“Okay,” Anh said, throwing herself onto Olive’s still-made bed, “you have two sentences to convince me that I shouldn’t be mad at you for forgetting to ask how my outreach event went.”
“Shit!” Olive covered her mouth with her hand. “I am so sorry. How did it go?”
“Perfect.” Anh’s eyes were shiny with happiness. “We had such great attendance and everyone loved it. We’re thinking of making this a yearly thing, and formally establishing an organization. Peer-to-peer mentoring! Hear this: every grad is assigned two undergrads. Once they get into grad school, they mentor two more undergrads each. And in ten years we take over the entire damn world.”
Olive looked at her, speechless. “This is . . . you’re amazing.”
“I am, aren’t I? Okay, now’s your turn to grovel. Aaand, go.”
Olive opened her mouth, but for a long time nothing really came out. “I don’t really have an excuse. I was just busy with . . . something Dr. Aslan asked me to finish.”
“This is ridiculous. You are in Boston. You should be out there in an Irish pub pretending you love the Red Sox and eating Dunkies, not doing work. For your boss.”
“We’re technically here for a work conference,” Olive pointed out.
“Conference shmonference.” Malcolm joined Anh on the bed.
“Can we please go out, the three of us?” Anh begged. “Let’s do the Freedom Trail. With ice cream. And beer.”
“Where’s Jeremy?”
“Presenting his poster. And I’m bored.” Anh’s grin was impish.
Olive was not in the mood for socializing, or beer, or freedom trails, but at some point she was going to have to learn to productively navigate society with a broken heart.
She smiled and said, “Let me check my email, and then we can go.” She had, inexplicably, accumulated about fifteen messages in the thirty minutes since she’d last checked, only one of which wasn’t spam.
Today, 3:11 p.m.
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Reaching out to researchers for pancreatic cancer project
Olive,
I’d be happy to introduce you and ask scholars about opportunities for you in their labs. I agree that they might be more welcoming if the email comes from me. Send me your list, please.
BTW, you still haven’t sent the recording of your talk. I cannot wait to listen to it!
Warmly,
Aysegul Aslan, Ph.D.
Olive did some mental calculations to determine whether it was polite to send the list and not the recording (probably not), sighed, and started AirDropping the file to her laptop. When she realized that it was several hours long, because she’d forgotten to stop her phone after her talk, her sigh morphed into a groan. “This’ll take a while, guys. I have to send Dr. Aslan an audio file, and I’ll need to edit it beforehand.”
“Fine,” Anh huffed. “Malcolm, would you like to entertain us with tales of your date with Holden?”
“Okay, first, he wore the cutest baby-blue button-down.”
“Baby-blue?”
“Shut your mouth with that skeptical tone. Then he got me one flower.”
“Where did he get the flower?”
“Not sure.”