Deep End

ON MONDAY MORNING, WE’RE TORTURED WITH STRENGTH training. Pen’s giddiness hums throughout the locker room. Victoria is not an early bird, and her bad mood is an ugly, tangible thing.

“It’s six fifteen a.m.,” she grunts. “Let’s keep unconscionable displays of happiness at a minimum.”

“Oh, come on. It’s such a good day.”

“You mispronounced heinous.”

“But we have synchro practice.” Pen sneaks up to Victoria, pressing a surprise kiss to her cheek. “I know you like it.”

“What I like is being on the couch feeling my atoms rot as I succumb to entropy.”

On paper, Victoria and I are the same person: two promising athletes who sold Coach Sima a bill of goods, then merrily proceeded to never fulfill their potential. I was injured, but Victoria’s talent simply . . . fizzled. Bad luck, competition anxiety, skills that never quite turned out right—it all conspired together, and she never qualified for the NCAA championship. Her perennially crotchety state is the mask she put on when her diving started going south. I know this because a few weeks ago I overheard her admit to Pen how much she needed a successful senior season to go out with a bang.

As for Pen . . . she’s always cheerful, but I’m not going to try to guess where today’s extra spark comes from, because it’s none of my business. I stuff the thought in the same corner of my head where I painstakingly shoved Lukas’s email—it’s a bad idea, he’s my captain’s ex, maybe he just wants to get back at her, make her jealous, bad idea, what is he into, what do I need, bad idea.

I focus on training. Field questions from Coach Sima about my “issues,” and his demand that I “stop changing those dives at the last minute. What is this, improv class?” Listen to Pen and Victoria’s golden retriever and black cat banter throughout lifting and drills, marveling at their unlikely friendship.

I wonder what that’s like. My old synchro partner and I had a good relationship, but she was older than me. We dove together for only a year or so, and outside of that we had little in common. I’ve never been bullied or maliciously isolated, and I hardly ever don’t get along with people. Unfortunately, I rarely ever get along with them enough to qualify as more than an acquaintance. And, of course, my best friend, Josh, hasn’t talked to me in over a year.

I spend the next hour focused on my lecture, but find myself scowling at the end, when Otis, Dr. Carlsen’s TA, returns last week’s homework. Comp bio was supposed to be my safe place this semester, but here I am, leafing through the pages, finding no letter grade. I covertly eye the guy sitting in front of me, the one with the cowlick the size of an orca.

D, his paper says in red ink. Below: You still have time to drop this course. AC

Orca Cowlick buries his face in his hand. I frantically look for a similarly inspirational quote on my own paper, and find it at the bottom of the second to last page.

See me after class. AC

My entire body goes hot, then cold, then damp. Every student knows that there is only one infraction egregious enough to warrant a summons.

Plagiarism.

The Great Expellable Offense.

I’m about to be accused of plagiarism. Which I am not guilty of. Which I can prove.

I still have the Word file. I can run it through the plagiarism detection software. I already would have, if Dr. Ozone-Hating Triassic Dinosaur Carlsen didn’t demand hard copies.

I power walk to his office. Every door in biology is wide open—except the one of Dr. Adam J. (Jackass?) Carlsen, which is just ajar enough to not be considered closed. Clearly a department policy loophole.

I knock with trembling hands, a little belligerent, mostly terrified. My diving, my other courses, my MCAT, my lack of meaningful social connections, my mean roommate, my long-distance dog—everything in my life is fucked up, or painful, or beyond my control, except for comp fucking bio. I can’t be kicked out of this class.

Dr. Carlsen spares me a three-nanosecond glance and turns back to his monitor. “My office hours are Thursday from—”

“I’m Scarlett Vandermeer.”

His look is a barely disguised and I should give a fuck, because?

“You asked me to come see you.”

And I should give a fuck about that, because?

“From your computational biology class?”

“Ah. Come in, please. Take a seat.”

I don’t want to be alone with this inflexible, bloodcurdling man. I leave the door wide open and park my butt on a chair. “I can prove it,” I say.

“Prove what?”

“That I didn’t plagiarize the essay.”

His brow furrows. “Of course you didn’t.”

Oh?

“I do need to know, however, if you wrote it on your own.”

“What do you mean?”

“I asked you to choose a science problem and solve it using computational biology. You proposed to classify different types of pancreatic cells using deep learning, and detailed the appropriate neural networks. Was it your idea? It’s a simple yes or no question. Don’t waste my time.”

I scowl at his audacity. Hot blood rushes to my cheeks. Of course it was my idea. Who the hell would I even ask to—

“I see that it was.” He seems . . . pleased? “Would you be interested in pursuing it further?”

“What?”

“The deep learning algorithm. Would you like to participate in a research project?”

“So it’s . . . is this why you asked me to come here?”

He nods.

I sink back into my chair, and must spend too long savoring my relief at having escaped plagiarism jail, because he prods: “The research project.”

“Oh, right.” Would I? In my carefully and anally crafted academic plan, I was going to get some research experience next summer, just in time to ask my mentor to write me a rec letter. Med schools love that stuff. “Maybe?”

“Maybe.” A puzzled eyebrow lifts, like he’s encountering the concept of indecision for the first time.

“Well, I’m a student athlete, and this semester is . . .”

His eyebrow demands to know, Did I ask?

Nope, you did not. My bad. “It would be amazing. But I’m not sure I’m quite good enough to . . .” I drift off, because he’s now writing something on a Post-it, then handing it over.

It’s an orange square. The printed message in the top corner reads Pumpkin Spice Life. The bottom is a smiling coffee cup, little hearts orbiting around the lid. Scribbled in the middle is an email.

“If you decide you’re interested, contact my colleague.”

“Will they know who I am?”

“Yes,” he says. No explanation. I have so many questions, it must take me too long to decide on which. “You may go now,” he says, sterner than a Victorian governess.

I quickly scurry to the door—then stop. “Dr. Carlsen?”

He types away, giving no sign of having heard me.

“There was no grade. On the paper.”

His eyes settle on me again, and he looks genuinely confused.

“Will I receive one?”

“Ms. Vandermeer, you planned a graduate-level study and extensively described its pitfalls and possible solutions, showing a command of the topic that eighty percent of my fellow faculty members will never achieve. Most of your peers copy-pasted their projects from Wikipedia and neglected to remove the hyperlinks. If your topic weren’t much more in line with my colleague’s research, and if my colleague wasn’t incredibly . . . persuasive, I would be recruiting you into my lab.”

“Oh.” Wow. Just . . . wow.

“Believe me when I say that the grade is . . .” I sense despair in him. I bet he’d love to slug off the mortal coil of scoring rubrics. “Irrelevant.”

“If you don’t care either way, I’d like an A plus.”

His mouth twitches. “I will let Otis know.”

I grin. This time, Dr. Carlsen nods his goodbyes. The overall effect is stilted, like he pulled an item off a How to Act Politely list that someone scribbled for him on an orange Post-it, but I’ll take it.

I’m starving, but my walk to the athlete dining hall is slow, because I’m busy writing an email to one Dr. Olive Smith.