The sidewalk and the street lights start to swirl around me.
My world tilts on its axis, just like when I enter a high field MRI scanner, except now it’s not the strong magnetic force scrambling up my vestibular system. I feel like I’m gliding down a waterslide headfirst, taking turn after turn into the unknown.
Thank god there’s nobody else on this sidewalk to see me lose control like this; hands shaking and breaths coming in choppy. I make the mistake of looking down at my phone that’s still bright with the wordswe regret to inform you. The hurt flares up, buckles my stomach, and clenches my chest tight.
Slow it down.
Lewis’s words come back to me, and I force myself to count to two on my inhale, four on my exhale. Once I manage to keep that up, I lengthen the intervals of my breaths and focus on the feeling of the humid night air when it passes through my nostrils.
Breathe.
In and out, and in and out again.
I think of the days, nights, weekends, months I spent writing this grant. I think of the four subprojects I planned out, each one essential to take the findings of my last research paper a step further to track how we encode memories in real time. I think of having to pack up my apartment into boxes again, another cycle ofkeepandtoss, departing from yet another town with people I don’t know enough to keep in touch with.
When I feel like I have control of my body again, I head back into the bar. My throat is parched after the quick rasps of my breath, and I stop at the bar counter to ask for a glass of water. I know I need to get back to the students, but I also don’t trust myself around them yet, with their bright eyes and open faces, their drive and motivation.
Ten years of tirelessly trying, and why the fuck is it still not enough?
I gulp down the water and head back outside, telling myself it’ll only be for a moment. Five minutes. That’s all I need to get my head on straight again.
“Frances,” someone calls. Lewis comes running up behind me as I shove through the door. Out on the sidewalk, he stops me with a warm palm on my shoulder. I turn around.
“What’s going on? Are you okay?” he asks, his eyes scanning my face.
I wipe my damp forehead with the sleeve of my shirtdress.I don’t want him to be perceptive now. Not when I need to bury all of this sadness and self-doubt and dejection down, or else I won’t function for the rest of the evening.
“What happened?” he insists.
“It doesn’t matter.” I shake my head and walk farther down the sidewalk, if only to put space between him and me. “I just need a moment.”
“Oh, but it does matter,” Lewis says and follows close behind me, even when I take a turn into the alleyway that leads to the brewery behind the bar. Caged industrial-style lights line the wall above us, and under their dim glow, his gaze skirts over my face again only to settle on my eyes. “If it’s about the grant, there are other options.”
He brings up the grant like it’s nothing. Like I didn’t spend all winter camped out behind my computer writing the damn thing, schmoozing professors to see if they’d put their names on it, then asking people for feedback to get even more of a competitive advantage. Like I didn’t cut my Christmas holidays short to help my boss with exam corrections, only so he would scrutinize the grant down to the last hypothesis.
I shouldn’t be surprised that Lewis handles a failed grant so casually. All my resentment for him and the advantage that his opinion paper gave him come bubbling back up. Apology or not, the fact is that he’s miles ahead of me in this rodeo.
“What wouldyouknow about other options?” I bite out. “Maybe to you, all of this comes easy. Maybe it doesn’t take you ages to work on revisions for a paper, months to come up with the right hooks for grants.”
“But that’s just—”
“You and I?” I interrupt. “We operate in different leagues. You publish higher. You have all your collaborations, your advisors who network to get you hired or mentor you throughwhatever hurdle you need to take next. But guess what? I don’t. And this Sawyer’s—I wanted to meet people here, to connect, to see if I could be useful in any other lab, butgod.” I’m long past the point of lowering my voice, suddenly realizing how furious I am, above all, at myself. “One tiny blip of judgment, and suddenly instead of doing what I came here for, I am obsessing about faking a relationship because otherwise my career would truly be over, never mind how low my chances are at this point at making it in academia. Everyone knows that—”
“That’s not—” Lewis tries to interject.
I raise my voice over him, “Which is one more thing I’m mad about, because, once again, I care too much about what other people think, when I should be more like you.” With the anger coursing hot through my limbs, I rake my fingers through my hair.
He takes a step forward and tilts his chin as if to measure me up. “And you think that’d do you any good?”
“Yes! You’re this insanely driven scientist. You don’t let anything come between you and what truly matters,” I yell.
“And neither do you,” he yells back, and reaches up as if to pluck my hands from my hair. “Otherwise, why would we be doing any of this?” Mid-movement, he stops and stretches his arms sideways instead, encompassing the alleyway, the city, us.
“Frances, let me talk here. You’re nothing like me,” he continues, and something desperate spans his expression and his voice. His hands bridge those last inches, until he closes his fingers around my wrists and pulls our arms down into the space between us. “You’re not and that’s a good thing. My only brother is basically a stranger to me and why? Because I have fucking unresolved daddy issues. If I were you, with an ex-boyfriend who’s a superstar in our field, organizing this summer school, and—surprise—has also gotten engaged, I wouldn’t even have come here. But you, you swallow your pride and pack your bagsand get on your way. Because the science matters more to you than any personal stuff.”
I open my mouth, ready to argue back, until I track that he’s pivoted into complimenting me. I feel outsmarted.“What?”
“Also, this stuff about not having what it takes to make it in academia? It’s infuriating that this broken system makes you doubt yourself that way and believe me—I know I’ve played my role in this.” His gaze bores into mine as he faces me head-on. “You know what should matter for making it in academia? That you like to pull other people up, that you’re brilliant and smart and driven and that you have good ideas—I should know because I’ve been admiring your work foryears. So, one decision by one grant committee?” He breaks off his rant with an exasperated laugh. “Screw them.”
