Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood

            Clearly, my brain wasn’t at her best on Friday. And I could stand here, stare at my closet, and agonize over the fact that my grad school nemesis saved my life. Or I could bask in my excitement and pick an outfit.

            I opt for black skinny jeans and a polka-dotted red top. I pull up my hair in braids that would make a Dutch milkmaid proud, put on red lipstick, and keep the jewelry to a relative minimum—the usual earrings, my favorite septum piercing, and my maternal grandmother’s ring on my left hand.

            It’s a bit weird to wear someone else’s wedding ring, but it’s the only memento I have of my nonna, and I like to put it on when I need some good luck. Reike and I moved to Messina to be with her right after our parents died. We ended up having to move again just three years later when she passed, but out of all the short-lived homes, out of all the extended relatives, Nonna is the one who loved us the most. So Reike wears her engagement ring, and I wear her wedding band. Even-steven. I shoot a quick, uplifting tweet from my WWMD account (Happy Monday! KEEP CALM AND CURIE ON, FRIENDS ) and head out.

            “You excited?” I ask Rocío when I pick her up.

            She stares at me darkly and says, “In France, the guillotine was used as recently as 1977.” I take it as an invitation to shut up, and I do, smiling like an idiot. I’m still smiling when we get our NASA ID pictures taken and when we later meet up with Guy for a formal tour. It’s a smile fueled by positive energy and hope. A smile that says, “I’m going to rock this project” and “Watch me stimulate your brain” and “I’m going to make neuroscience my bitch.”

            A smile that falters when Guy swipes his badge to unlock yet another empty room.

            “And here’s where the transcranial magnetic stimulation device will be,” he says—just another variation of the same sentence I’ve heard over. And over. And over.

            “Here is where the electroencephalography lab will be.”

            “Here you’ll do participant intake once the Review Board approves the project.”

            “Here will be the testing room you asked for.”

            Just a lot of rooms that will be, but aren’t yet. Even though communications between NASA and NIH indicated that everything needed to carry out the study would be here when I started.

            I try to keep on smiling. It’s hopefully just a delay. Besides, when Dr. Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1903, she didn’t even have a proper lab, and did all of her research out of a converted shed. Science, I tell myself in my inner Jeff Goldblum voice, finds a way.

            Then Guy opens the last room and says, “And here’s the office you two will share. Your computer should arrive soon.” That is when my smile turns into a frown.

            It’s nice, the office. Large and bright, with refreshingly not-rusted-through desks and chairs that will provide just the right amount of lumbar support. And yet.

            First of all, it’s as distant from the engineering labs as possible. I’m not kidding: if someone grabbed a protractor and solved for x (i.e., the point that’s farthest from Levi’s office), they’d find that x = my desk. So much for interdisciplinary workspaces and collaborative layouts. But that’s almost secondary, because . . .

            “Did you say computer? Singular?” Rocío looks horrified. “Like . . . one?”

            Guy nods. “The one you put on your list.”

            “We need, like, ten computers for the type of data processing we do,” she points out. “We’re talking multivariate statistics. Independent component analysis. Multidimensional scaling and recursive partitioning. Six sigma—”

            “So you need more?”

            “At the very least, buy us an abacus.”

            Guy blinks, confused. “. . . A what?”

            “We put five computers on our list,” I interject with a side look at Rocío. “We will need all of them.”

            “Okay.” He nods, taking out his phone. “I’ll make a note to tell Levi. We’re heading to meet him right now. Follow me.”

            My heartbeat accelerates—probably because the last time I saw Levi my brain confabulated that he was carrying me An Officer and a Gentleman–style, and the previous came on the tail of a year of him treating me like I’m a tax auditor. I’m nervously playing with my grandmother’s ring and wondering what disaster of galactic proportions this next meeting has in store for me, when something catches my eye through the glass wall.