Chapter 2 #2
Not like, politely clear-my-throat choke. Like an actual wheeze, one that earns me an immediate shift of his attention. His brow arches, slow and surgical, in my direction.
He doesn't say anything. Just stares. The whole room holds its breath.
“Sorry,” I manage to cough out, mortified. “Water. Went down wrong.”
Technically true. Also technically a lie. I simply wasn’t prepared for someone to refer to Dr. Kymbert by her first name like it wasn’t a privilege earned over years and years of collaboration.
Holden nods once, moves on. “And I’ll hold office and lab hours weekly. If something’s not working—your data, your equipment, your experimental design—you come to me.”
He raises an eyebrow again—so slight it could be mistaken for a twitch of disinterest—and waits. Like he’s not surprised that no one jumped in with a question, but mildly disappointed we didn’t try.
“As I mentioned,” he says, voice low and precise, “my research centers on cyclogenesis. The atmospheric conditions that allow coastal storms to form, escalate, and—if misjudged—level entire communities.”
He writes the word STORM in clean, precise lettering that somehow manages to radiate knowledge. There’s something unsettling about a man that confident with a dry erase marker.
“These systems operate on razor-thin margins,” he continues, sketching out an arrow toward LEVELS OF RISK and MARGIN OF ERROR.
“A one-degree temperature differential, a delay in data modeling, and your forecast becomes fiction. And fiction,” he adds, as he caps the marker, sets it aside, and turns to face us again, “doesn’t save lives. ”
“And yes,” he adds, gaze steady, “this class will change the way you work. Or it should.”
There’s something so maddeningly self-assured about the way he says it. Not arrogant, exactly. Just certain. Like the math always checks out in his head, and he’s generous enough to let the rest of us try and catch up.
“Don’t mistake this for a lack of understanding in biology. I will understand your theses, that I can guarantee.”
A frown pulls at my eyebrows, because here we go. Sometimes I wonder if male TAs are issued a starter pack that includes two button-downs, a superiority complex, and the phrase ‘actually, what you meant was—’.
His eyes land on me, and a frown of his own pulls at his face. “Let’s go around and hear what you’re working on, and why you picked the subject.”
We make it around the room quicker than I thought, which makes sense—there are only so many of us who willingly enrolled in a class designed to dissect failure.
And I’m into it. Every second of it.
One girl near the front, with a highlighter-yellow scrunchie and a beautifully steady voice, is studying the reproductive rates of silky sharks in high-impact fishery zones. She says it like it’s obvious, like she just woke up one day and had to know why the numbers weren’t lining up.
Then there’s the guy a few seats over who, by all appearances, is being slowly consumed by his own nerves.
He trips over words, gestures too much with his hands, and at one point accidentally refers to monk seals as “monk squirrels.” But his passion for them cuts through everything else.
It’s sharp, earnest, and impossible not to admire.
What I love most is that no one’s holding back.
Every person is clinging to some deeply niche passion with the kind of devotion normally reserved for cults or competitive baking.
And despite the nerves and the awkward fumbles, there’s something magnetic about it all.
Like the room itself is quietly shifting to accommodate this collective, chaotic brilliance.
But then, naturally, there’s me.
Holden’s eyes flick to mine—barely a tilt of the chin, prompting me to speak.
“Um, hi.” Great start. Very compelling.
“My research focuses on how octopuses adapt cognitively to environmental disruptions. Well I guess, in short, I’m studying their neural plasticity in response to habitat changes—how their problem-solving, memory, and camouflage behavior shifts under stress.
They’re remarkably intelligent, highly adaptable.
.. arguably better at handling stress than most graduate students I know. ”
That earns a couple soft laughs. Encouraging. I press on, against better judgment.
“I’m aware I talk about cephalopods like they’re my emotional support cryptids. It’s fine. I’m working on it.”
This time, the laughter is louder. Dr. Kymbert is definitely smiling. Unless I’ve blown a fuse in my optic nerve, which—given my current cortisol levels—is not entirely off the table.
Still, I’d like to formally apologize to my ancestors for whatever just came out of my mouth in that introduction.
“Anyway, I think the main point of this research is—”
“Alright, I think we’ve heard enough,” Holden cuts in, already pulling up the syllabus on the projector. He spares one last glance my way before turning his back to us.
There’s a very specific flavour of humiliation that comes from being interrupted by a man mid-sentence. In my defense, if I’d known he was going to look at me like that, I wouldn’t have spoken. Ever.
I catch a few people glancing my way with that look that says, If I were you, I’d fake my own death and transfer programs. And, honestly? Fair.
The rest of class goes… fine, if we’re using a grading scale where “ignored by the TA” and “pitied by two separate rows” qualify as a good thing.
Around the time Holden says multivariate climate model with the ease most people reserve for ordering a latte, I make an executive decision to stop watching his mouth form perfect jargon and redirect my attention to Dr. Kymbert. As I should have from the beginning.
She doesn’t interrupt so much as calibrate.
Two sentences, a precise question, and suddenly the room’s noise collapses into a well-orchestrated song.
Pens start moving. Mine included. When she asks, “What failure would actually falsify your claim?” I underline it three times and make a mental note of answering it later.
They wrap with a case study—one of theirs.
A joint paper on coral reef exposure to damaging tropical-cyclone waves.
Mid-deployment, a storm rolled through and erased half the experiment: loggers gone, transects mangled, sections of the reef itself wiped clean like an Etch A Sketch shaken too hard.
Where most people would file the whole thing under “unpublishable catastrophe,” they re-framed it: loss as measurement, absence as data.
He talks surge periods and broken moorings; she talks redesign and constraint as a method.
I write, in the margin like it’s a thesis-worthy revelation: Fieldwork is consenting to chaos.
It’s not reassuring. It is, however, exactly the kind of honesty I came here for.
The hallway outside bottlenecks, then exhales—one last tide of bodies surging past the labs before it goes quiet.
A knot of grads near me starts the debrief, and the distribution is hilariously predictable: ninety percent Holden—citations, models, biceps—ten percent Dr. Kymbert—“intense,” “scary good.”
I know this pattern. Put two geniuses in the same room and the narrative vector tilts toward the one with broader shoulders. He’s a prodigy; she’s “intimidating.” His certainty reads as authority; hers, as attitude. Disappointing, yet not surprising.
It’s at that moment that I get the feeling someone dragged the mountains indoors.
Same scale. Same hush. Except this mountain smells faintly of sandalwood and clean pine, reminding me of home, and moves with the quiet certainty of a PhD candidate who’s already three steps ahead.
Holden doesn’t so much as glance at me as he passes, which, fine—I probably haven’t earned the right to acknowledgement yet.
My brain, having logged one humiliation already today, decides to collect the set.
“So, I’m guessing you’re not a fan of cephalopods?”
He stops a few steps ahead and turns to search for the origin of the question—looking down, and then further down—at me.
One eyebrow ticks up. For a second I swear his mouth almost curves into a smile, though this feels dangerously like my chicken hallucination, and then his face resets to factory settings.
“I don’t study octopi, so no.”
“It’s octopuses.” Excellent. Fire me into the sun.
“Excuse me?” His eyebrow goes higher, arms crossing over a chest I am still choosing not to describe for the sake of my dignity, and my anxiety hits the big red button labeled start talking entirely too fast.
“People say octopi because it looks Latin, which it’s not.” I hear myself say, already regretting everything. “If we’re being precise, the fancy plural is octopodes, but no one uses it outside of trivia nights.”
I fidget with my bag and huff a laugh. “It’s not your fault, though. The plural of octopus is a trap designed to reveal which of us paid attention in Greek etymology class.”
His posture acquires the specific tension of a man realizing there is no emergency exit on this topic. His gaze flicks to the lab door, then back. I can’t really blame him.
“Are you done?” His eyes find mine—brown, unreadable—and his mouth presses into a line.
A mortifying lump forms in my throat. I nod.
He pivots toward the lab and is gone in three deliberate strides. The door hushes shut, and I stare at the space he vacated, then at my shoes, then at the nearest exit as though it might offer a tutorial on how fast one can transfer departments without looking obvious.
Maya halts whatever she was typing as I shove the door open. I groan and face-plant onto my bed, dropping my bag with all the flair of someone who should not be allowed to interact with fellow academics—especially if they’re hot. And tall. And clearly uninterested in anything I have to say.
“What has you in an existential crisis?”
“The fact that my brain has only two modes and doesn’t know when to use either.”
“Explain, please.”
“It’s either ‘I’m a brilliant, unstoppable academic,’ or ‘I have forgotten every piece of scientific knowledge I’ve ever absorbed, including my own name.’”
“And I assume today you forgot how to pronounce Coralie?” she says, smirking.
“Close.” I groan into my pillow and recount the full extent of the humiliation that was BIOL 403. She nods while scrolling on her phone which, I learn a minute later, was to add “The Sporting Life” by The Decemberists to my playlist.
“Hilarious,” I deadpan.
She giggles, flops back beside me, and turns her head. “Listen, it’s not that bad. I’ve heard of Holden Wilkes and the guy is a freak of nature. I think he published his first paper before he could drive.”
I hardly think that’s true… is it?
“So if anything, he’s the weird one here,” she continues. “He probably has no social skills and made you feel bad for it. And he didn’t know it’s octopuses, so maybe you are smarter than him.”
“Allow me to doubt that.”
“Hey, now. Don’t let one dickhead make you question why you’re here. Least of all Wilkes.”
I answer with a groan into my pillow.
“What’s your plan, then?”
“To avoid all human interaction until further notice.”
“Cool, so business as usual.”
I can’t help a laugh. She lets my increasingly unhinged playlist roll and gives me a too-bright smile that unclenches something in my chest—an efficient reminder that the world does not revolve around one lecture hall, and even less around one PhD student.
And there’s a kind of magic in not knowing how to handle something and wanting to learn anyway. That’s the whole reason I’m here. That, and a deeply unhealthy obsession with mollusks.