Martina
You’re still typing. Are you writing your next story by text?
She’d been gripping her phone so hard that its screen registered the pressure of her thumb as a keysmash. A scream of letters, numbers, and symbols spewed under her hold. At least she hadn’t hitSend.
Martina
What’s going on?
Incoming Video Call:Martina Perez
She answered. What else could she do?
Martina filled the screen, her curly bob wrapped in a silk sleep scarf, her phone propped up on the Perezes’ kitchen table and a notepad of dates, names, and numbers—likely the financial dirt she’d found on a city council trustee—receiving her focus instead of a plate of leftovers in plastic wrap by her elbow. But now, she pushed her notes and dinner aside to scrutinize Erin’s face. “Thank God—you’re breathing? You’re safe?”
“Y-yes, but…”
“What’s going on?”
This wasn’t popcorn.
Not anymore.
“Ethan was right,” she said.
Martina dropped her phone onto her enchiladas.
And then, it all came spilling out.
“Ethan was—he said—said that Dr. Kramer would retaliate, afterIsaid he didn’t have anything to contribute to our quantum gravity project, that he’d stolen his subordinates’ research to publish under his name, that he wasn’t a genius, just a parasite—and it was all true—istrue—but then he warned me about what Dr. Kramer would do, and I—I laughed.I laughed.I thought I could handle it, because I can always handle it, always have to—but now my paper’s being investigated for fraud, and I—I didn’t falsify my numbers. I didn’t. My name will still be linked with fake data in people’s minds, though, and you know what the field is like. I’m…me. I’m not going to get a second chance at… at…” She choked to a stop, out of breath, her throat raw. Then, swallowing through her friend’s wide-eyed, open-mouthed stare, “Like I said, Ethan was right.”
“…uh.”
“He’s also Bannister.”
“Bann—what?!”
“Yes.”
“That… that’s… you’re…really?Right.Right. So, first: the situation with Dr. Kramer and your paper is horrible, and I’ll do anything I can to help.Obviously.” Recovering with impressive speed, Martina brandished her notebook of city council dirt, almost knocking her plate off the table before she dropped the pages and grabbed her phone close, mouthing her words to Erin on the screen. “But also—Dr. Ethan Meyer and Bannister?”
“I know.”
“Did you?”
“Last Friday, but then everything just…”
“I knew before then.” Martina began to pace her family’s tiny kitchen, weaving between an asthmatic refrigerator and cluttered cabinets of spices. “Not about Bannister—thoughJesus, it’s really him?—but about you and Ethan. Because you don’t have a poker face, and he… you were the only person he talked to in anything but monosyllables, if he wasn’t discussing physics. I could tell that, even just from passing him in the office, which—this means that the pop psychology on those daytime talk shows is right! Opposites do attract!”
She’d expected to be flustered and embarrassed and defensive, almost ashamed of the truth, of her own bullheaded blindness.
Instead, despite everything, Erin found herself breathing, relaxing a fraction from her panicky hunch against her headboard when she said, “That’s valid with particle charges, but people aren’t just protons and electrons. There’s only anecdotal evidence about romantic opposites attracting from song lyrics and films. From art.”
“Like yours, and his.”
“Yes.”
“So?”
