Chapter Fifteen
After another day packed to the brim with science, the only thing that separates me from my Lewis-free weekend is the Q and A session with the students, which takes place at Second Draft, a microbrewery-slash-bar located in East Williamsburg.
Once Lewis and I get there, we push through the crowd of patrons with mustaches and rolled-up jeans, all the way to the back where, below one of the huge factory windows, most of the students are already seated at a long beer table.
Too focused on pushing down my inconvenient feelings for Lewis, I don’t pay much attention when one of the staff members explains how our beer tasting will proceed.
I make sure to put a few students between our seats: Francois, who lifts his head whenever someone calls my name; Selin, who’s a first-year PhD in Lewis’s lab; and Daina, who’s outgoing enough to start asking questions. Everyone else seems a little shy.
I smile at them encouragingly, the encounter with Rosanna Alderkamp—and how much it meant to me—still fresh in my mind.
In the grand scheme of things, it hasn’t been that long since I stood in their shoes: nervous about talking to anybody more senior and experienced than me, wishing someone would notice and reach out to me.
I hope I can do the same for them now. Soon enough—and perhaps with some liquid courage—more students join the conversation, and while we taste test through the menu, we drift off into small groups.
I pinball back a few of the questions to get an idea of this new generation of scientists, and all the while, I marvel at the fact that this is also my job: mentoring and encouraging the younger students, paying forward the favor that enabled me to get to this position in the first place.
As much as I love typing out code and exploring my data, this social side of the job is what keeps me going.
It’s why I want to become a professor eventually, with my own lab, advising students and helping them figure out their passion within research.
Throughout the evening, the groups mix and rematch, until our conversations drift away from science.
At some point, as I survey the room, I find Lewis looking back at me.
He holds my gaze across the table, drawing warmth from my core all the way to my cheeks, and it makes me feel like we’re in this together, for real.
This is temporary, I remind myself. But after the I-don’t-know-how-many-glasses-of-beer I’ve had, I don’t care.
Even if it’s temporary and only pretend, I can enjoy it, if just for this evening.
Daina—PhD student at University College London—is sharing their favorite brain-related fun facts they usually unpack at family parties, when my phone vibrates in my purse.
My heart starts to pound. News on the grant?
But no. It’s Friday night, past 8:00 p.m. here, and the middle of the night in Central Europe. Academia is brutal, but not that brutal.
I chance a glance nonetheless. It’s Karo. “I need to take this,” I apologize. The restrooms are packed, and smokers cluster outside the bar, but a few steps beyond, the sidewalk is empty and quiet enough, now that the stores and cafés in the surrounding buildings have closed for the night.
The hot and humid night air presses in on my skin as I lean against the brick wall. “You’re back! Finally! Did you get back okay?”
Karo laughs. “It’s only been five days, but yeah, we did get back okay. Probably with a few more mosquito bites than physically tolerable, but we’re good.”
I’m soothed by the sound of her voice, the knowledge of her presence, even if it’s only virtual. “No bears then?”
“Actually, we saw some bears, but from far away,” she adds before I can let out a gasp. “It was amazing, really.” She sounds high on fresh air and endorphins from all the hiking. “Listen, Franzi, I wanted to ask you something.”
A dark shape exits the bar, and when it steps into the cone of streetlight in front of me, I recognize it as Lewis. “Everything okay?” he murmurs. “I missed you in there.”
“Give me a second,” I tell my sister at the same time as I nod at him. “All good. I’m talking to Karo, but I’ll be back in a second.”
“Alright. I’ll see you inside.” He squeezes my shoulder, and something uncurls at the base of my stomach. Without thinking, I lift my fingers and graze the back of his hand in a gesture that feels intimate, just right. That is, until his eyes snag on the point of contact.
Maybe this is a little too much for friends who are helping each other out.
Confusingly, his eyebrows slot into a frown at the same time as the corner of his mouth flicks up.
When he returns to the bar, I’m left behind with a thudding heart and the realization that while my attraction to him is growing by the day, I really have no idea what he’s feeling or thinking.
A concerned fake boyfriend may have come outside to check on his girlfriend, but the shoulder squeeze?
The warmth in his eyes? That lopsided smile and the fact that he told me he missed me?
“Hmm.” Karo’s voice crackles through my phone speaker. “Sounds like more interesting things than science are happening at that summer school of yours.”
“I— Well. Yeah…”
“I see,” Karo purrs.
“No, no,” I tell her. “That was Lewis. Dr. North. He was just—”
“The Dr. North?” Karo cries.
“Ye—”
“Hold on, is he the one you had to convince to fake date you?”
“Karo—”
“And he let himself be convinced?”
I think that she’s done then, but she still doesn’t let me get in a word.
“I thought we hated him!”
“We did,” I agree, “but it turns out there’s a little more to the story than I thought.”
After a beat, she teases, “I told you that know-it-alls were your type.”
“Stop it,” I grumble. I kick a pebble out of the way and watch it skip down the sidewalk. “It’s not like that. He’s helping me out.”
“Helping you out, but missing you, too. O-kay,” she says, lingering on the vowels in a way that lets me know she doesn’t believe me at all.
“Listen, there’s something I did want to tell you. I talked to the professor from Amsterdam.”
“Oh! How did it go?”
And so I tell her about the successful conversation with Rosanna Alderkamp that made me hopeful I could collaborate with her using the money from the grant I’ve applied for.
“I know I’m getting ahead of myself.” I sigh.
“We didn’t talk for long, and in the bathroom, of all places, but still.
I’ve been wanting to work with her for so long…
and she was so kind.” Which is probably what excited me the most. Smartness is a given among academics, but not everyone chooses to be kind.
After we hang up and before going back to meet the others, I check my inbox. It’s become such an automatic thing by now. Swipe left, tap on the little icon at the bottom of the screen. I delete the usual three spam emails and one reply-all from a department-wide email.
But there’s one more email sitting in my inbox: the response to my grant application.
The thing I’ve been agonizing over and anxiously expecting.
My last shot at securing more funding before mine runs out in under three months.
My hope for stability so I can finally plan my research long-term.
The one thing I need to work out if I want to avoid packing my bags again to look for a new lab somewhere else in this world.
The Dutch Young Investigators Starting Grant.
The subject-line doesn’t reveal any decision, and I tap on it so hard that my phone almost tumbles out of my hands. The message opens to a short text and an attached PDF. I read through everything, the attachment, then the text again.
The sidewalk and the street lights start to swirl around me.
My world tilts on its axis, just like when I enter a high field MRI scanner, except now it’s not the strong magnetic force scrambling up my vestibular system. I feel like I’m gliding down a waterslide headfirst, taking turn after turn into the unknown.
Thank god there’s nobody else on this sidewalk to see me lose control like this; hands shaking and breaths coming in choppy.
I make the mistake of looking down at my phone that’s still bright with the words we regret to inform you.
The hurt flares up, buckles my stomach, and clenches my chest tight.
Slow it down.
Lewis’s words come back to me, and I force myself to count to two on my inhale, four on my exhale. Once I manage to keep that up, I lengthen the intervals of my breaths and focus on the feeling of the humid night air when it passes through my nostrils.
Breathe.
In and out, and in and out again.
I think of the days, nights, weekends, months I spent writing this grant.
I think of the four subprojects I planned out, each one essential to take the findings of my last research paper a step further to track how we encode memories in real time.
I think of having to pack up my apartment into boxes again, another cycle of keep and toss, departing from yet another town with people I don’t know enough to keep in touch with.
When I feel like I have control of my body again, I head back into the bar.
My throat is parched after the quick rasps of my breath, and I stop at the bar counter to ask for a glass of water.
I know I need to get back to the students, but I also don’t trust myself around them yet, with their bright eyes and open faces, their drive and motivation.
Ten years of tirelessly trying, and why the fuck is it still not enough?
I gulp down the water and head back outside, telling myself it’ll only be for a moment. Five minutes. That’s all I need to get my head on straight again.
“Frances,” someone calls. Lewis comes running up behind me as I shove through the door. Out on the sidewalk, he stops me with a warm palm on my shoulder. I turn around.
“What’s going on? Are you okay?” he asks, his eyes scanning my face.