Love with you

TER

biology departments in the country, one that housed more than one hund

never had the misfortune of interacting with Eitan Carlsen in the two years before The Night_it had been only a handful of days since the kissing incident, but Elaine already knew t

d had probably already forgotten all about what happened.Unless, of course, she was catastrophically wrong and he did end up

ting in less than two weeks. Or the note Jove had left this morning, telling her she'd seen a cockroach scurry under the credenza even though their apartment was already full of traps. Or the most crucial one: the fact that her research project had reached a critical point and

by the twenty new emails she'd received while busy with her lab animals. They were almost exclusively from predatory journals, Ni

iments, and then noticed that one message was actually a reply t

hard she almost sprai

, 4:3

gs-Wood@h

e-Davis@s

creatic Cancer S

ai

be visiting Stanford in about t

ee

gs

ate Pr

logical Sciences,

pulsate in her eyelids, which couldn't be healthy, but- Yes. Yes! She had a recruiter. Almost. Probably? Maybe. D

to reread the email she'd se

7, 8:

ne-Davis@s

s-Wood@h

eatic Cancer S

.

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 atta

to determine the feas

o 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

in detail about my proje

cer

ne D

Cand

tment, Stanfo

tanford and gave Elaine ten minutes of his time, she could

. . .

lling its importance to others. Science communication and pu

xplain 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 c

e his facilities only at night and limit her oxygen consumption to less than five breaths per minute.

ard that she almo

breath, and held tighter onto her Scooby-Do

ain

unless she was reprimanding her for biting her nails

ow was

ther n

. "-we

Car

t, dammit. "W

two of yo

Rea

own ears. Maybe she should have signed up for drama club in

, in the d

idn't see you, or

n. You know that I saw you, and I know that you kno

ave

e, as head of the Stanford Women in Science Association, as director of outreach for the Organization of Women Scientists

y messages for the past two da

e mug to her left hand, for no reason but ma

brow shot up. "Bus

at. That wa

ish the sentence. When it became obvious t

but that was the most biza

She doesn't know.

y. "Take that upside-down Spider-Man

night. You're not dating Carlsen, are y

aps of moronic things, together and separately; the time Elaine panicked and kissed none other than Eit

n

go out with Jeffrey. And as much as the idea of her best friend dating her ex had Elaine wanting to puke j

e 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

find, petrified. She was the only woman in the room, virtually alone in a sea of white men who were already talking about sports, about boats, and whatever sportsball was on TV the night

the chair next to hers and muttered, "So much for the STEM programs' comm

ke 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 Sa

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 fi

was befuddled. Then enraged. And then in absolute awe when she understoo

had crashed without backups, Hanh had stayed up all night to help her rewrite her crystallography paper. When Elaine had nowhere to go over the holidays, Hanh would bring her friend home to Michigan and

they'd begun to include Jove and become a bit of a trio, but Hanh . . . Hanh was he

hey'd been friends for more than two years, Elaine had ne

with Carlsen was the least Elaine cou

d to keep her tone reasonably even

nute of every day, and you ne

tment, and somehow I've never heard of it? You know his reputation, right?

meant that each lie got worse and less convincing than the previous. There was no way she could fool Hanh. There was no way she could fool a

going to lose her visa and her only source of income and move back to

ey

sen's. Just like she didn't need to turn to know that the large, warm weight suddenly steadying her, a firm but b

y c