Deep End(44)

“Oh. Is that a good thing?”

She shrugs, a little embarrassed. “It’s trite, I know, but Luk never calls me anything but Penelope.” She works in a slight Swedish accent. “He’s just not naturally affectionate. Theo the Hot Teacher is. And, I slept, as in, actually slept, at his place.”

“You didn’t sleep at Lukas’s?”

“Not really. Not if we could help it. We’re both fussy sleepers. With Theo it was nice, though.”

I nod. I’m happy for her. I’m happy that she got what she wanted. We stare at each other for a while, her elbow brushing my shoulder, the quiet of a Saturday afternoon on campus balmy against our skins. Laughter in the distance, birds, the rustling of trees.

And then something occurs to me.

I sit up. Almost choke on my saliva. “Your name is Penelope Diana Ross?”





CHAPTER 25


IT’S A NICE SATURDAY—BECAUSE I HAVE NO PLANS.

After lunch with Pen, I go home, shower until I fool my skin and hair into believing that I wasn’t spawned inside a puddle of chlorine, and then catch up with laundry and assignments. Herr Karl-Heinz, may both sides of his pillow always be cold and his favorite fanfiction update every night, shed some light on German’s obscure sentence structure. I walked out of his office last week feeling . . . in deep shit, but less alone.

Look at me. Acknowledging my deficiencies. Accepting help.

It’s difficult even for native speakers, he told me. You’re a STEM major, right? Try to see the rules as basic laws of biology. Sometimes you just have to accept them. And I can help you.

I managed not to burst into tears at the far-reaching, existential implications of his words, but decided to make a mental note for future me. Highly susceptible to inspirational messaging. Must NOT join cult.

I do my readings for Dr. Carlsen’s class. Finish an English composition essay, expanding my opinion that teachers should be paid more from because yes, duh, to a semi-cogent, multi-paragraph argument. Slog through my visualization exercises. By late afternoon, I decide to reward myself with some work on the bio project.

It sounds deeply uncool, but there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. It’d be nice if Lukas texted, but he’s obviously been putting out fires for the past week, and anyway, I haven’t had much of a sex life in the last year and a half. I can wait a few more days for . . . whatever comes next.

Zach kept his promises, and my student ID grants me access to Dr. Smith’s deserted lab. It makes me like her more, that none of her grad students seem to feel like they should be hard-core pipetting on a Saturday afternoon. I move through the benches, remembering the feeling of being in a lab—my favorite part of organic chemistry. Working with compounds. Chromatography. Synthesizing aspirin. Follow experiment protocols, see what happened. I cannot wait to become a capable, badass, life-changing physician like Barb, but I hope I’ll get to do some research on the side. Watching things explode and crystallize will never not be fun.

At the back of the lab, I find the computer Zach pointed me to. Before I can power it up, I hear a noise behind me and whirl around.

Lukas sits on a stool at the end of a bench, for once looking like he’s not coming from, going to, or currently at practice. Hair chlorine lightened, but not tousled. No goggles marks around his eyes. Jeans and a dark Henley with no Stanford logo in sight.

It’s . . . disrupting. He’s an athlete, and most of our interactions have in some shape revolved around that. But he’s also a person with interests and hobbies and a life, and I know so little about that Lukas.

And yet, I feel myself smile. “Hi?”

“Hi.”

“Where did you—did you come in behind me?”

He shakes his head .

“Um, okay. I’m here to . . .” I point at the computer behind me.

“Get the pictures for the input dataset?”

I nod.

He lifts his left hand, showing me the USB lodged between his thumb and pointer finger.

“Ah. Great. We’re going to need to—”

“Reorient the pics.”

“And—”

“Resize them.”

He completes my sentences unhurriedly, like finishing my thoughts is a natural thing for him. We assess each other for a silent beat. It feels like a contest, and when my lips curl first, I realize that he won.

“Maybe Pen has a point,” I muse.

“I’m sure she has many,” Lukas says. “What’s this specific one about?”

“You are a bit overwhelming.”

He laughs, low, amused. “Just a bit?”

“She may have been downplaying it. So I wouldn’t run.”

“She’s a great wingwoman, then.”

“Seems like it.” Why does she think you’re distant? Why can’t I reconcile the Lukas she talks about with the one I know? I ask none of this. Instead I idly step toward him, slowly glancing around the lab. It’s so wide. And we’re so alone. “What were you going to do with the flash drive?”

“Check your phone.”

I take it out of my pocket and find a text from him, delivered a few minutes ago.

LUKAS: Free?

I smile. “Is it over? Emotional support duties, I mean.”

“I hope so. Kyle and Nate took a couple of meetings today.”