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Of course Maria Lopez goes to the gym on a regular basis. I don’t say this.
She holds it out to Rachel, pointedly not looking at me. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Maria, Gabe’s big sister.”
Gabe makes a noise in his throat. “She’s my younger sister.”
“And you’re shorter than me,” Maria says, “so suck it up, little brother.”
Rachel takes it. “Thanks. You’re a real hoopy frood.” She wipes water off her face, and then hands it to me. For a second, I consider not using Maria’s towel. But umbrella or no, I’m drenched. I don’t say anything as I rub my hair dry.
She takes the towel from me with thumb and forefinger when I hand it back, dropping it into a plastic grocery bag like it needs to be quarantined and disinfected. Apparently, I have cooties.
“What’s your field?” Rachel asks Maria.
“Actuarial math.” Maria gives Rachel a friendly smile. “This is not exactly my ballgame here, but I muddle along.”
Rachel lights up. “Oh, yay! That means we have a chance for science-free conversation.”
“Good luck.” Maria zips her gym bag and lets it fall to the floor with a thump. “Have you met my brother? Or this guy?”
“I’m this guy?”
Maria doesn’t skip a beat. “Have you met Professor Thalang?”
I roll my eyes at her. “Are you in my quantum class?”
“No.”
“Then you aren’t going to call me Professor Thalang. That’s weird.”
“You know what’s weird?” Rachel interjects. “I don’t know if you’re Professor Thalang or Professor na Thalang. I mean, I always figured it was the latter. But then it says Thalang group on our lab door…” She trails off. “God, that sounds really dumb. Sorry to interrupt.”
I don’t really want to go into details right now, but I also don’t want to brush her off.
“Both right,” I say after a pause. “Long story short. When my grandfather came to the US fifty years ago, immigration recorded Thalang as his last name, and na as a middle name. He thought it was funny, and besides, he didn’t expect to stay after he finished college, so he never bothered to change it. Now it’s a family joke. Na is legally my middle name, but actually it shouldn’t be.”
I don’t look at Maria. Still, I can see her wrinkling her nose out of the corner of my eye.
“You were born in the US?” She doesn’t wait for my answer. “Of course. I should have known your accent was a put on. The pretentiousness fits you.”
There’s an uneasy silence, broken only by Gabe’s sigh.
“Oh,” Rachel says with a determined smile. “That’s, um, really interesting, Jay. We can be non-middle-name twins. People think that Ramirez is my middle name all the time. But we’re getting distracted. We were going to go over Gabe’s job talk.”
We start in on Gabe’s slides.
The thing that surprises me is that Maria participates.
“This should be r-squared,” she points out on the second slide, indicating one equation. And then, two slides later—“This should be h-bar here, unless you dropped a factor of two pi earlier.”
I glance at her, this time for a little longer.
She sees me looking at her. For a second, our eyes meet. The lights glint off the hoops in her ears, which are the brightest things in the room.
“Don’t make anything of it,” she says with a half smile. “You’re not going to have to reevaluate your world order, Three Sigma. I’m mostly average. I just happen to be an equation proofreading savant.”
It takes me a moment to remember why she’s calling me “Three Sigma”—that stupid conversation when we first met, when I implied that she wasn’t extraordinary enough to work with me.
Gabe winces. The sarcasm in her voice cuts sharper than a diamond blade. “You’re more than that,” he mutters.
“True,” Maria says brightly. “I’m also a towel service. And pizza delivery girl.”
“Oh my god,” Rachel says. “Pizza. Is that what I’m smelling?”
There is pizza. Apparently, Maria brought pizza for us.
Halfway through, Gabe calls a short dinner break. We find paper towels. The pizza is mushroom and green pepper, which likely means that Gabe told Maria that I don’t like meat on pizza, and she was nice enough to comply.
Maria being nice to me, even if in so limited a fashion, makes me feel like more of a dick than ever.
Gabe takes a slice and sits on the desk. “Rachel, did I hear you promising to talk about nonscience stuff for fifteen minutes?”
“Yes,” she says. “We can do it! Go team!”
Maria glances at me, as if she expects me to blame her for this development. “Don’t let me stop you,” Maria says. “Talk about whatever you want.”
“No.” I sit down. “Please. We all know how important it is to be well-rounded. Come to think of it, Maria, I don’t remember where you are in grad school. Are you past the qualifying exam stage, or…?”
She looks at her brother in annoyance. Then she looks back at me. “I’m a senior. My major is officially statistics and international relations, but I’m studying for actuarial exams.”
There’s a long pause. I try to calculate her age. This involves me staring at her. Into her eyes. Medium brown, sparkling with a malicious humor, winged in black liquid lines.
I swallow. “A senior.” My words come slowly. “As in, you don’t have a bachelor’s yet?” I look at her, then at her brother. “I didn’t realize there was that large an age difference between the two of you. What is that, nine years?”
She flushes. “Three years. I’m twenty-four.”
“I see.” I look up. “You’re just slow.”
Rachel frowns and shakes her head. “Seriously? Why are you being so cold? Gabe, I work for him. You have to kick his ass.”
Gabriel shrugs and looks at his sister, who shakes her head. “Maria can take care of herself. She’ll let me know if she needs to tap out.”
“I had some stuff I wanted to do before I started university,” Maria says. “It’s none of your business.”
“Trying to get your modeling career off the ground,” I guess. “I’m actually shocked that it failed.”
Rachel blows out a breath. “Hey,” she says with a forced smile. “So speaking of none of my business, how long did it take you to get your PhD, Jay?”
I let her change the subject. “Three and a half years.”
Maria blinks. “Are you serious? I’m not sure you’re an actual human being.”
“I’m human.” I fold my arms. “I’m just focused. Directed. Laser-like.”
She purses her lips. “Laser-like.”
“Yes.” I raise an eyebrow in her direction. “You know. My actions ten
d to be in phase with each other. I don’t dillydally all over the place.”
“I wasn’t disagreeing.” She’s almost smirking. In fact, she looks amused. “I was just trying the idea on. Laser-like is actually a really appropriate description for you.”
“Oh?”
“Sure.” She shrugs. “First, you’re an unnatural phenomenon.”
I tilt my head. “Unnatural.” I consider this. “Sure. Civilization is unnatural in the first place.”
“Second, you only manage to be as coherent as you are by dumping an abnormally large amount of energy into the system.”
“His nickname at Harvard,” Gabe puts in, “was Negative Temperature.”
I ignore this. “Okay,” I say to Maria. “Sure. I’ve had less favorable descriptions.”
“Which,” Maria continues, “means that system-wise—what is it that laser stands for again?”
“Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation,” Rachel chimes in helpfully.
She snaps her fingers. “Right. It means you end up in a near-perpetually excited state, and the only way you know how to deal with it is by stimulated emission.”
Rachel’s mouth falls open a fraction. Gabe coughs into his fist. I look at Maria, feeling utterly blank. It’s not…entirely untrue. I do have hookups when I have the time, but…yes, stimulated emission is often easier and more effective.
I’m surprised for a more basic reason. Maria knows what a laser is. And not just the sci-fi version of a laser beam. She knows how a laser works.
Gabriel blows out a breath. “Burn.”
Rachel slides lower in her chair. “Sick burn.”
“Hey,” Maria says, with a shrug. “I’m not dissing stimulated emission.”
I haven’t looked away from her. “Bullshit you aren’t.”
“I’m not,” she says. “But you called me slow. What exactly was your course?”
“Graduated college at twenty,” I say. “PhD by twenty-three. Tenure track position at twenty-five. And the department will recommend me for tenure by the time I’m thirty-one.”
“So what’s the rush?” she asks me.
I lick my lips.
