Page 5 of Love, Theoretically
“Elsie?” My name, again. Said like the universe made that word for him alone. “I asked, do you play?” He sounds amused. I hate him.
“Oh. Um, a bit.” Understatement. Go is mind twisting and punishingly intricate—therefore, many physicists’ extracurricular activity of choice. “Do you?”
Jack doesn’t answer. Instead he adds a few white stones.
“Oh, no.” I shake my head. “It’s someone else’s game. We can’t—”
“Black okay?”
Not really. But I swallow and hesitantly reach for the stones and set them down. My pride plays a nice little tug-of-war against my survival instincts: I won’t conceal my Go skills and let Jack win, but for all I know losing will transform him into a fire-breathing bison and he’ll incinerate a load-bearing wall. I don’t want to die in a house collapse, next to Jack Smith and his threesome-obsessed uncle.
“How’s Greg?” he asks.
“He’s over there, with your cousin,” I say absentmindedly, watching him place more stones. His hands are stupidly large. But also graceful, and it makes no sense. Also makes no sense? There are two chairs, but we’re not sitting.
“Buthowis he?”
In my humble experience, siblings at best tolerate each other, and at worst spit gum in one another’s hair. (Mine.Myhair.) Jack and Greg, though, are close—for undivinable reasons, given that Greg’s a likable human disaster full of Sturm und Drang, while Jack... I’m not sure what Jack’s deal is. There’s a dash of bad boy there, a hint of mystery, a dollop of smoothness. And yet a touch ofhunger, a raw, unrefined air. Mostly, he lookscool. Too cool to evenbecool. Like maybe in high school he skipped the school dance for a Guggenheim fellow’s art exhibition and somehow still managed to get elected prom king.
Jack looks distant. Uninterested. Effortlessly confident. Charismatic in an intriguingly opaque, inaccessible way.
But he does care for Greg. And Greg cares for him. I heard him say, with my own two ears, that Jack is his “best friend,” someone he “can trust.” And I listened without pointing out that he can’t reallytrusthisbest friendJack that much, or he’d be honest with him about the fake dating—because I’m a supportive fake girlfriend.
“Greg’s good. Why do you ask?”
“When we talked the other day he sounded stressed about Woodacre.”
About... what? Is this something Greg’s girlfriend should know? “Ah, yes,” I fib. “A little.”
“A little?”
I busy myself with the stones. I’m not winning as easily as I expected. “It’s getting better.” Everything does with time, right?
“Is it?”
“Very much.” I nod enthusiastically.
He nods, too. Less enthusiastically. “Really?”
Jack’s actually notbadat Go. How have I not wiped the floor with him yet? “Really.”
“I thought Woodacre was in a couple of days. I figured Greg’d be upset.”
I tense. Maybe I should have asked Greg for talking points. “Oh, yeah, true. Now that you mention it—”
“Remind me, Elsie.” He takes a tiny step closer to the board,towering over me like a towering tower. But I’m not short. Irefuseto feel short. “What’s Woodacre, again?”
Crap.“It’s”—I try for an amused expression—“Woodacre, of course.”
Jack gives me aDon’t bullshit melook. “That’s not an answer, is it?”
“It’s...” I clear my throat. “A thing Greg’s working on.” The extent of what I’ve been told about Greg’s job? That he’s a data scientist. “I don’t know the details. It’s complicated science stuff.” I smile airily, as though I don’t spend my life building complex mathematical models to uncover the origins of the universe. My heart hurts.
“Complicated science stuff.” Jack studies me like he’s peeling off my skin and expects to find a banana rotting inside.
“Yeah. People like you and I wouldn’t understand.”
He frowns. “People like you and I.”