Page 112 - The Love Hypothesis

Chase’s words lingered for the rest of the day. Olive thought about them

as she ran her mice through her experimental protocols, and then later while
she tried to figure out what to do with those two outliers that made her
findings tricky to interpret. She mulled it over while biking home, hot wind

warming her cheeks and ruffling her hair, and while eating two slices of the
saddest pizza ever. Malcolm had been on a health kick for weeks now

(something about cultivating his gut microbiome) and refused to admit that
cauliflower crust did not taste good.

Among her friends, Malcolm and Jeremy had had unpleasant dealings
with Adam in the past, but after the initial shock they didn’t seem to hold

Olive’s relationship with him against her. She hadn’t concerned herself too
much with the feelings of other grads. She had always been a bit of a loner,
and focusing on the opinion of people she barely interacted with seemed

like a wasteful use of time and energy. Still, maybe there was a glimmer of
truth in what Greg had said. Adam had been anything but a jerk to Olive,

but did accepting his help while he acted horribly toward her fellow grads
make her a bad person?

Olive lay on her unmade bed, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars. It
had been more than two years since she’d borrowed Malcolm’s stepladder

and carefully stuck them on the ceiling; the glue was starting to give out,
and the large comet in the corner by the window was going to fall off any
day. Without letting herself think it through too much, she rolled out of bed

and rummaged inside the pockets of her discarded jeans until she found her
cell phone.

She hadn’t used Adam’s number since he’d given it to her a few days
ago—“If anything comes up or you need to cancel, just give me a call. It’s

quicker than an email.” When she tapped the blue icon under his name a
white screen popped up, a blank slate with no history of previous messages.

It gave Olive an odd rush of anxiety, so much so that she typed the text with
one hand while biting the thumbnail on the other.

Olive: Did you just fail Greg?
Adam was never on his phone. Never. Whenever Olive had been in his
company, she’d not seen him check it even once—even though with a lab as