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“He loves you.”
“Aww fuck. I love that asshole too. I had a lot of rage in me back then, anger coming out of every pore. You could say Lou saved my life. He channeled the anger and made it constructive. Taught me how to fight, not just hit, the entire art—the mental aspect behind the fight."
"He seems to be good at taking in strays. When he found out I was originally from Little Burgundy, he gave me a job with no questions asked. He could tell I was on the run and he didn’t even hesitate to take me in. Told me I could sleep in the office if I didn’t have a place yet."
“Do you?”
“Sleep in the office?”
“Have a place, Ms. O’Hara?”
“Oh, yeah. I have an Airbnb right now. It’s like a basement room in this old lady’s house. She has a bunch of cats. There’s lots of meowing going on over there.”
“Stay with me,” I told her without any emotion in my voice.
“What? But we just met, and you’re my professor. You could lose your job.”
“Thank you for enlightening me. I’m fully aware of the consequences of discovery, Celia. Thing is, there won’t be any discovery.”
She bit her bottom lip and puffed out her cheeks and fuck me if I didn’t want to lean her back on that rock and punish her mouth for making such childish faces at me.
“So were you always into science? Did you always know you wanted to study physics?”
"My father was absolutely obsessed with me going to college. It was his biggest dream. Growing up, he used to tell me about a friend of his who’d busted his ass and worked hard and came out a big shot. That's all I know, not who he was or what he did, but he got a degree and was successful and the power of that made a huge impression on my dad. He used to tell me he wanted me to be a big shot one day, just like his friend.”
“You did him proud then.”
“Oh, if you believe in that kind of thing. He died when I was just a kid. My gram was the one who raised me.”
“I’m sorry,” she told me. I couldn’t do much more than shrug in response.
“My dad wasn’t always around either.” She continued. “He ended up going to jail when I was two. When he came back into our life, he'd made up for it, or at least he tried to. Seven years without him, it was hard on my mother and me. My younger siblings are lucky that they had him from day one. He has made a lot of mistakes, still does, but he was a good dad to me. He'd never left my mother's side before that. The jail time was hard on my mom, but she did it with my grandparents' help. My mom's parents just cut her off when she got pregnant so young and never talked to her again. I've still never met them."
"Oh, that's rough. You think the stint in jail was what propelled your dad toward Joplin and getting saved?"
She turned her face to me and smiled with a faraway look in her eye. "They were young and impressionable and totally splayed open to that kind of thing. I guess I was lucky it wasn’t drugs that took them away from me.”
“They’re not dead. Things could change. It could end.”
“They’re pretty much dead to me.”
I grabbed her face with both of my hands and forced her to look at me.
“Did they hurt you at Joplin? Was there some kind of systematic abuse going on?”
“What will you do? Go find the compound and blow up all the people inside, Lawson? It’s futile to get angry. You can’t tell people they’re being abused if they think that abuse is saving them from eternal damnation. My family is in as deep as it goes. There’s no getting out of there and starting over for them. Joplin is their end all be all. I’m lucky I got away or I’d be just like them.”
I saw her then in a different light. Not necessarily as a survivor, but as a real outlier, a warrior of sorts. A woman with a mind strong enough to realize she was being duped when everyone and everything around her was sending her a different message. Not just authority figures, but also all the people she loved. Her fortitude was astounding. Her own personal insight was stronger than a convincing cult-leader’s brainwashing—not to mention the pressure from her own parents.
“You are the beauty quark, my dear. Defying physics with your mettle,” I tell her. She cocks an eyebrow at me and it’s simultaneously cute and sexy. I can’t help but to look at the world through the lens of physics, even the people I meet and choose to have in my life.
