Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

            I sit back in my chair and—I want it bad, so bad, I moan. My way out of fake-girlfriending. Above all, my way out of the crappiest, lamest circle of academia: the one of adjunct professors.

            I know that I sound dramatic. I know that the title conjures lofty images. Professor? Has prestige, nurtures minds, wears tweed jackets. Adjunct? Pretty word, starts with the first letter of the alphabet, reminds one faintly of a sneeze. When I tell people that I’m an adjunct professor of physics at several Boston universities, they think that I made it in life. That I’m adulting. And I let them. Take my mom: she has lots to worry about, between my idiot brother and my other idiot brother. It’s good for her to believe that her daughter is a fully operational human being with access to basic healthcare.

            Not good for her? To know that I teach nine courses and commute between three different universities, translating into some five hundred students sending me pics of the weird rash on their crotch to get their absence excused. That I make so little money, it’s almost no money. That I have no long-term contract or benefits.

            Cue mournful violin sonata.

            It’s not that I don’t like teaching. It’s just that . . . I really dislike teaching. Really, really, really. I’m constantly drowning in the ever-swallowing quicksand of student emails, and I’m way too screwed up to shape young minds into anything that’s not aberrant. My dreams of physics academia always entailed me as a full-time researcher, a blackboard, and long hours spent pondering the theories on the equatorial sections of Schwarzschild wormholes.

            And yet here I am. Adjuncting and fake-girlfriending on the side. Teaching load: 100 percent. Despair load: incalculable.

            But things might be turning around. Adjuncts are cheap labor, the gig workers of academia, but tenure-track positions . . . oh, tenure tracks. I shiver just thinking about them. If adjuncts float like buoys in the open sea, tenure tracks are oil rigs cemented into the ocean floor. If adjuncts open Nickelback concerts, tenure tracks headline Coachella. If adjuncts are Laughing Cow wedges, tenure tracks are pule cheese, lovingly made from the milk of Serbian Balkan donkeys.

            Point is, I’ve been academia’s disposable fake girlfriend for a while now, and I’m exhausted. I’m all done. I’m ready to graduate to a real relationship, ideally something lasting with MIT—who’ll put a 401(k) and a ring on it.

            Unless they choose the other physicist they’re interviewing. Oh God. What if they choose the other physicist they’re interviewing?

            “Elsie? Are you thinking about whether they’ll hire the other candidate?”

            “Don’t read my mind, please.”

            Cece laughs. “Listen—they won’t. You’re the shit. All those years in grad school spent thinking about multiverses and binomial equations and . . . protons?” I lift my eyebrow. “Fine, I have no idea what you do. But you forsook a social life—and oftentimes personal hygiene—to elevate yourself above the sea of mediocre white men that is theoretical physics. And now—one job opening this year, one, and out of hundreds of applicants, you’re in the final round—”

            “Two job openings. I didn’t get an interview for Duke—”

            “Because Duke’s a nepotistic swamp and the position was already earmarked for the chair’s cousin’s son’s girlfriend’s llama, or whatever.” She hops off the counter and sits across from me, reaching out to cup my hand. “You’re going to get the job. I know it. Just be yourself during the interview.” She bites her lip. “Unless you can be Stephen Hawking. Is there any way you could—”

            “No.”

            “Then yourself will do.” She smiles. “Think of the future. Of your livable salary, which will allow us to hire some brawny lad to come lift the top part of the credenza onto the bottom part of the credenza.” She points at the hutch in the corner of the living room. Cece and I hit a wall mid-assembly. Three years ago. “And of course it will keep me in the cheese lifestyle I am accustomed to.”

            It’s easy, with Cece, to smile and let myself believe. “Unlimited pecorino romano.”

            “And all the insulin your worthless pancreas desires.”

            “Concrete bricks. To squash the Raid-resistant crab-hornet spiders.”

            “A little plasma TV for Hedgie’s terrarium.”