Chapter Four #3
“You could tell the truth?” Karo suggests over the noise of a car door shutting.
“I should.” I sigh. “But lying is not just a bad character trait—for someone whose work is reason and figuring out the true mechanisms behind how the world works, it’s the worst trait.
Not to mention that the most important people from my field are at this conference.
It’s a small community, and word travels fast. I’d be judged big-time, something I absolutely cannot afford, especially now when my funding is running out.
” I rattle off the flowchart from bad decision to sudden career death that I’ve plotted out in my head.
“I’m still waiting for the outcome on that big grant, and what I did doesn’t exactly speak for my integrity—scientific or otherwise.
I need my colleagues to know they can trust me, not to make them wonder what else I’d lie about. ”
“Crap, okay.” Karo hums. “You’re right, it doesn’t sound like telling the truth is the best option.
” When she falls silent on the other end of the line, I get up and start pacing from the couch to the kitchen island.
Illustrated postcards and photos from trips across the world are tacked to the sunflower-yellow kitchen cabinets.
The studio I’m staying in is small but more welcoming than my place back in the Netherlands, where the rooms are empty save for the content of two suitcases, mismatched secondhand pottery, and the furniture that came disassembled and flat-packed from IKEA.
“What are the odds that this person didn’t tell anybody else?” Karo pipes up. “That they ultimately don’t care who you do or don’t date?”
“Given that she’s Jacob’s fiancée,” I say, “I’d gauge that those odds are pretty low.”
“Oh, Hasi.” Bunny. Her tone is soft, and I hate how small it makes me feel.
“She’s really nice. Considerate. Wanted to tell me the news in person. Probably also extremely smart, otherwise she wouldn’t be working for Jacob.”
“Hold on, she works for him?”
“Yeah. It feels like déjà vu. Or more like an upgrade, really.” I go on to tell her about Vivienne’s invitation to dinner, which brings me back to the big question: What am I going to do?
“Well, you know there’s always the option of fake dating,” Karo shares offhandedly.
“There’s what? Fake data?”
“No, don’t worry.” She laughs. “Nothing as bad as that. I said fake dating. It’s a thing in romance novels. Or romantic comedies, for those of us who don’t pick up books for fun.”
I roll my eyes. Karo is a social media manager at a publishing company and likes to nag me to read more, but honestly, after spending my days with words like hemodynamic or bootstrapping, or multivariate pattern analysis, my concept of free time doesn’t involve more words.
“I’m not following.”
“Fake dating is something people do, for mutual benefits. So… famous people may do it for some media buzz, other people to get meddling relatives off their back, others to win back their exes—”
“I don’t want to win him back,” I interject.
“You don’t?”
“I don’t.”
“Well thank god.” She sighs. “I already thought Lennart and I would have to skip the road trip and stage an intervention. The guy was a dickhead.”
“He was,” I concur. “So. False dating.”
“Fake dating. Yeah. It’s a popular concept, though I’ve never met anybody who has fake dated in real life.”
Outside, an ambulance drives by, and I wait until the howling siren fades into the distance. “But how do people do it?”
“It’s as simple as it sounds. You make others believe you’re in a relationship.
” The line crackles, like she’s switching the phone from one ear to the other.
“It has to be a mutual thing—you can’t just tell people that you are in a relationship.
The other person has to be in on it and you’d have to be seen together enough for people to believe it’s true.
We’ve established that he’s cute, but how likely is it that he’d help you out? ”
Not very. Lewis regularly makes it onto the list of people I want to throw my desk at. As kind as he seemed when he soothed me on the flight and again in front of Vivienne’s office, I still don’t trust him after the stunt he pulled four years ago. But he does owe me.
Did I think I’d use his favor for more academic purposes when I agreed to help him with his abstract? Sure. But I also thought I’d be on the tenure track by now, have a publication in a prestigious journal, and the luxury of planning more than one year ahead.
What has grad school trained me for, if not finding creative solutions to tricky problems?
“I think I can find a way,” I say. “What do people do when they fake date?”
“They behave like, well… like they’re in love.
Some fake couples set an end date, some make a sort of contract, like an agreement to establish how you’re allowed to interact and touch each other in public, fake nicknames for each other, which social engagements you accompany each other to. All sorts of things, really.”
“Like a social transaction?”
“Sort of.”
I don’t like the idea of having to rely on Lewis to help me out, but so far, it sounds like the best option to get me out of the dilemma I created for myself. It would allow me to reclaim some of the control I so wildly lost in that meeting with Vivienne.
And how hard can it be, really? It can’t be more complicated than doing a PhD.
Something that probably wouldn’t require much acting, given that a fight with Lewis tipped Vivienne off.
I might not even have to pretend I like him.
We could just carry on being our hateful selves, and she’d interpret it as chemistry.
Before I can get too far ahead of myself my scientifically trained brain kicks in. Maybe I should do a little more research.
“And people do this in books?”
“Books, movies, series. As I said, it’s a popular concept.”
“Can you send me some titles of books that include false dating?”
“Fake—never mind. I’ll send you a title I think you’ll enjoy. You can download it on that audiobook app I gave you a voucher for last Christmas.”
“How do you know I haven’t already used it?”
“Because I know you.”
“Fair.” I bite my lip, uncertain if Karo has just helped me claw myself out of this hellhole of an impossible situation or handed me a shovel to dig my own grave. “Do you really think this could work?”
“Honestly? I’m not super sure. From what I’ve read, it’s a messy thing.
” After a beat, she explains, “People develop feelings, Franzi. Because they spend so much time together and pretend they’re a couple, the boundary with the real thing gets blurred.
For sure there’s some psychological explanation behind this, which you’d know more about than me, but the point is, you put your feelings on the line. ”
Falling for Dr. Theodore L. North? The chances of it are so low that I don’t even dwell on Karo’s warning.
“I don’t think that’s going to become a problem,” I tell her, relieved that this is the only thing she’s worried about.
“What will be hard, though, is not going straight for his throat whenever he says something wildly obnoxious.”
From the program leaflet on the kitchen island, the flat stare of Jacob’s photograph follows me as I pace by for what’s probably the hundredth time.
I try to focus on Rosanna Alderkamp’s warm smile instead, visualizing what I’d be doing this for.
Convincing Lewis, pretending to date him for the duration of two weeks.
It’s nothing compared to the decade of work I’ve put in to understand what happened to my sister on that skiing trip.
Even though Karo’s amnesia was temporary, the fascination it triggered in me wasn’t.
Her accident and how it jump-started my obsession with science has become a bit of a code word in my family, ever since my research became too detailed and complicated to explain.
How’s work going? my father would ask when we’d all be at their house at Christmas.
I’d complain about my model not running properly, or celebrate a fresh paper publication, or this really cool idea I had, and they’d ask me what it meant.
I’d tell them about my attempts to translate results obtained from highly controlled environments with lab animals to safe and noninvasive settings in humans.
In those animals, each and every memory seems to have something like a fingerprint, a unique code for the place, timing, and emotional undertone of the memory.
If I could detect that fingerprint in humans it might help me solve where Karo’s brain got scrambled after that skiing accident.
But not only that—it could be a launchpad to help people with longer-lasting memory issues, ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder to Alzheimer’s.
I’d try and fail to explain, until it was time to cook dinner or light the Christmas tree, and revert to the surface-level explanation: I’m just trying to solve Karo’s amnesia.
I’m just trying to understand how memory generally works, because only then can we come up with scientifically grounded ways of diagnosing or treating it when it fails.
That’s all I’m really doing this for. The moment of panic in Vivienne’s office? It was nothing more than a blip, a snafu, that, luckily, has a solution.
I stop the pacing, strengthening the grip around my phone and steeling my voice as I say, “As messy as it could become, fake dating might be my only option if I don’t want to risk jeopardizing everything I’ve worked for.”
“Then”—Karo inhales—“you’d better get that other person on board.”