“I’m free.”
“Great. You, Adam?”
Olive froze. And so did Adam, for about a second, before pointing out, “I don’t think I should be present, if you’re about to interview her—”
“Oh, it’s not an interview. Just an informal chat to see if Olive’s and my research match. You’ll want to know if your girlfriend is moving to Boston for a year, right? Come on.” He motioned for them to follow him and then stepped inside the Starbucks.
Olive and Adam exchanged a silent look that somehow managed to speak volumes. It said, What the hell do we do? and How the hell would I know? and This is going to be weird, and No, it’s going to be plain bad. Then Adam sighed, put on a resigned face, and headed inside. Olive followed him, regretting her life choices.
“Aslan’s retiring, huh?” Tom asked after they’d found a secluded table in the back. Olive had no choice but to sit across from him—and on Adam’s left. Like a good “girlfriend,” she supposed. Her “boyfriend,” in the meantime, was sullenly sipping his chamomile tea next to her. I should snap a picture, she reflected. He’d make for an excellent viral meme.
“In the next few years,” Olive confirmed. She loved her adviser, who had always been supportive and encouraging. Since the very beginning she had given Olive the freedom to develop her own research program, which was almost unheard of for Ph.D. students. Having a hands-off mentor was great when it came to pursuing her interests, but . . .
“If Aslan’s retiring soon, she’s not applying for grants anymore—understandable, since she won’t be around long enough to see the projects through—which means that your lab is not exactly flush with cash right now,” Tom summarized perfectly. “Okay, tell me about your project. What’s cool about it?”
“I . . . ,” Olive began—she scrambled to collect her thoughts. “So, it’s—” Another pause. Longer this time, and more painfully awkward. “Um . . .”
This, precisely, was her problem. Olive knew that she was an excellent scientist, that she had the discipline and the critical-thinking skills to produce good work in the lab. Unfortunately succeeding in academia also required the ability to pitch one’s work, sell it to strangers, present it in public, and . . . that was not something she enjoyed or excelled at. It made her feel panicky and judged, as though pinned to a microscope slide, and her ability to produce syntactically coherent sentences invariably leaked out of her brain.
Like right now. Olive felt her cheeks heat and her tongue tie and—
“What kind of question is that?” Adam interjected.
When she glanced at him, he was scowling at Tom, who just shrugged.
“What’s cool about your project?” Adam repeated back.
“Yeah. Cool. You know what I mean.”
“I don’t think I do, and maybe neither does Olive.”
Tom huffed. “Fine, what would you ask?”
Adam turned to Olive. His knee brushed her leg, warm and oddly reassuring through her jeans. “What issues does your project target? Why do you think it’s significant? What gaps in the literature does it fill? What techniques are you using? What challenges do you foresee?”
Tom huffed. “Right, sure. Consider all those long, boring questions asked, Olive.”
She glanced at Adam, finding that he was studying her with a calm, encouraging expression. The way he’d formulated the questions helped her reorganize her thoughts, and realizing that she had answers for each one melted most of her panic. It probably hadn’t been intentional on Adam’s part, but he’d done her a solid.
Olive was reminded of that guy from the bathroom, from years ago. I have no idea if you’re good enough, he’d told her. What matters is whether your reason to be in academia is good enough. He’d said that Olive’s reason was the best one, and therefore, she could do this. She needed to do this.
“Okay,” she started again after a deep breath, gathering what she’d rehearsed the previous night with Malcolm. “Here’s the deal. Pancreatic cancer is very aggressive and deadly. It has very poor prognosis, with only one out of four people alive a year after diagnosis.” Her voice, she thought, sounded less breathy and more self-assured. Good. “The problem is that it’s so hard to detect, we are only able to diagnose it very late in the game. At that point, the cancer has already spread so widely, most treatments can’t do much to counteract it. But if diagnosis were faster—”
“People could get treatment sooner and have a higher chance of survival,” Tom said, nodding a bit impatiently. “Yep, I’m well aware. We already have some screening tools, though. Like imaging.”
She wasn’t surprised he brought it up, since imaging was what Tom’s lab focused on. “Yes, but that’s expensive, time-consuming, and often not useful because of the pancreas’s position. But . . .” She took another deep breath. “I think I have found a set of biomarkers. Not from tissue biopsy—blood biomarkers. Noninvasive, easy to obtain. Cheap. In mice they can detect pancreatic cancer as early as stage one.”
She paused. Tom and Adam were both staring at her. Tom was clearly interested, and Adam looked . . . a little weird, to be honest. Impressed, maybe? Nah, impossible.
“Okay. This sounds promising. What’s the next step?”
“Collecting more data. Running more analyses with better equipment to prove that my set of biomarkers is worthy of a clinical trial. But for that I need a larger lab.”
“I see.” He nodded with a thoughtful expression and then leaned back in his chair. “Why pancreatic cancer?”
“It’s one of the most lethal, and we know so little about how—”
“No,” Tom interrupted. “Most third-year Ph.D. students are too busy infighting over the centrifuge to come up with their own line of research. There must be a reason you’re so motivated. Did someone close to you have cancer?”
Olive swallowed before reluctantly answering, “Yes.”
“Who?”
“Tom,” Adam said, a trace of warning in his voice. His knee was still against her thigh. Still warm. And yet, Olive felt her blood turn cold. She really, really didn’t want to say it. And yet she couldn’t ignore the question. She needed Tom’s help.
“My mother.”
Okay. It was out there now. She’d said it, and she could go back to trying not to think about it—
“Did she die?”
A beat. Olive hesitated and then nodded silently, not looking at either of the men at the table. She knew Tom wasn’t trying to be mean—people were curious, after all. But it wasn’t something Olive wanted to discuss. She barely ever talked about it, even with Anh and Malcolm, and she had carefully avoided writing about her experience in her grad school applications, even when everyone had told her it would give her a leg up.
She just . . . She couldn’t. She just couldn’t.
“How old were you—”
“Tom,” Adam interrupted, tone sharp. He set his tea down with more force than necessary. “Stop harassing my girlfriend.” It was less of a warning and more of a threat.
“Right. Yes. I’m an insensitive ass.” Tom smiled, apologetic.
Olive noticed that he was looking at her shoulder. When she followed his gaze, she realized that Adam had placed his arm on the back of her chair. He wasn’t touching her, but there was something . . . protective about his position. He seemed to generate large amounts of heat, which was not at all unwelcome. It helped melt the yucky feeling the conversation with Tom had left behind.
“Then again, so is your boyfriend.” Tom winked at her. “Okay, Olive. Tell you what.” Tom leaned forward, elbows on the table. “I’ve read your paper. And the abstract you submitted to the SBD conference. Are you still planning to go?”
“If it’s accepted.”
“I’m sure it will be. It’s excellent work. But it sounds like your project has progressed since you submitted that, and I need to know more about it. I
f I decide that you can work in my lab next year, I’ll cover you completely—salary, supplies, equipment, whatever you need. But I need to know where you’re at to make sure that you’re worth investing in.”
Olive felt her heart racing. This sounded promising. Very promising.
“Here’s the deal. I’m going to give you two weeks to write up a report on everything you’ve been doing so far—protocols, findings, challenges. In two weeks, send me the report and I’ll make a decision based on it. Does that sound feasible?”
She grinned, nodding enthusiastically. “Yes!” She could absolutely do that. She’d need to pull the intro from one of her papers, the methods from her lab protocols, the preliminary data from that grant she’d applied for and not won. And she’d have to rerun some of her analyses—just to make sure that the report was absolutely flawless for Tom. It would be lots of work in little time, but who needed sleep? Or bathroom breaks?
“Great. In the meantime I’ll see you around and we can chat more. Adam and I will be joined at the hip for a couple of weeks, since we’re working on that grant we just got. Are you coming to my talk tomorrow?”
Olive had no idea he was giving a talk, let alone when or where, but she said “Of course! Can’t wait!” with the certainty of someone who had installed a countdown widget on her smartphone.
“And I’m staying with Adam, so I’ll see you at his place.”
Oh no. “Um . . .” She risked a glance at Adam, who was unreadable. “Sure. Though we usually meet at my place, so . . .”
“I see. You disapprove of his taxidermy collection, don’t you?” Tom stood with a smirk. “Excuse me. I’ll get some coffee and be right back.”
The second he was gone, Olive instantly turned to Adam. Now that they were alone there were about ten million topics for them to debrief on, but the only thing she could think of was, “Do you really collect taxidermied animals?”
He gave her a scathing look and took his arm away from around her shoulders. She felt cold all of a sudden. Bereft.
“I’m sorry. I had no idea he was your friend, or that you two had a grant together. You do such different research, the possibility didn’t even cross my mind.”
“You did mention that you don’t believe cancer researchers can benefit from collaborating with computational modelists.”
“You—” She noticed the way his mouth was twitching and wondered when exactly they’d gotten on teasing terms. “How do you two know each other?”
“He was a postdoc in my lab, back when I was a Ph.D. student. We’ve kept in touch and collaborated through the years.”
So he must be four or five years older than Adam.
“You went to Harvard, right?”
He nodded, and a terrifying thought occurred to her. “What if he feels obliged to take me on because I’m your fake girlfriend?”
“Tom won’t. He once fired his cousin for breaking a flow cytometer. He’s not exactly tenderhearted.”
Takes one to know one, she thought. “Listen, I’m sorry this is forcing you to lie to your friend. If you want to tell him that this is fake . . .”
Adam shook his head. “If I did, I’d never live it down.”
She let out a laugh. “Yeah, I can see that. And honestly it wouldn’t reflect well on me, either.”
“But, Olive, if you do end up deciding that you want to go to Harvard, I’ll need you to keep it a secret until the end of September.”
She gasped, realizing the implications of his words. “Of course. If people know that I’m leaving, the department chair will never believe that you’re not leaving, too. I hadn’t even thought of it. I promise I won’t tell anyone! Well, except for Malcolm and Anh, but they’re great at keeping secrets, they’d never—”
His eyebrow rose. Olive winced.
“I will make them keep this secret. I swear.”
“I appreciate it.”
She noticed that Tom was on his way back to the table and leaned closer to Adam to quickly whisper, “One more thing. The talk he mentioned, the one he’s giving tomorrow?”
“The one you ‘can’t wait’ for?”
Olive bit the inside of her cheek. “Yes. When and where is it going to be?”
Adam laughed silently just as Tom sat down again. “Don’t worry. I’ll email you the details.”
Chapter Six
HYPOTHESIS: When compared with multiple types and models of furniture, Adam Carlsen’s lap will be rated in the top fifth percentile for comfort, coziness, and enjoyment.
The moment Olive opened the door of the auditorium she and Anh exchanged a wide-eyed look and said, in unison, “Holy shit.”
In her two years at Stanford she had been to countless seminars, trainings, lectures, and classes in this lecture hall, and yet she’d never seen the room this full. Maybe Tom was giving out free beer?
“I think they made the talk mandatory for immunology and pharmacology,” Anh said. “And I overheard at least five people in the hallway saying that Benton is ‘a known science hottie.’ ” She stared critically at the podium, where Tom was chatting with Dr. Moss from immunology. “I guess he’s cute. Though not nearly as cute as Jeremy.”
Olive smiled. The air in the room was hot and humid, smelling like sweat and too many human beings. “You don’t have to stay. This is probably a fire hazard and not even remotely relevant to your research—”
“It beats doing actual work.” She grabbed Olive’s wrist, pulling her through the throng of grads and postdocs crowding the entrance and down the stairs on the side. They were just as packed. “And if this guy is going to take you away from me and to Boston for an entire year, I want to make sure that he deserves you.” She winked. “Consider my presence the equivalent of a father cleaning his rifle in front of his daughter’s boyfriend before prom.”
“Aww, Daddy.”
There was nowhere to sit, of course, not even on the floor or on the steps. Olive spotted Adam in an aisle seat a few meters away. He was back to his usual black Henley and deep in conversation with Holden Rodrigues. When Adam’s eyes met Olive’s, she grinned and waved at him. For some yet unknown reason that likely had to do with the fact that they were sharing this huge, ridiculous, unlikely secret, Adam now felt like a friendly face. He didn’t wave back, but his gaze seemed softer and warmer, and his mouth curved into that tilt that she’d learned to recognize as his version of a smile.
“I can’t believe they didn’t switch the talk to one of the bigger auditoriums. There is not nearly enough space for— Oh, no. No, no, no.”
Olive followed Anh’s gaze, and saw at least twenty new people arrive. The crowd immediately started pushing Olive toward the front of the room. Anh yelped when a first-year from neuroscience who weighed about four times as much as she did stepped on her toe. “This is ridiculous.”
“I know. I can’t believe more people are—”
Olive’s hip bumped against something—someone. She turned to apologize, and—it was Adam. Or, Adam’s shoulder. He was still chatting with Dr. Rodrigues, who wore a displeased expression and was muttering, “Why are we even here?”
“Because he’s a friend,” Adam said.
“Not my friend.”
Adam sighed and turned to look at Olive.
“Hey—sorry.” She gestured in the direction of the entrance. “A bunch of new people just came in and apparently the space in this room is finite. I think it’s a law of physics, or something.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’d take a step back, but . . .”
On the podium, Dr. Moss took the mic and began introducing Tom.
“Here,” Adam told Olive, making to stand from his chair. “Take my seat.”
“Oh.” It was nice of him to offer. Not fake-dating-to-save-her-ass, spend-twenty-bucks-on-junk-food-for-her nice, but still very nice. Olive couldn’t possib
ly accept. Plus, Adam was a professor, which meant that he was older and all that. Thirtysomething. He did look fit, but he probably had a bum knee and was only a few years short of osteoporosis. “Thank you, but—”
“Actually, that would be a terrible idea,” Anh interjected. Her eyes were darting between Olive and Adam. “No offense, Dr. Carlsen, but you’re three times larger than Olive. If you stand, the room’s going to burst.”
Adam stared at Anh like he had no idea whether he’d just been insulted.
“But,” she continued, this time looking at Olive, “it’d be great if you could do me a solid and sit on your boyfriend’s lap, Ol. Just so I don’t have to stand on my toes?”
Olive blinked. And then she blinked again. And then she blinked some more. Near the podium, Dr. Moss was still introducing Tom—“Got his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt and then moved to a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, where he pioneered several techniques in the field of imaging”—but her voice sounded as if it was coming from far, far away. Possibly because Olive couldn’t stop thinking about what Anh had proposed, which was just . . .
“Anh, I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Olive mumbled under her breath, avoiding glancing in Adam’s direction.
Anh gave her a look. “Why? You’re taking up space we don’t have, and it’s only logical that you use Carlsen as a chair. I would, but he’s your boyfriend, not mine.”
For a moment, Olive tried to imagine what Adam would do if Anh decided to sit on his lap, and figured that it would probably end up involving someone being murdered and someone doing the murdering—she wasn’t sure who’d be doing what. The mental image was so ridiculous that she almost giggled out loud. Then she noticed the way Anh was looking at her expectantly. “Anh, I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because. This is a scientific talk.”
“Psh. Remember last year, when Jess and Alex made out for half of that CRISPR lecture?”
“I do—and it was weird.”
“Nah, it wasn’t. Also, Malcolm swears that during a seminar he saw that tall guy from immunology get a hand job from—”
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