Chapter 3
Ren
Cookies are, by their definition, supposed to provide comfort.
Nourishment and nutrition, even, depending on the ingredient list.
Probably.
I don’t know much about the anthropological origins of baking—ask me about nesting or social behaviour of the velociraptor, I’m on it. I can even rhyme off all relevant radiometric dating numbers on the surrounding rocks of the most important fossils ever found.
Whatever Natufian hunter-gatherers in Jordan used to bake has nothing on the potassium-40-to-argon ratio in volcanic ash.
But these cookies?
The ones sitting pretty on a chipped, plastic tray in front of me on the table in the staff room? Painted like cartoon imaginings of the Tyrannosaurus rex with their tiny arms, bright eyes, and smiles revealing sharp teeth?
I’ve got nothing on them.
Leaning forward in my seat, eyes narrowed, nose turned up, I peer down at the tray and wonder if I’ll be able to see all my failures spelled out in the pretty swirls of icing.
I’m about to reach out and snap the small arms off the one painted a colour I’ll call puke when the chair beside me screeches as it’s pulled out from the table.
Imani huffs, the puff of air sending her hair out of her face, and she adjusts her glasses after the giant folder she was carrying hits the desk with a thud. “Hi. I thought I’d be late, I was in the prep lab and—oh, who brought cookies?”
“Probably Graham, or the hiring committee,” I mutter, folding my arms across my chest so I don’t go on a rampage and start snapping forelimbs.
Her brow furrows with the tilt of her head but understanding winks behind her eyes when they trace the shape of the cookies. “No one else got cookies when they started.”
“Well, no one else was considered an ‘emerging expert’ and ‘one of the most promising young scientific minds in the field of paleontology’ when it comes to the Tyrannosaurus rex.” I spout off the accolades that belong to Scott before I can think better of it.
On most exes, it might be normal to hear an undercurrent of envy, maybe even reproach or anger.
But the undercurrent belonging to me just sounds like a horribly sad, slow drift of stagnant water. It’s heavy with wasted potential, and maybe a riptide or two of pathetic slinking along the sediment of forgotten dreams at the bottom.
Imani places a gentle hand on my arm. “That’s only because people don’t know the truth.”
“What’s that?” I turn to her, frowning. I half expect her to start spouting truths about Scott—as many as she has, anyway.
That an eighteen-year-old me thought he was confident and brilliant, so self-assured that she was almost in awe of him, so she placed him and his bestowed affection on a pedestal, hidden behind glass in a temperature-controlled room where nothing could possibly get to it, like the most important discovery ever unearthed.
Until she realized too late that sometimes, confidence is arrogance.
And sometimes, people love that we love them more than we love ourselves and more than they love us.
But her finger taps the silk of my blouse, and she smiles conspiratorially. “That the T. rex isn’t the most important dinosaur. It’s just the most famous. How lazy of him, really. To dedicate his entire career to fame and sheer recognizability.”
The corners of my mouth tip up, some of those riptides loosen their grip when I half whisper, “Right? Had the whole Late Cretaceous Period at his fingertips and he picked the largest carnivorous dinosaur but the one with the tiniest arms?”
“Telling.” Imani nods, with a flick up of her brows. “He couldn’t have picked hypacrosaurus and learned something about parental care?”
“Forget the nests and the eggs. Who cares about those?” I wave a hand. “Give me the one with the strongest bite force.”
Imani shakes her head slowly. “Typical man.”
My smile inches higher, and I can hardly feel the pull of any of it at all—the cookies look just like cookies now. I might even have one—not the puke-coloured one, but the purple one that looks like Chomper from The Land Before Time—but that typical man drops into the seat across from me.
Everything about Scott looks relaxed. The wave of golden hair cresting across his forehead. The black acetate frames resting just on the bridge of his nose, and the dark eyes, lit with amusement behind them. The top two buttons of his pressed Oxford undone and relaxed.
Lackadaisical and at ease, even, in this brand-new world and environment.
Like he doesn’t have a single care in the world, and he can sit wherever he wants, whenever he wants. And he can.
But I know Scott.
And I know it was intentional.
“Nice to see you all cleaned up, Ren.” He grins when he says it, and there’s an ease there too. Any outsider looking in would think it’s familiarity, two people who knew each other better than they knew themselves, who can laugh and poke fun.
But the familiarity isn’t kind. It’s Scott, looking down at me from the pedestal I made for him, reminding me he sees me on the ground beneath him, and it’s where he thinks I belong.
I dig my heels into the linoleum floor under my seat and try to stand proverbially taller than I feel. I force a smile. “It’s nice to be cleaned up.”
“That was my fault.” Imani waves a hand nervously. “I dropped the hot dog. And the margarita. Ren’s hands are very steady, you know. She never leaves a mess. You should see her hold a fossil brush.”
“I have,” Scott says flatly.
I steel myself for the inevitable dig to come—that he has seen me, and it wasn’t terribly impressive.
That my skills, just like me, weren’t good enough in the end.
But instead of being admonished and picked apart in that unique way only Scott’s hands are capable of, I’m saved by Graham folding himself down in the chair beside him.
“Ren. Dr. Juma.” Graham nods at each of us in turn, and there’s a barely discernable twitch of what might look like laughter, but I know it’s just cruelty sketching across Scott’s freshly shaven jaw.
“Morning.” I try to smile, blinking too much at Graham, resolutely staring away from the cookies that seem like their wide smiles are turning to snarls in my periphery.
Imani shifts in her seat, sympathy tugging the corners of her mouth down when she watches me out of the corner of her eye, but she looks to Graham, offering a quiet “Good morning.”
If he realizes he somehow discredited me and drew attention to my general lack of credentials in front of the man who usurped the position that I wanted so very badly, he doesn’t show it. Graham sets his briefcase on the table, the tarnished brass buckles groaning ominously as he clicks it open.
But his eyes find us again, almost disinterested and like he’s really not very good at making small talk—he’s not—and he asks, “I trust you’re making our new curator feel right at home?”
Imani shoves her hands under her thighs like she’d rather use those same hands to shove the new curator out the door. “Of course.” One of her hands comes out from underneath her skirt, a finger extending towards the cookies. “Look. Cookies.”
Graham’s eyes find the cartoon T. rexes spread across the tray for the first time. He makes a noncommittal noise before reaching forward and picking up the puke-green one, inspecting it from behind his glasses like it’s a real specimen sitting in the lab.
Finally deigning to move, Scott leans forward and takes the purple one, brow cocked when he sits back, eyes laser focused on me when he bites off the head. He chews, thoughtful, and I try to give him a hard stare, but he swallows, holding up the headless dinosaur. “These from you, Ren?”
I don’t miss the way he emphasizes my name. The lack of formality, the lack of any type of anything important associated with it.
“No,” I mumble, glancing down at the curved edge of the table as it starts to blur.
“Oh, I brought those,” Dev, the vertebrate exhibit developer, says with a grin, sliding the chair beside me out. It screeches across the floor, but he doesn’t seem to notice, swinging it around so he can sit, arms folded across the back.
He doesn’t seem to notice Graham’s look of thinly veiled displeasure at the lack of formality, either, reaching forward and grabbing a cookie at random, and chomping down on the head with significantly less ire and finesse than Scott.
Graham clears his throat, mouth pinching into a straight line, and he widens his eyes at the back of Dev’s chair.
Dev looks down, grip on the blue T. rex slackening, cheeks puffed out, when he mutters, “Sorry, Graham,” through a mouth full of cookie, scrambling to straighten his chair and sit properly without choking.
Mollified, Graham abandons his own cookie and starts pulling out folders from his briefcase, the sleeves of his tweed jacket it’s significantly too hot for buckling.
He’s only forty-three, but he looks like he walked off the set of a television show about the most stereotypical paleontologist to exist. Flaxen hair, horn-rimmed glasses, tweed year-round, a stern set to what could be handsome features if he’d just relax, and a penchant for rule-following I should have remembered when I reached for a job I wasn’t qualified for on paper.
“Thanks, man.” Scott lifts what’s left of his cookie towards Dev in some sort of salute, an easy smile sliding into place.
Dev recovers, grinning widely. “Anything for the guy who found the oldest T. rex skull ever known in Hell Creek.”
Imani scoffs, but a quick cut of Graham’s eyes turns that scoff into a sputter, and she sinks lower into her seat.
Scott doesn’t bother to look at her, or me for that matter, but he does smile politely at Dev, and then Graham when he accepts the pile of manilla folders from him to hand around the table as the rest of the staff file in.
My cheeks flame when mine reaches me and I see the embossed sticker sealing the envelope.
TMLB, shining and written in gold like it’s stitched across the jerseys.
Toronto Major League Baseball.
Graham waits until everyone has one in their hand before he starts to speak. “Before we get started with our regular agenda, I’d like to take a moment to welcome our new assistant curator to his inaugural staff meeting. Scott Saunders joins us from . . .”
I stop listening. I look off into the corner of the staff room and study the paint, peeling where the wall meets the ceiling.
I could name all of Scott’s credentials and accomplishments better than Graham.
They’re tattooed somewhere on me anyway, a bit like a brand.
Graham doesn’t say the one that matters most though.
Scott Saunders, PhD. Better than Ren Jacobs.
A smattering of polite applause and a dig from Imani’s elbow into my rib cage bring my eyes back to my folder, and I start clapping, too, a beat too late.
My skin burns and I try to swallow the sting of embarrassment and shame and ignore how it feels when Scott’s gaze settles on me.
“Welcome, Scott. I have no doubt you’ll fit right in.
” Graham smiles tightly before tapping his own manilla envelope.
“Which brings me to our next item before we move to grants. Our new philanthropic partners for the summer season, who were kind enough to host us last week.” He holds up the envelope.
The logo flashes under the dim lighting, and I can feel the phantom spread of a margarita across my blouse.
“Obviously we’re off to a collegial start, seeing as the star shortstop didn’t seem to mind taking time out of his day to help Ren out. ”
Graham thinks he’s telling a joke we’re all in on, not reliving something at my expense. It’s the lack of nuanced understanding of social cues.
Imani says he spends too much time arguing about sauropod anatomy and why the brontosaurus deserved its name the whole time.
And she’s probably right—but that doesn’t save me from the sort of congenial laughter ringing out around the table, or Dev knocking my shoulder with his fist, laughing when he says, “Imagine? Ren’s the one who gets Miller CB to settle down?”
Scott’s forced laughter changes tone, and the lines of his neck shift to mocking. But no one else notices when they pull out their partnership information and event schedules from the folders.
They wouldn’t, anyway.
Because he and I are the only two who know the truth.
Ren Jacobs is someone you settle for, not someone you settle down with.