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“By the way, you can get leprosy from armadillos.”
I peel my nose away from the airplane window and glance at Rocío, my research assistant. “Really?”
“Yep. They got it from humans millennia ago, and now they’re giving it back to us.” She shrugs. “Revenge and cold dishes and all that.”
I scrutinize her beautiful face for hints that she’s lying. Her large dark eyes, heavily rimmed with eyeliner, are inscrutable. Her hair is so Vantablack, it absorbs 99 percent of visible light. Her mouth is full, curved downward in its typical pout.
Nope. I got nothing. “Is this for real?”
“Would I ever lie to you?”
“Last week you swore to me that Stephen King was writing a Winnie-the-Pooh spin-off.” And I believed her. Like I believed that Lady Gaga is a known satanist, or that badminton racquets are made from human bones and intestines. Chaotic goth misanthropy and creepy deadpan sarcasm are her brand, and I should know better than to take her seriously. Problem is, every once in a while she’ll throw in a crazy-sounding story that upon further inspection (i.e., a Google search) is revealed to be true. For instance, did you know that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was inspired by a true story? Before Rocío, I didn’t. And I slept significantly better.
“Don’t believe me, then.” She shrugs, going back to her grad school admission prep book. “Go pet the leper armadillos and die.”
She’s such a weirdo. I adore her.
“Hey, you sure you’re going to be fine, away from Alex for the next few months?” I feel a little guilty for taking her away from her boyfriend. When I was twenty-t
wo, if someone had asked me to be apart from Tim for months, I’d have walked into the sea. Then again, hindsight has proven beyond doubt that I was a complete idiot, and Rocío seems pretty enthused for the opportunity. She plans to apply to Johns Hopkins’s neuro program in the fall, and the NASA line on her CV won’t hurt. She even hugged me when I invited her to come along—a moment of weakness I’m sure she deeply regrets.
“Fine? Are you kidding?” She looks at me like I’m insane. “Three months in Texas, do you know how many times I’ll get to see La Llorona?”
“La . . . what?”
She rolls her eyes and pops in her AirPods. “You really know nothing about famed feminist ghosts.”
I bite back a smile and turn back to the window. In 1905, Dr. Curie decided to invest her Nobel Prize money into hiring her first research assistant. I wonder if she, too, ended up working with a mildly terrifying, Cthulhu-worshipping emo girl. I stare at the clouds until I’m bored, and then I take my phone out of my pocket and connect to the complimentary in-flight Wi-Fi. I glance at Rocío, making sure that she’s not paying attention to me, and angle my screen away.
I’m not a very secretive person, mostly out of laziness: I refuse to take on the cognitive labor of tracking lies and omissions. I do, however, have one secret. One single piece of information that I’ve never shared with anyone—not even my sister. Don’t get me wrong, I trust Reike with my life, but I also know her well enough to picture the scene: she is wearing a flowy sundress and flirting with a Scottish shepherd she met in a trattoria on the Amalfi Coast. They decide to do the shrooms they just purchased from a Belarusian farmer, and mid-trip she accidentally blurts out the one thing she’s been expressly forbidden to repeat: her twin sister, Bee, runs one of the most popular and controversial accounts on Academic Twitter. The Scottish shepherd’s cousin is a closeted men’s rights activist who sends me a dead possum in the mail and rats me out to his insane friends, and I get fired.
No, thank you. I love my job (and possums) too much for this.
I created @WhatWouldMarieDo during my first semester of grad school. I was teaching a neuroanatomy class and decided to give my students an anonymous mid-semester survey to ask for honest feedback on how to improve the course. What I got was . . . not that. I was told that my lectures would be more interesting if I delivered them naked. That I should gain some weight, get a boob job, stop dying my hair “unnatural colors,” get rid of my piercings. I was even given a phone number to call if I was “ever in the mood for a ten-inch dick.” (Yeah, right.)
The messages were pretty appalling, but what sent me sobbing in a bathroom stall was the reactions of the other students in my cohort—Tim included. They laughed the comments off as harmless pranks and dissuaded me from reporting them to the department chair, telling me that I’d be making a stink about nothing.
They were, of course, all men.
(Seriously: Why are men?)
That night I fell asleep crying. The following day, I got up, wondered how many other women in STEM felt as alone as I did, and impulsively downloaded Twitter and made @WhatWouldMarieDo. I slapped on a poorly photoshopped pic of Dr. Curie wearing sunglasses and a one-line bio: Making the periodic table girlier since 1889 (she/her). I just wanted to scream into the void. I honestly didn’t think that anyone would even see my first Tweet. But I was wrong.
@WhatWouldMarieDo What would Dr. Curie, first female professor at La Sorbonne, do if one of her students asked her to deliver her lectures naked?
@198888 She would shorten his half-life.
@annahhhh RAT HIM OUT TO PIERRE!!!
@emily89 Put some polonium in his pants and watch his dick shrivel.
@bioworm55 Nuke him NUKE HIM
@lucyinthesea Has this happened to you? God I’m so sorry. Once a student said something about my ass and it was so gross and no one believed me.
Over half a decade later, after a handful of Chronicle of Higher Education nods, a New York Times article, and about a million followers, WWMD is my happy place. What’s best is, I think the same is true for many others. The account has evolved into a therapeutic community of sorts, used by women in STEM to tell their stories, exchange advice, and . . . bitch.
