She frowned, scrolling down to reread the email she’d sent him several weeks earlier.
July 7, 8:19 a.m.
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Pancreatic Cancer Screening Project
Dr. Benton,
My name is Olive Smith, and I am a Ph.D. student in the biology department of Stanford University. My research focuses on pancreatic cancer, in particular on finding noninvasive, affordable detection tools that could lead to early treatment and increase survival rates. I have been working on blood biomarkers, with promising results. (You can read about my preliminary work in the peer-reviewed paper I have attached. I have also submitted more recent, unpublished findings to this year’s Society for Biological Discovery conference; acceptance is pending but see the attached abstract.) The next step would be to carry out additional studies to determine the feasibility of my test kit.
Unfortunately my current lab (Dr. Aysegul Aslan’s, who is retiring in two years) does not have the funding or the equipment to allow me to proceed. She is encouraging me to find a larger cancer research lab where I could spend the next academic year to collect the data I need. Then I would return to Stanford to analyze and write up the data. I am a huge fan of the work you have published on pancreatic cancer, and I was wondering whether there might be a possibility to carry out my work in your lab at Harvard.
I am happy to talk more in detail about my project if you are interested.
Sincerely,
Olive
Olive Smith
Ph.D. Candidate
Biology Department, Stanford University
If Tom Benton, cancer researcher extraordinaire, came to Stanford and gave Olive ten minutes of his time, she could convince him to help her out with her research predicament!
Well . . . maybe.
Olive was much better at actually doing research than at selling its importance to others. Science communication and public speaking of any sort were definitely her big weaknesses. But she had a chance to show Benton how promising her results were. She could list the clinical benefits of her work, and she could explain how little she required to turn her project into a huge success. All she needed was a quiet bench in a corner of his lab, a couple hundred of his lab mice, and unlimited access to his twenty-million-dollar electron microscope. Benton wouldn’t even notice her.
Olive headed for the break room, mentally writing an impassioned speech on how she was willing to use his facilities only at night and limit her oxygen consumption to less than five breaths per minute. She poured herself a cup of stale coffee and turned around to find someone scowling right behind her.
She startled so hard that she almost burned herself.
“Jesus!” She clutched her chest, took a deep breath, and held tighter onto her Scooby-Doo mug. “Anh. You scared the shit out of me.”
“Olive.”
It was a bad sign. Anh never called her Olive—never, unless she was reprimanding her for biting her nails to the quick or for having vitamin gummies for dinner.
“Hey! How was your—”
“The other night.”
Dammit. “—weekend?”
“Dr. Carlsen.”
Dammit, dammit, dammit. “What about him?”
“I saw the two of you together.”
“Oh. Really?” Olive’s surprise sounded painfully playacted, even to her own ears. Maybe she should have signed up for drama club in high school instead of playing every single sport available.
“Yes. Here, in the department.”
“Oh. Cool. Um, I didn’t see you, or I’d have said hi.”
Anh frowned. “Ol. I saw you. I saw you with Carlsen. You know that I saw you, and I know that you know that I saw you, because you’ve been avoiding me.”
“I have not.”
Anh gave her one of her formidable no-bullshit looks. It was probably the one she used as president of the student senate, as head of the Stanford Women in Science Association, as director of outreach for the Organization of BIPOC Scientists. There was no fight Anh couldn’t win. She was fearsome and indomitable, and Olive loved this about her—but not right now.
“You haven’t answered any of my messages for the past two days. We usually text every hour.”
They did. Multiple times. Olive switched the mug to her left hand, for no reason other than to buy some time. “I’ve been . . . busy?”
“Busy?” Anh’s eyebrow shot up. “Busy kissing Carlsen?”
“Oh. Oh, that. That was just . . .”
Anh nodded, as if to encourage her to finish the sentence. When it became obvious that Olive couldn’t, Anh continued for her.
“That was—no offense, Ol—but that was the most bizarre kiss I have ever seen.”
Calm. Stay calm. She doesn’t know. She cannot know. “I doubt that,” Olive retorted weakly. “Take that upside-down Spider-Man kiss. That was way more bizarre than—”
“Ol, you said you were on a date that night. You’re not dating Carlsen, are you?” She twisted her face in a grimace.
It would have been so easy to confess the truth. Since starting grad school Anh and Olive had done heaps of moronic things, together and separately; the time Olive panicked and kissed none other than Adam Carlsen could become one of them, one they laughed about during their weekly beer-and-s’mores nights.
Or not. There was a chance that if Olive admitted to lying now, Anh might never trust her again. Or that she’d never go out with Jeremy. And as much as the idea of her best friend dating her ex had Olive wanting to puke just a bit, the thought of said best friend being anything but happy had her wanting to puke a lot more.
The situation was depressingly simple: Olive was alone in the world. She had been for a long time, ever since high school. She had trained herself not to make a big deal out of it—she was sure many people were alone in the world and found themselves having to write down made-up names and phone numbers on their emergency contact forms. During college and her master’s, focusing on science and research had been her way of coping, and she had been perfectly ready to spend the rest of her life holed up in a lab with little more than a beaker and a handful of pipettes as her faithful companions—until . . . Anh.
In a way, it had been love at first sight. First day of grad school. Biology cohort orientation. Olive entered the conference room, looked around, and sat in the first free seat she could find, petrified. She was the only woman in the room, virtually alone in a sea of white men who were already talking about boats, and whatever sportsball was on TV the night before, and the best routes to drive places. I have made a terrible mistake, she thought. The Guy in the bathroom was wrong. I should never have come here. I am never going to fit in.
And then a girl with curly dark hair and a pretty, round face plopped in the chair next to hers and muttered, “So much for the STEM programs’ commitment to inclusivity, am I right?” That was the moment everything changed.
They could have just been allies. As the only two non-cis-white-male students in their year, they could have found solace together when some bitching was needed and ignored each other otherwise. Olive had lots of friends like that—all of them, actually, circumstantial acquaintances whom she thought of fondly but not very often. Anh, though, had been different from the start. Maybe because they’d soon found out that they loved spending their Saturday nights eating junk food and falling asleep to rom-coms. Maybe it was the way she’d insisted on dragging Olive to every single “women in STEM” support group on campus and had wowed everyone with her bull’s-eye comments. Maybe it was that she’d opened up to Olive and explained how hard it had been for her to get where she was today. The way her older brothers had made fun of her and called her a nerd for loving math so much growing up—at an age when being a nerd was not quite considered cool. That time a physics professor
asked her if she was in the wrong class on the first day of the semester. The fact that despite her grades and research experience, even her academic adviser had seemed skeptical when she’d decided to pursue STEM higher education.
Olive, whose path to grad school had been rough but not nearly as rough, was befuddled. Then enraged. And then in absolute awe when she understood the self-doubt that Anh had been able to harness into sheer fierceness.
And for some unimaginable reason, Anh seemed to like Olive just as much. When Olive’s stipend hadn’t quite stretched to the end of the month, Anh had shared her instant ramen. When Olive’s computer had crashed without backups, Anh had stayed up all night to help her rewrite her crystallography paper. When Olive had nowhere to go over the holidays, Anh would bring her friend home to Michigan and let her large family ply Olive with delicious food while rapid Vietnamese flowed around her. When Olive had felt too stupid for the program and had considered dropping out, Anh had talked her out of it.
The day Olive met Anh’s rolling eyes, a life-changing friendship was born. Slowly, they’d begun to include Malcolm and become a bit of a trio, but Anh . . . Anh was her person. Family. Olive hadn’t even thought that was possible for someone like her.
Anh rarely asked anything for herself, and even though they’d been friends for more than two years, Olive had never seen her show interest in dating anyone—until Jeremy. Pretending that she’d been on a date with Carlsen was the least Olive could do to ensure her friend’s happiness.
So she bucked up, smiled, and tried to keep her tone reasonably even while asking, “What do you mean?”
“I mean that we talk every minute of every day, and you never mentioned Carlsen before. My closest friend is supposedly seeing the superstar professor of the department, and somehow I’ve never heard of it? You know his reputation, right? Is it some kind of joke? Do you have a brain tumor? Do I have a brain tumor?”
This was what happened whenever Olive lied: she ended up having to tell even more lies to cover her first, and she was horrible at it, which meant that each lie got worse and less convincing than the previous. There was no way she could fool Anh. There was no way she could fool anybody. Anh was going to get mad, then Jeremy was going to get mad, then Malcolm, too, and then Olive was going to find herself utterly alone. The heartbreak was going to make her flunk out of grad school. She was going to lose her visa and her only source of income and move back to Canada, where it snowed all the time and people ate moose heart and—
“Hey.”
The voice, deep and even, came from somewhere behind Olive, but she didn’t need to turn to know that it was Carlsen’s. Just like she didn’t need to turn to know that the large, warm weight suddenly steadying her, a firm but barely there pressure applied to the center of her lower back, was Carlsen’s hand. About two inches above her ass.
Holy crap.
Olive twisted her neck and looked up. And up. And up. And a bit more up. She was not a short woman, but he was just big. “Oh. Um, hey.”
“Is everything okay?” He said it looking into her eyes, in a low, intimate tone. Like they were alone. Like Anh was not there. He said it in a way that should have made Olive uncomfortable but didn’t. For some inexplicable reason his presence in the room soothed her, even though until a second ago she had been freaking out. Perhaps two different types of unease neutralized each other? It sounded like a fascinating research topic. Worth pursuing. Maybe Olive should abandon biology and switch to psychology. Maybe she should excuse herself and go run a literature search. Maybe she should expire on the spot to avoid facing this crapfest of a situation she’d put herself in.
“Yes. Yes. Everything is great. Anh and I were just . . . chatting. About our weekends.”
Carlsen looked at Anh, as though realizing for the first time that she was in the room. He acknowledged her existence with one of those brief nods dudes used to greet others. His hand slid lower on Olive’s spine just as Anh’s eyes widened.
“Nice to meet you, Anh. I’ve heard a lot about you,” Carlsen said, and he was good at this, Olive had to admit. Because she was sure that from Anh’s angle it looked like he was groping her, but in fact he was . . . not. Olive could barely feel his hand on her.
Just a little, maybe. The warmth, and the slight pressure, and—
“Nice to meet you, too.” Anh looked thunderstruck. Like she might pass out. “Um, I was just about to leave. Ol, I’m going to text you when . . . yeah.”
She was out of the room before Olive could answer. Which was good, because Olive didn’t need to come up with more lies. But also slightly less good, because now it was just her and Carlsen. Standing way too close. Olive would have paid good money to say that she was the one to put some distance between them, but the embarrassing truth was that it was Carlsen who stepped away first. Enough to give her the space she needed, and then some.
“Is everything okay?” he asked again. His tone was still soft. Not something she would have expected from him.
“Yes. Yes, I just . . .” Olive waved her hand. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Did you hear what she said? About Friday and . . .”
“I did. That’s why I . . .” He looked at her, and then at his hand—the one that had been warming her back a few seconds ago—and Olive immediately understood.
“Thank you,” she repeated. Because Adam Carlsen might have been a known ass, but Olive was feeling pretty damn grateful right at the moment. “Also, uh, I couldn’t help noticing that no agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation have knocked on my door to arrest me in the past seventy-two hours.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. Minimally. “Is that so?”
Olive nodded. “Which makes me think that maybe you haven’t filed that complaint. Even though it would have been totally within your rights. So, thank you. For that. And . . . and for stepping in, right now. You saved me a lot of trouble.”
Carlsen stared at her for a long moment, looking suddenly like he did during seminar, when people mixed up theory and hypothesis or admitted to using listwise deletion instead of imputation. “You shouldn’t need someone to step in.”
Olive stiffened. Right. Known ass. “Well, it’s not as if I asked you to do anything. I was going to handle it by myse—”
“And you shouldn’t have to lie about your relationship status,” he continued. “Especially not so that your friend and your boyfriend can get together guilt-free. That’s not how friendship works, last I checked.”
Oh. So he’d actually been listening when Olive vomited her life story at him. “It’s not like that.” He lifted an eyebrow, and Olive raised a hand in defense. “Jeremy wasn’t really my boyfriend. And Anh didn’t ask me for anything. I’m not some sort of victim, I just . . . want my friend to be happy.”
“By lying to her,” he added drily.
“Well, yeah, but . . . She thinks we’re dating, you and I,” Olive blurted out. God, the implications were too ridiculous to bear.
“Wasn’t that the point?”
“Yeah.” She nodded and then remembered the coffee in her hand and took a sip from her mug. It was still warm. The conversation with Anh couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes. “Yeah. I guess it was. By the way—I’m Olive Smith. In case you’re still interested in filing that complaint. I’m a Ph.D. student in Dr. Aslan’s lab—”
“I know who you are.”
“Oh.” Maybe he had looked her up, then. Olive tried to imagine him combing through the Current Ph.D. Students’ section on the department website. Olive’s picture had been taken by the program secretary on her third day of grad school, well before she had become fully aware of what she was in for. She had made an effort to look good: tamed her wavy brown hair, put on mascara to pop the green of her eyes, even attempted to hide her freckles with some borrowed foundation. It had been before she’d realized h
ow ruthless, how cutthroat academia could be. Before the sense of inadequacy, before the constant fear that even if she was good at research, she might never be able to truly make it as an academic. She had been smiling. A real, actual smile.
“Okay.”
“I’m Adam. Carlsen. I’m faculty in—”
She burst out laughing in his face. And then regretted it immediately as she noticed his confused expression, as though he’d seriously thought Olive might not know who he was. As though he was unaware of being one of the most prominent scholars in the field. The modesty was not at all like Adam Carlsen. Olive cleared her throat.
“Right. Um, I know who you are, too, Dr. Carlsen.”
“You should probably call me Adam.”
“Oh. Oh, no.” That would be way too . . . No. The department was not like that. Grads didn’t call faculty by their first names. “I could never—”
“If Anh happens to be around.”
“Oh. Yeah.” It made sense. “Thank you. I hadn’t thought of that.” Or of anything else, really. Clearly, her brain had stopped working three days ago, when she’d decided that kissing him to save her own ass was a good idea. “If that’s o-okay with you. I’m going to go home, because this whole thing was kind of stressful and . . .” I was going to run an experiment, but I really need to sit on the couch and watch American Ninja Warrior for forty-five minutes while eating Cool Ranch Doritos, which taste surprisingly better than you’d give them credit for.
He nodded. “I’ll walk you to your car.”
“I’m not that distraught.”
“In case Anh’s still around.”
“Oh.” It was, Olive had to admit, a kind offer. Surprisingly so. Especially because it came from Adam “I’m Too Good for This Department” Carlsen. Olive knew that he was a dick, so she couldn’t quite understand why today he . . . didn’t seem to be one. Maybe she should just blame her own appalling behavior, which would make anyone look good by comparison. “Thanks. But no need.”
The Love Hypothesis Page 3
