as it is. Is it so weird to want a separate life?”
He shakes his head. “No. Trust me. Nobody understands that as well as I do.”
br /> I should leave. I’m not sure if it would be more awkward if I do, or if I don’t.
I should talk to Tina about it.
But she’s holding hands with her boyfriend, and dammit, I don’t want to make her uncomfortable.
“That reminds me,” Blake says. “Speaking of normal people. Maria, do you want to come to Saints and Dinosaurs?”
Now I have to pretend I’m listening again. I look up. “What?”
“It’s this Cyclone thing,” he explains earnestly. “It started a while back. Long story short, hundreds of Cyclone employees and friends and family come. My dad makes dessert. So does the head of programming. Employees vote on which one’s better.”
“Um.” I look over at Tina. “It sounds…”
It sounds awful. Cyclone people are all inherently suspect. They work with his dad, for one, and Blake’s dad is, as far as I can tell, King Asshole of Asshole County. Plus, Cyclone people are programmers. They skew male. They have lots of stock options, and tend to think that makes them far more attractive than they actually are. Spending time around Cyclone programmers sounds about as fun as slapping myself in the face with a porcupine.
But Tina is giving me puppy-dog eyes. “Please come,” she says. “Blake has to abandon me to help his dad. That leaves me to be eaten by the wolves. Pretty please.”
I look down at my computer. “Wolves. How enticing.”
“Anj will be there,” she says coaxingly. “You’ll have fun. Sorta.”
I look over at Tina. I look back at Blake.
“Fine,” I say. “I think I have some extra wolf spray around here somewhere.”
* * *
11:47 AM
Good news: I have experimentally verified that there is, in fact, a difference between drowning in twelve feet of water and drowning in fifty. Spoiler alert: The extra water pressure crushes you faster.
* * *
11:48 AM
Am I supposed to feel sorry for you, Actual Physicist?
* * *
11:49 AM
As long as you die slowly enough, you’ll get another publication out of it.
That’s got to count for something.
11:50 AM
:P
* * *
11:53 AM
Speaking of drowning. I just agreed to go to this thing with my friend. I am going to be surrounded by…dudes. Dudes who will explain everything I know to me the entire time. I will have to smile and nod and not correct them. I do not know why I agreed to this.
* * *
11:54 AM
I suspect it is because you are a genuinely nice person.
11:57 AM
It’s cool. I can handle a little mild social interaction. Probably.
And look at me, hijacking your conversation. What went wrong on your end?
11:59 AM
I just heard back on the last of my grant proposals and I am so fucked.
12:01 PM
Oh no!
Did it not go well?
* * *
12:03 PM
Define “well.”
“You get maybe 20% of your proposals funded,” my old PI told me. “If you want funding for two projects, submit ten proposals.” Fuck me. I thought at five I was maybe undercutting it?
* * *
12:04 PM
Oh dear. Was five not enough? Is it too late to send out another round?
* * *
12:08 PM
Alas. That is not the problem I have. I can’t even complain about the problem I have to my friends, because I try not to be a complete dick. I am suffering from the crushing burden of success. I am five for five. Now how am I supposed to get all this research done?
* * *
12:09 PM
Poor Actual Physicist.
Having to do Actual Physics.
* * *
12:09 PM
I detect sarcasm.
12:10 PM
Poor baby. It’ll be okay. We can talk again in three years, when you have time.
* * *
12:10 PM
You’re mean.
12:10 PM
You’re busy.
* * *
JAY
* * *
A rap on my office door interrupts the conversation.
“Jay. Yo. Are you in there?”
I’m jolted away from the messages on my phone. I shake my head and look around my office. My papers are in order on my desk. It’s fifteen minutes past noon, and…holy shit, I’m starving. I had no idea.
Fuck. I didn’t realize how effectively Em had distracted me. I hadn’t even noticed how hungry I was. I stand up and open my office door.
Gabriel Lopez is standing in front of me. He’s gotten a haircut since last I saw him, probably proof that the job search is on in earnest. His dark eyes are furrowed in worry.
I blink at him in utter confusion.
“We were going to do lunch today, remember? I’ve been waiting for like ten minutes.”
“Shit.” I run my hand through my hair. “Dammit. I’m sorry. I was just in the middle of something. I forgot.”
He glances at my desk. There’s no evidence of Em in my office, just a few papers filled with my doodles of a quantum circuit.
“We were going to talk about your paper over lunch.” I read the abstract. “Let me grab it.”
He rolls his eyes. “You work too much. Fuck my paper. You obviously need a break.”
I blink. I’m meeting with my grad students in forty-five minutes. Plus, I’m finishing my final so that my graduate student instructor can take it and make sure that all the problems have actual solutions. I haven’t seen Gabe in weeks, not since we went over his job talk.
With his sister.
I frown. I don’t want to think about his sister.
Whatever. It’s not like I can drown faster.
“You’re right.” I stand up. “But can we be quick?”
We find tacos. I pick at mine for five minutes and try to think about something to talk about that isn’t his paper or his job talk. Politics? No, my blood pressure does not need that discussion. Either we’ll agree, and we’ll get mad together, or we’ll disagree and get mad at each other. Sports? I haven’t been following sports. As soon as I have a little more time…
“I can’t believe you’re engaged.” It’s the first thing that comes to mind.
He snorts. “You make it sound like it’s a death sentence. Not all of us are as fiercely committed to our bachelorhood as you are.”
I don’t think that’s a good description for me. I grimace. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound judgmental.”
“I’m a little touchy right now. My parents are giving me shit, too. They keep asking me how I know that Jutta isn’t just marrying me for US citizenship. I want to strangle them.”
I have no idea how to handle shit like that. I can give him advice on job talks and papers. Family advice is absolutely not my forte. That being said, I’m aware that this is the point in the conversation where I should say something supportive.
I settle on, “That’s bullshit.”
He shrugs.
“Is Maria giving you shit, too?”
“God, no,” Gabe says. “Maria and I have each other’s backs. She video chats with Jutta. Has since we got serious.”
My first thought—purely dismissive—is this: Of course Maria is the kind of person who video chats. It takes me a second to recognize this for what it is: stupid bullshit.
I’ve been trying to be better since Maria called me out. I apologized to Rachel. I told her I messed up. I didn’t make excuses. I didn’t tell her that I was judging Maria by a standard in my head, a standard that I let Clio set all those years ago, one that I’m still working on.
I’m trying to hold myself to a different standard now. What would Em think if I told her that I was annoyed that someone video chatted? She’d probably tell me to get over myself. My nose wrinkles. Yeah. So. I’ll get over myself.
Ga
be must see the face I’m making, because he shakes his head. “Are you allergic to the word serious? Getting married is not going to kill me, you know.”
“It wasn’t that.”
Gabe sighs. “Sorry. I’m not trying to be judgy. It’s okay that you don’t do serious.”
“It’s not that.”
Here’s the thing. Gabe and I met at Harvard four years ago. I was dating a postdoc who worked in the lab across from ours. We were together for five months.
We broke up because of academic jobs.
Specifically, I got one in Berkeley. I also was offered a job in Pittsburgh, where Dave had just landed a multiyear contract as lecturer. I didn’t even think about the decision, and he wanted me to think about it, and that ended…badly. Really badly.
I suspect that Gabe heard about that decision from both ends. Right now, though, is not the time for me to explain that I wasn’t going to rearrange my entire life for someone I’d been with for less than a year. The divergent job searches were not the problem. They were a symptom of the problem. Dave was into me a lot more than I was into him, and it turns out that’s not fun for anyone involved.
Gabe and I eat in awkward silence for a little while longer.
“So, serious question,” Gabe says. “Feel free to say no. I’m not sure where you are on this right now, but there’s this postdoc in bioinformatics I met—”
I do not need my friends to set me up with anyone. I don’t even let him finish the sentence. “Nope.”
“You don’t even want to meet her?”