Love, Theoretically

So. Just to get this straight. You, Elsie ‘I’m allergic to peanuts but I still ate Mrs. Tuttle’s homemade brittle because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, have you seen my EpiPen?’ Hannaway—you told Jack Smith . . . all that?”

I’ve kicked off the red dress, and I’m neurotically pacing in the glory of my thigh highs, striped cotton underwear, and insulin pod. I should be cold, but my anger burns toasty from within, like the plasma core of the sun. “It’s a minor allergy, Mrs. Tuttle is very elderly and our landlady, and yes, I did—because Jack deserved it.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Cece lies back on the couch, watching like my meltdown is the apotheosis of entertainment. Hedgie lounges in her lap with a schadenfreudey, demonic gleam, clearly getting a serotonin boost from my impending demise. “That article he wrote was such a huge deal, every academic field still talks about it. Even linguistics. How did you not know what he looked like?”

I rub my eyes. My fingers come back soot black. “I was engaging in an academic boycott.”

“Maybe not your most fortunate idea.”

“If someone wrote a hoax paper saying that adjectives suck, you’d boycott them, too.”

“I’d straight up murder them. And I’m proud of you for finally yelling at someone—a most pleasing moment in your career. But my question is, how are you going to do”—she waves her hand inchoately—“all that?”

“Do what?”

“Hatch out of the yolky egg of adjuncthood. Get the job. Make Jack rue the day he was born. What’s the plan here?”

“Right. Yeah.” I stop pacing. Massage my temples. “I have none.”

“I see no flaws in that.”

The only response I can think of involves kicking the top part of the credenza. I do just that, then proceed to limp around with a swollen pinky toe.

“I’ve never seen you like this, Elsie.”

“I’ve never felt like this.” I’m a Large Hadron Collider: atomic particles smash angrily about my body, building up the energy to burn Jack to a crisp. Or at least cook him well done. I can’t remember the last time I experienced so many negative emotions. “I should have known. I always had a bad feeling about him, and last night—that’s why he’s so good at Go. He was a physicist all along, that—that piece of Uranus—”

“Science insult. Nice.”

“I bet he thinks in Fahrenheit—”

“Ooh, sick burn.”

“—and spends his free time flying to Westminster Abbey to dance on Stephen Hawking’s grave—”

“Hawking’s dead?”

“—and won’t even bother calling Greg to ask for an explanation, because he’s a sadistic, egotistical, ignorant black hole of sh—”

“Elsie, babe, do you need us here for this, or should we go to our room to mourn Stephen?”

I stop pacing. Cece and Hedgie are staring, heads tilted at the same angle. “Sorry,” I say sheepishly.

“Not gonna lie, it’s kinda fun to see you soapbox it all out, geyser-style. I’m sure there are some serious health benefits to this. But before you pull a machete out of your butt crack and begin the rampage, let me point out, this Smith-Turner dude? He cannot touch you.”

“He may not be able to knee me in the groin or poison my tea with a vial of measles, but—”

“He also cannot interfere with your interview.”

“If Jack tells Volkov or Monica, I—”

“Pff.” She waves her hand. “He won’t.”

“He won’t?” I squint at Cece. Is she placating me? I wouldn’t know—I never need placating.

“First, admitting that he knows you from a nonacademic setting would create a sizable conflict of interest. They’d force him to recuse himself from the search committee. He’d lose the ability to influence the other members.”

“Oh.” I nod. First slowly, then not. “You’re right.”

“Plus, you’re not contrabanding cigars or organizing illegal cockfights. You told a small, irrelevant lie about your personal life to a passing acquaintance. For all Jack knows, you’re in the witness protection program. Or you misspoke when you were first introduced. Or you and Greg have a role-play kink you expand out of the bedroom: you pretend to be a librarian at his grandma’s birthday, he spanks you with Billy the IKEA bookcase, orgasms are had. Consensual, Swedish, and above all: private.”

“That’s . . . intense.”

“I’ve been watching HBO with Mrs. Tuttle’s password. Point is, Jack’s not telling anyone shit. Can you imagine if he went to Monica and brought up random details of your romantic relationships that he thinks should be disqualifying? HR would have a field day. Don’t you watch the harassment-prevention webinars?”

“I—they’re mandatory.”

Cece’s eyes narrow. “Yes, but do you watch them, or do you let them play while you do integral calculus and browse cheese porn on Pinterest?” I flush and look away, and she sighs. “Here’s a recap: Jack can’t ask you about your personal life.”

“He already has.”

“But he can’t tell others. It would be, as the kids say, a bad look. And, as the lawyers say, illegal. Plus, Monica the badass chair would kick him in the nuts. She seems nicely predisposed to nut kicking.”

I exhale. “You’re right.” I celebrate my relief by rolling down my thigh highs. Small miracle: no holes yet. “So he’s bluffing. Posturing. Just like I am.”

“Yup.” Cece bites into her lip, suddenly pained. “With one minor difference.”

“Which is?”

“If his posturing doesn’t work, he’s still an MIT professor. If yours doesn’t . . .”

I groan and drop onto the lazy chair. “If mine doesn’t, it’s one more year in the adjunct pit.” No research time. Students calling me Mom and insisting their dogs ate their computers. Rationed insulin. And, of course, the longer I spend without a tenure-track job, the less appealing a candidate I’ll be. I hate vicious cycles, and academic ones are the most vicious of all.

“Hey!” Cece comes to kneel next to me, setting Hedgie on top of my chest. “Clearly Jack knows you have a shot at the job, or he wouldn’t try to intimidate you. And Kirk said that scientists—”

I sit up. “Kirk? The new Faux guy?”

“Yeah.” Is she blushing, or is it just the poor lighting? We need new bulbs. Also needed: money for new bulbs. “He said that scientists get mean when they feel threatened.”

“Hmm.” What if Jack really does think I have a better shot than George? I ponder the possibilities until Hedgie rolls on her back, quills stabbing my right boob. “I’m going to boil you and eat your soup with udon noodles,” I murmur.

Cece frowns. “What did you say?”

“Nothing! Just . . . You’re right. Thank you for talking me down.”

She smiles, and I feel a surge of affection for her. “See, that’s the reason scientists need the humanities. You guys lack big picture.”

“We don’t—”

“Plus, you morons are training the machines to become our robotic overlords.” She pats my head. “Have you told Dr. L. about this?”

I groan, once again sapped of my will to live. “I sent him an email. He wants to see me in his office tomorrow morning.”

“Before your teaching demo? Can’t you just have a call?”

“He doesn’t like phones.”

“Hmm. High maintenance.”

He’s not. Dr. L. only wants the best for me, and given everything he’s done, waking up one hour early is the least I can do. Or two hours, accounting for traffic.

The first thing I do once I’m in my jammies and my “Physics: why shit does stuff” Snuggie is contact Greg. I already tried from the Uber, after spending dinner debasing myself by using my hard-earned physics Ph.D. to make up puns for Volkov—my serial killer origin story. I wonder if Jack tried to call his brother, too, and I snort at the idea. Clearly he’s decided that I’m after the Smith trust funds, like some skank from the Dynasty reboot. He probably just called his nosy mom and Uncle Paul the Perv, and they’re all about to descend on Greg like a horde of goblin sharks.

But Greg is unreachable. I send him a text he won’t see. I set the iTwat aside, wondering if Jack’s phone is cracked, too. Probably not. Next time I see him, I should smash it into the sidewalk and correct the situation.

What a plan.

With a sigh, I pull out my 2013 MacBook Pro. (Decrepit, Cece calls it. I prefer vintage. Still, the number of high-performance computing simulations I’ve been able to run in the past year is zero.) In love and war everything’s fair, and this is bloodshed. So I allow myself something not quite kosher: I look up the competition.

The physics community is weirdly sized: not so small that we’re all bosom friends, not so large that we can overlook someone’s existence. Especially someone good enough to make the final round of an MIT interview. Take me: my claim to fame, what got me on Monica’s radar, is my dissertation—a bunch of mathematical formulas that predict the behavior of two-dimensional liquid crystals. They are special, multitudes-containing materials, with properties of both liquids and solids, of mobility and stasis, of chaos and organization. Like me, basically. And my favorite part about them is that the very multitudes they contain may have led them to play a key role in the origins of life, by helping build the first biomolecules on Earth.

Riveting, I know. Just wait for the movie adaptation.

But it did get some buzz, because what Monica said is also true: the possible applications of my research are nearly infinite. For my work, I got one of those Forbes STEM awards that only people not in STEM care about, and I was interviewed on a couple of podcasts downloaded by more than just the host’s extended family. One of my Nature Physics articles was even featured on the cover. The research groups at Northeastern started giving me covetous glances and stopped asking me to make coffee—only fair, since I don’t even drink it. Cece got me a “Great women of science” T-shirt with my portrait sandwiched between Alice Ball’s and Ada Lovelace’s. My parents . . . Well, my family didn’t react to any of it, because they were busy dealing with a tax audit or something. But Dr. L., who’s family in any way that counts, patted me on the back, told me that I was the most promising theorist of my generation, and assured me that I’d have my pick of tenure-track positions out of grad school.

And any other time, it might have even been true. But these times are unprecedented—hiring freezes, systematic defunding of higher education, adjunctification. And a few weeks ago, when the Forbes journalist contacted me to do a “where are they now” follow-up story, I had to tell her that no, it wasn’t a mistake: I hadn’t published in months, my research had stalled, and I had not been able to get a cool job at a top institution. In fact, I was lucky to find any job. Even one whose description is academia’s little bitch.

George the Chosen Experimentalist, though . . . I have no idea what his claim to fame is, and he doesn’t ring any bells. So I google the devil I know: Jack. He has a Wikipedia entry—I refuse to give it hits on principle—and a Google Scholar page—which I must click on, but do so while gagging. I try not to notice how much I have to scroll down to get to the bottom of his publication list, mutter “Show-off,” then start combing through his coauthors.

I find a Gabriel. Gayle. Giovanni. Gunner (really?). Georgina Sepulveda, a physics superstar whose work I’ve been stanning for years (I choose to think she collaborated with Jack under duress and donated all proceedings to the local animal shelter). After a minute, I come across the elusive George—George Green. He’s on two low-impact articles—both recent, both with Jack. There’s next to no online trace of him, but he just finished his postdoc at Harvard and posts on physics subreddits under his real name.

“Seriously?” This guy’s being interviewed? Whatever strings Jack had to pull, I’m going to cut them one by one with my poultry shears. His mediocre love child doesn’t stand a chance—

My phone rings. I jolt and immediately pick up—Greg. Finally.

“Hey! I—”

“I need your help.”

I swallow a groan. “Hi, Mom.” I’ve made a lethal mistake.

“The situation is dire. You need to rein in your brothers.”

After two and a half decades of APE, I can safely state that the Elsie my mom wants is a droid. She’s powerful, mobile, financially soluble. She successfully quenched her earthly needs and lives in a state of perennial prosperity. Her main purpose is to score prestige points when Aunt Minnie brags about her son who almost finished law school. Her secondary purpose? To intervene when two idiots decide to embark on months-long feuds over stuff that, historically, has included:

• who gets the front seat in the car

• who deserves the piece of cake with the frosting bootie at Cousin Jenna’s baby shower

• who’s taller (they are identical twins)

• who’s more handsome (see above)

• whose birth year, according to the Guinness World Records book, has more recorded python attacks (see above!)

• who gets to pick the dog’s name (we never had pets)

This is a noncomprehensive list. Over the years, the feuds have become more rabid, Dad more absent, Mom more reliant on me for cleanups. “You can’t be your family’s janitorial staff,” Cece tells me once a week, but I do my best to make Mom happy, even though of all the Elsies people want, hers is the fakest—and the one with deepest roots. I have, after all, cursed my way into it, tirelessly and painstakingly.

“How are you, Mom—”

“Overwhelmed. Lucas and Lance are at it again. Almost came to fists after their soccer game.”

“Over the result?”

“Over Dana.”

I rub my temple. “They both agreed to stop dating her.”

“They did. But Dana needed a ride somewhere.”

“Who did she call?”

“Lucas. Lance slashed his tire. The neighbors are starting to talk. You need to stop them.”

“I did, Mom. Two weeks ago. A month ago. Three months ago.” I’ve been holding a series of conflict mediation seminars in my parents’ basement. They mostly consist of me reminding my brothers that murder is illegal.

“Well, do it again. Come over tomorrow.”

I physically cringe. “I’m sorry. It’s not possible.”

“Why?”

“I—” No. No I statements. Too personal. “This is a stressful, busy time. The semester just started and . . .” Do I tell her? I shouldn’t. But maybe she’ll want to know? “I’m interviewing for a job.”

“You have a job.”

“This is a better job.”

“Your job is already a better job.”

I consider bringing up concepts like relativity, gig economy, and insulin resistance. “This is even better.”

“Let’s hear it—what is it?”

“Professor.”

“So you’d go from being a professor to being a professor.”

Needless to say, I don’t bother telling my parents about the pendulous nature of my job situation. Or . . . anything else. “I’ll call them tomorrow morning, okay?”

She grumbles for five more minutes and guilts me into calling tonight, then switches to complaining about something related to toxic deodorants that she saw on Facebook. I hang up to a notification—not Greg, but some guy looking for a fake girlfriend for a Valentine’s Day group date. I decide on the spot to personally blame Faux for tonight’s shit show and chuck the iTwat into the laundry hamper.

What’s the plan here? Cece asked.

I have a grand total of zero ideas, which means that I’m going to have to annihilate Jack Shitwipe Smith-Turner the old way: by excelling at my job.

I sigh deeply. Then I pull my ancient Mac onto my lap, click on my teaching demonstration, and rehearse the crap out of it.