Page 176 - The Love Hypothesis

Chapter Twelve

HYPOTHESIS: If I am bad at doing activity A, my chances of being asked to
engage in activity A will rise exponentially.

Campus felt strangely empty with Adam gone, even on days in which she
likely wouldn’t have met him anyway. It didn’t make much sense: Stanford
was most definitely not empty, but teeming with loud, annoying undergrads

on their way to and from class. Olive’s life, too, was full: her mice were old
enough for the behavioral assays to be run, she’d finally gotten revisions for

a paper she’d submitted months earlier, and she had to start making
concrete plans for her move to Boston next year; the class she was TA’ing

had a test coming up, and undergrads magically began to pop by during
office hours, looking panicky and asking questions that were invariably

answered in the first three lines of the syllabus.
Malcolm spent a couple of days trying to convince Olive to tell Adam
the truth, and then became—thankfully—too discouraged by her

stubbornness and too busy trying to meditate away his own dating drama to
insist. He did bake several batches of butterscotch cookies, though, patently

lying that he was “not rewarding your self-destructive behaviors, Olive, but
just perfecting my recipe.” Olive ate them all, and hugged him from behind
while he sprinkled sea salt on top of the last batch.

On Saturday, Anh came over for beer and s’mores, and she and Olive
daydreamed about leaving academia and finding industry jobs that paid a

proper salary and acknowledged the existence of free time.