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“Lots of competition, I bet.” He has a dimple. Only one. Ugh.
“Tons.But I had an in. Through the D&D Club.”
His laugh is soft. Relaxed. Lopsided. Different from the unyielding expression I’ve come to expect from him. Even more breaking news: I’m smiling, too. Yikes.
“I bet you weren’t half as cool,” I say, pressing my lips together, assessing him. The broad shoulders. The strange, striking eyes. Thecasual confidence of someone who was never picked anything but first during PE. Jack was no marching tuba. “You held the heads of people like me in the toilet bowl. Occupied the janitor’s closet with the cheerleaders.”
“We mathletes often do,” he murmurs, a little cryptic. “Your models are elegant and grounded. It’s clear that you have a very intuitive grasp of particle kinetics, and your theories on the transitions to spherulitic structures are fascinating. Your 2021 paper in theAnnals, in particular.”
My eyebrow lifts. I don’t believe for a second that anything he’s saying is true. “I’m surprised you read theAnnals.”
He laughs once, silent. “Because it’s too advanced for me?”
“Because of what you’ve done to Christophe Laurendeau.”
The detached nothingness of his expression slips. Morphs into something harsh. “Christophe Laurendeau.”
“Not a familiar name? He was the editor of theAnnalswhen you pulled your stunt. And, more recently, my mentor.” Jack’s eyes widen into something that looks beautifully, unexpectedly like shock.Splendid.I exploit my advantage by leaning forward in the seat, resist the temptation to adjust the hem of my skirt, and say, “No theorist has forgotten about the article. It might have been fifteen years ago, but—”
Wait. Something doesn’t add up.
Jack’s three years older than Greg, which makes him about five years older than me. Thirty-two or thirty-three. Except that...
I study him narrowly. “The hoax article came out when I was in middle school. You must have been...”
“Seventeen.”
I shrink back in the chair. Was he some sort of wunderkind? “Were you already doing your Ph.D.?”
“I was in high school.”
“Then why—how does one submit a paper to a higher education journal atseventeen?”
He shrugs, and whatever emotion he was showing a minute ago has been reabsorbed into the customary blank wall. “I didn’t know there were age limits.”
“No, but most seventeen-year-olds were too busy begging for hall passes or rereadingTwilight—”
“Twilightand Bill Nye, huh?”
“—to focus on cloak-and-dagger ploys that involved writing offensive, unethical parody articles whose only purpose is to deceive hardworking scholarsand slander an entire discipline.” I end the sentence practically yelling, nails clawing the armrests.
Okay. Maybe I’m notsupercalm. Maybe I could use some deep breaths. De-escalate. How does one de-escalate? I don’t know. I’m usuallyalreadyde-escalated. Unless Jack’s around, that is. Jack, who’s sitting there, relaxed, all-knowing. Punchable.
I close my eyes and think of my happy place. A warm beach somewhere. No one is fair haired and massive. Cheese is heavily featured.
“You know what puzzles me?” Jack asks.
“The entire gamut of human emotions?”
“That, too.” I look at him. Take in his self-deprecating smile when there isn’t a single self-deprecating bone in his body. “But here’s the thing: whenever the article comes up, what everyone asks is how I could do such ahorriblething. Why did I write it? Why did I submit? Why did I set out to humiliate theoretical physics?”
“As opposed to? What chianti vintage you celebrated your evil triumph with? The breed of the mandatory supervillain white cat you were stroking? The decibels at which you cackled?”
“As opposed to why it got accepted.”
I know exactly where he’s going with this. “It was a fluke.”
“Maybe,” he concedes. “But here’s the thing: if a theoretical geologist wrote a bullshit article saying that the inner core of the earth is made of nougat, and the foremost authority in the discipline, say, theNew England Journal of Rocks, decided to publish and endorse the article, I wouldn’t be so quick to chalk it off as a fluke. Instead I’d investigate whether there is a systemic problem in the way theoretical geology papers are assessed. Whetherthe editormade a mistake.”
