Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
My first pet as a child was a tiny, stubborn crab I named Barnacle. He escaped the very same day I found him, pinched my thumb for the road, and scuttled back into the tide pool. I like to think he thrived.
In hindsight, Barnacle was delivering a lesson I wouldn’t translate until much later, which is that you do not hold what was never yours and that love can sting even when it only grazes a thumbnail.
The trouble is that wisdom like that moves slowly while feelings sprint.
My processing time lagged by a few years, and the message only truly landed after my first official breakup.
Neuroscience would agree with me here—strong emotions have a habit of ejecting executive function from a very high window, then locking it outside for good measure.
That first breakup came a few years later, during undergrad.
Malcolm Harrington was, by every definition available to any dictionary or thesaurus, a golden boy.
His grades behaved, he knew what to do with both a hockey stick and a baseball bat—which some might rank in the top ten hottest competencies—and he was fluent in STEM, which is what caught my heart, though the bright, photogenic smile and the oversized hoodies did significant supporting work.
By nothing short of a miracle, Malcolm asked me out during my first year at Dalhousie.
I did the mandatory three-hundred-sixty-degree check to make sure it was not one of those situations where someone waves and you wave back only to discover their friends were standing behind you, but no, Malcolm was actually talking to me.
It started out great. Our families lived in very different tax brackets, yet he never minded walking the beach to hunt sea glass with me, and because he was a first-year too we partnered on more projects than was good for my blood pressure.
That alone tells you how far gone I was, since maybe, just maybe, somewhere in a different dimension, I’m the kind of person who thrives in group projects.
But on this planet, I’m the kind who grits her teeth every time someone suggests we “divide and conquer.”
A couple months passed and I began to think I had a respectable grasp on the relationship thing, but I had not crossed paths with Barnacle for nothing and his warning came back with excellent aim.
For our first symposium, Malcolm and I paired up to present an East Coast study on how rockweed canopy buffers tide-pool temperature after storms and nudges invertebrate behavior.
Great ideas rarely go unnoticed, yet one thing often does, and that is the woman co-author.
Halfway through the weekend his careful we softened into an effortless I, and Ms. Taylor flattened into this kid.
I wish I were kidding but, unfortunately, I am not.
He compiled back-pats and a tidy cluster of emails from prospective mentors, while I collected polite thumbs-ups and the academic equivalent of a shiny gold star for completing my homework.
Right there, I learned that being a woman in science requires arriving twice as prepared, waiting three times as patiently, and resisting five times as hard the urge to punch people in the neck when they rebrand your work as theirs.
I also learned that Malcolm was no better than Barnacle—less, if you count the fact that he did not even have a cool exoskeleton.
Since then my frontal lobe has finally come online and I’ve written myself a few house rules to get through this career without another week of couch-rot and salted-caramel, puffy-face crying over a boy who didn’t deserve me.
The rules are straightforward. If someone starts siphoning attention from my work, they go to the back burner—quietly, firmly—so I can go as far as I know I can.
And I back women in STEM at every turn, because I used to read being underestimated as an insult; now I treat it as cover, a tactical advantage that buys time to build something undeniable.
There’s a small revolution in taking up space in rooms that were never designed for you, and I intend to keep doing it.
Which is why I’m here, gloriously Malcolm-free, claiming a sensible rectangle of lab bench and sorting my notes before heading to the Day octopus.
He isn’t technically mine, but we have an understanding.
We’re still in the get-to-know phase, yet the moment I approach with a Tupperware of LEGO, his eyes notch, his skin shifts to that curious mottling, and an arm unfurls toward the surface—the very recognizable posture of a scholar anticipating enrichment.
Did I ever picture scheduling playdates with an octopus? Jokes on you, because I totally did.
Octopuses can recognize people by sight, touch, and the chemical trail we cart around.
I’m not pretending he knows me after four visits, but he absolutely recognizes the puzzle kit and the toys.
As if to confirm, he extends two more arms and starts stacking pieces with the concentration of a tiny engineer.
“Look at you go. Next week I’ll bring the Batman set,” I say, dropping a few more blocks into the tank.
“We should find you a name. Maybe Damon—Day octopus, Damon. No? Okay. I’ll see myself out.”
The lab door swings open and a crisp “hello?” cuts through the room.
A woman steps in who could have been cast as 2007 Megan Fox: long legs, black tube top, dark hair straight as a ruler and glossy enough to catch the fluorescents, silver jewelry flashing at wrist and ear.
Her face is a work of art worth studying.
She is stunning in the most womanly, intimidating way there is.
She scans the space, which takes one second—it’s me, the octopus, and the clam tank humming in the corner.
“Hi. Have you seen Holden? Holden Wilkes?”
My pulse does an unhelpful kick. I do not want to unpack the why. “Not since yesterday, sorry.”
“Who were you talking to? I thought I heard voices.”
I rub the back of my neck and nod at the tank. Damon pauses mid-build, chromatophores settling. “Just him.”
“The octopus?”
“The octopus.”
She considers that, then steps back, eyes running over me with the same cool efficiency she used on the room. “Right,” she says, perching on a stool. She taps in a number and sets the phone on the counter.
“Yeah?” Comes the voice I could identify through a hurricane at this point, thinned by wind and background chatter through the speakers.
“Holden,” she says, a thread of impatience in it, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I even came to your little lab.”
“Summer? What?” he says, confused. I pivot back to Damon because my job is enrichment and not eavesdropping, and because he is very clearly building something that rivals even my best LEGO work.
“Yes, Summer, dummy. I thought maybe we could hang out. I miss you.”
The pang that hits my chest is absolutely not jealousy, and surely just a harmless cardiac glitch brought on by humidity and a potassium deficiency, which I will address later with a banana.
I have no reason to be jealous. Except, perhaps, the wish for two extra inches below my knees, a fraction of her effortless poise, and the ability to “hang out” at will.
Not with Holden, obviously. Certainly not.
“Um, sure, but I’m kinda busy. And off campus.”
“Okay? So just tell me where you are and I’ll meet you. I don’t feel like staying here a minute longer, not with this girl talking to fish.”
My teeth catch my tongue. Not a fish—cephalopod—three hearts, copper blood, distributed nervous system. I swallow the correction because apparently I like living.
“Coralie is with you?”
My head snaps up so fast my ponytail brushes my shoulder. There could be another Coralie on this island, or even on campus, or maybe in this program, right? There’s no way he figured out she was talking about me. Summer’s gaze slides to me and narrows like she just solved for x.
“Are you Coralie?”
“Um… yeah.”
She stands in one smooth line, scoops up a handbag stamped with a very confident silver G, and heads for the door. The heels—silver-strapped, razor-thin—click once, twice, sharp as the AC hum. “What the heck, H, I thought you were going to—” Her voice thins as the hallway swallows it.
Behind me, water filters murmur and Damon’s arms go still, a single LEGO brick hovering between two suckers like he’s waiting for my cue. Heat climbs my neck. So, he knew my name. She now knows my face. And I have just become the shiny new variable in a system that already runs too hot.
If Holden didn’t already dislike me, irritating his girlfriend by existing within his range will probably do the trick.
“You’d tell me if there were fumes in here making me hallucinate that entire exchange, right?”
Damon offers no opinion. He resumes stacking with the same unbothered focus he gives everything that isn’t my personal life, which is probably the healthiest response in the room.
My imagination is decent, but it does not have the horsepower to fabricate a woman like Summer from scratch, much less the dialogue that followed.
The quiet after she leaves is enormous. I let it close over me while I watch the octopus do what he does best. He solves the bait puzzle in under two minutes, tasting each seam with careful suckers before twisting the lid as if he’s done this many times before.
He checks the new rock I slipped into his den when he wasn’t looking, tests it with the edge of his beak, then decides it can stay.
His chromatophores ripple when he shifts strategies, dark to pale and back again, and the slit of his pupil thins whenever he narrows his attention.
The data tell a simple story. He is tracking the environment with more care than most people track their own words.