This Is My Brain on Boys

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  Addie had to agree. Anger was only useful to precipitate a rush of adrenaline so one could battle a predator. Therefore, from an evolutionary standpoint, there was no reason to hold on to this purely temporal emotion.

  Dr. Brooks said, “You must strictly adhere to the rules of scientific procedure, not your emotions. Are we clear?”

  “Yes,” Addie and Dex said simultaneously.

  “Therefore, can I count on you two to conduct this experiment with professional detachment?”

  They nodded, duly shamed.

  “Good. Now, if your so-called B.A.D.A.S.S. theory is correct, Lauren and Alex will end up as platonic friends,” Dr. Brooks concluded, crossing her fingers, “while Lauren and Kris will be something more. If your system is as effective as you claim, then you should be able to delude anyone into feeling as if they were falling madly in love.”

  A few minutes later, Dr. Brooks left to go to her next class, and Dex returned to his crabs, while Addie simply stared at nothing on her laptop, replaying those words over and over in her mind.

  If your system is as effective as you claim, then you should be able to delude anyone into feeling as if they were falling madly in love.

  Did she dare? Was it wrong? Did she have a choice?

  Yes. Yes. And, unfortunately, no.

  Then she picked up her phone and texted the only person who could possibly help.

  Ed.

  SEVEN

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you after Ed dropped us off. Kris is Kara Wilkes’s boyfriend.” Tess handed Addie the pitcher of limeade. “So how do you feel about him now?”

  “Dr. Brooks says we’re supposed to ignore our emotions and follow scientific procedure.” Addie took the pitcher from her and placed it on the folding table.

  “That doesn’t answer the question,” Tess said, opening a Tupperware container of cookies. “Earlier, you told me it didn’t matter what he’d done. Something about neural whatever . . .”

  “Pathways. This morning it didn’t, but . . .” She aimlessly picked a cookie from the bowl and bit. “I don’t know what to think.”

  Not even hours of immersing herself in the latest bulletin from the Caltech Neurophysiology Department and flipping through images of coronal brain sections had been able to stem her whirring thoughts of Kris and Kara and the awful things they’d done to her.

  Tess called at five to remind Addie about dinner, even if she wasn’t the least bit hungry (another disturbing aftereffect of the adrenaline rush), and that she was supposed to help out with the evening games as Assistant PC.

  “I can’t,” Addie said, scrolling to a particularly fascinating axial section of the interpeduncular cistern. “I’m working.”

  “I don’t care. You need to meet the girls and get out of that dark, windowless cave. Anyway, you promised Foy you’d help. You begged to be made my assistant.”

  So Addie packed up her computer, grabbed a tasteless turkey sandwich from the vending machine, and ate it as she hiked up to the quad, dreading the prospect of having to be social.

  When she arrived, she found Tess on the green, wrestling with a folding table, practically near tears.

  Addie dropped her backpack and grabbed the other end. “Let me help you. Geesh, Tess, it’s not worth crying over.” She pulled out the four legs and rolled it to standing. “Voilà!”

  But Tess was in a full sob. “Ed was supposed to help me. He completely blew me off.”

  “No, he didn’t. It’s my fault, I . . .”

  Tess snapped up. “Your fault? Oh, come on, Addie.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?” Addie moved the table under a tree, for shade.

  “Cover for him.”

  “I’m not . . .”

  “If Ed thinks of me as just a little high schooler because he’s off to college next month, then screw him.”

  “I don’t think . . .”

  Tess threw open the lid of a red cooler and removed a bottle of limeade. “Do you know what he said to me last night? I asked him when he was planning on coming to visit next fall. He said he didn’t know if he could because he got only one break for three days in October and that wasn’t long enough to fly all the way from Chicago to Boston, and Thanksgiving he’d have to be with his family.” She blinked. “I mean, what a jerk!”

  Addie bit her lip so she wouldn’t accidentally blurt out something she shouldn’t. “You might be blowing this out of proportion.”

  “Blowing this out of proportion?”

  Addie winced.

  “Unless he flies to Paris for Christmas, I won’t see him until next summer!” Tess yelled. “That is, if he can work me into his schedule.”

  “You better get yourself together. Here they come.”

  Addie pointed to a pair of impossibly blond, skinny girls laconically strolling across the grass in absurd six-inch sandals. She feared for the integrity of their ankles.

  Tess whipped out a mirror and dabbed a tissue at her smeared mascara. “Bree and Tay. The taller is Tay. She’s the leader. Bree is the Igor to her Dr. Frankenstein. They’re best friends back home in LA and they’re super-pissed that they’ve been separated and put with different roommates.”

  There was a recipe for mean girl disaster, Addie thought. “Who are their roommates?”

  Tess gestured briefly to a slightly chunky girl with a pretty face and brown hair streaked with purple. “That’s Emma, Bree’s roomie. Friendly. Midwestern. Type you can’t help but like. How do I look?”

  “Fine. Do you have Visine?”

  “Do the Kardashians have plastic surgeons on speed dial? Of course.” She rummaged in her bag and squeezed in a few drops.

  “Who’s the smiley girl sitting next to Emma?” Addie asked.

  “That’s Tay’s roommate, Shreya Khan. She’s from India, so she wins the farthest-from-home award—besides the exchange students, of course. Her dad’s a massively famous Bollywood actor,” Tess said. “Worth gazillions, with homes all over the world. Tay has no idea how cool she is. If she did, she probably wouldn’t treat her like crap.”

  Several others arrived. Zuri, who was from Baltimore and took classes at Johns Hopkins; Rachel, an apparent piano prodigy from Manhattan; and Fiona and Mindy, the exchange students from China.

  They made up Tess’s “core peer group,” which meant that she was completely responsible for handling all their concerns, including roommate conflicts and other problems.

  “Tay and Bree keep threatening to run away, they hate it here so much,” Tess said while they sat apart from the group on their own blanket. “I told them security wouldn’t let them drive off campus but they said that didn’t matter. They’d walk. Like, in those shoes?”

  Shreya had her hand up. “Are we doing the Battle of the Sexes tonight?”

  “That’s the plan,” Tess chirped, pouring juice into the cups. “Would you mind passing these around, assistant?”

  It took a second for Addie to realize Tess meant her. “Oh, sure. Right.” She carefully lifted the red cups and handed them to Bree and Tay, who curled their lips in disgust.

  “Ew. What is this gross green stuff?” Tay took a sniff. “It smells like toilet bowl cleaner.”

  “High fructose corn syrup, filtered water, lime pulp, and green dye number six. You want me to draw the carbon chain?” Addie answered.

  The girls glanced at Tess.

  “This is Addie,” she said. “She’s my assistant.”

  Addie said, “What’s a Battle of the Sexes?”

  “A chance for butt kicking,” Emma declared with a fist pump, the rest of them applauding in confirmation.

  Interesting. Physical combat did not pop up in Addie’s research as an appropriate summer school field game. “Will there be artillery?” she inquired. “Any mortally wounded?”

  “If I have anything to say about it,” Shreya answered, setting off a round of giggling.

  “We have a few minutes before the boys
get here, so why don’t you tell them a little bit about yourself,” Tess suggested. “The normal bits.”

  She wiped her hands on her skirt and proceeded. “Like Tess said, I’m Addie, your Assistant PC, and a rising senior at the Academy who’s here for the summer to manipulate sensory perceptions of the opposite sex . . .”

  Tess murmured, “Be normal. Like we’ve practiced.”

  Zuri, the one sitting closest, said, “Normalcy is overrated. Let her speak.”

  “Yeah, I want to hear about manipulating the opposite sex,” Rachel said, smiling at Emma.

  Addie lifted her chin and continued. “Thank you for that vote of confidence. Actually, I’m conducting an experiment measuring the male/female reactions to various stimuli at a chemical level. I can’t really discuss it further.”

  Shreya said, “Ooookay.”

  “However, you should know that as your official Assistant PC, I will help you work through whatever relationship problems you are experiencing. So don’t hesitate to come to me with any relationship issue. Straight. Gay. Bi. Transgender. I have extensively researched these concerns.”

  She gave Tess the thumbs-up, but Tess missed this, due to the fact that her face was in her hands. Clearly, she was so overcome by the sensitive insight of Addie’s speech that she’d started to weep.

  Addie said, “Now you know why the headmaster made me your assistant. To help.”

  “Yes,” Tess said wearily, as a gaggle of male summer students rounded the corner, Ed in the lead, tossing a white volleyball.

  If he had any clue that Tess was pissed, he didn’t show it, even when she turned her back to him and folded her arms.

  “The field is really muddy thanks to the rain,” he said.

  “Afraid of getting dirty?” she grumbled.

  “Not us. We’re game if you are.”

  She snorted. “Yeah, right. You want us to call it off. Like we would.”

  The girls cheered.

  “We’re so totally going to win this,” said one of the boys, snatching the ball out of Ed’s hands and jogging down the hill to the field, everyone following.

  Tess got up and started collecting cups. “You go without me. I’ll be right there.”

  “Ed and I will clean up,” Addie said. “You go with the kids, Tess.” She slid her eyes to Ed. “He and I need to talk, anyway.”

  Tess looked from her to Ed and back to Addie again. “Okay. Thanks.”

  They watched Tess stroll off, her sundress fluttering in the summer breeze, exposing the bright pink bikini she wore underneath.

  “She’s so amazing,” Ed said with a sigh of longing.

  “She’s super-mad at you.” Addie recapped the limeade and replaced it in the cooler. “Did you know that?”

  Ed cocked his head, surprised. “No. Why?”

  “Because you said you weren’t going to see her again.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You said you wouldn’t be able to get away this fall to visit. Can you help me with this table?”

  “I’ll do the whole thing. Stand back.” He flipped it over and folded in the legs. “I was only being honest. I have no idea how hard school’s going to be or whether I’ll be able to get away. I might have to study constantly. It is the University of Chicago. You know, where fun goes to die.”

  “Sounds like my kind of place,” Addie said.

  Ed laughed.

  “I’m serious.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” He carried the table to the gazebo and came back, frowning thoughtfully. “Okay. I’ll talk to her and explain what I meant and I’ll try to get away over break if I can. But she has to understand that everything is up in the air for me, too. Give me the cooler. I’ll put it with the table.”

  She handed him the cooler. “She’s afraid you’re going to leave her behind when you get to college and that you’ve already begun thinking of her as a little high schooler. Her words, not mine.”

  “Tess? A little high schooler? There is nothing little about Tess.”

  “She might not take that the right way.”

  “Fair enough.” They headed down the hill to the field. “How you holding up?” Ed asked.

  “Okay. Still trying to process the fact that Kris is Kara Wilkes’s boyfriend. I don’t know how I missed that. Even with that long conversation on the flight, I never put two and two together. Must have been the turbulence that addled my otherwise perceptive faculties.”

  Ed grinned. “If you say so.”

  “You won’t tell Tess about my call, will you?”

  He slid a finger over his lips. “It’s in the vault.”

  “What vault?”

  “It’s an expression. Means I won’t tell anyone.”

  “That’s a relief. Because she would not understand.”

  “She will, eventually. By the way, I ran into Kris at dinner and asked if he wanted to join us tonight. I hope you’re cool with that.”

  That was a surprise. Ed had been so cold to him in the car. “Suuuure. He’s in my experiment tomorrow so it’s not like I can avoid him.”

  “Not if I have anything to do with it.” Ed punched her lightly on the shoulder. “Hang in there, you rodent slayer.”

  For a second, she was shocked, until she realized he was making a joke and laughed.

  “See? Humor’s the best medicine,” he said.

  That wasn’t true. The best medicine was the one that had been genetically targeted to treat a particular illness. But Addie supposed that was too awkward to embroider on a pillow.

  A couple of students were resetting the spikes to hold up the volleyball net at the far end of the athletic fields near the woods. Ed hadn’t been exaggerating when he called it muddy.

  Since it was straight-up boys versus girls, there would be none of that choosing sides for volleyball awkwardness, though Tess insisted on taking Addie aside and offering her pointers such as not to duck with her hands over her head when the ball came to her.

  “Hit it back. You can do that, right?” Tess paused. “I mean over the net.”

  “Right. Absolutely,” Addie lied. Anything to get the game going so it could end and she could go back to the lab.

  “She can do it,” a voice said from the other side.

  Kris was in black running shorts and a tight gray T-shirt constructed from some sort of magical material that clung to his muscles and triggered a gush of epinephrine while her amygdala attempted to reconcile two conflicting signals from her prefrontal cortex: attraction and revenge.

  “All right, everyone, play clean,” Ed shouted, tossing the ball to Shreya. “Girls go first.”

  Addie and Kris faced each other.

  “I know what you did, Kris Condos,” she said. “You and Kara.”

  Shreya served the ball. It hit the net. Tess tossed it back to her for another chance. “Warming up!”

  Kris said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t . . .”

  “You did. That’s why you . . .”

  “Addie!” someone screamed just in time for her to look up and see the business end of the volleyball plummeting downward.

  “I got it!” Tay cried, saving it with a pass to Emma, who spiked it over the net, where it fell between Dex and another boy.

  “That was yours,” Dex said.

  The other boy squinted and chucked the ball back to Shreya. “What? It was right on top of you, man.”

  “Look, I can explain,” Kris said. “It’s complicated.”

  Addie rolled her eyes. “Please, don’t even.” It was a phrase Tess occasionally used, much to Addie’s annoyance, since it lacked both a transitive verb and a subject.

  Kris punched the ball to the girls’ side. Zuri was on it, easily hitting it to the far line, where Ed and one of his PCs nearly smashed into each other to get it.

  It landed next to Addie with a thud. “My bad,” she said.

  Tess picked it up and gave it to Kris. “Next time, look up, not at.”

  Addie assumed that meant she wasn’
t supposed to talk to Kris. Tess became so competitive when it came to sports. It was annoying.

  The next time the ball headed toward her, Addie yelled, “Tay. Get it!” Which Tay did. Problem solved.

  Until it was her turn to serve.

  “You can do this,” Tess said, positioning the ball in Addie’s left hand. “Just make it mathematical. You know, calculate the arc of the curve or whatever it is you do.”

  “Calculate the arc would suffice,” Addie said. “You don’t have to add . . .”

  “Freakin’ serve already!” Dex shouted.

  She pretended the ball was his head and lobbed it over. Kris spiked it back to Emma, who passed it to Shreya, who let it drop.

  The boys were winning twenty-three to twenty, which, as far as Addie was concerned, meant it was merely a matter of minutes before she was back at the lab to set up for tomorrow’s experiment.

  Then she found herself opposite Kris again.

  “Hi there,” he said. “Miss me?”

  “You do know you made my life hell, you and your girlfriend, don’t you?”

  He threw up his hands. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought you understood. After our talk on the plane . . .”

  “I did. Now I don’t. I’m . . .” What was she? “Unresolved. I need closure. An apology or something.”

  “I’ve apologized a million times. I don’t know what else I can say. I was messed up then. A different person. I got in with the wrong people. I was still getting over what I saw in Nepal. Hey, you were the one who told me about the neural pathways.”

  The ball was back in the boys’ court.

  “You can’t use my research against me,” Addie said, flinching as the ball, thankfully, sailed past her to Emma, who lobbed it back. “And you don’t go trashing a lab, destroying expensive equipment, just because you don’t feel like you fit in with society.”

  “That wasn’t it. And I never wanted to trash the lab. We went there because you guys were torturing mice . . .”

  “Gerbils!”

  “Okay, gerbils . . .”

  “We weren’t. Where did you get that idea? Who told you that?”

  “I don’t know.” Kris volleyed the ball across the net. “Kara, I guess. She said you guys killed frogs and had bags of dead cats and we needed to send a message.”