Chapter Text
“Were you able to calculate the focal length for the new optics?”
“I mean, I got something but it’s not right. I— ”
“How about the materials? I still have no word on our screws. What’s their radiopurity? Were you able to determine that, at least?”
“Well, I need to talk to the chemistry department. I believe the screws need to be screened with both gamma spectroscopy and mass spectroscopy.”
Her advisor was spinning a pencil in one hand, looking deadpan as he rattled off his questions one-by-one. He looked bored.
“They, uh— they haven’t emailed me back yet,” Reagan stumbled as she tried to fill the silence. “Once they do, I’ll— ”
“What about our fucking roughing pump?” He interrupted. “Were you able to fix it, or was that also something you couldn’t handle?” Her advisor dropped the pencil he was twirling, letting it hit the table as if to add punctuation to his irritation.
Reagan looked down. She couldn’t meet his eyes. I’m trying , she wanted to say, but knew better than to talk like that around Professor Slepian. Professor Slepian didn’t care if you were trying. He didn’t care if you had homework, or TA duties. He didn’t care if you were sick, or if the roads were bad, or if there was a family emergency. His graduate students were in the lab, every day, without fail. There were no excuses for Slepian— just progress.
“He’s the smartest man I know, other than me, of course . ” That’s what Rand had said to her back in November, back when she was still eyes-deep in applications. “ Work for Slepian, and you’ll be a shoo-in for whatever ya want kid. You can fix or fuck the world as you see fit.”
I can’t even fix a roughing pump, she thought.
It was true, though. Every graduate student Slepian had mentored was either wildly successful or had completely disappeared off the face of the planet after dissertation.
“Recruited by Cognito Inc. , ” Rand had said. “The names you never hear again are the smartest of them. And one day kiddo, your name will be blacked out of every publication just like them.”
Rand had always been over-confident in her abilities. That was at least one quality Reagan shared with her father. Undergrad was easy, childsplay. She thought this would be no different.
Stupid fucking idiot.
She was drowning.
“Reagan,” Slepian said, bringing her back to the moment. “Look at me.” He was staring at her over round wire glasses with steely, grey eyes that looked like they were locking away lightning as the fluorescent LEDs above scattered electric blue across them. Peppered hair was neatly combed back, and still very thick. His face, though aged, held no secrets of the good looks he must have held in his youth. Even in his fifties, Slepian was a good looking man. Good looking in the way that a high school English teacher is— the glasses. The peacoats. The knit sweaters. He was built like a runner, and had the posture of a soldier and spoke with a deep, lulling voice that even when quiet, would carry down the halls of the department, demanding its attention.
“Look at me,” He repeated. Underneath his baritone, one could pick up just the smallest twinge of a southern drawl.
Reagan obliged, glancing up at him. She always expected to see anger on his face, but he never looked angry. He never looked like anything at all, and somehow, that made every interaction with him that much worse. It was already hard enough for Reagan to pick up on what people were feeling around her and then act accordingly— it was just that much harder to know what the fuck was going in her advisor’s brain at any given moment.
“I didn’t recommend you to the admissions committee because I wanted mediocrity. I recommended you because you are Rand Ridley’s daughter. I recommended you because I expected greatness from you, and yet, here you are. Less than great. Disappointing. My students have a certain reputation, and if you cannot adhere to that— if you humiliate me, I will make sure your career ends just as fast as it started, Reagan. Do you understand me, Reagan? ”
Her head was pounding. There was a knot in her throat. She wanted to evaporate, to die. She wished she didn’t eat an egg sandwich before this. God, why did every one-on-one meeting with Slepian have to be such a fucking shit show?
“Y-yes,” she murmured.
“What?” He demanded.
“I understand, professor,” Reagan said, more clearly this time. She tried to straighten her posture. Look more like a well-put-together and totally-qualified scientist. She drew her mouth into a line and forced herself to not break eye contact with her advisor, no matter how much she wanted to just crumple into a ball and pretend like she was nothing more than the pencil which was now lying peacefully on Slepian’s desk. At least, as a pencil, no one would ever ask her about the radiopurity of screws.
“Fix the pump. Get the focal point. Find the radiopurity. If you don’t have the numbers by Wednesday, don’t bother returning to the lab. Now get out of my office.”
Reagan nodded before awkwardly fumbling for the doorknob with shaky hands. Calm down, she tried to tell herself as she saw herself out, careful to not relax her shoulders before closing the office door behind her.
Once in the empty hallway and completely out of sight, Reagan closed her eyes and exhaled a shaky breath that she didn’t know she was holding. The knot in her throat felt like a knife now, trying to cut its way out. It hurt. And her stomach hurt. And her head was pounding. And she was on her period. And she spilled coffee on her favorite shirt earlier. And the soup of the day at the salad bar had been lentil soup. She hated lentil soup. Might as well just kill herself now.
So stupid. So stupid.
She forced herself to walk at least a few paces away from Slepian’s door before leaning against a wall, unable to find the strength to stand.
What the hell am I even doing here?
There was a time, once, when she loved science. Fuck— it wasn’t even that long ago, and she was good at it. In undergrad, while her classmates were constantly struggling and always pouring hours and hours into problem sets, Reagan barely had to try. It came easy to her. She could always visualize the problem in her head, could always distill which math trick needed to be used, could always think her way through each question with little to no resistance. Physics, mathematics, engineering, computer science— none of it phased her. It was as if her gut always just knew what to do, always knew which equation came next. It was electrifying, and it felt so good to be good at something, the best at something. Although that wasn’t entirely untrue here either, graduate school was more than just classes.
The classes here weren’t awful, sure, but it was everything else . Her project. The lab. Her advisor. Her own expectations of herself. The terrible feeling in her gut that reminded her that she wasn’t special like Rand always said she was. Like she always thought she was.
What the fuck am I doing here?
And what was she supposed to do? Go home? To Rand? Or her mom? Give up and settle for a mundane entry-level engineering position at some stupid start-up selling vegan cardboard or whatever-the-fuck? She’d rather blow her fucking brains out— it was genius or nothing.
Reagan buried her face in her hands.
There was no way she could get what Slepian wanted by Wednesday. Today was Monday, and it was 1:00pm, so she had the rest of today and tomorrow to figure everything out. Maybe thirty, thirty-five hours, tops? She had a bagel, and there were vending machines— so she wouldn’t have to leave the building for food. The chemistry department was still open. She could go there in person and demand help with the radiopurity stuff, but even if she could start on the mass spectroscopy and gamma spectroscopy experiments today, it would take at least two days to get half-decent results.
It’s impossible, Reagan was starting to realize. The knot in her throat had turned itself into tears in her eyes without her realizing. It stung.
Stop crying.
Stop crying.
But she couldn’t.
There was no Plan B. It was this or nothing, and she was failing.
Can’t even fix a roughing pump.
Still leaning against the wall, Reagan’s knees buckled and she crumpled, back sliding against the wall as she collapsed to the floor. She sat there, hugging her knees as her back heaved from trying her best to at least stop her tears from turning into sobs. The hall was still empty. Linoleum floors that likely hadn’t been mopped in a decade collected harsh, yellow light as if it were collecting dust. The white walls were decorated with ugly old scientific posters and beautiful framed pictures of space. The juxtaposition of them was nearly laughable. It was so obvious now— science and the stars were so beautiful once, but to know them, to truly know them was terrible. Horrific. Nothing but plots and numbers and greek letters and broken roughing pumps. Nothing but people like Slepian.
Across from her, the cat eye nebula stared at her.
Reagan pressed her forehead into her knees and wrapped her arms around her legs and held them to her chest. Now what? Was it even worth trying to get everything done before Wednesday? Or just give up now and quit with dignity.
Mediocre.
Mediocre.
Mediocre.
She didn’t even hear him when he approached. At first, all she saw was a pair of shoes from between her legs. Timberlands, with neatly tied shoelaces. And then, she heard a voice.
“Are you okay?”
Great .
“Fuck off,” she muttered without un-burying her face from her assumed fetal position on the ground.
Earlier today, she might have been embarrassed that someone was seeing her like this, but what was the point now? She was either going to kill herself or burn all her money and live in the woods with fifty cats. Either way, she was getting kicked out of the program, and these fucks would never see her again.
“Are you good?” The voice asked again.
“I said leave me alone—” Reagan said, finally looking up, her cheeks caked in tear stains, but she cut herself off once she saw him.
He was tall. And lanky. His hair was brown and shaggy, and he had very clearly not shaven in a few days, but despite his not-put-toegther appearance, he had a nice and homely look to him. Not like, strikingly attractive or anything, not anything to write home about, but he looked like someone who might help an old woman carry her groceries, or who might tell a barista “take your time!” during a rush hour, or someone who might hold the door for an awkward amount of time just because someone a few yards away was vaguely heading in the same direction. He looked kind , and that was something Reagan hadn’t seen in this building since she got here a few months ago.
“Reagan, right?” he asked.
“How do you know my name?”
He laughed lightly. “We’re taking QFT together?”
Oh.
Honestly, Reagan made a point to not talk to the other grad students. She didn’t even know the people in her own cohort, much less the people in the same classes as her. Besides, between her father and Slepian, her social points were already extensively overused on those two.
“Professor Dolphman really sucks, right?” The other grad student smirked.
Reagan wiped her face, trying to rub away some of the tears.
Do I talk to him? And say what? Do what? Fucking hell. I probably look like a crazy person right now.
“Ya, he’s an idiot,” Reagan tentatively agreed. “He barely knows what he’s talking about.”
“I KNOW! The way he draws Feynman diagrams—”
“— they’re atrocious,” Reagan finished, accidentally finding herself smile slightly.
“The dude uses a “P” to label photons. I mean who does that?”
“ And pions.”
“YA! As if there isn’t an already perfectly fine and agreed-upon naming convention that everyone else in the fucking world uses.”
It was crazy. The guy was talking like a normal person. Not some socially inept STEM incel. It was crazy. Was this real?
Did I already kill myself? Am I dead?
“Oh, well, didn’t you hear him at the start of the semester?” Reagan asked. “His way makes much more sense . He’s right and every other particle physicist in the world is wrong. Duh.”
The other grad student laughed out loud. It was a nasally and deep laugh that forced Reagan to smile too. He sounded like a walrus, but like a really charismatic and chill walrus.
After a moment of laughing, he offered a hand to Reagan. She glanced up at it from her spot on the floor, not sure if she should take it or not. She didn’t really like touching other people, or other people touching her. And she especially didn’t like being helped, but something in his doe-brown eyes made her feel like she had to accept it. Like that if she didn’t, she’d basically be kicking a puppy.
Slowly, she took his hand and let him help her up.
“Hey. I’m Ron,” he introduced.