It’ll be easy as pie, he said back at the cabin when we talked about the week ahead, and it’s true that we don’t have to worry about convincingly portraying our relationship anymore, but we both forgot a crucial element in our charade, and the havoc it could wreak if it went missing.
The notebook.
Lewis’snotebook. The one that has records on his conditions for fake dating me, the start and end date of our plan, all the steps we thought of on the walk after Jacob and Vivienne’s dinner. There’s one page that lists the names of all my family members, my teaching schedule from last semester, including weekends when we would’ve visited each other, and the name of who I believed to be the most influential and invaluable person in the history of psychology, although I’m not sure how the latter fits in with the rest. (I told him B. F. Skinner, which Lewis reacted to with an appreciative hum.)
“How can it be gone?” I hiss at Lewis, who sits with his elbows on his knees and head in his hands on the terraced wall snaking around the raised plant beds in front of Schermerhorn Hall. Despite the midday heat, I’m pacing up and down in front of him, unable to sit down. Since he outlined the problem, the deluge of adrenaline in my veins hasn’t let up.
Lewis lifts his head and shifts forward to pat his back pocket. “It’s not there.”
“But you always have it on you, rain or shine. You even found a place for it in those tight shorts of yours when we went hiking,” I point out.
“Dr. Silberstein,” Lewis tuts. “Were you looking at my ass?”
I roll my eyes and can’t help the laugh shooting out of my mouth. It takes some of my tension with it. I stop in front of Lewis and turn the conversation back to the matter at hand. “Just because the notebook’s missing doesn’t mean people will read it, right? If I were to find a notebook, I’d take it to the lost-and-found. Or check the first page to see who it belongs to.”
Lewis grimaces. “It doesn’t have my name in it. At least not on the first page. Nobody would know it belonged to me unless they flip all the way through to our fake-dating plan.”
My heart speeds up. If anybody finds his notebook, we’re royally screwed. Because no matter how obviously attracted we are to each other, it’ll be there, in graphite on white paper, that it all started as a wild plan we concocted.
I gulp and resume my pacing. “Are you sure you didn’t leave it in your room? Or at the cabin? When’s your friend going up there next, so he can check?”
Lewis shakes his head. “I had it this morning. I noted down a reference.”
“I didn’t see you in the lecture.”
“I was in the back. I got in late because I did the school run with Al this morning.”
“Right. Okay, so you had it this morning, which means it has to besomewhere. Like the lecture hall, or… the bathrooms?”
Lewis nods. “I checked, but no luck. Someone must’ve found it and taken it.”
“Fuck.” I groan, as I remember the bad-decision-to-sudden-career-death flowchart that had prompted me to convince Lewis to fake date in the first place. If someone were to leaf through the notes and get a line-by-line breakdown of our fake relationship, the news would spread fast in this small community, damaging our reputations irreparably. And then, who’d want to work with us?
It’s not only mine, but also Lewis’s career that’s at stake now. If we’re exposed, he goes down with me.
AndIroped him into this.
Guilt turns the swirl in my stomach into nausea as a bead of sweat trails down my neck.
“Let’s go and check again,” I say, voice tight with desperation. “It has to be somewhere. It has to.”
Lewis presses his lips together. I take his hand, and as we walk back into the building, I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at the irony that my looming unemployment isn’t my biggest problem anymore.
We look for the notebook everywhere.
We crouch down to search below the rows of foldout seats in the lecture hall. We jog down corridors, dart into empty classrooms, and knock at the doors of the ones that are occupied by groups of other scientists. We scour the restrooms of the buildings. We visit Regina at the secretary’s office and the security desk at the entrance to ask for a lost-and-found, andall the while my stomach twists deeper into anxiety. Lewis gets quieter, his face cementing into a mask.
“I’m not sure if it’s a good or a bad sign it hasn’t turned up yet,” I mutter to him as we make our way back to the concourse.
“Definitely bad. It should have been found and dropped off somewhere by now, unless the person who found it kept it.”
Instead of picturing whose hands the notebook could’ve gotten into and what they’re doing with that information, I scan the concourse, but it’s pure chaos: Crowds of people push around, backpacks are strewn on the floors. Discarded plastic and cardboard tubes.
If the notebook is here, it could be anywhere.
Lewis pulls me against his side as we make our way into the first row of poster boards. A motivated grad student spots us and starts presenting his research, and I nod mechanically as my eyes search the floor below us.
“—actually really hoping to talk to you, Dr. North…”
