Then there’s the guy a few seats over who, by all appearances, is being slowly consumed by his own nerves. He trips over words, gestures too much with his hands, and at one point accidentally refers to monk seals as “monk squirrels.” But his passion for them cuts through everything else. It’s sharp, earnest, and impossible not to admire.
What I love most is that no one’s holding back. Every person is clinging to some deeply niche passion with the kind of devotion normally reserved for cults or competitive baking. And despite the nerves and the awkward fumbles, there’s something magnetic about it all. Like the room itself is quietly shifting to accommodate this collective, chaotic brilliance.
But then, naturally, there’s me.
Holden’s eyes flick to mine—barely a tilt of the chin, prompting me to speak.
“Um, hi.” Great start. Very compelling.
“My research focuses on how octopuses adapt cognitively to environmental disruptions. Well I guess, in short, I’m studying their neural plasticity in response to habitat changes—how their problem-solving, memory, and camouflage behavior shifts under stress. They’re remarkably intelligent, highly adaptable... arguably better at handling stress than most graduate students I know.”
That earns a couple soft laughs. Encouraging. I press on, against better judgment.
“I’m aware I talk about cephalopods like they’re my emotional support cryptids. It’s fine. I’m working on it.”
This time, the laughter is louder. Dr. Kymbert is definitely smiling. Unless I’ve blown a fuse in my optic nerve, which—given my current cortisol levels—is not entirely off the table.
Still, I’d like to formally apologize to my ancestors for whatever just came out of my mouth in that introduction.
“Anyway, I think the main point of this research is?—”
“Alright, I think we’ve heard enough,” Holden cuts in, already pulling up the syllabus on the projector. He spares one last glance my way before turning his back to us.
There’s a very specific flavour of humiliation that comes from being interrupted by a man mid-sentence. In my defense, if I’d known he was going to look at me likethat, I wouldn’t have spoken. Ever.
I catch a few people glancing my way with that look that says,If I were you, I’d fake my own death and transfer programs.And, honestly? Fair.
The rest of class goes… fine, if we’re using a grading scale where “ignored by the TA” and “pitied by two separate rows” qualify as a good thing. Around the time Holden saysmultivariate climate modelwith the ease most people reserve for ordering a latte, I make an executive decision to stop watching his mouth form perfect jargon and redirect my attention to Dr. Kymbert. As I should have from the beginning.
She doesn’t interrupt so much as calibrate. Two sentences, a precise question, and suddenly the room’s noise collapses into a well-orchestrated song. Pens start moving. Mine included. When she asks, “What failure would actually falsify your claim?” I underline it three times and make a mental note of answering it later.
They wrap with a case study—one of theirs. A joint paper on coral reef exposure to damaging tropical-cyclone waves. Mid-deployment, a storm rolled through and erased half the experiment: loggers gone, transects mangled, sections of the reef itself wiped clean like an Etch A Sketch shaken too hard. Where most people would file the whole thing under “unpublishable catastrophe,” they re-framed it: loss as measurement, absence as data. He talks surge periods and broken moorings; she talks redesign and constraint as a method. I write, in the margin like it’s a thesis-worthy revelation:Fieldwork is consenting to chaos.
It’s not reassuring. It is, however, exactly the kind of honesty I came here for.
The hallway outside bottlenecks, then exhales—one last tide of bodies surging past the labs before it goes quiet. A knot of grads near me starts the debrief, and the distribution is hilariously predictable: ninety percent Holden—citations, models, biceps—ten percent Dr. Kymbert—“intense,” “scary good.”
I know this pattern. Put two geniuses in the same room and the narrative vector tilts toward the one with broader shoulders. He’s a prodigy; she’s “intimidating.” His certainty reads as authority; hers, as attitude. Disappointing, yet notsurprising.
It’s at that moment that I get the feeling someone dragged the mountains indoors. Same scale. Same hush. Except this mountain smells faintly of sandalwood and clean pine, reminding me of home, and moves with the quiet certainty of a PhD candidate who’s already three steps ahead. Holden doesn’t so much as glance at me as he passes, which, fine—I probably haven’t earned the right to acknowledgement yet.
My brain, having logged one humiliation already today, decides to collect the set.
“So, I’m guessing you’re not a fan of cephalopods?”
He stops a few steps ahead and turns to search for the origin of the question—looking down, and then further down—at me. One eyebrow ticks up. For a second I swear his mouth almost curves into a smile, though this feels dangerously like my chicken hallucination, and then his face resets to factory settings.
“I don’t study octopi, so no.”
“It’s octopuses.” Excellent. Fire me into the sun.
“Excuse me?” His eyebrow goes higher, arms crossing over a chest I amstillchoosing not to describe for the sake of my dignity, and my anxiety hits the big red button labeledstart talking entirely too fast.
“People say octopi because it looks Latin, which it’s not.” I hear myself say, already regretting everything. “If we’re being precise, the fancy plural is octopodes, but no one uses it outside of trivia nights.”
I fidget with my bag and huff a laugh. “It’s not your fault, though. The plural of octopus is a trap designed to reveal which of us paid attention in Greek etymology class.”
His posture acquires the specific tension of a man realizing there is no emergency exit on this topic. His gaze flicks to the lab door, thenback. I can’t really blame him.
