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“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.
