Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

            “I don’t doubt it.” Cece lies back on the couch, watching like my meltdown is the apotheosis of entertainment. Hedgie lounges in her lap with a schadenfreudey, demonic gleam, clearly getting a serotonin boost from my impending demise. “That article he wrote was such a huge deal, every academic field still talks about it. Even linguistics. How did you not know what he looked like?”

            I rub my eyes. My fingers come back soot black. “I was engaging in an academic boycott.”

            “Maybe not your most fortunate idea.”

            “If someone wrote a hoax paper saying that adjectives suck, you’d boycott them, too.”

            “I’d straight up murder them. And I’m proud of you for finally yelling at someone—a most pleasing moment in your career. But my question is, how are you going to do”—she waves her hand inchoately—“all that?”

            “Do what?”

            “Hatch out of the yolky egg of adjuncthood. Get the job. Make Jack rue the day he was born. What’s the plan here?”

            “Right. Yeah.” I stop pacing. Massage my temples. “I have none.”

            “I see no flaws in that.”

            The only response I can think of involves kicking the top part of the credenza. I do just that, then proceed to limp around with a swollen pinky toe.

            “I’ve never seen you like this, Elsie.”

            “I’ve never felt like this.” I’m a Large Hadron Collider: atomic particles smash angrily about my body, building up the energy to burn Jack to a crisp. Or at least cook him well done. I can’t remember the last time I experienced so many negative emotions. “I should have known. I always had a bad feeling about him, and last night—that’s why he’s so good at Go. He was a physicist all along, that—that piece of Uranus—”

            “Science insult. Nice.”

            “I bet he thinks in Fahrenheit—”

            “Ooh, sick burn.”

            “—and spends his free time flying to Westminster Abbey to dance on Stephen Hawking’s grave—”

            “Hawking’s dead?”

            “—and won’t even bother calling Greg to ask for an explanation, because he’s a sadistic, egotistical, ignorant black hole of sh—”

            “Elsie, babe, do you need us here for this, or should we go to our room to mourn Stephen?”

            I stop pacing. Cece and Hedgie are staring, heads tilted at the same angle. “Sorry,” I say sheepishly.

            “Not gonna lie, it’s kinda fun to see you soapbox it all out, geyser-style. I’m sure there are some serious health benefits to this. But before you pull a machete out of your butt crack and begin the rampage, let me point out, this Smith-Turner dude? He cannot touch you.”

            “He may not be able to knee me in the groin or poison my tea with a vial of measles, but—”

            “He also cannot interfere with your interview.”

            “If Jack tells Volkov or Monica, I—”

            “Pff.” She waves her hand. “He won’t.”

            “He won’t?” I squint at Cece. Is she placating me? I wouldn’t know—I never need placating.

            “First, admitting that he knows you from a nonacademic setting would create a sizable conflict of interest. They’d force him to recuse himself from the search committee. He’d lose the ability to influence the other members.”

            “Oh.” I nod. First slowly, then not. “You’re right.”

            “Plus, you’re not contrabanding cigars or organizing illegal cockfights. You told a small, irrelevant lie about your personal life to a passing acquaintance. For all Jack knows, you’re in the witness protection program. Or you misspoke when you were first introduced. Or you and Greg have a role-play kink you expand out of the bedroom: you pretend to be a librarian at his grandma’s birthday, he spanks you with Billy the IKEA bookcase, orgasms are had. Consensual, Swedish, and above all: private.”