Theo snorts. I choke on my latte.
“Then the label printer dies, so I’m writing on wet plastic with a marker clearly not meant for that. Ink slides right off. I start calling drinks by modifiers like a lunatic—‘tall caramel, extra hot, too many pumps of raspberry syrup?’—and it actually works.”
Holden, without looking up: “Modifiers over names is standard. Fewer collisions.”
Kai points at him. “See? Takes a genius to get it. Anyway, a toddler tips a fistful of coins into the tip jar and then takes one back like it’s a bank. Manager catches me laughing and assigns me to ‘lid duty.’ Lid duty is just… lids. For an hour.”
Another shush. Kai grins. “But hey, I survived. Although now my coworkers call me Alex With Oat.”
Holden checks his watch, and I—purely for science—watch him do just that. Tendons flex, metal flashes, and the forearm–shiny thing combo sends heat skittering through me like a faulty Bunsen.
He starts packing with that exacting efficiency he applies to everything: pen capped, papers squared, chair slid in until it kisses thetable. “I’m late for a lecture,” he tells Theo. They stand; Theo throws us a grin and a friendly wave. Holden gives me a single, unreadable nod—dark eyes offering exactly zero data—and follows.
Well. That could’ve gone worse. Right?
“Girl, what did you do to him?” Kai asks, eyes tracking them through the maze of tables.
“What? Nothing. I just… I don’t think he likes me.”
“Yeah, no shit,” he says, scoffing. He sees my reaction and quickly adds, “But I’ve heard he’s tough on students, so maybe it’s not personal.”
I nod, even though I’ve seen him with other people—no one’s handing him the Nobel Prize in Warm Fuzzies, but it’s different with me. Colder. Like he’s actively increasing the distance, not just living in it.
Like I said, I don’t need to be universally adored. But this feels like an issue I should identify, so I can decide whether to push back or let it be. Did I unintentionally do something to upset him? Is there something wrong with me to begin with? I came here for marine biology, not a slow-burn academic panic spiral.
And yet.
CHAPTER FOUR
My first pet as a child was a tiny, stubborn crab I named Barnacle. He escaped the very same day I found him, pinched my thumb for the road, and scuttled back into the tide pool. I like to think he thrived.
In hindsight, Barnacle was delivering a lesson I wouldn’t translate until much later, which is that you do not hold what was never yours and that love can sting even when it only grazes a thumbnail.
The trouble is that wisdom like that moves slowly while feelings sprint. My processing time lagged by a few years, and the message only truly landed after my first official breakup. Neuroscience would agree with me here—strong emotions have a habit of ejecting executive function from a very high window, then locking it outside for good measure.
That first breakup came a few years later, during undergrad. Malcolm Harrington was, by every definition available to any dictionary or thesaurus, a golden boy. His grades behaved, he knew what to do with both a hockey stickanda baseball bat—which some mightrank in the top ten hottest competencies—and he was fluent in STEM, which is what caught my heart, though the bright, photogenic smile and the oversized hoodies did significant supporting work.
By nothing short of a miracle, Malcolm asked me out during my first year at Dalhousie. I did the mandatory three-hundred-sixty-degree check to make sure it was not one of those situations where someone waves and you wave back only to discover their friends were standing behind you, but no, Malcolm was actually talking to me.
It started out great. Our families lived in very different tax brackets, yet he never minded walking the beach to hunt sea glass with me, and because he was a first-year too we partnered on more projects than was good for my blood pressure. That alone tells you how far gone I was, since maybe, just maybe, somewhere in a different dimension, I’m the kind of person who thrives in group projects. But on this planet, I’m the kind who grits her teeth every time someone suggests we “divide and conquer.”
A couple months passed and I began to think I had a respectable grasp on the relationship thing, but I had not crossed paths with Barnacle for nothing and his warning came back with excellent aim.
For our first symposium, Malcolm and I paired up to present an East Coast study on how rockweed canopy buffers tide-pool temperature after storms and nudges invertebrate behavior. Great ideas rarely go unnoticed, yet one thing often does, and that is the woman co-author. Halfway through the weekend his carefulwesoftened into an effortlessI, andMs. Taylorflattened intothis kid. I wish I were kidding but, unfortunately, I am not.
He compiled back-pats and a tidy cluster of emails from prospective mentors, while I collected polite thumbs-ups and the academic equivalent of a shiny gold star for completing my homework. Right there, Ilearned that being a woman in science requires arriving twice as prepared, waiting three times as patiently, and resisting five times as hard the urge to punch people in the neck when they rebrand your work as theirs.
I also learned that Malcolm was no better than Barnacle—less, if you count the fact that he did not even have a cool exoskeleton.
Since then my frontal lobe has finally come online and I’ve written myself a few house rules to get through this career without another week of couch-rot and salted-caramel, puffy-face crying over a boy who didn’t deserve me.
The rules are straightforward. If someone starts siphoning attention from my work, they go to the back burner—quietly, firmly—so I can go as far as I know I can. And I back women in STEM at every turn, because I used to read being underestimated as an insult; now I treat it as cover, a tactical advantage that buys time to build something undeniable. There’s a small revolution in taking up space in rooms that were never designed for you, and I intend to keep doing it.
Which is why I’m here, gloriously Malcolm-free, claiming a sensible rectangle of lab bench and sorting my notes before heading to the Day octopus. He isn’t technicallymine, but we have an understanding. We’re still in the get-to-know phase, yet the moment I approach with a Tupperware of LEGO, his eyes notch, his skin shifts to that curious mottling, and an arm unfurls toward the surface—the very recognizable posture of a scholar anticipating enrichment. Did I ever picture scheduling playdates with an octopus? Jokes on you, because I totally did.
Octopuses can recognize people by sight, touch, and the chemical trail we cart around. I’m not pretending he knows me after four visits, but he absolutely recognizes the puzzle kit and the toys. As ifto confirm, he extends two more arms and starts stacking pieces with the concentration of a tiny engineer.
“Look at you go. Next week I’ll bring the Batman set,” I say, dropping a few more blocks into the tank.
