“It literally takes ten minutes.” She reached for him, tugging at the sleeve of his shirt. “You get there, they scan your university badge. They give you the shot.” She felt his muscles tense under her fingertips as she said the last word. “Easy peasy, and the best part is, you don’t get the flu for a whole year. Totally— Oh.” Olive covered her mouth with her hand.

“What?”

“Oh my God.”

“What?”

“Are you— Oh, Adam.”

“What?”

“Are you afraid of needles?”

He went still. Completely immobile. He wasn’t breathing anymore. “I’m not afraid of needles.”

“It’s okay,” she said, making her tone as reassuring as possible.

“I know, since I’m not—”

“This is a safe space for you and your fear of needles.”

“There is no fear of—”

“I get it, needles are scary.”

“It’s not—”

“You are allowed to be scared.”

“I am not,” he told her, a little too forcefully, and then turned away, clearing his throat and scratching the side of his neck.

Olive pressed her lips together, and then said, “Well, I used to be scared.”

He looked at her, curious, so she continued.

“As a child. My . . .” She had to clear her throat. “My mother would have to hold me in a bear hug every time I needed a shot, or I’d thrash around too much. And she had to bribe me with ice cream, but the problem was that I wanted it immediately after my shot.” She laughed. “So she’d buy an ice cream sandwich before the doctor’s appointment, and by the time I was ready to eat, it’d be all melted in her purse and make a huge mess and . . .”

Dammit. She was weepy, again. In front of Adam, again.

“She sounds lovely,” Adam said.

“She was.”

“And to be clear, I’m not afraid of needles,” he repeated. This time, his tone was warm and kind. “They just feel . . . disgusting.”

She sniffled and looked up at him. The temptation to hug him was almost irresistible. But she’d already done that today, so she made do with patting him on the arm. “Aww.”

He pinned her with a withering look. “Don’t aww me.”

Adorable. He was adorable. “No, really, they are gross. Stuff pokes at you, and then you bleed. The feeling of it—yikes.”

She got out of the car and waited for him to do the same. When he joined her, she smiled at him reassuringly.

“I get it.”

“You do?” He didn’t seem convinced.

“Yep. They’re horrible.”

He was still a little distrustful. “They are.”

“And scary.” She wrapped her hand around his elbow and began to pull him in the direction of the Fluchella tent. “Still, you need to get over it. For science. I’m taking you to get a flu shot.”

“I—”

“This is nonnegotiable. I’ll hold your hand, during.”

“I don’t need you to hold my hand. Since I’m not going.” Except that he was going. He could have planted his feet and stood his ground, and he would have turned into an immovable object; Olive would have had no way of dragging him anywhere. And yet.

She let her hand slide down to his wrist and looked up at him. “You so are.”

“Please.” He looked pained. “Don’t make me.”

He was so adorable. “It’s for your own good. And for the good of the elderly people who might come in any proximity to you. Even more elderly than you, that is.”

He sighed, defeated. “Olive.”

“Come on. Maybe we’re lucky and the chair will spot us. And I’ll buy you an ice cream sandwich afterward.”

“Will I be paying for this ice cream sandwich?” He sounded resigned now.

“Likely. Actually, scratch that, you probably don’t like ice cream anyway, because you don’t enjoy anything that’s good in life.” She kept on walking, pensively chewing on her lower lip. “Maybe the cafeteria has some raw broccoli?”

“I don’t deserve this verbal abuse on top of the flu shot.”

She beamed. “You’re such a trooper. Even though the big bad needle is out to get you.”

“You are a smart-ass.” And yet, he didn’t resist when she continued to pull him behind her.

It was ten on an early-September morning, the sun already shining too bright and too hot through the cotton of Olive’s shirt, the sweetgum leaves still a deep green and showing no sign of turning. It felt different from the past few years, this summer that didn’t seem to want to end, that was stretched full and ripe past the beginning of the semester. Undergrads must have been either dozing off in their midmorning classes or still asleep in bed, because for once that harried air of chaos that always coated the Stanford campus was missing. And Olive—Olive had a lab for next year. Everything she’d worked toward since fifteen, it was finally going to happen.

Life didn’t get much better than this.

She smiled, smelling the flower beds and humming a tune under her breath as she and Adam walked quietly, side by side. As they made their way across the quad, her fingers slid down from his wrist and closed around his palm.

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Chapter Ten

The knockout mouse had been hanging from a wire for a length of time that should have been impossible, considering how it had been genetically modified. Olive frowned at it and pressed her lips together. It was missing crucial DNA. All the hanging-from-a-wire proteins had been erased. There was no way it could hold on for this long. It was the whole point of knocking out its stupid genes—

Her phone lit up, and the corner of her eye darted to its screen. She was able to read the name of the sender (Adam) but not the content of the message. It was 8:42 on Wednesday, which immediately had her worried that he might want to cancel their fake date. Maybe he thought that because he’d let Olive pick out an ice cream sandwich for him yesterday after Fluchella (which she may or may not have ended up eating herself) they didn’t need to meet today. Maybe she shouldn’t have forced him to sit on a bench with her and recount the marathons they had run, and possibly she had come off as annoying when she’d stolen his phone, downloaded her favorite running app, and then friended herself on it. He had seemed to be enjoying himself, but maybe he hadn’t been.

Olive glanced at her gloved hands, and then back at her mouse, who was still holding on to the wire.

“Dude, stop trying so hard.” She kneeled until she was at eye level with the cage. The mouse kicked around with its little legs, its tail flopping back and forth. “You’re supposed to be bad at this. And I’m supposed to write a dissertation about how bad you are. And then you get a chunk of cheese, and I get a real job that pays real money and the joy of saying ‘I’m not that kind of doctor’ when someone is having a stroke on my airplane.”

The mouse squeaked and let go of the wire, flopping on the floor of the testing cage with a thud.

“That’ll do it.” She quickly got rid of her gloves and unlocked her phone with her thumb.

Adam: My arm hurts.

She initially thought that he was giving her a reason why they couldn’t meet up. Then she remembered waking up and rubbing her own achy arm.

Olive: From the flu shot?

Adam: It’s really painful.