The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

Author:Ali Hazelwood [Hazelwood, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

HYPOTHESIS: If I am bad at doing activity A, my chances of being asked to engage in activity A will rise exponentially.

Campus felt strangely empty with Adam gone, even on days in which she likely wouldn’t have met him anyway. It didn’t make much sense: Stanford was most definitely not empty, but teeming with loud, annoying undergrads on their way to and from class. Olive’s life, too, was full: her mice were old enough for the behavioral assays to be run, she’d finally gotten revisions for a paper she’d submitted months earlier, and she had to start making concrete plans for her move to Boston next year; the class she was TA’ing had a test coming up, and undergrads magically began to pop by during office hours, looking panicky and asking questions that were invariably answered in the first three lines of the syllabus.

Malcolm spent a couple of days trying to convince Olive to tell Adam the truth, and then became—thankfully—too discouraged by her stubbornness and too busy trying to meditate away his own dating drama to insist. He did bake several batches of butterscotch cookies, though, patently lying that he was “not rewarding your self-destructive behaviors, Olive, but just perfecting my recipe.” Olive ate them all, and hugged him from behind while he sprinkled sea salt on top of the last batch.

On Saturday, Anh came over for beer and s’mores, and she and Olive daydreamed about leaving academia and finding industry jobs that paid a proper salary and acknowledged the existence of free time.

“We could, like, sleep in on Sunday mornings. Instead of having to check on our mice at six a.m.”

“Yeah.” Anh sighed wistfully. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was running in the background, but neither of them was paying attention. “We could buy real ketchup instead of stealing packets from Burger King. And order that wireless vacuum cleaner I saw on TV.”

Olive giggled drunkenly and turned to her side, making the bed squeak. “Seriously? A vacuum cleaner?”

“A wireless one. It’s the shit, Ol.”

“That is . . .”

“What?”

“Just . . .” Olive giggled some more. “It’s the most random thing.”

“Shut up.” Anh smiled but didn’t open her eyes. “I have severe dust allergies. You know what, though?”

“Are you going to hit me with a Trivial Pursuit vacuum cleaner fact?”

The corners of Anh’s eyes crinkled. “Nah,” she said, “I don’t have any. Wait—I think that maybe the first female corporate CEO worked for a vacuum cleaner company.”

“No way. That is actually cool.”

“But maybe I’m making it up.” Anh shrugged. “Anyway, what I meant to say is . . . I think I still want it?”

“The vacuum cleaner?” Olive yawned without bothering to cover her mouth.

“No. An academic job. And everything that comes with it. The lab, the grad students, the outrageous teaching load, the race for the NIH grants, the disproportionately low salary. The whole shebang. Jeremy says that Malcolm has it right. That industry jobs are where it’s at. But I think I want to stay and become a professor.

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