“Hey, don’t worry about it. That’s what brothers-in-law are for. It’s why you moved so close, right?” They’d found a temporary rental not ten minutes away and were searching for something more permanent.
“Exactly. Okay, be good for your uncle Jax and I’ll see you at the end of the day. One of us will be back to pick her up as soon as we can.”
Jax squeezed his precious niece and pressed his face to her downy head. “Like I said, don’t worry about it. I’m sure you’ll be back before my shift at seven. Now go—make money and wow your bosses. Say bye-bye to Daddy, Alice!”
She lifted a chubby hand and waved at George as he backed away and then dashed to his car.
Jax shut the front door and then stared at Alice. “Alone at last,” he said as it dawned on him that he was indeed alone with his niece for the very first time and it had been years since he last took a babysitting job. “Well, today should be interesting,” Jax told Alice. She nodded seriously. “Do you like strawberries?”
She clapped. “S’awberries!”
“Let’s go find some, then.”
At least she wasn’t afraid of him. Otherwise it’d be a really long day.
George had texted a tentative schedule—when he could expect her to be hungry, when she’d want a nap. One of the texts was just a poop emoji followed by10:30. Alice beat the clock by three minutes.
“Your dad is kind of scary good at this,” Jax told her while he changed her diaper on the living room table. One good thing about living with a doctor—they always had plenty of bleach wipes to disinfect the furniture.
“Good,” Alice agreed. Then she attempted to kick him in the face.
By nap time—eleven—Jax was ready to sack out with her. He put her down for a nap in the middle of his bed, pillows piled on either side so she couldn’t roll off, closed the curtains to make it at leastsort ofdark, and crept back toward the door. But as he was closing it behind him, something got caught underneath, and he stopped to pick it up.
Dear Mr. Hall,
Pursuant to our email of September 3….
Jax bit back a curse and crumpled the paper in his fist. Then, in a fit of uncharacteristic rage-induced determination, he went back into the bedroom, dug under his desk for his school laptop, and crept out again. If this was the universe sending him a sign, fine. It could maybe take a lesson in subtlety—Jax didn’t need to be babysitting his niece to be reminded that he had adult responsibilities—butfine. He needed to confront reality. Message received.
The laptop hadn’t been powered on in months, and it took half an hour to run a bunch of updates before he could do anything. In honesty, it didn’t have much software to update—just the antivirus and the operating system, a web browser, and the two programs Jax had written, which took up most of the memory.
It still had Excel, though, and he pulled that up, along with his bank account information. It was time to take a look at the facts.
Fact one: He’d been ready to defend for more than a year. His thesis was based on a computer program that modeled population growth and decay within biological systems. Grayling, his advisor, had pronounced it ready to defend in March of 2020, just before the world imploded, when Jax had been conscripted as his assistant on a modeling project for the Massachusetts Department of Health.
Fact two: He’d already paid thousands of dollars tonot finish his PhD, because if he withdrew completely, it would cost him forty grand to go back and finish, even if all he had to do was sit in front of the committee.
Fact three: Jax didn’t pay a lot in rent, but he also didn’t make enough money to justify continuing to spend thousands of dollars in “nonresident graduate tuition” per term.
It wasn’t sustainable. He knew it wasn’t. He could’ve done the math on this when he was ten. If you factored in scholarships, he’d spent more moneynotgoing to MIT than he had actually attending four years of classes.
The problem was that the idea of returning to Cambridge, walking through the Simons Building, knowing his advisor wouldn’t be there… sucked.
Also, he needed, like, thirteen thousand dollars.
Grimly, Jax opened Excel and began entering numbers—expenses, estimated income, assets. He might not be able to do anything right now, but he at least needed to know what he didn’t know—a bottom line, a final figure, a stretch goal.
Twenty minutes later he blew out a long breath and closed his laptop, ready for a different kind of distraction.
Hopefully Alice would wake up soon.
ARI SPENTthe majority of Thursday fussing with “Alice,” until it became less wonderland and more psychedelic musings. He moved the piano melody down an octave and transposed it to a minor key. Then he took a pen to the lyrics.
It seemed so obvious now that Jax wasn’t some innocent who’d fallen down a rabbit hole into a nonsense world. No, Jax was the grinning Cheshire Cat—an outsider who understood the illogic of the world but didn’t belong to it. Notreally. He was holding too much of himself back.
Ari wanted to see beyond the grin, but he had the suspicion that if he tried, the whole of Jax would slip away bit by bit, just as the cat did in the book.
When he’d reworked it to his satisfaction, he sat down to rerecord, first the piano and then the violin. He even took video of the violin part so Noella would have something to post to Instagram. In a separate file, he recorded the vocals too, even though he hated his own singing voice, and packaged the whole thing off for Noella.
