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Not that Maria is out of my league. It’s more that the very concept of a league makes no sense, because we’re not playing the same sport. I’m more of a pickup basketball kind of guy, and she’s… Well, she’s into whatever game you play with a French manicure and Louboutins. The game she’s playing sucks, the players are mean, and I want nothing to do with it or them.
Nothing, except… My stupid lizard brain wouldn’t mind watching her play. The light catches her hair—a high-gloss counterpoint that draws my eye—and it’s so perfect that I can’t help but wonder if she planned it.
My teeth grind together. Maybe I could collapse reasons one through eight into this: Maria reminds me of Clio. It’s not anything so obvious as her looks—Clio was blond and about six inches shorter—so much as a vague impression. Clio had that same air of polished perfection. That same awareness in her eyes when she caught me looking. Go ahead. I can see that final message in my mind’s eye. No one cares.
Including me. I won’t care, and I don’t want anything to do with Maria or the memories she brings up.
I turn to Gabe. “Let’s talk particle physics.”
He frowns at me. He glances at Maria. He shakes his head, then sits down. “Dude,” he finally says. “Don’t be mean to my sister, okay?”
“Don’t bother,” Maria says smoothly. “He’s too busy to be reprimanded.” She glances in my direction and smiles sweetly. “And I don’t mind.”
Striking, yes. Eye-catching, yes. And was I mean to her? I consider everything I’ve said. Yes, that was probably over the top. I have too many memories of where playing nice with girls like her gets me.
The last thing I need at this point is to spend more time looking at her. The less we like each other, the better.
* * *
It’s nine at night, half an hour after I abandoned Gabe, his sister, and the world’s most painful dinner. I’m reading through my grant proposal one last time, sitting in bed in sweats, trying to pretend I’m not waiting…
Ding. My phone chirps beside me, and I smile. Smile isn’t the right word for what I do. My whole body lights up, the way I know it shouldn’t, not for someone I’ve never met. Not for someone I’ve never seen.
I pick up my phone and open the chat app.
There’s a message. It’s from Em. I’m sorry. I know I promised I was going to get this post up in the next hour, but I’m not finishing it tonight.
I don’t even hesitate before typing back. Do you need to work something out? It’s not like my grant deadline is tomorrow or anything.
My grant deadline is tomorrow.
I can be a sounding board, I write.
Her response is immediate and dismissive. It’s not that at all. I need soup.
Oh. Shit. Stop everything! We have a soup emergency here. Do you have any soup in the house?
There’s a pause before her response comes through. Soup. In the house. I must have misheard. Did you say soup in the house?
There’s a longer pause. It’s weird how colloquialisms play out on the internet. It’s not like she could actually mishear me; my words are right there, and they aren’t changing.
She goes on: You are, perhaps, referring to the abomination known as soup in a can? What kind of a monster do you take me for? Soup in a can is not soup. The vegetables get soggy. The noodles turn to mush. SOUP IN A CAN IS NOT REAL SOUP, OKAY?
I have a goofy grin on my face as I shut my laptop. I don’t take a lot of breaks; my tenure clock has effectively three years left before I have to put the final application together. I’m not about to screw around. But relationships ebb and flow differently in real life versus online. The friend I played pool with three times a week at university now posts happy birthday on my Facebook wall once a year. By contrast, Vithika Chaudhary and I never started talking quantum algorithms until six months after we ended up at a physics course in the French Alps together. Now we talk twice a wee
and make plans to cross paths as often as two people on opposite sides of the world can.
As for Em? I have no idea who she is.
We found each other by accident, when Vithika forwarded me a link to her blog a few years ago. We started talking some months later when I left a comment critiquing her physics, and we somehow never stopped.
I grin as I type. Uh. Em. I’m pretty sure canned soup is actually soup. There’s an entire series of paintings about it.
She sends me a skull-and-crossbones emoji. FUCK WARHOL. I AM SERIOUS ABOUT SOUP.
Whoa, I type. Em. Calm down.
IF YOU ARE GOING TO BE FLIPPANT ABOUT SOUP, THIS CONVERSATION IS OVER.
I know she’s joking the way I know Rayleigh scattering explains why the sky is blue: immediately and without thinking. Over the past eighteen months, I’ve come to know her pretty well.
That’s why I play along. I apologize. Clearly I have failed to take soup with the seriousness that soup deserves. All hail the mighty soup. Ave, soup. Morituri te salutant.
I can almost feel the suspicion roiling off my phone. Three little dots appear, indicating that she’s typing. Then: What are you talking about?
It’s not often I manage to stump her. Reading comics in my misspent youth has given me some useful ammunition. It’s what ancient gladiators would say to Caesar before they did battle. Except the soup part. It means something like, “We who are about to die salute you.” One can’t get more serious about soup than a death match in its honor.
I can almost imagine her smiling. I detect sarcasm on your part. Whatever. I’ll circle back to this later. I have to run out for soup before the good restaurants close. I have about a two-block radius.
What’s in two blocks? I ask, before I think better of the question.
Pretty much everything. Chinese. Korean. Vietnamese. Thai. I am not sure which soup I will get, but there will be soup.
I bite my lip.
Here’s the thing. I grew up spending afternoons at Cyclone Technologies, the computer company where my mother worked. Basic online safety was drummed into me from an early age. Always use a pseudonym if you can. Never tell people who you are or where you live. Never drop clues.
It’s a good idea for all minors; it’s an absolute necessity for a teenager messing around on a computer hooked to the network of one of the largest computer manufacturers in the world. Black-hat hackers would have loved to infect our machines.
As an adult with a ridiculously Googleable name, I’ve learned it’s best to adhere to those rules. People discover who my parents are, and things get weird.
Em knows me as my online pseudonym—Actual Physicist—and I know her as Em. And after eighteen months of chatting, I’ve realized that layer of pseudonymity is important. Necessary, even.
I shake my head and type. Okay, not that I want to be crazy stalker guy, but that was a slip. If I *were* crazy stalker guy, you realize that you just told me a lot of stuff about yourself, right?
I haven’t mentioned Em to my other friends. Or my parents. Or my colleagues. For one, I’m not sure how I would classify her. We are friends, ye
s. We flirt, yes. I talk to her a lot, because she’s fun to talk to, and I’m so busy being not-lonely that someone interesting who I’ve never met fits perfectly into my life.
This isn’t really weird. I’ve written papers with people on the other side of the globe, people I’ve never met. I’m used to relationships that don’t involve phone conversations or the exchange of pictures. I don’t need to think of her as anything except the little avatar she uses—a globe of the earth, rotating silently in space, blue and green and brown and glowing with pulsating radioactivity.
Shit, she says. What did I say?
I bite my lip.
Not to freak you out or anything, but if restaurants are just now closing, that pretty much told me you’re on the West Coast. And you’ve listed four separate ethnicities in a two-block radius, so you’re in a major urban center. So Seattle/Portland/Bay Area/LA Basin. I think for a moment, and then add: Scratch the LA Basin, because you can’t really walk anywhere in LA. Sorry, Em. I try not to think about these things. But I can’t help it. My mind just doesn’t shut up.
This is a lie. I think about her all the time. I have a mental image of her that I cannot get rid of, no matter how many times I tell myself she’s just an avatar. Em, in my mind, is self-conscious. I suspect she’s a little hesitant in real life. She’s short, and she shies away from eye contact. She wears jeans and hoodies, and she doesn’t smile often, but when she does…
Dammit. I wipe the image from my head.
Thanks, she types. I didn’t even think before typing. My need for soup is dire. Please don’t sell my personal information to the Haters of the Great Zombie Schism. It would not make this day better.
It’s the second time she’s mentioned having a rough day. I contemplate asking. That not-lonely-but-maybe part of me wants to know. My forefinger hovers over the onscreen keyboard.
Em rarely complains, and today is no exception.
I don’t really want to say more, because otherwise you’ll figure out that you forgot Sacramento in your list of population centers.
Jokes are good. The last thing I want is us comparing locations or agreeing to meet. I’m too aware of the way I smile when she messages me. Starting a long-distance relationship while my tenure clock is ticking is the worst idea I can think of.
