Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

            I wander away with a smile, winding up at the half-played Go board in the corner of the room. It’s been here ever since my first visit, the wooden squares and porcelain stones incongruous amid the coastal decor. Greg is chatting with his dad, and I wonder if we’ll leave soon. I have thirty-three Vibrations, Waves, and Optics essays to grade, which will surely have me wishing for a violent death. A Fundamentals of Materials Science Scantron exam to write. And, of course, a job talk to prepare. I want—no, I need to nail it. There’s no margin of error, since it’s my way out of spending my nights fake dating and my days exchanging emails with [email protected] about whether his chinchilla’s gluten allergy should release him from the Physics 101 midterm. I’ll have to rehearse it a minimum of eleven times—i.e., the number of dimensions according to M-theory, my favorite über-string version—

            “Do you play?”

            I startle. Again. Jack stands on the other side of the board, dark eyes studying me. All his relatives are here—why is he wasting precious family time to pester his brother’s fake girlfriend?

            “Elsie?” My name, again. Said like the universe made that word for him alone. “I asked, do you play?” He sounds amused. I hate him.

            “Oh. Um, a bit.” Understatement. Go is mind twisting and punishingly intricate—therefore, many physicists’ extracurricular activity of choice. “Do you?”

            Jack doesn’t answer. Instead he adds a few white stones.

            “Oh, no.” I shake my head. “It’s someone else’s game. We can’t—”

            “Black okay?”

            Not really. But I swallow and hesitantly reach for the stones and set them down. My pride plays a nice little tug-of-war against my survival instincts: I won’t conceal my Go skills and let Jack win, but for all I know losing will transform him into a fire-breathing bison and he’ll incinerate a load-bearing wall. I don’t want to die in a house collapse, next to Jack Smith and his threesome-obsessed uncle.

            “How’s Greg?” he asks.

            “He’s over there, with your cousin,” I say absentmindedly, watching him place more stones. His hands are stupidly large. But also graceful, and it makes no sense. Also makes no sense? There are two chairs, but we’re not sitting.

            “But how is he?”

            In my humble experience, siblings at best tolerate each other, and at worst spit gum in one another’s hair. (Mine. My hair.) Jack and Greg, though, are close—for undivinable reasons, given that Greg’s a likable human disaster full of Sturm und Drang, while Jack . . . I’m not sure what Jack’s deal is. There’s a dash of bad boy there, a hint of mystery, a dollop of smoothness. And yet a touch of hunger, a raw, unrefined air. Mostly, he looks cool. Too cool to even be cool. Like maybe in high school he skipped the school dance for a Guggenheim fellow’s art exhibition and somehow still managed to get elected prom king.

            Jack looks distant. Uninterested. Effortlessly confident. Charismatic in an intriguingly opaque, inaccessible way.

            But he does care for Greg. And Greg cares for him. I heard him say, with my own two ears, that Jack is his “best friend,” someone he “can trust.” And I listened without pointing out that he can’t really trust his best friend Jack that much, or he’d be honest with him about the fake dating—because I’m a supportive fake girlfriend.

            “Greg’s good. Why do you ask?”

            “When we talked the other day he sounded stressed about Woodacre.”

            About . . . what? Is this something Greg’s girlfriend should know? “Ah, yes,” I fib. “A little.”

            “A little?”

            I busy myself with the stones. I’m not winning as easily as I expected. “It’s getting better.” Everything does with time, right?

            “Is it?”

            “Very much.” I nod enthusiastically.

            He nods, too. Less enthusiastically. “Really?”

            Jack’s actually not bad at Go. How have I not wiped the floor with him yet? “Really.”

            “I thought Woodacre was in a couple of days. I figured Greg’d be upset.”