SWNOVELS : Chapter 2
“BY THE WAY, you can get leprosy from armadillos.”
I peel my nose away from the airplane window and glance at Rocío, my research assistant. “Really?”
“Yep. They got it from humans millennia ago, and now they’re giving it back to us.” She shrugs. “Revenge and cold dishes and all that.”
I scrutinize her beautiful face for hints that she’s lying. Her large dark eyes, heavily rimmed with eyeliner, are inscrutable. Her hair is so Vantablack, it absorbs 99 percent of visible light. Her mouth is full, curved downward in its typical pout.
Nope. I got nothing. “Is this for real?”
“Would I ever lie to you?”
“Last week you swore to me that Stephen King was writing a Winnie-the-Pooh spin-off.” And I believed her. Like I believed that Lady Gaga is a known satanist, or that badminton racquets are made from human bones and intestines. Chaotic goth misanthropy and creepy deadpan sarcasm are her brand, and I should know better than to take her seriously. Problem is, every once in a while she’ll throw in a crazy-sounding story that upon further inspection (i.e., a Google search) is revealed to be true. For instance, did you know that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was inspired by a true story? Before Rocío, I didn’t. And I slept significantly better.
“Don’t believe me, then.” She shrugs, going back to her grad school admission prep book. “Go pet the leper armadillos and die.”
She’s such a weirdo. I adore her.
“Hey, you sure you’re going to be fine, away from Alex for the next few months?” I feel a little guilty for taking her away from her boyfriend. When I was twenty-two, if someone had asked me to be apart from Tim for months, I’d have walked into the sea. Then again, hindsight has proven beyond doubt that I was a complete idiot, and Rocío seems pretty enthused over the opportunity. She plans to apply to Johns Hopkins’s neuro program in the fall, and the NASA line on her CV won’t hurt. She even hugged me when I offered her the chance to come along—a moment of weakness I’m sure she deeply regrets.
“Fine? Are you kidding?” She looks at me like I’m insane. “Three months in Texas, do you know how many times I’ll get to see La Llorona?”
“La . . . what?”
She rolls her eyes and pops in her AirPods. “You really know nothing about famed feminist ghosts.”
I bite back a smile and turn back to the window. In 1905, Dr. Curie decided to invest her Nobel Prize money into hiring her first research assistant. I wonder if she, too, ended up working with a mildly terrifying, Cthulhu-worshipping emo girl. I stare at the clouds until I’m bored, and then I take my phone out of my pocket and connect to the complimentary in-flight Wi-Fi. I glance at Rocío, making sure that she’s not paying attention to me, and angle my screen away.
I’m not a very secretive person, mostly out of laziness: I refuse to take on the cognitive labor of tracking lies and omissions. I do, however, have one secret. One single piece of information that I’ve never shared with anyone—not even my sister. Don’t get me wrong, I trust Reike with my life, but I also know her well enough to picture the scene: she is wearing a flowy sundress, flirting with a Scottish shepherd she met in a trattoria on the Amalfi Coast. They decide to do the shrooms they just purchased from a Belarusian farmer, and mid-trip she accidentally blurts out the one thing she’s been expressly forbidden to repeat: her twin sister, Bee, runs one of the most popular and controversial accounts on Academic Twitter. The Scottish shepherd’s cousin is a closeted men’s rights activist who sends me a dead possum in the mail, rats me out to his insane friends, and I get fired.
No, thank you. I love my job (and possums) too much for this.
I created @WhatWouldMarieDo during my first semester of grad school. I was teaching a neuroanatomy class, and decided to give my students an anonymous mid-semester survey to ask for honest feedback on how to improve the course. What I got was . . . not that. I was told that my lectures would be more interesting if I delivered them naked. That I should gain some weight, get a boob job, stop dying my hair “unnatural colors,” get rid of my piercings. I was even given a phone number to call if I was “ever in the mood for a ten-inch dick.” (Yeah, right.)
The messages were pretty appalling, but what sent me sobbing in a bathroom stall was the reactions of the other students in my cohort—Tim included. They laughed the comments off as harmless pranks and dissuaded me from reporting them to the department chair, telling me that I’d be making a stink about nothing.
They were, of course, all men.
(Seriously: why are men?)
That night I fell asleep crying. The following day I got up, wondered how many other women in STEM felt as alone as I did, and impulsively downloaded Twitter and made @WhatWouldMarieDo. I slapped on a poorly photoshopped pic of Dr. Curie wearing sunglasses and a one-line bio: Making the periodic table girlier since 1889 (she/her). I just wanted to scream into the void. I honestly didn’t think that anyone would even see my first tweet. But I was wrong.
@WhatWouldMarieDo What would Dr. Curie, first female professor at La Sorbonne, do if one of her students asked her to deliver her lectures naked?
@198888 She would shorten his half-life.
@annahhhh RAT HIM OUT TO PIERRE!!!
@emily89 Put some polonium in his pants and watch his dick shrivel.
@bioworm55 Nuke him NUKE HIM
@lucyinthesea Has this happened to you? God I’m so sorry. Once a student said something about my ass and it was so gross and no one believed me.
Over half a decade later, after a handful of Chronicle of Higher Education nods, a New York Times article, and about a million followers, WWMD is my happy place. What’s best is, I think the same is true for many others. The account has evolved into a therapeutic community of sorts, used by women in STEM to tell their stories, exchange advice, and . . . bitch.
Oh, we bitch. We bitch a lot, and it’s glorious.
@BiologySarah Hey, @WhatWouldMarieDo if she weren’t given authorship on a project that was originally her idea and that she worked on for over one year? All other authors are men, because *of course* they are.
“Yikes.” I scrunch my face and quote-tweet Sarah.
Marie would slip some radium in their coffee. Also, she would consider reporting this to her institution’s Office of Research Integrity, making sure to document every step of the process
I hit send, drum my fingers on the armrest, and wait. My answers are not the main attraction of the account, not in the least. The real reason people reach out to WWMD is . . .
Yep. This. I feel my grin widen as the replies start coming in.
@DrAllixx This happened to me, too. I was the only woman and only POC in the author lineup and my name suddenly disappeared during revisions. DM if u want to chat, Sarah.
@AmyBernard I am a member of the Women in Science association, and we have advice for situations like this on our website (they’re sadly common)!
@TheGeologician Going through the same situation rn @BiologySarah. I did report it to ORI and it’s still unfolding but I’m happy to talk if you need to vent.
@SteveHarrison Dude, breaking news: you’re lying to yourself. Your contributions aren’t VALUABLE enough to warrant authorship. Your team did you a favor letting you tag along for a while but if you’re not smart enough, you’re OUT. Not everything is about being a woman, sometimes you’re just A LOSER
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a community of women trying to mind their own business must be in want of a random man’s opinion.
I’ve long learned that engaging with basement-dwelling stemlords who come online looking for a fight is never a good idea—the last thing I want is to provide free entertainment for their fragile egos. If they want to blow off some steam, they can buy a gym membership or play third-person-shooter video games. Like normal people.
I make to hide @SteveHarrison’s delightful contribution, but notice that someone has replied to him.
@Shmacademics Yeah, Marie, sometimes you’re just a loser. Steve would know.
I chuckle.
@WhatWouldMarieDo Aw, Steve. Don’t be too hard on yourself.
@Shmacademics He is just a boy, standing in front of a girl, asking her to do twice as much work as he ever did in order to prove that she’s worthy of becoming a scientist.
@WhatWouldMarieDo Steve, you old romantic.
@SteveHarrison Fuck you. This ridiculous push for women in STEM is ruining STEM. People should get jobs because they’re good NOT BECAUSE THEY HAVE VAGINAS. But now people feel like they have to hire women and they get jobs over men who are MORE QUALIFIED. This is the end of STEM AND IT’S WRONG.
@WhatWouldMarieDo I can see you’re upset about this, Steve.
@Shmacademics There, there.
Steve blocks both of us, and I chuckle again, drawing a curious glance from Rocío. @Shmacademics is another hugely popular account on Academic Twitter, and by far my favorite. He mostly tweets about how he should be writing, makes fun of elitism and ivory-tower academics, and points out bad or biased science. I was initially a bit distrustful of him—his bio says “he/him,” and we all know how men on the internet can be. But he and I ended up forming an alliance of sorts. When the stemlords take offense at the sheer idea of women in STEM and start pitchforking in my mentions, he helps me ridicule them a little. I’m not sure when we started direct messaging, when I stopped being afraid that he was secretly a retired Gamergater out to doxx me, or when I began considering him a friend. But a handful of years later, here we are, chatting about half a dozen different things a couple of times a week, without having even exchanged real names. Is it weird, knowing that Shmac had lice three times in second grade but not which time zone he lives in? A bit. But it’s also liberating. Plus, having opinions online can be very dangerous. The internet is a sea full of creepy, cybercriminal fish, and if Mark Zuckerberg can cover his laptop webcam with a piece of tape, I reserve the right to keep things painfully anonymous.
The flight attendant offers me a glass of water from a tray. I shake my head, smile, and DM Shmac.
MARIE: I think Steve doesn’t want to play with us anymore.
SHMAC: I think Steve wasn’t held enough as a tadpole.
MARIE: Lol!
SHMAC: How’s life?
MARIE: Good! Cool new project starting next week. My ticket away from my gross boss.
SHMAC: Can’t believe dude’s still around.
MARIE: The power of connections. And inertia. What about you?
SHMAC: Work’s interesting.
MARIE: Good interesting?
SHMAC: Politicky interesting. So, no.
MARIE: I’m afraid to ask. How’s the rest?
SHMAC: Weird.
MARIE: Did your cat poop in your shoe again?
SHMAC: No, but I did find a tomato in my boot the other day.
MARIE: Send pics next time! What’s going on?
SHMAC: Nothing, really.
MARIE: Oh, come on!
SHMAC: How do you even know something’s going on?
MARIE: Your lack of exclamation points!
SHMAC: !!!!!!!11!!1!!!!!
MARIE: Shmac.
SHMAC: FYI, I’m sighing deeply.
MARIE: I bet. Tell me!
SHMAC: It’s a girl.
MARIE: Ooooh! Tell me EVERYTHING!!!!!!!11!!1!!!!!
SHMAC: There isn’t much to tell.
MARIE: Did you just meet her?
SHMAC: No. She’s someone I’ve known for a long time, and now she’s back.
SHMAC: And she is married.
MARIE: To you?
SHMAC: Depressingly, no.
SHMAC: Sorry—we’re restructuring the lab. Gotta go before someone destroys a 5 mil piece of equipment. Talk later.
MARIE: Sure, but I’ll want to know everything about your affair with a married woman.
SHMAC: I wish.
It’s nice to know that Shmac is always a click away, especially now that I’m flying into The Wardass’s frosty, unwelcoming lap.
I switch to my email app to check if Levi has finally answered the email I sent three days ago. It was just a couple of lines—Hey, long time no see, I look forward to working together again, would you like to meet to discuss BLINK this weekend?—but he must have been too busy to reply. Or too full of contempt. Or both.
Ugh.
I lean back against the headrest and close my eyes, wondering how Dr. Curie would deal with Levi Ward. She’d probably hide some radioactive isotopes in his pockets, grab popcorn, and watch nuclear decay work its magic.
Yep, sounds about right.
After a few minutes, I fall asleep. I dream that Levi is part armadillo: his skin glows a faint, sallow green, and he’s digging a tomato out of his boot with an expensive piece of equipment. Even with all of that, the weirdest thing about him is that he’s finally being nice to me.
WE’RE PUT UP in small furnished apartments in a lodging facility just outside the Johnson Space Center, only a couple of minutes from the Sullivan Discovery Building, where we’ll be working. I can’t believe how short my commute is going to be.
“Bet you’ll still manage to be late all the time,” Rocío tells me, and I glare at her while unlocking my door. It’s not my fault if I’ve spent a sizable chunk of my formative years in Italy, where time is but a polite suggestion.
The place is considerably nicer than the apartment I rent—maybe because of the raccoon incident, probably because I buy 90 percent of my furniture from the as-is bargain corner at IKEA. It has a balcony, a dishwasher, and—huge improvement in my quality of life—a toilet that flushes 100 percent of the times I push the lever. Truly paradigm shifting. I excitedly open and close every single cupboard (they’re all empty; I’m not sure what I expected), take pictures to send Reike and my coworkers, stick my favorite Marie Curie magnet to the fridge (a picture of her holding a beaker that says “I’m pretty rad”), hang my hummingbird feeder on the balcony, and then . . .
It’s still only two thirty p.m. Ugh.
Not that I’m one of those people who hates having free time. I could easily spend five solid hours napping, rewatching an entire season of The Office while eating Twizzlers, or moving to Step 2 of the Couch-to-5K plan I’m still very . . . okay, sort of committed to. But I am here! In Houston! Near the Space Center! About to start the coolest project of my life!
It’s Friday, and I’m not due to check in until Monday, but I’m brimming with nervous energy. So I text Rocío to ask whether she wants to check out the Space Center with me (No.) or grab dinner together (I only eat animal carcasses.).
She’s so mean. I love her.
My first impression of Houston is: big. Closely followed by: humid, and then by: humidly big. In Maryland, remnants of snow still cling to the ground, but the Space Center is already lush and green, a mix of open spaces and large buildings and old NASA aircraft on display. There are families visiting, which makes it seem a little like an amusement park. I can’t believe I’m going to be seeing rockets on my way to work for the next three months. It sure beats the perv crossing guard who works on the NIH campus.
The Discovery Building is on the outskirts of the center. It’s wide, futuristic, and three-storied, with glass walls and a complicated-looking stair system I can’t quite figure out. I step inside the marble hall, wondering if my new office will have a window. I’m not used to natural light; the sudden intake of vitamin D might kill me.
“I’m Bee Königswasser.” I smile at the receptionist. “I’m starting work here on Monday, and I was wondering if I could take a look around?”
He gives me an apologetic smile. “I can’t let you in if you don’t have an ID badge. The engineering labs are upstairs—high-security areas.”
Right. Yes. The engineering labs. Levi’s labs. He’s probably up there, hard at work. Engineering. Labbing. Not answering my emails.
“No problem, that’s understandable. I’ll just—”
“Dr. Königswasser? Bee?”
I turn around. There is a blond young man behind me. He’s non-threateningly handsome, medium height, smiling at me like we’re old friends even though he doesn’t look familiar. “. . . Hi?”
“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I caught your name and . . . I’m Guy. Guy Kowalsky?”
The name clicks immediately. I break into a grin. “Guy! It’s so nice to meet you in person.” When I was first notified of BLINK, Guy was my point of contact for logistics questions, and he and I emailed back and forth a few times. He’s an astronaut—an actual astronaut!—working on BLINK while he’s grounded. He seemed so familiar with the project, I initially assumed he’d be my co-lead.
He shakes my hand warmly. “I love your work! I’ve read all your articles—you’ll be such an asset to the project.”
“Likewise. I can’t wait to collaborate.”
If I weren’t dehydrated from the flight, I’d probably tear up. I cannot believe that this man, this nice, pleasant man who has given me more positive interactions in one minute than Dr. Wardass did in one year, could have been my co-lead. I must have pissed off some god. Zeus? Eros? Must be Poseidon. Shouldn’t have peed in the Baltic Sea during my misspent youth.
“Why don’t I show you around? You can come in as my guest.” He nods to the receptionist and gestures at me to follow him.
“I wouldn’t want to take you away from . . . astronauting?”
“I’m between missions. Giving you a tour beats debugging any day.” He shrugs, something boyishly charming about him. We’ll get along great, I already know it.
“Have you lived in Houston long?” I ask as we step into the elevator.
“About eight years. Came to NASA right out of grad school. Applied for the Astronaut Corps, did the training, then a mission.” I do some math in my head. It would put him in his mid-thirties, older than I initially thought. “The past two or so, I worked on BLINK’s precursor. Engineering the structure of the helmet, figuring out the wireless system. But we got to a point where we needed a neurostimulation expert on board.” He gives me a warm smile.
“I cannot wait to see what we cook up together.” I also cannot wait to find out why Levi was given the lead of this project over someone who has been on it for years. It just seems unfair. To Guy and to me.
The elevator doors open, and he points to a quaint-looking café in the corner. “That place over there—amazing sandwiches, worst coffee in the world. You hungry?”
“No, thanks.”
“You sure? It’s on me. The egg sandwiches are almost as good as the coffee is bad.”
“I don’t really eat eggs.”
“Let me guess, a vegan?”
I nod. I try hard to break the stereotypes that plague my people and not use the word “vegan” in my first three meetings with a new acquaintance, but if they’re the ones to mention it, all bets are off.
“I should introduce you to my daughter. She recently announced that she won’t eat animal products anymore.” He sighs. “Last weekend I poured regular milk in her cereal figuring she wouldn’t know the difference. She told me that her legal team will be in touch.”
“How old is she?”
“Just turned six.”
I laugh. “Good luck with that.”
I stopped having meat at seven, when I realized that the delicious pollo nuggets my Sicilian grandmother served nearly every day and the cute galline grazing about the farm were more . . . connected than I’d originally suspected. Stunning plot twist, I know. Reike wasn’t nearly as distraught: when I frantically explained that “pigs have families, too—a mom and a dad and siblings that will miss them,” she just nodded thoughtfully and said, “What you’re saying is, we should eat the whole family?” I went fully vegan a couple of years later. Meanwhile, my sister has made it her life’s goal to eat enough animal products for two. Together we emit one normal person’s carbon footprint.
“The engineering labs are down this hallway,” Guy says. The space is an interesting mix of glass and wood, and I can see inside some of the rooms. “A bit cluttered, and most people are off today—we’re shuffling around equipment and reorganizing the space. We’ve got lots of ongoing projects, but BLINK’s everyone’s favorite child. The other astronauts pop by every once in a while just to ask how much longer it will be until their fancy swag is ready.”
I grin. “For real?”
“Yep.”
Making fancy swag for astronauts is my literal job description. I can add it to my LinkedIn profile. Not that anyone uses LinkedIn.
“The neuroscience labs—your labs—will be on the right. This way there are—” His phone rings. “Sorry—mind if I take it?”
“Not at all.” I smile at his beaver phone case (nature’s engineer) and look away.
I wonder whether Guy would think I’m lame if I snapped a few pictures of the building for my friends. I decide that I can live with that, but when I take out my phone I hear a noise from down the hallway. It’s soft and chirpy, and sounds a lot like a . . .
“Meow.”
I glance back at Guy. He’s busy explaining how to put on Moana to someone very young, so I decide to investigate. Most of the rooms are deserted, labs full of large, abstruse equipment that looks like it belongs to . . . well. NASA. I hear male voices somewhere in the building, but no sign of the—
“Meow.”
I turn around. A few feet away, staring at me with a curious expression, is a beautiful young calico.
“And who might you be?” I slowly hold out my hand. The kitten comes closer, delicately sniffs my fingers, and gives me a welcoming headbutt.
I laugh. “You’re such a sweet girl.” I squat down to scratch her under her chin. She nips my finger, a playful love bite. “Aren’t you the most purr-fect little baby? I feel so fur-tunate to have met you.”
She gives me a disdainful look and turns away. I think she understands puns.
“Come on, I was just kitten.” Another outraged glare. Then she jumps on a nearby cart, piled ceiling-high with boxes and heavy, precarious-looking equipment. “Where are you going?”
I squint, trying to figure out where she disappeared to, and that’s when I realize it. The equipment? The precarious-looking equipment? It actually is precarious. And the cat poked it just enough to dislodge it. And it’s falling on my head.
Right.
About.
Now.
I have less than three seconds to move away. Which is too bad, because my entire body is suddenly made of stone, unresponsive to my brain’s commands. I stand there, terrified, paralyzed, and close my eyes as a jumbled chaos of thoughts twists through my head. Is the cat okay? Am I going to die? Oh God, I am going to die. Squashed by a tungsten anvil like Wile E. Coyote. I am a twenty-first-century Pierre Curie, about to get my skull crushed by a horse-drawn cart. Except that I have no chair in the physics department of the University of Paris to leave to my lovely spouse, Marie. Except that I have barely done a tenth of all the science I meant to do. Except that I wanted so many things and I never oh my God any second now—
Something slams into my body, shoving me aside and into the wall.
Everything is pain.
For a couple of seconds. Then the pain is over, and everything is noise: metal clanking as it plunges to the floor, horrified screaming, a shrill “Meow” somewhere in the distance, and closer to my ear . . . someone is panting. Less than an inch from me.
I open my eyes, gasping for breath, and . . .
Green.
All I can see is green. Not dark, like the grass outside; not dull, like the pistachios I had on the plane. This green is light, piercing, intense. Familiar, but hard to place, not unlike—
Eyes. I’m looking up into the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen. Eyes that I’ve seen before. Eyes surrounded by wavy black hair and a face that’s angles and sharp edges and full lips, a face that’s offensively, imperfectly handsome. A face attached to a large, solid body—a body that is pinning me to the wall, a body made of a broad chest and two thighs that could moonlight as redwoods. Easily. One is slotted between my legs and it’s holding me up. Unyielding. This man even smells like a forest—and that mouth. That mouth is still breathing heavily on top of me, probably from the effort of whisking me out from under seven hundred pounds of mechanical engineering tools, and—
I know that mouth.
Levi.
Levi.
I haven’t seen Levi Ward in six years. Six blessed, blissful years. And now here he is, pushing me into a wall in the middle of NASA’s Space Center, and he looks . . . he looks . . .
“Levi!” someone yells. The clanking goes silent. What was meant to fall has settled on the floor. “Are you okay?”
Levi doesn’t move, nor does he look away. His mouth works, and so does his throat. His lips part to say something, but no sound comes out. Instead, a hand, at once rushed and gentle, reaches up to cup my face. It’s so large, I feel perfectly cradled. Engulfed in green, cozy warmth. I whimper when it leaves my skin, a plaintive, involuntary sound from deep in my throat, but I stop when I realize that it’s only shifting to the back of my skull. To the hollow of my collarbone. To my brow, pushing back my hair.
It’s a cautious touch. Pressing but delicate. Lingering but urgent. As though he is studying me. Trying to make sure that I’m all in one piece. Memorizing me.
I lift my eyes, and for the first time I notice the deep, unmasked concern in Levi’s eyes.
His lips move, and I think that maybe—is he mouthing my name? Once, and then again? Like it’s some kind of prayer?
“Levi? Levi, is she—”
My eyelids fall closed, and everything goes dark.