Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

            “As opposed to? What chianti vintage you celebrated your evil triumph with? The breed of the mandatory supervillain white cat you were stroking? The decibels at which you cackled?”

            “As opposed to why it got accepted.”

            I know exactly where he’s going with this. “It was a fluke.”

            “Maybe,” he concedes. “But here’s the thing: if a theoretical geologist wrote a bullshit article saying that the inner core of the earth is made of nougat, and the foremost authority in the discipline, say, the New England Journal of Rocks, decided to publish and endorse the article, I wouldn’t be so quick to chalk it off as a fluke. Instead I’d investigate whether there is a systemic problem in the way theoretical geology papers are assessed. Whether the editor made a mistake.”

            I swallow. It goes down like broken glass. “I am willing to acknowledge that the system is fallible, if you stop pretending that you acted out of concern for the injustice of the peer-review system and admit that you maliciously exploited its loopholes because you wanted to . . . You still haven’t answered, actually. Why did you do it?”

            “Not for any reason you think, Elsie.”

            I bite my lip to not bark at him to stop using my name. “Not to pull an epic prank and become famous among the lab bros?”

            “No.” I wish he sounded defensive or offended or—anything at all. He’s just matter-of-fact, like he’s saying a simple truth.

            “And not the same reason you want to hire an experimentalist over me?”

            He draws back, looking surprised. Disturbed, even. “You think I don’t want to hire you because you’re a theorist?”

            I almost snort and say, Yes, of course, but then I remember my first meeting with him, back in the summer. The way he looked at me a little too hard, hesitated a little too long before shaking my hand. “Well,” I concede with a small shrug, “I suppose you do come by your dislike of me honestly.”

            He huffs out a laugh and shakes his head. “Again, with this supposed dislike.”

            “I heard you talking to Greg about me.” I ignore the way his eyes widen, almost alarmed. “Asking him how quickly he planned to get rid of me.” I pull on the hem of my skirt again, and his eyes dart to my knees, lingering for a moment before ricocheting away. I should probably stop doing that. I need a new nervous habit. Nail biting. Fidget spinners. I’ve heard great things about crystal meth.

            “I’ve never said—”

            “Oh, it’s fine.” I wave my hand. “You have every right to your opinion of me. You think I’m not good enough for him. I don’t care.” Much.

            He bites the inside of his mouth. His paw-like hand reaches out to play with something on his desk—a 3D-printed model of the Large Hadron Collider. “You make lots of assumptions about my thoughts,” he says, setting it down. “Negative assumptions.”

            “Your thoughts are clearly negative.”

            “It might be connected to the fact that you’ve been insincere with my brother for months.”

            I sigh. “We can navel-gaze about how abominable a girlfriend I am till Betelgeuse explodes, but there are a few things you don’t know about me and Greg, and until—”

            “There are many things I don’t know.” He drums his fingers on his desk, slow, methodical. I cannot look away. “I spent hours last night trying to home in on this, and I’m not any closer to sorting you out. For instance, why would you lie about your job? You’re an adjunct, not Jeff Bezos’s accountant. And the fact that not only are you a physicist, but you’re interviewing here . . . My first instinct would be to assume that it has something to do with me.”

            “I—”

            “But I saw your face last night. You had no idea who I was. So back to square one. Why the lie? And what else have you lied about? How have you kept it up for months without Greg realizing it? How will he react when he finds out? And above all, how will you react when he finds out?” He stares at me like I’m a hexagonal Rubik’s cube. I picture him lying in a bed too small for his frame, wondering all sorts of things about me, and nearly shiver. “Are you in love with my brother, Elsie?”