Chapter Twenty
On Monday, the concourse in Schermerhorn Hall greets us with a maze of cork boards.
My favorite part of any scientific event officially starts today: the poster sessions.
Compared to a talk or a lecture, they’re less prestigious, but there’s always something special about seeing the neat boxes detailing experimental designs, the bar charts and scatter plots showing statistical analyses.
The most complicated studies broken down into a few key words and a handful of diagrams.
After a short block of lectures in the morning, I seek out the colorful brain maps in the concourse, figuring that the students’ enthusiasm will ignite the spark I so desperately need to court professors for a job.
I talk to an American professor who’s leading a lab in Tokyo and exchange email addresses with a researcher working in Melbourne.
During the coffee break, as I grab a chocolate chip cookie off a plastic tray, I spot Rosanna Alderkamp at the other end of the room and take a deep breath to gather up the courage to approach her.
I sent her my workshop materials and availability for lunch after we talked last week and while she replied with a slew of questions about my code and the words “Let’s discuss over lunch,” she forgot to confirm a date.
“Frances.” Lewis’s voice comes from behind me. I want to wave him away, but when I turn around, his face is pinched into that nonexpression that tells me something must be going on. After dropping me off at home yesterday, he took the car back to his sister, and I haven’t seen him since.
“What’s up?” I ask, my hand coming up to cup his elbow.
Lewis’s eyes swivel over my shoulder and as they dance around the room, the tension carves deeper into his features. He nods his head to the side. “Can we go outside? We need to talk.”
“What do you mean, it’s gone?” I push out between clenched teeth.
It’ll be easy as pie, he said back at the cabin when we talked about the week ahead, and it’s true that we don’t have to worry about convincingly portraying our relationship anymore, but we both forgot a crucial element in our charade, and the havoc it could wreak if it went missing.
The notebook.
Lewis’s notebook. The one that has records on his conditions for fake dating me, the start and end date of our plan, all the steps we thought of on the walk after Jacob and Vivienne’s dinner.
There’s one page that lists the names of all my family members, my teaching schedule from last semester, including weekends when we would’ve visited each other, and the name of who I believed to be the most influential and invaluable person in the history of psychology, although I’m not sure how the latter fits in with the rest. (I told him B.
F. Skinner, which Lewis reacted to with an appreciative hum.)
“How can it be gone?” I hiss at Lewis, who sits with his elbows on his knees and head in his hands on the terraced wall snaking around the raised plant beds in front of Schermerhorn Hall.
Despite the midday heat, I’m pacing up and down in front of him, unable to sit down.
Since he outlined the problem, the deluge of adrenaline in my veins hasn’t let up.
Lewis lifts his head and shifts forward to pat his back pocket. “It’s not there.”
“But you always have it on you, rain or shine. You even found a place for it in those tight shorts of yours when we went hiking,” I point out.
“Dr. Silberstein,” Lewis tuts. “Were you looking at my ass?”
I roll my eyes and can’t help the laugh shooting out of my mouth.
It takes some of my tension with it. I stop in front of Lewis and turn the conversation back to the matter at hand.
“Just because the notebook’s missing doesn’t mean people will read it, right?
If I were to find a notebook, I’d take it to the lost-and-found.
Or check the first page to see who it belongs to. ”
Lewis grimaces. “It doesn’t have my name in it. At least not on the first page. Nobody would know it belonged to me unless they flip all the way through to our fake-dating plan.”
My heart speeds up. If anybody finds his notebook, we’re royally screwed. Because no matter how obviously attracted we are to each other, it’ll be there, in graphite on white paper, that it all started as a wild plan we concocted.
I gulp and resume my pacing. “Are you sure you didn’t leave it in your room? Or at the cabin? When’s your friend going up there next, so he can check?”
Lewis shakes his head. “I had it this morning. I noted down a reference.”
“I didn’t see you in the lecture.”
“I was in the back. I got in late because I did the school run with Al this morning.”
“Right. Okay, so you had it this morning, which means it has to be somewhere. Like the lecture hall, or… the bathrooms?”
Lewis nods. “I checked, but no luck. Someone must’ve found it and taken it.”
“Fuck.” I groan, as I remember the bad-decision-to-sudden-career-death flowchart that had prompted me to convince Lewis to fake date in the first place.
If someone were to leaf through the notes and get a line-by-line breakdown of our fake relationship, the news would spread fast in this small community, damaging our reputations irreparably. And then, who’d want to work with us?
It’s not only mine, but also Lewis’s career that’s at stake now. If we’re exposed, he goes down with me.
And I roped him into this.
Guilt turns the swirl in my stomach into nausea as a bead of sweat trails down my neck.
“Let’s go and check again,” I say, voice tight with desperation. “It has to be somewhere. It has to.”
Lewis presses his lips together. I take his hand, and as we walk back into the building, I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at the irony that my looming unemployment isn’t my biggest problem anymore.
We look for the notebook everywhere.
We crouch down to search below the rows of foldout seats in the lecture hall.
We jog down corridors, dart into empty classrooms, and knock at the doors of the ones that are occupied by groups of other scientists.
We scour the restrooms of the buildings.
We visit Regina at the secretary’s office and the security desk at the entrance to ask for a lost-and-found, and all the while my stomach twists deeper into anxiety.
Lewis gets quieter, his face cementing into a mask.
“I’m not sure if it’s a good or a bad sign it hasn’t turned up yet,” I mutter to him as we make our way back to the concourse.
“Definitely bad. It should have been found and dropped off somewhere by now, unless the person who found it kept it.”
Instead of picturing whose hands the notebook could’ve gotten into and what they’re doing with that information, I scan the concourse, but it’s pure chaos: Crowds of people push around, backpacks are strewn on the floors. Discarded plastic and cardboard tubes.
If the notebook is here, it could be anywhere.
Lewis pulls me against his side as we make our way into the first row of poster boards. A motivated grad student spots us and starts presenting his research, and I nod mechanically as my eyes search the floor below us.
“—actually really hoping to talk to you, Dr. North…”
Lewis, seemingly unaware of the question, uses his foot to shift the student’s backpack, which sports a Stanford logo.
“Um?”
“I lost something,” Lewis says. His eyes jump to mine, then the student, who seems to realize we haven’t listened to him at all. Lewis clears his throat, glancing up at the poster. “So. Uh.” His eyes squint together. “You really think you can detect hippocampal theta with EEG?”
As they discuss, I peer down the aisle of poster boards as far as I can, but when Lewis is still discussing with the student ten minutes later, I excuse myself. I can’t tell if he wants to make up for our rudeness, or if he’s actually interested, but I know we’ll be quicker if we split up.
I’m about a third of the way down the room, in front of a poster that, in other circumstances, I’d find much more interesting, when Rosanna Alderkamp walks up next to me.
“Frances, how are you?”
The poster’s author is nowhere to be seen. I’m kneeling to see if the notebook fell behind the paper bin pushed against the wall. A second later and she would’ve found me with my hand inside that bin.
“Oh, hi,” I chirp and retie the laces of my left shoe, pretending that’s what I crouched down for.
“Did you have a nice weekend?”
It takes me a moment to answer. After the mad search that has made up this last hour, the weekend feels like it happened years ago. “I did.” I straighten. “What about you?”
She gives me a tired smile. “Too warm, but my wife flew in on Friday and we rented a car and went to a beach in New Jersey, so it was manageable.”
“Yeah, the summers here are a little different from the ones in the Netherlands,” I say.
Which reminds me that, once I’m back in Europe, this might be my last summer in the Netherlands…
unless I bookmark the search for a moment and try my luck with her.
“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.
Would you still be up for having lunch at some point this week? ”
“Sure. Let me check.” Rosanna rummages through her bag, and after she finds her phone, she lifts her glasses to the top of her forehead and taps on her screen. “Thank you for sending me the code, by the way. Is tomorrow okay?”
Other than my data-blitz presentation on Thursday morning, the final social event of the Sawyer’s on the same evening, and finding this goddamn notebook, I have nothing scheduled for the week, so I nod. “Works for me. Shall we meet outside the building after tomorrow’s keynote?”
“Let’s do that.” She puts her phone away and brushes her hair over one shoulder. “There’s this café on Broadway I walk past every morning on the way here that I’ve been wanting to try.”
“That sounds good,” I chime. Honestly, we could be having stale store-bought chips on a bench somewhere and I’d still be happy I get to talk to her.
Rosanna gives me a small wave. “See you then.”
As she walks away, my worries about the missing notebook immediately burst back up and I tell myself it’ll be fine, that it won’t turn up in unwanted hands, that nobody will read what’s inside, and I’ll get to meet Rosanna and make my case for how well I would fit into her lab if she has any available funding.
Lewis comes to find me not long after, and as we continue our search, Jacob stops us on the way to the seminar rooms. He asks us about our weekend, and through our jumpy, nervous replies, I wait for him to casually announce that he’s found the notebook, but he only turns to Lewis and says, “Dr. North, could you resend your lecture slides from last week? I think there’s something wrong with the file,” before he wishes us a good rest of the day.
With Lewis tense against my side, and my breaths shaky, I steer us out of the building, across the plaza, and into the shade of a leafy tree away from view.
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
“What for?”
“We wouldn’t be in this mess if I hadn’t insisted on this whole charade.”
“Yeah, but you’d also still be hating my guts.” Lewis runs a hand through his hair, his mouth curving into a hollow smile. “This one is on me. We wouldn’t be in this mess if I didn’t need to write everything down.”
But hearing him take the blame doesn’t make me feel any better. “What about the rest of the notebook?” I ask. “Not… related to us, but is there anything else in there that’d suck if it was gone?”
“Maybe the last few pages. Everything I wrote down since we arrived, but in comparison, that doesn’t really matter…”
He doesn’t need to finish his sentence.
We both know that if we are found out, our careers might well be over.