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“Besides your first name, what else do you and T-Swifty have in common?” Brody asked. “You from Tennessee?”
“California, actually. I grew up in the bay area, then started teaching at a college nearby.”
“Bay area?” Brody’s eyes lit up, and he paused to put down his burger and wipe his hands. He leaned across the table like he was going to make a crude joke. “Serious question. Are you a Niners fan, or Raiders?”
“I come from a long line of Oakland fans,” I said. “At least, before they moved out of the Bay Area. But I’m not a big football fan myself.”
Brody looked almost disappointed by this, and resumed eating his food. I considered telling him about my side-gig as a cheerleader. But that felt too flirty. Telling random strangers at the bar that you were an NFL cheerleader was immodest at best, and braggadocios at worst.
“You said you’re a professor,” Brody went on. “What do you teach?”
“Paleontology.”
His eyes lit up again the way they had when we talked about football. “So you’re, like, a lady Indiana Jones?”
“He was an archeologist,” I clarified. “Big difference.”
“Still, though. I bet you have a cool hat and whip back home.”
“Nothing that exciting!” I replied with a laugh. “Compared to Indy, I’m terribly boring. My area of focus is environmental isotope geology.”
Brody squinted suspiciously at me. “I don’t mean to sound like the village idiot, but I have no idea what any of those words mean.”
“You don’t sound like an idiot! It has to do with the way we date fossils.”
“Date them, as in their age?” Brody clarified. “Not date them as in, take them out to dinner?”
I rolled my eyes at the cheesy joke, even though it made me smile. “Right. There are a number of atoms which decay at predictable rates over time. We use science to figure out how much those atoms have decayed, which then tells us how old a sample is.”
“Oh, like carbon dating?” he asked.
“Just like that!” I said, happy that he got the gist of what I did. “Carbon is only one atom. There are a whole bunch of others. Like deuterium, and nitrogen fifteen, and silicon twenty-nine.”
He leaned his elbows on the table and thought about this while chewing. “How accurate can you get? If I give you a T-Rex bone, can you tell me his birthday?”
“It’s just a rough estimate, unfortunately,” I said. “We can narrow it down within a hundred thousand years.”
“But that’s a small period of time compared to, say, hundreds of million years, right?” Brody asked.
I blinked in surprise. “That’s exactly right.”
He ate the last bit of his burger. “Told you I was a good listener.”
My phone buzzed on the table. It was an email from one of the other members of the paleontology department:
TO: [emailprotected]
FROM: [emailprotected]
SUBJECT: RE: Is trivia night still on?
Hi Professor Fox, I don’t know why Dean Armbruster told you to be at Tommy’s. We always meet at the Wild Rover Bar, down in West Jordan. Trivia started at six, so we’re almost done. Maybe you can join us next week?
My stomach sank when I read the message. “It looks like I didn’t make a mistake. My new boss intentionally told me the wrong bar because he didn’t want me to be there.”
“Ah, shit,” Brody said. “Sorry to hear that.”
“I was looking forward to finally meeting some people,” I said, tearing up my trivia card. “Thanks for keeping me company. I’m going to leave so someone else can have the table.”
