Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood

            “Is it?” I wince. “Well, in another defense of mine, weren’t you a hunter back in grad school?”

            His shoulders stiffen imperceptibly. “My entire family hunts, and I’ve gone on more hunting trips than I’d have liked as a teen. Before I could say no.”

            “That sounds awful.” He shrugs, but it looks a little forced. “Okay. I guess I have no defense at all. I’m just an asshole.”

            He smiles. “I didn’t know you were a vegan, either. I remember Tim bringing you meat lunches back at Pitt.”

            “Yeah.” I roll my eyes. “Tim was of the school of thought that I was being stubborn and that a taste of meat would convert me back to a regular diet.” I laugh at Levi’s appalled expression. “Yeah. He’d sneak non-vegan stuff into my food all the time. He was the worst back then. Anyway, how long have you been a vegan?”

            “Twenty years, give or take.”

            “Ooh. Which animal was it for you?”

            He knows exactly what I mean. “A goat. In a cheese commercial. She looked so . . . cogent.”

            I nod somberly. “It must have been very emotional.”

            “Sure was for my parents. We fought over whether white meat is really meat for the better part of a decade.” He hands me a plate, gesturing for me to fill it. “What about you?”

            “A chicken. Really cute. He’d sometimes sit next to me and lean against my side. Until . . . yeah.”

            He sighs. “Yeah.”

            Five minutes later, sitting in a breakfast nook I’d literally give my pinkie to own, plates full of delicious food and imported beer in front of us, something occurs to me: I’ve been here for one hour and I haven’t felt uneasy—not once. I was fully ready to spend the night pretending to be in my happy place (with Dr. Curie under a blooming cherry tree in Nara, Japan), but Levi has made things weirdly . . . easy for me.

            “Hey,” I say before he can take a bite of his tacos, “thank you for today. It can’t be easy, to be so welcoming to someone you don’t particularly get along with or like, or to have them stay in your house.”

            He closes his eyes, like every other time I mention the obvious fact that there’s no love lost between us (he is surprisingly truth-averse). But when he opens them, he holds my gaze. “You’re right. It’s not easy. But not for any reason you think.”

            I frown, meaning to ask him what exactly he means by that, but he beats me to it.

            “Eat up, Bee,” he orders gently.

            I’m starving, so I do just that.





10





DORSOLATERAL PREFRONTAL CORTEX: UNTRUTHS



“I’M GOING TO switch off your speech center, now.”

            Guy looks up from under his eyelashes with a defeated sigh. “Man, I hate it when people do that.”

            I laugh. Guy’s the third astronaut I’ve tested this morning. He works on BLINK, so we weren’t originally planning to map his brain, but someone pulled out of the pilot group last minute. Brain stimulation is tricky business: it’s complicated to predict how neurons will respond, and even harder in people who have a history of epilepsy or electric misfiring. Just drinking a cup of strong coffee can mess up brain chemistry enough to make a well-consolidated stimulation protocol dangerous. When we found out that one of the astronauts we selected had a history of seizures, we decided to give his spot to Guy. Guy was ecstatic.

            “I’m going to target your Broca’s area,” I tell him.

            “Ah, yes. The famed Broca’s area.” He nods knowingly.

            I smile. “That would be your left posterior-inferior frontal gyrus. I’ll stimulate it with trains up to twenty-five hertz.”

            “Without even buying me dinner first?” He clucks his tongue.

            “To see whether it’s working, I’ll need you to talk. You can recite a poem, free-style it, doesn’t matter.” The other astronauts I tested today chose a Shakespeare sonnet and the Pledge of Allegiance.

            “Whatever I want?”